Eight Million Gods Read online

  The detective put her backpack on the table and settled into the chair across from her. Silently, they eyed each other. It reminded her of meeting a new psychiatrist. The quiet weighing in of battle spirit before the subtle and non-so-subtle word games started.

  He was tall, solidly built for a Japanese man, and good-looking. Brown hair and brown eyes went without saying, although his haircut wasn’t the drama excess she was used to in J-pop idols and male nightclub hosts. He seemed fairly young to be a detective. Was he one of those guys that got ahead merely because he acted the arrogant alpha male? No, he didn’t have the self-centered air that they had. He was searching her face, his dark eyebrows arched in mild confusion. Maybe he was the rare type of man that was as intelligent as he was good-looking. Maybe he did criminal profiling and he was realizing that she really didn’t fit the type that killed men with blenders. If she could keep from scribbling madly on the walls, she might even be able to convince him of that.

  “I don’t speak Japanese.” She said it slowly but not loudly. Loudly only annoyed people. “Please. English. Kudasai.”

  “Chotto matte kudasi.” He stood up and took out a key ring. She realized that he was going to take off her handcuffs. She managed to slip her stolen pen up her sleeve and tucked it into her watchband before he reached her side.

  “Arigato go—go—goazimasu.” She purposely stumbled with the “thank you very much.”

  As she rubbed her wrists, he took his seat again. Okay, not being handcuffed was good, maybe. It meant Tanka didn’t consider her dangerous. If she lost control of her hypergraphia, however, her hands would be free to disobey.

  They had taken her wallet and passport at the restaurant. He took them out now and studied her passport and tourist visa papers. He sounded out her name. “Nikki Delany.”

  Nikki nodded. “Hai.”

  He produced latex gloves out of his coat pocket and pulled them on. Oh, joy. He was treating her backpack as evidence. He cautiously unzipped the bag as if suspecting she had poisonous snakes inside. She winced as she remembered the contents: an extremely graphic yaoi manga, a package of fireworks, more pens than God, a fresh notebook, and one very large knife. In the USA, everything but the pen and paper would get her into trouble. At least in Japan, they’d only be concerned with the knife.

  He pulled out the sealed plastic package of the fireworks she’d bought at 7-11 that morning. As she’d expected, he put it to the side with only a slight look of confusion.

  A paper fan she forgot she’d collected followed. It was one of the traditional non-folding fans called an uchiwa. She had recently started to decorate the walls of her apartment with them because they were given out for free. This one had a beautiful woodblock print of a sparrow sitting on a flowering tree on one side and an advertisement on the back, although she couldn’t tell for what. It stated “lead the value” in English and then “kanji” underneath identifying the company. She had asked the man handing it out for a translation. He’d misunderstood and demonstrated fanning himself. It triggered one of the many cultural shocks of the morning.

  Detective Tanaka laid the fan aside and took out the yaoi manga. She liked the series because it explained the world of manga production, but the cover made clear that the plot followed the romance of two men. She was laboring over translating a page a day in an attempt to learn Japanese on her own. Tanaka’s confused look grew deeper.

  He took out the notebook she had bought that morning. He flipped through it, noting all the pages were blank, and put it down. Her hands were moving toward it before she stopped herself. Tanaka eyed her hands and then the notebook.

  Jerking her hands back would be bad. Considering how twitchy her fingers felt, picking up the notebook would be very bad. She froze. Her Japanese utterly failed her. “Good paper. Very good paper.”

  Finally he hit the cleaverlike nakiri with the gleaming black blade.

  She had done endless research on knives in her quest to learn how to cook Japanese style. She knew for example that the nakiri of Osaka were called kamagata nakiri and had a rounded corner instead of the Tokyo rectangular shape. She had not a clue how to say “cut vegetables.”

  “Daikon.” She named one Japanese vegetable she knew, the large radish root and mimed cutting one up. “Chop, chop, chop.” How did you say cook? “Shabu shabu.” Technically it was a dish, but the name came from the sound of the food being cooked. She was fairly sure you chopped up vegetables for it.

