And they did seem pretty much determined to keep at it for the time being, but just as Yoji was about to interrupt them again, things got even weirder. A guy appeared out of nowhere, ran up to the bench, stared down at the couple, did this dramatic kind of double take—“Whooooa”—and stood there with this bizarre look on his face. But it wasn’t just his look that was weird—it was everything about him. He was wearing a pink polo shirt tucked into chinos. A little Hello Kitty doll hung off his backpack. He was pale as a ghost and wore these big glasses that were almost covered by long bangs. And he had on this really weird hat. The whole effect was gross—like that disgusting guy on TV, Bondo Oki. I was beginning to think it was something about this park.
But almost as soon as he appeared, the woman, who had seemed completely hot for it until that moment, suddenly pulled away from her husband and rolled down her skirt—I assumed she must know the weird guy somehow. And then the man, Mr. Yoshiba, began slowly pulling up his pants, though he still had a hard-on, and when he was decent again, he got up and walked away without saying a word.
But the Bondo guy was all squirmy and giggly. “Sorry,” he said. “Did I interrupt something?” Then he turned to the woman, apologized again, and ran out of the park, his long hair and Hello Kitty doll bouncing all the way.
By this time Yoji and I were pretty freaked out, so we turned around and headed back ourselves.
WTF.
I remembered I had been crying, but I couldn’t remember why anymore.
Why should I when the tears weren’t even real?
6
The Yoshibas live right near me. You go a little north until you hit the Nogawa River, turn left and follow the bank for about five minutes, then down this little alley. It’s right there. The whole place was crawling with media until just recently, clogging up the streets with cars and bikes and nosy neighbors and gawkers. It was a regular madhouse. But that was over now. It’d been more than two months since the Round-and-Round Devil kidnapped little Shin’ichi, Koji, and Yuzo, cut them up, and dumped them in a heap by the river. Since then, a slasher in Nigata Prefecture had run through a shopping center stabbing everyone in sight. He managed to kill seven people and wound five more before heading for the hills. Everybody was really tense for a week or so until they found his body—he had committed suicide. And then there were the three families living tooth-to-jowl in Tottori Prefecture. A three-way feud that had been simmering for more than a decade boiled over one night. Weapons of choice: kitchen knives, hatchets, aluminum bats, lead pipes. Casualty count: four dead, twelve seriously injured. Afterwards, there was an even bigger stink in the village when they found out that the whole thing had been stirred up by a woman who wasn’t even related to any of the three families. She took off out of the village, and the media followed her with helicopters and everything, and in the end just about everybody in Japan was watching the chase on live TV—and nobody even seemed to remember the mass murderer in our neighborhood anymore.
But to get back to my story, in the two years leading up to the Round-and-Round Devil killing the boys, he had apparently killed seven cats and four dogs—maybe more—and left notes by the bodies, labeling them “Souvenirs of a Visit from the Round-and-Round Devil.” There were even little pictures with some of them—supposedly drawn by the Monster himself. I’m not sure what they showed, but they said they were these weird whirlpool shapes. Shit, it was all just copycat stuff, riffing off those notes about the “Bamoidoki God” left by that Sakakibara kid who cut off that little boy’s head, or that other killer who called himself the “Jawakutora God.”
You shouldn’t go stealing other people’s gods.
But then isn’t all religion a matter of stealing in the first place?
The “religious spirit”—a big rip-off?
It’s all about losers, big zeros who suddenly panic and figure they’ve got to find something to go nuts over, so they look around everywhere and they see other losers praying their guts out to the sky or a cross or some statue, and they figure “Shit! That looks good” and they end up doing the same thing—that’s all religion is, deep down. Then there’s missionary work—spreading the Good News—which is even worse. You go out and find other frustrated, pathetic fuckers and sell them the same crap, tell them to pray to the same whatever until they’re dead. But you know, I don’t really give a shit what people do—fool each other, copy each other, even help each other; as long as they don’t bug other people, it’s all good with me. But when it comes to these really pathetic bastards who use a bogus religion or their “principles” or “ideology” as an excuse to kill cats or dogs or little kids—well they can just fuck off and die.
So as for the creep who calls himself the Round-and-Round Devil…well, you pretty much know what he can do.
The little notes he left—those were totally like his calling card: like, “Round-and-Round Devil man was here!” But what the hell were those stupid whirlpool drawings? Self-fucking-portraits? So then maybe he isn’t even human. But of course he’s human, so what we’ve really got is a killer who is some sort of immature child, completely fucked up in the head and unable to tell the difference between this bogus Round-and-Round Devil god and the (human) idiot who made him up and worships him—an idiot who can’t tell
