Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The next day, Aki Senbei had a visitor. Setsura was rolling up the steel shutters. The electric motor had given out two weeks before. Leaving it unrepaired added another five minutes to accomplish the task.

He had his shoulder into it and the shutters a third of the way up when a cheerful voice behind him said, “Look at that. A true Tokyoite.”

Setsura lost his balance. It wasn’t his fault. The visitor hadn’t made any noise and Setsura hadn’t sensed her sneaking up. But what really threw him off his stride was the random nature of the statement.

He braced himself against the shutters and turned around. “Well, well,” he said, not so much an expression of annoyance as delighted surprise at an unexpected reunion.

Standing about a yard from him, wearing a moss-green dress, was the girl who’d gotten herself nice and plastered at the bar on Fifth Street. Setsura smiled. His smile was always friendly and welcoming. The look of apprehension on the girl’s face dissolved into a grin.

Her oval face and the way her hair was tied up with a ribbon suggested a woman in her twenties. The body-hugging dress accentuated the ample bust and rounded hips that lent her five-foot six-inch frame a generous physicality. The purse hanging loosely from her belt and the blue scarf tied around her neck suggested a kind of practiced innocence, the kind often seen in sophisticated college coeds.

“Um, I’m the girl who had a bit too much to drink at the bar on Fifth Street,” she admitted awkwardly.

“I am a Tokyoite, but I wasn’t born in Kanda City.” Setsura gave up on the shutters for the time being. “Did you find your way home okay?”

Soon after he’d watched the mysterious ship sail out of sight, the girl had been bundled into a taxi and was soon snoring heartily away.

“Eh, more or less.” She hesitated, and then added cheerfully, “I dumped him.”

An otherwise inappropriate subject to bring up with a total stranger, but not so strange seeing that she was talking to Setsura.

“That’s too bad. You gotta feel sorry for the guy.”

“It’s okay. He didn’t take me home in that condition. We somehow ended up at a hotel. Fortunately, I’d sobered up enough by that point. I slapped him and took off.”

“Oh.” Setsura gave the girl a rueful look. It was hard to tell whether she or her boyfriend deserved the most pity.

A warm breeze tousled his black hair and ruffled the collar of his black shirt. His shirt was open to the second button down, revealing his white chest. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. His slacks and belt were black. He didn’t wear a watch. He probably didn’t need one.

He could show up the nattiest of zoot-suited yakuza without meaning to. But Setsura was so handsome that clothes weren’t a problem. It was like dressing a sculpture carved by the gods. Their eyes met and the girl’s face darkened with unconscious desire. Without knowing it, her lips softened and her eyes smiled.

“If you’re waiting for the store to open, it’ll be thirty minutes before my sales girl arrives.”

The girl came back to her senses. She blinked her big, round eyes. “Um, my name is Takako Kanan. The bartender told me where to find you. It wasn’t exactly senbei I was interested in.”

“I see.” Setsura introduced himself as well. “Then let’s go inside and talk it over.”

Strangely tense, Takako Kanan stared at the senbei and barley tea sitting on the coffee table. She picked up the frosty glass and took a sip.

“It’s good,” she said with a sigh.

“I’m glad you like it,” said Setsura, with an air of personal satisfaction. They were in the tiny, ten-foot-square back office of the Aki Detective Agency (also known by the initials, “DSM”). It was a traditional Japanese room with tatami-mat floors. “So, what did you come here for?”

“There’s somebody I need to find.”

“And who would that be?”

“A Chinese woman,” she said, and Setsura’s eyes glowed. Takako didn’t notice. “The woman I saw the other night, in Kabuki-cho, around two in the morning. I just have to meet her again.”

“If you don’t mind, could you tell me why? I can’t promise you that I’ll take the job, though.”

Takako responded with a forceful nod and began to explain.

She lived outside Shinjuku in Hakusan, Bunkyou Ward. She was a college senior, majoring in history. Her specialty was ancient Chinese history. She had tired of book studies and wanted to do more field work. She’d already traveled to China several times, making her fifth trip earlier that year.

She was particularly interested in China’s legendary dynastic rulers, particularly the Hsia Dynasty. Since ruins dating to the Hsia Dynasty had been discovered in Henan Province several years ago, a great many new findings had been announced and research papers published.

Chinese research groups were presently in the process of resuming the excavations. However, Takako’s research had taken her in a quite different, even radical, direction.

She said fervently, “I want to uncover the truth about Daji.”

Setsura recognized the name. Until the discovery of the Hsia, the Shang had been the oldest known Chinese dynasty. Shang had toppled Hsia, in the earliest example of a dynasty founding itself through armed revolution. After six hundred years and twenty-eight successions of power, it crumbled during the reign of Emperor Zhou.