  “Ah.” He made a little noise of understanding but was careful to put the knife onto the chair beside him, out of her reach.

  The door opened and the little tiny salaryman from the restaurant paused in the doorway, clutching a folder to his chest.

  “You!” Nikki pointed at him, and he nearly jumped back out of the room. “You speak English!”

  Tanaka snickered. “Yes. He speaks English. This is Aki Yoshida.”

  She didn’t know if she was more pissed or relieved. She settled on relieved because pissed usually caused problems. “This is a mistake. I write novels. Like this.” She tapped the manga. She really hoped that Yoshida didn’t pair Miriam’s taunt at the restaurant with the cover art of a half-naked, big-eyed uke staring up at his leering seme. “I’m here in Japan researching locations for a novel I’m writing. That’s what we were talking about in the restaurant. One of my characters had been murdered. I wrote about killing . . .”

  Tanaka was in full confusion. She had outstripped his understanding of English. She tucked her hands under the table, reached up her sleeve to her stolen pen and clicked it. Breath deep. Click. White sands. Click. Blue ocean. Click.

  “I didn’t kill anyone.” She stuck to plain and simple.

  Yoshida nervously eyed the knife on the chair on the police side of the table. Tanaka said something to him and pointed to the fourth chair. The little policeman edged closer to Nikki, grabbed the chair, and dragged it quickly away from her side.

  “I’m a forensic scientist,” Yoshida said. “I studied at California State University.”

  So he should understand English very well, but he didn’t look any less scared.

  “I write novels,” she tried again, slower. “I was talking about my book. My characters are not real people.”

  Yoshida opened the folder that he was carrying and pushed a picture toward her. It was a blond man, fairly good-looking if one overlooked the fact that he was obviously very dead.

  “Do you know this man?” Tanaka asked.

  “No.” They had a dead body! They had a real dead body! Clickclickclickclickclick.

  “He is American,” Tanaka said. “His name is Gregory Winston.”

  “I don’t know him!” Okay, that was eerily close to her character George Wilson’s name. She fought the urge to reach for her notebook. Now was not the time to break down. “Crazy” was too close to “homicidal” in most people’s dictionary.

  “He had an apartment in Umeda,” Tanaka said.

  Just like George Wilson.

  “I don’t know him,” Nikki said. How do you prove that you don’t know someone—especially after they’re dead? “Really, I’ve only been in Japan for two months. I barely know anyone.”

  “Did you meet him in the United States? Maybe you were lovers?”

  “No! I’ve never seen that man before in my life!” She was going to lose it soon.

  Tanaka motioned to Yoshida, and the little police officer took out another photograph and put it beside the picture of the dead man. It was a Blendtec blender covered in blood, still set on puree.

  She upset her chair, tripped over it, and came up against the wall before she realized that she had recoiled as fast as she could from the photograph. Her mouth was open and something loud and not very sane sounding was struggling to push its way out. She slapped her hand back over her mouth to keep it in.

  “You recognize this?” Tanaka asked.

  Nikki nodded and then realized that it made her very guilty looking and shook her head.
r />   “Which is it? Yes or no?”

  She found herself in the corner, still trying to backpedal away from the photograph. She took her hands away to explain how she “recognized” the blender but didn’t “recognize” it.

  “I wrote a story. I made up a man. I made him an American living here in Osaka for business because I’m writing a book set here in Osaka. I said he lived in Umeda so he could see the Ferris wheel on the top of Hep Five. Honest to God. I made it all up.”

  Shit, she was babbling. She needed to shut up. “I was eating ramen for lunch and thought ‘George Wilson will be killed by a blender’ and started to write it. I don’t know why a blender. I didn’t even know anything about blenders. That’s just how the muse works.” Stop talking. “I had to look them up on the Internet. They’re really a stupid murder weapon. Their cords are only this long, you always put on the jar before you put on the blades, and I don’t know if you can buy them in Japan.” Stop talking! Just stop! “I spent all yesterday doing research on them. I ended up on youtube.com watching the Blendtec ‘will it blend’ videos. They put weird shit in blenders and reduce them down to scrap. You know—marbles and cell phones. It felt right; it was the kind of blender George would own.”

