Competition #7: One's Company
Mar 27, 2015 22:47:18 GMT
StarlightDragons, kkrazy256, and 2 more like this
Post by House of Mystery on Mar 27, 2015 22:47:18 GMT
As promised, our "star" this time is a pretty obscure character from the series (though he does have his own Wiki page). If you'd like some additional background on him before you read this, scroll to the bottom where I've amassed several sources.
It was today again. It was today, wasn't it? Yes yes that was it. It was today and it was going to be the day he died.
Unless it was yesterday. Then maybe he'd died yesterday. That wasn't impossible. It was so hard to tell so hard to tell sometimes what made today different from yesterday from yesterday anyhow.
Maybe the prime minister had gone and abolished it all so today and yesterday (and maybe tomorrow too) were just one big day now.
And maybe he'd abolish the gallows next.
No no no check the hair, he told himself. He felt around. A little longer than it was yesterday (or was it today?). Yes yes yes, that was the best proof there was. It was today.
(Or tomorrow.)
Same futon. Same desk. Same chair. Same sink. Same room four tatamis long and four tatamis wide. Same hallway sitting outside his window laughing at him. Sometimes he would laugh back. Not too loudly or they would come and discipline him with fists and sticks and he didn't want that.
Was it still summer? He hoped it was. But maybe it was winter. It was cold enough.
He hoped it wasn't winter. His friends wouldn't like that they would all be dead like everything else in the forest. Dead. Dead. Dead men tell no tales have no names.
Did he still have his name?
He tried to sound it out. His mouth wasn't being very nice today, but he tried anyway.
"Nuh... Nuh... Numa..."
It wasn't being very nice at all. He kept trying.
"Numabuchi."
He smiled.
"Kiichiro Numabuchi."
He'd heard rumors. Rumors that they'd changed the law so people like him could see their families once in a while. That wouldn't do him any good, though. Mom and Dad were dead and deader and ashes in a jar now. Tossed in the sea like they'd always wanted. Maybe.
Thank God.
Thank God that they'd left this world before they had a chance to see their boy turn into a three-time loser.
A loser at school. A loser at crime. A loser at life.
Thank God.
And every so often after the lights went out he would find them standing beside his futon and he would cry until it felt like there wasn't a drop of water left in his body. The orderlies would always tell him there was nothing there.
He believed them.
It didn't change a thing.
For twelve hours a day (or so he'd been told) he sat in his cell, eyes to the wall. Regulations demanded that he move as little as possible if it wasn't exercise hour or if he hadn't scored a job putting together shopping bags or something. To preserve your peace of mind and your dignity, they'd told him.
He spent much of that time wondering where he'd gone wrong.
The nicer, smarter bits of his mind would give different answers at different times. From the day you were born. From the day you dropped out. From the day you got your first knife.
More often than not, it would come back to Hyogo.
To the overnight driving academy and the son-of-a-bitch that never smiled and tore him a new asshole every time his mirror was half a degree off. To the bottle of sake and the five people who might've been the closest things he'd ever had to two-legged, no-winged friends.
He'd meant it as a joke. They'd all meant it as a joke. Let Old Man Inaba get himself a DUI. Maybe then he'd know what it was like to get chewed out behind the wheel for a change.
They'd gone to bed a bunch of happy little pranksters. They'd woken up to a news anchor who'd kindly informed them they were now murderers.
Assuming anyone found out.
There was no hushed oath the morning after. No opening veins and swapping blood. They swore they'd keep their mouths shut tight without a single word to each other.
After that, they'd all drifted apart. One of them went into politics - got himself a comfy seat on the Osaka city council, apparently. The rest found little odd-jobs here and there, himself included.
(It was then that he'd claimed his second victim. A twit who'd thought his fancy American popgun meant he didn't have to pay the stakes for any poker game. It turned out that knives were far, far better friends in close quarters.)
Mr. Inaba stayed dead.
Until twenty years after the fact. When he was further in the gutter than he'd ever thought possible, stuffed in a little cabin on Mount Taka and living on whatever he could steal from tourists on the trail.
Oh, the man who'd kicked the door in and flashed that badge might technically have been Mr. Inaba's son. He was sure that was what the birth certificate and the census form and everything else said.
But it was Mr. Inaba who'd cuffed him to a pillar in the attic and left him on a diet of ramen and crackers for more than a month while he'd gone out and got his just desserts on everyone else in on the joke. It couldn't have been anyone else.
He was only borrowing his son's body. That was all.
Mr. Inaba was alive. And at least once a month, it would be him by the futon, not Mom and Dad.
On those nights, he would get on his hands and knees and kowtow until his skull felt ready to crack open and spill his brains all across the floor.
It wasn't enough.
