My mother’s murder was meant to be a warning. It stated that the private life my father had tried so hard to hide was, in fact, quite well known—at least to the people whom feared and hated him the most. It also stated, in words so brilliantly written with deep red blood spilt across an unvarnished wooden floor, that if he did not comply with those persons’ agendas, that that private life would be crushed. Crushed, like my mother’s body under the steel of “improperly set” theater lights.
Like in the macabre fairy tales of old, you cannot kill the Beast by simply cutting out his heart. Living with the aftermath of my mother’s death taught me this. In killing Beauty, you destroy the last link of humanity that ultimately saves the Beast as a character, turning him from villain to hero. Instead, he becomes the Monster; a cold hearted man with steel eyes, whom calculates by logic and expediency without thought for love or compassion. And the coldest truth in this story is that all along it was the child that was replaceable.
They should have killed me.
And in moments like this, I really wish they had…
Through the bars surrounding the Oakrest Cemetery—named in English for unknown reasons and populated by a sea of western-style tombstones though bodies were never interned there—those standing outside the gates of the sacred grounds could just make out a large, undulating mass of milling bodies inside. Everyone there was dressed in black, or some shade close to, and each bore candles and flowers and handkerchief to mark their tears as they comforted one another, and hugged and shared in their grief for their lost loved one. With the rolling, turbulent and dreary clouds above, and a taste of impending rain upon the bitter, unseasonably cold wind, it was a perfect, if stereotypical, setting for a funeral.
The problem was that no one had died that day.
In fact, no one entombed in this particular cemetery had died within the past year. The place was highly expensive and exclusive; a resting-place artfully designed as a well shaded, flower-filled park set among the crowded, urban streets of Tokyo was a luxury many could not afford to their living relatives, much less those who had passed on. Most Tokyo cemeteries were tiny places, jammed into brick-walled back yards beside inner-city shrines. As such, the only persons’ memories kept in this spacious splash of emerald in the heart of a concrete sea were the wealthy and usually famous. Scenes such as this grieving gathering were not altogether unusual here, though most fans tended to come in pairs and trios, and did not congregate in such a large, loud and intrusive fashion.
But who could blame them? They ranged from the elderly, gray-haired grandmothers who had looked fondly on the celebrity’s acts of charity and kindness, to the school children playing tardy that they might be near the actress whose death had come before they had first discovered her. There were, of course, the would-be lovers; the men (and women) who had pined for her beauty in life, and whose hearts had broken upon news of her death. There were the stagehands and old friends, and the persons whose posters she had signed, who would always remember her smiles and nice words and the time she gave them, even if she didn’t have it to give.
The gathering was packed with persons who had never held her hand, or been gathered in her arms. Persons who had never had her sit in their bed and read them a bed time story, or had never been forced to understand why those strangers always came first. In a sad sort of twisted irony, it was the one person who had known her, who had truly known her, that now stood outside the gates of the cemetery. Always she looked in on this day, but never was she allowed to grieve near the tombstone representation of her mother. And in fact, she didn’t want to.
The scuffing of shoes on pavement drew Izana’s attention at last, though the last thing she wanted to do was acknowledge her unwanted company. Arms still crossed tightly about her chest, she turned her head just enough to see the bald-headed boy sucking on a cigarette behind her. “That’s going to kill you, you realize.”
It was an old argument between them, one that was likely to never be resolved. It had started the day they met, seven months ago to the day, and was mentioned at least once a day since. As he always did, Takeuchi remained silent on the subject, choosing to answer instead with an artful ring of smoke released into the clouded, dismal sky.
He wasn’t a gentle looking boy, as many these days were. Unlike others that had chosen to follow the trend towards a unisex beauty, a feminine fashion of male that emphasized as much grace and polish as any female, Takeuchi reeked of edges and sharpness and old fashioned masculinity. His features were broad and rough, with a jaw already chiseled in his seventeen years and cheekbones defined and high risen. Takeuchi’s profile was of the heavy, European stock introduced in his great-grandfather’s line, as was his approximately one-hundred-and-ninety-three centimeters of height. Already, the exercise regime he’d been submitted to since a very young age had hung muscle on his frame to dwarf most men decades older than he. Couple that body with the expensive Armani suit he wore, the shaven head, mirrored shades and black fedora, and Takeuchi was the essence of Mafia stereotype. Which was how he liked it.
Not, the girl reflected, that anyone from this country would see him as anything other than exactly what he was.
“Done?”
He was annoyed, that she could tell despite the toneless cantor of his voice. This wasn’t unusual, and for a moment Izana considered ignoring the question entirely. Takeuchi rarely liked anything she did that he could, potentially, get in trouble for. Unfortunately, that included anything up to, and possibly including, staying at home at any and all hours she didn’t spend in school. But as her father had not yet confided her to the grounds, she continued to drag her reluctant bodyguard around the city. To dig a little at his annoyance, she refused to use the car.
Her gaze returned to the wrought iron gate that separated the cracked sidewalk outside with the perfectly poured concrete path beyond, bordered by plush, manicured lawn. Someone in the mass had erected an easel with her mother’s framed portrait and a ring of flowers, as if they had just come from the funeral. Tears pricked at her eyes as she gazed upon that radiant smile and porcelain skin hidden away by glass and time. Why did they have to do this every year? It had been seven years—seven long, lonely years—since Reika’s passing. She should have been forgotten to time.
“Yeah, I’m done,” Izana sighed, her words a bare whisper against the wind howling about their ears. For the millionth time that day she pulled her hair out of her face, and turned into the wind as she began the slow journey away from the cemetery gate. A hand caught her elbow.
“Wrong direction.”
The girl jerked her elbow away from his hand with an ease she’d have never gotten from her old bodyguard. Though Takeuchi could have stopped her in an instant, without the slightest effort on his part, he didn’t. For a moment this surprised her, and she’d already tensed herself for the clamp of his hand and jerk on her shoulder. For that reason she was glad of the change that had been made.
Despite Sato having been her bodyguard for the past six and a half years, there was little love lost between the pair. All too often an argument between the two had been ended with a bruise of some form on Izanami’s body. Though she’d done her part in provoking him to manhandling her, it didn’t entirely justify the excessive force he’d taken to using with her at all times near the end of his service. Intellectually she’d long since learned that Takeuchi’s philosophy was different than Sato’s had been. Trained reactions took a long time to correct, however.
Behind the mirrored sunglasses, she could feel Takeuchi watching her, if she could not see it. “I’m not going home yet,” Izanami knew perfectly well that explanation wasn’t enough for him, but it was also the most that he had to be told. Unlike Sato, he seemed to understand that she was the boss in the relationship. Sort of. Her wandering about the streets of Tokyo was not likely a habit or hobby that her father would approve of—but what he did not know about, he could not guard against. After thirteen years, she knew enough of her estranged father’s ways to realize that he did not care to be bothered with her day-to-day activities. Her bodyguards never reported to him, unless there was a major incident that needed to be dealt with. Izanami’s attempting to see her mother’s grave was hardly cause for a requested audience with so dangerous a man as Miwa Yasuo.
Izanami had a good idea of the resentment harbored behind those mirrored panes and she ignored it in favour of walking away once again. The bag slung across her chest thumped softly against her thigh, a faint beat in the song of life that hummed through the city streets. Tokyo wasn’t a noisy city by the standards of the rest of the world. But Japan was, and had been for quite some time, a quiet sort of country. To those who lived here, such days as this were very noisy indeed—but Izanami had lived in other countries, and visited even more. She knew the roar and stench of New York, Dallas, Hong Kong and London. She knew the clamour and hustle and press of people everywhere that seemed perfectly capable and happy to dive into a stranger’s business. Takeuchi wouldn’t ask, he never did, and that was perfectly fine with Izanami.
They made quite a sight for the look-do-loos and gossips, and she was quite used to that now. Though it would have been acceptable for her to have an—innocent—boyfriend of Takeuchi’s age, by way of their society, their relationship to one another was obviously not one of romantic attachment. He walked at precisely ten steps behind her, a distance that was quite enough to give her space, yet not enough for someone to get between them. Takeuchi was the dark black shadow of her tiny, school-uniformed and underaged self. Wherever she went he followed, like a dog that one couldn’t seem to shake, forever with those shades across his eyes and something smoking between his lips. She hated smokers.
If her bodyguard spoke of her father’s wealth, his tattoos spoke of why Miwa Yasuo was wealthy. Izanami knew from watching his practices in the dojo that Takeuchi’s tattoos were quite extensive. A dragon, cold and cool in shades of blue wrapped itself from his shoulders to the foot of his left ankle. It was a single claw that was visible from day to day, peeking out above the Armani collar and sinking its wicked talons into the bare skin of Takeuchi’s shaved and polished cranium. Anyone who saw that claw knew, and those who knew were terrified.
The Tokyo Yakuza was no laughing matter.
One of the oldest surviving institutions in Japan, the Yakuza had long since drifted from its origins of loosely tied and ever fluctuating street gang scammers. Though still comprised of the unwanted, the loud, the pushy and simply non-traditional Japanese, the Yakuza had evolved a set of rules and social stigmas all its own. It was a society in and of itself, with structure and laws and by-laws, and even its own form of commerce. Each major city was its own form of Yakuza “country.” Each had its own regime, its own feudal lords and ladies, its own day-to-day struggles for internal power and external wars with the neighboring cities. Alliances and feuds changed constantly as the leaders bargained and re-bargained, and played their political pundits within the borders of their kingdom within a kingdom. And if anyone did not believe that the Yakuza were the ones who truly controlled this country, they were strongly under the influence of denial.
It wasn’t a bad thing, however. Despite the inner squabbling, the Yakuza bosses were smart persons, all highly educated and well versed in their specialties. Most were politicians in the public eye, whose less legitimate practices were run subtly but always in the plain sight. It wasn’t that they were immune to the law, but that they had long since come to an understanding with that organization. The Yakuza, as a whole, was far too important to the economy to be taken down. Not all commerce the Yakuza engaged in was illegal—in fact, these days, more than seventy percent of their business was conducted in a quite legitimate, on-the-books manner. But the percent that remained illegal—the drugs, assassinations, illegal imports and exports, and the dwindling tradition of street scams—was done so well and quietly that it was hard to pin it on anyone. Anyone, that was, whom the police would have the balls to arrest.
There was always the danger of some young upstart that had it in his head to “purify” the political situation; to remove the “corrupted” from the top and throw them to their proper places in penitentiaries. Occasionally one of these white knights managed something, and a Yakuza boss went away for a year or two. These knights never lived for long.
This was what Izanami had been taught all her life. It had been sucked from her mother’s perfectly sculpted tit and poured down her throat as a toddler. It had been in every scolding from her father and bedtime story on her mother’s lap. It was her history, her world, her life and hopes and dreams and fears, for she was born a Yakuza Princess.
The first born daughter, the only born child of Miwa Yasuo, Tokyo boss; it was not an easy position to be in, and one that she had never properly filled. When most people pictured a Princess of any sorts, even a hidden one such as herself, they thought of limousines and designer clothing; of sprawling mansions and glorious parties, private schools and famous friends. By a common man’s imagination, Izanami should have schooled with the royal children of other nations, and been on a first name basis with the up-and-rising childhood stars of her generation. Not, she smirked with some touch of mirth, walking in dirty sneakers around the streets of her homeland, trailed by a single young bodyguard and clothed the plain uniform of a public middle school.
Take the bodyguard away, replace him with her two former friends and Izanami would have been the happiest girl in Japan. The one thing that she had liked, and now missed, about Sato was that he had had no issue in “ghosting” her from a distance. In fact, he’d often left to attend to his own duties, and tracked her down at a later date. He could easily get away with it, for in plain clothes she looked quite like any other Japanese girl, even to other members of the Yakuza. Boss Miwa liked his private life extremely private; beyond his higher-ranking underlings, few had any idea that the Tokyo Princess was anything more than a rumor. There were even some, she was told, who thought his marriage to Reika Borgois was nothing more than a silly rumor.
Those persons had either come to the Family long after Reika’s death, or were else deaf, blind and intolerably stupid. The effect her death had had on the Tokyo Godfather was one that the entire city had felt for months afterward.
She rounded the corner three blocks from Oakrest and entered a small shopping district. Just a few grocery stores and second-hand shops lined the streets, with housewives and maids running to and fro between the sides. Here, a young girl out in her school uniform in the middle of the day wasn’t going to get much notice. Many other delinquent girls such as herself were about, selling underwear and, occasionally, far more personal things to balding, middle aged paper pushers from the local offices. The shops here were just as bright as their underwear, all sparkles and flashing jumble of colour. Confusing mixes of kanji and badly spelled, meaningless English were splashed across garish and oft abused signs tossed around streets barely wide enough for a single car. Ones own feet were the vehicle of choice in these streets, and the only one that was at all reliable.
Izanami didn’t stop, didn’t even look as they passed by. A few people gave them sidelong looks, or pulled small children out of their paths, but for the most part the pair went as unnoticed in this mill as they would have in any time past. That was the way of things, here; that which was not socially acceptable was ignored. For the sake of politeness, you pretended to never see things that were other people’s business, such as the Mafia suit or the dragon tattoo. It was dishonorable to eavesdrop, and doubly so to poke your nose into places it does not belong. Some people were even so strict about this that they honestly did not notice these things, or if they did, they forgot them within a moment. Silently her shadow followed behind, sparing not a glance for the braver girls whom flashed their barely buttoned shirts in his direction. He’d probably have gotten them for free.
Another corner turned and they were back to decently decorated apartment complexes and tiny corner stores. This was the type of neighborhood she secretly envied. A place where you went to sleep at night listening to the rustle of other lives around you, the distant echoes of other stories being written and unfolded, hidden by paper thin walls. To one such as she, whom had never lived beyond expensive condos and houses with yards, the idea of the apartment lifestyle was a fairy tale of happy husbands and doting wives. Of children across the hall to play with, and a bedroom you could invite your friends into. Mai and Ayako had not been allowed in her house.
Izanami sighed as she stopped and sat down on a bus stop bench. After a moment of dealing with the discomfort, she moved herself around so that her cell phone wouldn’t dig under her ribs through its pocket on the side of her bag. The girl drew her feet up onto the edge of the bench and wrapped her arms about her legs, leaning forward as she looked down both directions of the road, hoping to sight the bus. It wasn’t there, and so she sat back and instead watched a scrap of cloudy sky peeking through the surrounding buildings. When a few minutes had passed, she felt Takeuchi settle on the bench as well. A bird chirped in the distance.