  She slapped her hands over her mouth. Obviously, she had lost Tanaka long ago, and Yoshida was frowning in concentration to understand what she had said. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  Yoshida started to talk in Japanese to Tanaka. Maybe translating. Maybe suggesting that they put her in a mental hospital. She really wished she understood Japanese better. She closed her eyes and thought of tropical beaches—someplace where people spoke English—with no blenders.

  Cigarette smoke made her open her eyes. Tanaka had taken out a pack of Lucky Strikes and lit one. He was listening to Yoshida, but he was watching her with puzzled eyes. He held out the pack as an offering. Nikki shook her head. He took a portable ashtray, known as a keitai haizara, out of his pocket and placed it beside him.

  “Where were you last night?” Tanaka asked when Yoshida finished. “With people? They can say you were with them?”

  Could she talk without babbling? She slid her hand off her mouth and tried to stay focused on not babbling and sounding guilty as hell. Her hands fluttered around, looking for the pen she’d been holding. “Saturdays I do chores. I cleaned my apartment, did laundry, and wrote.” The pen wasn’t in her pocket or up her sleeve. She scanned the floor and spotted it beside her overturned chair. She edged over and scooped up the pen as she righted her chair. She pushed the chair toward the table while keeping to a sane, safe subject. “There’s a FamilyMart across the street. I went to it three—no—four times. Nakamura was working yesterday; she wants to be a JAL flight attendant, so she likes to practice her English with me. First time I bought panda blood-flavored cookies . . .”

  “Nani?” Tanaka exclaimed.

  Yoshida shrugged.

  “Panda blood-flavored?” Tanaka asked.

  Nikki sat down, her right hand holding the pen hidden in her lap. She put her left out on the table to distract the policemen. “I don’t know what they’re called.” Nikki quietly clicked the ballpoint and tried not to think about the huge gaps of time she spent in her apartment alone yesterday. “The bag has a picture of a panda on the front. The cookies were squishy, and they have some kind of red filling. I thought it would be cherry or raspberry or something, but it was something icky that I’ve never had before. I didn’t like them. I posted about them on my blog, and someone commented that they were panda blood-flavored.”

  Yoshida condensed her ranting down to four words.

  “You went three more times?” Tanaka asked.

  “Second time I bought the ramen for lunch and got yen coins for the washing machines in the lobby of my apartment building. I went home and ate and wrote.” The visits had been hours apart. She had been alone, lost in her writing. Click. Click. Click. “I posted the scene, started my laundry, and then went back to FamilyMart.”

  By then, she was in the fact-checking phase of writing, trying to fill in all the details that the muse had left out. In the scene, it had just been “the blender” and the action had been confusing, mostly because of her own ignorance of the kitchen appliance. Somehow she had lived twenty years without seeing one in person. She had found the Blendtec videos, and it felt right, but none of her searches were pulling up where you could buy them in Japan.

  “I’m out of rice and stuff,” she said. “I had planned to go food shopping, but I wanted to keep working—polishing the scene—so I got three rice balls for dinner.”

  She also showed Nakamura some Blendtec videos on her laptop and asked the girl if she had ever seen any for sale. So not going to mention that. She realized, though, that she had proof of the third visit. She couldn’t tax-deduct food, so normally she didn’t keep food receipts. Since she had taken the laptop with her in her backpack, though, she had tucked away the sales slip as she pulled out her computer. “I kept the receipt. It’s in the little zippered pocket in the front.”

  Tanaka unzipped the compartment and pulled out the little slips of paper. Nikki had kept the receipts of her morning shopping because the manga, and possibly both the fireworks and the knife, were all deductible. She would have to check with the Team Banzai members. Tanaka sorted through the receipts and found the one that recorded her trip to the FamilyMart. He uttered one of the Japanese wordless sounds of surprise and slid the slip to Yoshida, who produced a plastic evidence bag and bagged it.

  “How long did you talk with her?” Tanaka asked.