A woman of uncommon evil had led Emperor Zhou to lay waste to six centuries of accumulated wisdom. When he’d conquered the state of Yousu, the daughter of one of the noble families was offered to him as tribute. Her name was Daji.

Practically overnight, in order to win and keep her favor, Zhou turned from an enlightened monarch into a depraved ruler. His tall towers and mighty warehouses bulged with gold and silk and rice and barley and fruit stolen from his subjects. All manner of rare plants and exotic animals were confiscated from their rightful owners and put on display.

In the gardens of gigantic palaces constructed in Henan Province at great expense and the cost of countless lives, lakes were filled with wine and cuts of fine meat were hung from the trees. His guests—men and women alike—stripped naked and danced through the wooded glens while indulging in every immoral perversion and desire.

It’d be no exaggeration to say that the expression, “To live a life of debauchery” originated with Emperor Zhou.

When the wine turned sour and the meat rotted and everyone had exhausted themselves in violent bouts of sexual competition, bawdy melodies such as “The Northern Town Dance” and “The Seduction Song” would come flitting through the evening air.

As the aroused emperor listened in an ecstatic trance, his poisonously beautiful concubine would whisper in his ear, filling his head with even more temptations.

“I want to tell a child’s sex before it is born,” she’d muse.

And he would respond, “How would you tell a thing like that?”

And Daji would say, “Cut her open.”

Separated far from the hearts of the people, only the winds of hate and resentment blew down the streets of the capital. Lord Jiu and Lord E, the two advisors of his Executive Council who dared take him to task, were brutally murdered. Those who opposed him were forced to walk across a roaring fire on an oil-coated bronze cylinder.

The screams of the victims as they burned to death echoed alongside any mention of this “trial by fire” unto the end of time.

According to one legend, Daji was a nine-tailed fox whose soul was the sum total of all the misery and darkness created in the bowels of Hell itself. After the Shang was overthrown by Emperor Wu of the Chou Dynasty, she fled to India. There she gained notoriety as the voluptuous Madame Hua Yang who seduced Crown Prince Banzu.

But her true nature came to light and she fled to Japan. She possessed the body of Tamamo no Mae, the concubine of Emperor Toba, and haunted the Imperial Family until the Court Shaman, Yasunari Abe, exorcised her.

The last days of the fox spirit came in the fall of the year 1137. For two days and two nights, she faced off against fifteen thousand soldiers in a desolate field on the outskirts of Nasu in Shimotsuke Province. Defeated at last, she transformed into a smoldering chunk of noxious lava.

This “death stone” remains there to this day, where the annual Nasu Fire Festival serves to warn of its terrible powers.

Not only the Shang, Takako pointed out, but three ancient Chinese dynasties faced a day of judgment because of this evil consort.

The Hsia Dynasty ended when Emperor Jie was overthrown by Emperor Tang, establishing the Shang Dynasty. The Shang Dynasty ended with the downfall of Emperor Zhou. In the annals of tyrannical rulers, Emperor Jie ranked alongside Emperor Zhou.

Emperor Jie was given a beguiling woman called Moxi from the land of Youshi as tribute. At the end of the Chou Dynasty, Emperor You was served by a sorceress of unknown origins who went by the name of Baosi.

These three courtesans—sorceresses might be the better term—were likely all the same person. Several years before the existence of the Hsia Dynasty came to light, portraits of these sorceresses from the Shang and Chou dynasties were unearthed at archeological digs.

They were painted by artists serving in the Imperial Court. The women were identified by name as Daji and Baosi. They looked like identical twins. And despite the faded, scarred canvases, their dazzling beauty and awful wickedness was plain to behold.

Takako naturally jumped at a chance to get access to the Hsia excavations. She had to explore this intersection of history, legend and folklore further. Her uncle was a key player in the Sino-Japanese Cultural Exchange Society. That gave her a lot of pull.

Fifteen hundred feet down, the cold ruins of a Hsia Dynasty palace were unearthed. The complex covered more than a hundred and sixty acres. Responding to her inquiries, an official showed her a bronze mirror. The name “Moxi” was clearly inscribed next to a woman’s portrait. Hers was the spitting image of the other women, separated by centuries.

Setsura asked, “So you believe that these three sorceresses are the same as that woman we saw in Kabuki-cho?”

Takako shook her head. “I’m probably mistaken in this regard. I can’t believe that the sorceress who toyed with the fates of three dynasties fifteen hundred years ago would show up in present-day Shinjuku. I came here to find examples of spiritual possession and the supernatural. I wasn’t necessarily looking for a direct connection to the sorceresses. Short of other undeniable facts, I wouldn’t have visited you either. Except there were two portraits etched on the mirror discovered at the Hsia Dynasty dig. Moxi and a younger girl, a maidservant apparently. The same girl I saw on a crowded street in Kabuki-cho.”