It would never be enough.
Sometimes he thought of them.
It had sounded so cool at first. The suits. The guns. The codenames.
(He'd asked if he could be Beer. The shorter one with the tie was nice enough to chuckle a bit. The taller one with the fright-wig told him maybe in ten years without a scrap of warmth.)
Go all around the world, he'd thought, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, London, New York. Kill important people like diplomats and presidents and kings and vanish into the night without a single trace. Let the police and CIA and FBI and MI6 and Interpol scratch their heads. Get a billion yen for every job. Bed any woman - any woman at all - without even trying.
The training had been Hell on wheels, but he'd clenched his teeth and taken it. His future had seemed so bright...
Until the first job.
It turned out that killing someone who'd pissed him off or had something he wanted was one thing. Killing someone he'd never even met before was another.
He didn't care to remember details beyond that. Everything had gone downhill. His new "friends" had sent him a letter promising that no, they didn't blame him at all. Rookies choked on their first jobs all the time, so if he would be just so kind to report to Kashii Pharmaceutical for additional training...
He might've been a dropout, but he wasn't that stupid.
Less than a day after he'd made a break for the Tohoku border. The first time in his life he'd driven anything since the Academy, and he'd nailed it. More or less.
Of course, they'd followed him. He'd expected nothing less.
The first three days had been the worst. He'd changed cars and hitchhiked a dozen times, and he knew it was barely slowing them down. Tohoku gave way to Kanto. Kanto gave way to Kansai, where the whole mess had began.
With every region he got the drop on another one of their lackeys. Slit their throats and smashed their skulls. Some professionals they were.
And for a moment or two, he'd actually convinced himself that he'd made a goddamn difference.
Reality had caught up to him in the second week.
The three people he'd killed had probably been small fry just like him, he'd realized, if they were part of the syndicate at all. The real professionals were closing in, and they wouldn't make mistakes.
It was then he'd first considered turning himself in. The country's police were tough no matter where a man went, but they'd be better than a secret society of spies, extortionists, and hitmen, right? All he had to do was march up to the closest cop-house, tell his story...
... and get laughed onto death row while the prosecutors pinned every cold case from the last century on him.
In the end, it hadn't even mattered. The police had caught up to him anyhow. And lo, the Osaka Detention Centre had been his new home for the last few months.
(Or was it years?)
He could never go more than a week without seeing them. In his cell. In the hall. In the exercise yard. Never in the same place twice. Always staring at him with those hard, cold eyes, like they couldn't decide how they wanted to kill him. Ice-pick to the eye? Pillow over the face? Cyanide in his water?
It was something he'd never told the orderlies. More likely than not, they'd just tell him his mind was playing tricks on him again.
That was what he was afraid of.
He received meals twice a day. Colorless, calorie-free things that tasted like chalk. Usually, they were the most exciting things he got to see. Or at least taste.
More than once he'd tried to skip them. Tried to hold one of those hunger strikes the papers had talked so much about in the old days. If a bunch of old Indians and South Africans could pull it off, why couldn't he?
The orderlies had been happy to show him why. With leather straps and metal gags and plastic tubes and mush. He'd learned quickly enough.
It would probably be the last thing he'd ever learn.
Well, no, that wasn't quite right. He'd get to see what the gallows looked like right before he got to feel them. Unless they blindfolded everyone who went in there. They didn't do that anymore, did they?
The boy might know.
(He gave a start.)
The boy probably did know.
He'd forgotten the boy's name (if he'd ever remembered it), but not the face. Never the face. When that rope finally tightened around his neck and cut his windpipe in two, that face would be the last thing he saw. He knew it.
The first time he'd seen it, he'd been chained in that attic on Mount Taka. And so hungry that he'd been ready to eat his own fingers.
He'd thanked every god he'd ever heard of when the cops - real cops, not insane driving teachers wearing a cop's skin - had found him. He'd thanked them again when those cops had let their guards down just enough for a getaway.
Then he'd been running, sliding that knife between the boy's ribs with that sweet, familiar squishing noise. The boy wanted to play hero? He was happy to oblige.
And the next thing he knew he'd been on the floor, arms behind his back, feeling like his hands were going to be ripped off one joint at a time.
(Later, he'd learned that the boy had lived. Little weirdo kept a piece of chain in his pocket for some reason.)
He'd thought no more of that face until the next summer. When the urge to see his friends - his real friends - one last time had finally swallowed the rest of him.
And so he'd spun them a yarn about the fourth body in Gunma's forests, about how sorry he was and how he'd be so happy to put it to rest at last. It'd taken time, but they'd finally swallowed it.
(There were more than three bodies, of course, but none of them were in Gunma. A man's homeland was no dumping ground, and he would fight anyone who said otherwise.)