  This sounded good, like maybe she had an alibi. “I was there fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty minutes. I didn’t know what I wanted to eat for dinner. I like to try new stuff, but the panda blood-flavored cookies made me not want to experiment.”

  She had desperately wanted peanut butter sandwiches, but none of the local food stores carried the tiny jars of Skippy, which was the only way the spread was sold in Japan. She didn’t want to make a special trip across town to buy some. “In the end, I got the rice balls because they’re a safe bet. I like the salmon-stuffed ones. Then I looked at the manga until no one was there so I could ask Nakamura questions.”

  Yoshida translated or speculated or talked about the weather. He didn’t mention rice balls, which were called onigiri, so she wasn’t sure what he actually talked to Tanaka about.

  Tanaka nodded to whatever Yoshida told him, watching Nikki through his cigarette smoke. “Last time you went?”

  “About ten minutes later.” She checked on her laundry and then went back to the convenience store without going back up to her apartment. “I wanted to ask Nakamura more questions, but she had gotten off work. I decided to buy something to drink, but I didn’t want soda. I looked at the drinks for five or ten minutes. I bought something I thought was grape juice—I don’t know what it was—it tasted horrible.” She pointed at the pile of receipts. “I think it might have been sake. I kept the receipt to show my friend.”

  Tanaka shuffled through the papers again and found that she indeed had kept the receipt. She took it as a very good sign that he seemed slightly dismayed by it. He tapped his fingers beside it for a few minutes before asking, “Who else did you talk to about the blender?”

  They were considering the possibility that someone else had murdered George’s doppelganger. Relief went through Nikki, as she had a trump card on top of the receipts. “I blogged it.”

  Tanaka glanced to Yoshida, who said something long and detailed. Surely the Japanese knew about blogging. Yoshida got up and left.

  “We start again.” Tanaka stubbed out his butt and tapped another cigarette out of the pack. His dark eyes studied her closely. “Why are you in Japan?”

  “I’m writing a novel set in Japan,” she said truthfully. “I came to do research for the book.”

  “On a tourist visa?”

  “I don’t qualify for other types of visas. I have another thirty days on my visa.�
� At which time she planned to visit South Korea with Miriam for the weekend and renew the tourist visa upon their return flight. It was the trips out of Japan and back to renew her visa that made her budget so tight. She had been trying to set up a different, longer visa, when her mother forced her early flight. If she could get a three-year artist visa, then her money would stretch further.

  Tanaka considered her as he took a long drag on his cigarette and blew out the smoke. “You write about murder?”

  Yes? No? If they looked at her blog, they would see it was all she wrote about lately. “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes,” Tanaka echoed. He studied her another minute. “You do not know this man?”

  Nikki shook her head.

  “But you wrote of a man being killed with a blender?”

  Nikki winced and gave a tiny nod.

  “This man—this made-up man—he was American?”

  Nikki nodded again.

  “And he lived in Umeda where he could see the Ferris wheel?”

  She had babbled that out? Yes, she had. “Yes, he did.”

  Yoshida came back with a laptop, which he pushed toward her. He had a browser up in English. A Tachikoma robotic tank from Ghost in the Shell anime peeked around the window from a screensaver. The little forensic scientist was an anime fan.

  “Your blog. Show it to us, please.” Tanaka pointed at the laptop.

  Nikki typed in the address for her author website. She used a pen name in an effort to keep her writing secret from her mother. She had suspected she might want to be able to prove that she was really the author of the book, so she had included photographs of herself, albeit hidden under a secret directory. “Look, see, this is my website.”

  “Ah!” Tanaka studied the secret pictures closely. “Very sexy.”

  Nikki blushed. Sheila’s brother, Doug, had been the photographer, so Sheila had taken the opportunity to play dress-up and matchmaker. Nikki ended up in a tight leather dress, three-inch stiletto boots, and more hairspray and makeup than she had ever used in her entire life. On the bright side, she doubted her mother would recognize her. On the downside, it had led to a short “thing” with Doug that ended like most of her dating attempts. She was just too creepy for most guys to take for more than a few days.