“That’s an impressive memory you’ve got. Don’t get me wrong. I mean it as a compliment.”

Takako laughed. “Reserve your compliments for those Hsia Dynasty artists. The French realists had nothing on them. But I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Setsura nodded solemnly.

The urgency was there in his voice, and for the first time Takako felt a sense of familiarity with this shudderingly handsome black-clad young man.

“And what were those other undeniable facts?” he asked.

“I started following her. Part of me knew it was a waste of time. She was wearing a cheongsam cut all the way up her thigh. She was heading towards Kabuki-cho’s Golden Gai district. I should have cut my losses there. But curiosity got the better of me, and I walked into the ruins. My intention was to turn around and go back if it looked like I’d be going too far in. We’d come from the street that runs by the ward council offices. She took the first left and I followed her at a safe distance—”

They’d been maybe six feet apart, in the middle of a dark alleyway, when the girl stopped and turned around. The girl looked at her, and Takako felt her blood freeze in her veins. She tried to run.

Crimson flashed in the girl’s eyes. As soon as she saw the red glow, Takako felt as if her brain had suddenly instructed her body not to move a muscle. The girl raised her hand, gesturing for Takako to come here. Her legs moved of their own accord.

“I was completely helpless. She hadn’t said a thing, but my legs obeyed her anyway. I was sure my number was up. She really is her, I thought.”

“Weren’t you frightened?”

“It was more that I was totally spaced out to an uncomfortable degree. My body kept going forward like I was sleepwalking, like my own will was out of my control. It had to be because of those eyes. When I was right in front of her, she stood on her tiptoes and nuzzled my throat. That’s when I knew she was a vampire.”

“And then what happened?” Setsura asked, eyeing the blue scarf around her neck.

“Nothing. I don’t know why, but as soon as her lips touched my throat, she screamed and jumped back from me.” Takako paused. “Sorry, it’s a little too warm for this.”

She unwound the scarf. There wasn’t a mark on her unblemished skin.

“Do you know why?”

“Not in the slightest,” Takako said, waving her hand. “I took off like a shot. When she jumped back from me, all the feelings returned to my limbs. I ran and didn’t look back. Come to think about it, I did hear heavy breathing behind me. Like someone was having a coughing fit.”

“Coughing?” Setsura furrowed his brows.

“Hey, you look really cute when you do that.”

“Well, ah, thanks. Not to be nosy, but did you have gyoza or Chinese for dinner the night before?”

“No. I had borscht at Nakamura’s at the station. Fourteen hundred yen.”

“They’ve raised their prices,” Setsura quipped. But he stopped asking about the cause.

At the same time that this Chinese girl was having fits, he couldn’t have known that patrol officer Hyuuga Kaneda had been rendered unconscious in the ruins near Nakai Station, a garlic-soaked handkerchief plastered across his nose and mouth.

“So, what do you think?” Takako asked.

Setsura picked up a thick senbei cracker and took a bite. It made a sharp, crisp sound. Either the loud crunching or the taste made him frown. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll look into it.”

“Good.”

“But I have conditions.”

“What?” said Takako, unconsciously raising her hand to her chest, as if she expected him to make demands of an untoward nature. But the rapturous echoes in her voice were stronger than the words of protest forming in her mouth. Such was the magic of Setsura’s presence.

“While I’m conducting my investigation, you have to return to the outside world. Don’t ask the reasons. And I won’t ask what you’d do with a girl like that if you did find her.”

“I intend to ask her about her lineage,” Takako immediately answered. “If she’s who I think she is, then this is really serious. She’s not some schoolgirl. She’s a big-time sorceress who brought down three dynasties. Even Shinjuku has good reason to be afraid. I wouldn’t count on the cops or the shamans to get the job done. It’s up to you.”

Setsura smiled thinly. “Because she’s such a dangerous opponent. I can handle her. But not if you’re in the line of fire as well. I don’t admit this very often, but this time around, I’m not sure how things are going to turn out.”

Hearing the ominous undertones in his quick and to-the-point reply, Takako swallowed hard. She said, after a long pause, “It seems you’re already onto something. I get it. The word is that Shinjuku’s No. 1 P.I. has a well-earned reputation. I promise.”

“So you went to the police first?”

“Yeah. But they said all the vampires were living in Toyama, so no problem. Is that true?”

“Not counting her, it probably is. As for my fee—”

Setsura picked up his glass. Downing the contents, he let the barley tea seep into his insides as he tried to recall his rate schedule.

That was when the telephone rang.