Slipping away from his chaperons had been easy enough, but he'd never really expected the forests to hide him forever. Gunma was too small for that, and its cops couldn't all be as stupid as that fatheaded lieutenant was.
All he'd wanted was to say 'goodbye' to his friends. And he had.
But not before he'd gotten tangled up with some stupid little runaway from the big city. A friend of the boy's, it turned out.
And a friend of his friends too.
(That was when he'd learned that the boy knew things that most adults from the city didn't know. The easiest explanation was that the boy liked to read. A lot. Something told him that that was also the least likely one.)
He could've used the little runaway as a shield. Bought himself a little more time, maybe even a getaway car or something. He'd been empty-handed, but how much effort would it take to break a kid's neck?
Instead, he'd taken the kid to see his friends.
The cops had caught up to them right after, but what did it matter? He'd gotten what he'd come for. The boy's friend had gotten what he'd come for. And the boy had two closed cases to gloat over.
From time to time, he would wonder about the boy. There was something strange about those big blue eyes behind those oversized glasses. Something sharp and cold and... for lack of a better word, inhuman.
He never saw the boy - or the boy's friend - anywhere in his room. Or outside it, for that matter. A small relief, but one that he'd savor whenever he could.
For he was sure that when he took the plunge down the gallows, it would be the boy who came to whisk his soul off to Hell. Or Purgatory. Or Limbo. Or wherever men who did bad things were supposed to wind up.
Perhaps it would be today.
Unless it had been yesterday...
Maybe tomorrow then.
If tomorrow hadn't been abolished too...
So. Ki'ichiro Numabuchi. He's about as obscure as you can get with an "important" character in the series, having appeared in two separate storylines and possessing a tangential connection to the men in black. You can find his wiki page here; if you want to see his appearances for yourself, the anime has them in episodes 118 (the Naniwa case) and 289-290 (the Missing Mitsuhiko case), while the manga has them in Vol. 19, chapter 5-8 and Vol. 35, chapter 8-10.
Most of my motivation for writing this piece came from me wanting to explore what would be going through the mind of a man on death row. My primary sources on how Japan's death row operates are these two links, though I admit to taking certain liberties (an inevitability when you realize that even members of the Diet had to wrangle for a deal to be let into a death row detention centre, and even then they weren't allowed to take photographs). The trait that struck me as most hellish was the fact that prisoners aren't told when they're supposed to be executed until it's actually time; that, combined with the fact that it would almost certainly be impossible to keep track of time in those cells, would probably crack many a man's mind.
It was today again. It was today, wasn't it? Yes yes that was it. It was today and it was going to be the day he died.
Unless it was yesterday. Then maybe he'd died yesterday. That wasn't impossible. It was so hard to tell so hard to tell sometimes what made today different from yesterday from yesterday anyhow.
Maybe the prime minister had gone and abolished it all so today and yesterday (and maybe tomorrow too) were just one big day now.
And maybe he'd abolish the gallows next.
No no no check the hair, he told himself. He felt around. A little longer than it was yesterday (or was it today?). Yes yes yes, that was the best proof there was. It was today.
(Or tomorrow.)
Same futon. Same desk. Same chair. Same sink. Same room four tatamis long and four tatamis wide. Same hallway sitting outside his window laughing at him. Sometimes he would laugh back. Not too loudly or they would come and discipline him with fists and sticks and he didn't want that.
Was it still summer? He hoped it was. But maybe it was winter. It was cold enough.
He hoped it wasn't winter. His friends wouldn't like that they would all be dead like everything else in the forest. Dead. Dead. Dead men tell no tales have no names.
Did he still have his name?
He tried to sound it out. His mouth wasn't being very nice today, but he tried anyway.
"Nuh... Nuh... Numa..."
It wasn't being very nice at all. He kept trying.
"Numabuchi."
He smiled.
"Kiichiro Numabuchi."
He'd heard rumors. Rumors that they'd changed the law so people like him could see their families once in a while. That wouldn't do him any good, though. Mom and Dad were dead and deader and ashes in a jar now. Tossed in the sea like they'd always wanted. Maybe.
Thank God.
Thank God that they'd left this world before they had a chance to see their boy turn into a three-time loser.
A loser at school. A loser at crime. A loser at life.
Thank God.
And every so often after the lights went out he would find them standing beside his futon and he would cry until it felt like there wasn't a drop of water left in his body. The orderlies would always tell him there was nothing there.
He believed them.
It didn't change a thing.
For twelve hours a day (or so he'd been told) he sat in his cell, eyes to the wall. Regulations demanded that he move as little as possible if it wasn't exercise hour or if he hadn't scored a job putting together shopping bags or something. To preserve your peace of mind and your dignity, they'd told him.
He spent much of that time wondering where he'd gone wrong.
The nicer, smarter bits of his mind would give different answers at different times. From the day you were born. From the day you dropped out. From the day you got your first knife.
More often than not, it would come back to Hyogo.
To the overnight driving academy and the son-of-a-bitch that never smiled and tore him a new asshole every time his mirror was half a degree off. To the bottle of sake and the five people who might've been the closest things he'd ever had to two-legged, no-winged friends.
He'd meant it as a joke. They'd all meant it as a joke. Let Old Man Inaba get himself a DUI. Maybe then he'd know what it was like to get chewed out behind the wheel for a change.
They'd gone to bed a bunch of happy little pranksters. They'd woken up to a news anchor who'd kindly informed them they were now murderers.
Assuming anyone found out.
There was no hushed oath the morning after. No opening veins and swapping blood. They swore they'd keep their mouths shut tight without a single word to each other.
After that, they'd all drifted apart. One of them went into politics - got himself a comfy seat on the Osaka city council, apparently. The rest found little odd-jobs here and there, himself included.
(It was then that he'd claimed his second victim. A twit who'd thought his fancy American popgun meant he didn't have to pay the stakes for any poker game. It turned out that knives were far, far better friends in close quarters.)
Mr. Inaba stayed dead.
Until twenty years after the fact. When he was further in the gutter than he'd ever thought possible, stuffed in a little cabin on Mount Taka and living on whatever he could steal from tourists on the trail.
Oh, the man who'd kicked the door in and flashed that badge might technically have been Mr. Inaba's son. He was sure that was what the birth certificate and the census form and everything else said.
But it was Mr. Inaba who'd cuffed him to a pillar in the attic and left him on a diet of ramen and crackers for more than a month while he'd gone out and got his just desserts on everyone else in on the joke. It couldn't have been anyone else.
He was only borrowing his son's body. That was all.
Mr. Inaba was alive. And at least once a month, it would be him by the futon, not Mom and Dad.
On those nights, he would get on his hands and knees and kowtow until his skull felt ready to crack open and spill his brains all across the floor.
It wasn't enough.
It would never be enough.
Sometimes he thought of them.
It had sounded so cool at first. The suits. The guns. The codenames.
(He'd asked if he could be Beer. The shorter one with the tie was nice enough to chuckle a bit. The taller one with the fright-wig told him maybe in ten years without a scrap of warmth.)
Go all around the world, he'd thought, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, London, New York. Kill important people like diplomats and presidents and kings and vanish into the night without a single trace. Let the police and CIA and FBI and MI6 and Interpol scratch their heads. Get a billion yen for every job. Bed any woman - any woman at all - without even trying.
The training had been Hell on wheels, but he'd clenched his teeth and taken it. His future had seemed so bright...
Until the first job.
It turned out that killing someone who'd pissed him off or had something he wanted was one thing. Killing someone he'd never even met before was another.
He didn't care to remember details beyond that. Everything had gone downhill. His new "friends" had sent him a letter promising that no, they didn't blame him at all. Rookies choked on their first jobs all the time, so if he would be just so kind to report to Kashii Pharmaceutical for additional training...
He might've been a dropout, but he wasn't that stupid.
Less than a day after he'd made a break for the Tohoku border. The first time in his life he'd driven anything since the Academy, and he'd nailed it. More or less.
Of course, they'd followed him. He'd expected nothing less.
The first three days had been the worst. He'd changed cars and hitchhiked a dozen times, and he knew it was barely slowing them down. Tohoku gave way to Kanto. Kanto gave way to Kansai, where the whole mess had began.
With every region he got the drop on another one of their lackeys. Slit their throats and smashed their skulls. Some professionals they were.
And for a moment or two, he'd actually convinced himself that he'd made a goddamn difference.
Reality had caught up to him in the second week.
The three people he'd killed had probably been small fry just like him, he'd realized, if they were part of the syndicate at all. The real professionals were closing in, and they wouldn't make mistakes.
It was then he'd first considered turning himself in. The country's police were tough no matter where a man went, but they'd be better than a secret society of spies, extortionists, and hitmen, right? All he had to do was march up to the closest cop-house, tell his story...
... and get laughed onto death row while the prosecutors pinned every cold case from the last century on him.
In the end, it hadn't even mattered. The police had caught up to him anyhow. And lo, the Osaka Detention Centre had been his new home for the last few months.
(Or was it years?)
He could never go more than a week without seeing them. In his cell. In the hall. In the exercise yard. Never in the same place twice. Always staring at him with those hard, cold eyes, like they couldn't decide how they wanted to kill him. Ice-pick to the eye? Pillow over the face? