Diane Joplin spent the afternoon in her hotel room surfing the Japanese sector of cyberspace. The hotel’s in-house Mitsubishi console did a fairly good job of translating the Kanji on the fly. She pored through so many news stories and features related to the Yakuza and to Kenzo Yamamoto that she now considered herself somewhat of an expert on the topic. Several hours later, eyes tired from the constant stream of words scrolling down the screen and the void in her stomach screaming for attention, she ordered room service.

Ten minutes later the bell rang and she opened the door, a bit self-conscious since she was wearing only the white terry-cloth robe with nothing underneath. There was no one there except a room service robot, its sensors blinking rapidly. The trolley moved smoothly past her into the room and positioned itself at right angles to the desk and the in-house console. Xybo, sensing food, was on the alert, its tail wagging expectantly. Diane wondered whether now that robots where doing everything, the people who used to work in hotels were now all making robots. The good thing was you no longer felt like you were compelled to tip.

She had opened the cover of the trolley and marveled at the exquisite artistic creations of sticky rice and colorful slivers of raw fish and seafood. The blob of wasabi was carved into the shape of an exotic dragon complete with scales. She knew that within the oblongs of sticky rice hid a generous helping of wasabi so she left the dragon intact while she ate. She had then taken a quick nap after instructing the house computer to wake her up at 6.00PM. That was two hours ago.

Her father had appeared in her dreams, urging her to be vigilant and to take care of herself. His face had been wracked with guilt and in the dream he had begged her to forgive him for leaving her all alone. Then he had asked her to search for the maker of console and find out what it was for. Diane wasn’t sure whether she had subconsciously injected her own will into the dream or vice versa but with Yamamoto dead there was not much more she could do. The connection to Takahashi was too remote. Then her mother had also appeared in her dreams, face as white as the snow that was falling outside, tracks of dried tears trailing down her face, black with dislodged mascara. Her mother had spirited her father away without saying a word, just that look in her eyes that said she was sorry but at least now they were together.

And Diane, all alone, had cried in her sleep and woken up with tears streaming down her face. Her pillow and parts of her hair that had covered her face as she slept were soaking wet. She’d showered and changed and spent an hour on the in-house console searching for something very specific. She was about to give up after an hour when an obscure out-of-date investor relations site gave her what she was looking for. Kenzo Yamamoto sat on the board of Tokyu Nanotechnology Corp., a start-up company formed less than two years earlier to research and manufacture chips based on nanotechnology. What was interesting to Diane was who else was on the board of directors. One Akio Inoue, seventy five years old and the foremost mind in Japanese microprocessor design. Further searches on Akio Inoue resulted in something even more interesting. Several news articles indicated that Inoue, a master console builder, had been hospitalized just two weeks ago. He had suffered a stroke. One of the articles stated with authority that he was being treated in a private wing at the Tokyo Medical University Hospital. And that was also located in Shinjuku.

***

Diane emerged, through the revolving doors, from the relative calm environment of the Keio Plaza Hotel into a tide of moving flesh and melting snow. Shinjuku had a different feel at night than it did during the day time. It was still crowded with pretty much the same mix of passers-by. Yet, underneath the harsh artificial daylight of the relentless neon, the people seemed more alive. The stress of their daytime jobs had been replaced with the anticipation of pleasure and relaxation at the numerous bars, restaurants and gaming parlors in the neighborhood.

Her first plan of action was to get to know the Shinjuku area, especially the locations of immediate interest. She’d bookmarked the locations on the AR unit so that it would pull them up automatically as she walked into their vicinity or on demand if she requested. On the AR unit’s recommendation, she headed north towards the imposing twin monoliths of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which was where the alleged Yamaguchi-gumi oyabun Minister Takahashi supposedly kept his governmental offices. The voices were now saying that it was too dangerous to attempt to approach him and this piece of advice mirrored Diane’s own thoughts on the matter so no surprise there.

From the news articles, it was obvious that Takahashi was constantly surrounded by a wall of Yakuza meatheads. She would either have to reckon with the Yamaguchi-gumi thugs or the minister’s official government bodyguards. Nevertheless, she had availed herself of a steak knife from the room service robot’s dinner service inventory. It was one of those knives with a serrated edge and a pointed tip. Another search had armed her with valuable information on how to use it, if she did indeed happen to get close enough to the oyabun. She could slice through his jugular or just push it between his ribs right into his heart, twisting as she went. She had studied the explanatory photos carefully. The heart was on the left side of the body. She could hear hers thumping away at the thought of murder. She shuddered. The connection between Takahashi and Kenzo Yamamoto was too remote to justify such an action but it wouldn’t hurt to hide the knife in the leg pocket of her canvas combat trousers anyway just in case the opportunity presented itself and she changed her mind.

Diane walked past the perimeter walls of what the AR informed her was Shinjuku Central Park. She wasn’t that interested in the park’s history but was intrigued when the AR told her that inside the park was a massive makeshift shanty town of Tokyo’s homeless. And surely enough a few meters up ahead, one of the park’s inhabitants was urinating against the wall, a bowl of steaming Nishin instant noodles held aloft in one hand, another hand at the controls. The man wore an ill-fitting battered suit that had once been blue but now had turned brown and shiny with filth. One of his broken leather shoes was missing the front section. Diane could see a dirt-caked big toe crowned with a black overgrown toenail sticking out like the head of an aging tortoise. Diane crossed the street to give the man a wide birth in case he was dangerous but not before she was assaulted by a powerful whiff of stale vomit and alcohol. She felt sorry for him but there was nothing much she could do.

She took a right westward into the skyscraper district. You couldn’t miss it. The sky above this section was fluorescent white and the air was alive with the sound of various forms of electronic activity. Behind her the government building cast an invisible shadow, its twin towers weighing heavily in the air, oppressive. A light snow was falling but there was very little actual snow on the ground. It was as though the glare of neon and the stampede of eager feet had dissolved the snow into the concrete. It was cold but Diane was well prepared with layers of insulated clothing and a black wool hat with leather flaps that covered her ears. With her puffy black North Face jacket and Evisu canvas combat pants she could easily pass for a boy, which explained why nobody paid her any attention. Her rucksack containing Xybo and the console in a nest of hotel towels added to the urban look.

One of the voices was back again asking Diane a question that had not occurred to her to ask. What was that salaryman in black still doing in the lobby of the hotel when she came down from her room? She hadn’t really noticed or paid attention but now the voice had reminded her, she did recall that there had indeed been someone of a similar description sitting there. Diane stopped in her tracks and everything sped up as the crowd of people shifted past her in both directions. She turned around and scanned the people behind her. There was too much flesh and too many black-clad salarymen. She didn’t even know what the man in the hotel actually looked like but she was sure she would recognize him if she saw him again.

The voice had mentioned it out of the blue so there had to be something in it. She decided she would be more vigilant and stay alert. It was obvious that if indeed the man had been watching her, he was just following her and not actually planning to do her any harm. Otherwise he could have easily found out her room number and paid her an unwelcome visit.

And then it dawned on her. Her father had died under suspicious circumstances and she had disappeared. The FBI might be after her and this guy might be a local FBI guy. He definitely looked Japanese. Yet, he didn’t really look like the FBI type. She had seen FBI agents in action on many occasions. That guy was definitely not FBI. That meant only one thing. He was probably Yakuza. Why would the Yakuza just follow her though? Were they waiting to see what she was going to do?

She continued walking past a phalanx of massive brightly-lit department stores with names like Odakyu, Keio, Mitsukoshi and Isetan. Their display windows offered Diane a convenient mirror of sorts to scan the crowds for anyone who was paying her too much attention. There was nothing out of the ordinary although at one point she thought she saw a dark shadow coming towards her in the window and whipped around only to find that it was a trick of light and it was just a foreigner in a stylishly-cut black Sherlock Holmes cloak walking past. Diane noted that the man had probably had a bit too much plastic surgery as his face was all taut and shiny, not a pimple anywhere. Obviously American, probably in the movie business. Some kind of Hollywood producer, she thought. Everything from his cloak, scarf and black crocodile skin boots looked expensive. There were many of those rich foreign types in Shinjuku.

She crossed the West Exit of Shinjuku station and felt a warm gust of stale air blasted from the depths of the station by two giant air vents. There was a faint but unmistakable smell of sweating flesh and urine. Diane wrinkled her nose as she transitioned into a totally different section of Shinjuku consisting of small lanes lit with even more garish neons. The AR informed her that she had just entered Kabukicho the red light district and home to some fifty thousand Yakuza gang members. Closer inspection of the signage in front of the mostly smallish looking establishments confirmed this.

Some of the facades had backlit boards showing photos of scantily-clad Japanese girls dancing around metal poles, dressed up as nurses, manga characters or school girls or just standing there as though they were in the bikini line-up of some beauty pageant. Above the photos were various prices in Japanese Yen. Intermingled between these establishments were what looked like noisy video game arcades but there was this thundering metallic clinking sound and when Diane looked through one of the windows she saw people, mostly men and young boys, sitting in front of these elaborate looking machines with plastic bowls of what looked like little silver metal balls and more balls pouring out of the machines making that loud thundering noise.

The AR described these noisy establishments as Pachinko parlors and started explaining the rules but Diane overrode it with a flick of a switch. The small lanes pulsed with the sound of music, computer-generated beeps and melodies, the chatter of clientele and the sounds of those Pachinko balls. At the corner of one of the lanes, a group of drunken salarymen leered at her but she just kept on walking past gangs of young men with crazy haircuts and black suits trying to stuff leaflets in her hands and speaking to her in Japanese. It seemed as though they wanted her to go into one of those places with the half-naked girls in the pictures. Diane just shook her head and kept on moving.

