Waking Up At 18 To A World Submerged In Flames

Izuka Naze was never the child her parents wanted. In a society that doesn’t like questions being asked, let alone answered, she was a walking inquiry.

At first, they thought she was nothing but an average child, curious about that which Frued said children were curious about. However, Naze did not envy her father’s penis; she envied his status.

Why was it that he always got the biggest piece of steak at dinner? Why was it that her family even had steak at all? Cows had nearly gone extinct in the great cleansing of ‘26; any form of beef was a luxury. One day, at the age of five, when she told class what she’d had for dinner, the responses of the other children shook her.

What does it taste like?

Naze didn’t understand. Was this some kind of joke? Had they conspired to create a simulacrum of a world without steak? Why would they do this? They wouldn’t ask her if she knew what grass tasted like, so why steak?

That was when she learned the truth. Everyone knew what grass tasted like because they had it for lunch every Thursday, but only Naze knew the juicy delight of flesh torn off of a living bovine and seared to perfection on the grill.

So why did they eat it every night? And why did her father always get two pieces?

And this is how, despite being Japanese, Naze became class-conscious in the whitest sense of the term.

Only with a backstory like that could someone end up a journalist in the Japan of 2069. A couple of months ago, Naze had turned 18 and left home. Against her mother’s wishes but her father didn’t put up any resistance. He was too concerned with his own affairs, financial and illicit, to care about one of the children that was legally his.

That’s how a girl like Naze had found herself in San’ya, Tokyo; the district where freedom is writing its suicide note.

Long before the establishment of Voran Magic’s League of United Nations had made the facade of democracy apparent, citizens of Japan had been casting aside their invented obligations and disappearing into the night.

These people who willingly vanish are known as the johatsu, and many of them end up in San’ya or places like it across the country. If you’ve been blacklisted from money, then you could find jobs in San’ya that paid in food, drink and something approaching a bed. This arrangement suits the johatsu as much as it does the employer, invariably the Yakuza. Ever since the big computer that handles all the money started handling all the money, criminals across the world had to get creative to hide their activities.

None of this provided Naze with a reason to come to this place. There was almost nothing for her to gain by coming here. She was short, cut her hair into a stylish bob and kept herself fashionable; she reeked of privilege, and that would make her a target. On the way in she could feel the chain being wrapped around her neck, even though it wasn’t real in one sense of the word. To any one of the denizens of these streets watching on, the assumption was that this girl didn’t have the strength to end things on her own terms.

But Naze didn’t want to die. She came here because she’d heard a rumour. At Namae no Nai Baa in the inner reaches of San’ya, there’s a man that arrives every day at 6, drinks until 6 the following morning and then leaves for work, allegedly never sleeping.

Stories like this coming out of johatsu informants isn’t unique. Invariably there’s always a kernel of truth to them, sometimes more. What had grabbed Naze’s attention with this particular rumour, were two innocuous details. This man never wore a shirt, only jeans and Js. But more striking than that, he was a foreigner.

There was only one man that could be and he was meant to be dead. But no one really believed that, everyone had a feeling that he was out there still, living by an assumed name and probably having grown a killer beard. And some people still held out hope that one day he would return to challenge Godking Voran once more. That one day, he would reclaim the name of...