According to the AR unit, Kabukicho was the capital of Tokyo’s sex industry. It was sex packaged in every form imaginable. There were strip clubs, role-playing clubs, S&M clubs, nude shows, pornographic cinemas, unlikely-looking bathing houses and massage parlors all packed one on top of each other on either side of these small lanes. All these services were announced boldly in Japanese, English and Chinese in flashing or pulsating neon.

The AR unit explained that in the eighteenth century Shinjuku had been a refuge or resting place for long-distance commuters to Tokyo. The name Shinjuku, it said, translated roughly as “new lodgings”. It was just a matter of time before the inns realized that their clientele was willing to pay for more than rice, sake and a place to sleep for the night. The quintessentially Japanese solution was to have young female “rice servers” serve food to the guests who could then request additional services. Once again Diane overrode the AR. This was way too much information and there were all these young guys in black, drunken salarymen and elaborately-dressed and made-up young Japanese girls to look at. Some of the girls, despite the chill, wore these impossibly short skirts that revealed parts of their underwear and exposed pale translucent legs to the elements. This is really, really crazy, Diane mumbled to herself.

The AR unit was constantly marking off places Diane should not venture into and as Diane moved deeper into Kabukicho she noticed that the unit had designated huge swathes of the area as dangerous. The AR displayed a snippet of additional information on the glasses that made the hairs on the back of Diane’s neck stand on end. Young girls were routinely tricked into going into some of these bars and racking up huge drinking bills which they had to pay off by engaging in the sex trade. Diane shuddered at the thought that earlier she had been tempted to enter one of the bars to see what it was like inside. Once again the AR was proving itself invaluable. She gave those areas a wide berth, constantly checking the map in the AR’s cheap plastic glasses. The AR was also dividing the tiny map of Kabukicho into areas with translucent color-coded overlays labeled with the name of the Yakuza gang that controlled it. The Yamaguchi-gumi and some Chinese gang controlled most of it, including the real estate and the various dodgy lines of business.

Diane turned round a corner into a lane that was not as crowded or as brightly lit as the others. As she pressed forward craning her neck to peep into one of the windows of a small bar, she got that prickling feeling again at the back of her neck. She straightened, turned round and her mouth opened in surprise. The foreigner in the black cloak who she had seen on the pavement in the business district of Shinjuku was standing there, that plastic face lit up with blue neon from one of the facades, his left arm reaching for something tucked into his waist belt. The few people walking in this part of Kabukicho stopped in their tracks, with the exception of three salarymen who just walked straight past the man, oblivious. The foreigner wasn’t looking at her. He was looking behind her. Diane whipped her head around, her thoughts coalescing around the steak knife in her pocket, the voices in her head screaming, willing her to stay alive. She stifled a gasp as she realized there was another man behind her. It was the Japanese man in black she had seen in the lobby when she was checking into the Keio Plaza hotel. She was sure of it and she recognized the bulky earpiece, his phone.

The foreigner’s hand came away from his waistband and there was this thing in his hand that looked like a gun, except the barrel was shaped like a funnel expanding outwards. Diane thought he wasn’t as young as she had previously thought, more like in his fifties. Yet he was fast and he wasn’t American either. There was something vaguely European about him. The gun spasmed in his hand and Diane expected to hear a gunshot but there was no sound at all. All Diane could see was the air in front of the man suddenly come alive and assume some kind of blob-like shape but it wasn’t actually a blob, just a section of air moving separately from all the other air around it. And the vibrating mass of air rushed past her causing her to take a deep intake of breath. She whirled around again and all she could see was the Japanese man go totally stiff, both hands to his sides, and just fall straight down to the pavement.

Diane turned round but the foreigner had already reached her. Thin bony fingers with a strong grip grabbed her and pulled her in the direction she had come from. Then the foreign man started running, pulling Diane along with him and as they turned the corner another two men joined them. One of them was Black and the other was Caucasian but Diane could swear they were identical twins, just different colored skin. They kept running, scattering crowds of Japanese. Diane had lost any will she had to resist. The lights were dancing in her eyes, the thunder of Pachinko balls threatening to deafen her.

Yet, the voices were telling her that it was OK and that this man with the sloping jaw had saved her from the Yakuza. They reached one of the main streets bordering Kabukicho and Diane noticed that there was a massive black van with heavily tinted windows idling on the curb. One of the other men slid open the van doors and she was bundled inside. She half expected it to be some kind of delivery van but was amazed to find all these computers and plush leather sofas inside. The men got in, slid the doors shut and sat down on the leather sofas breathing heavily. The van began to move silently through the evening Shinjuku traffic.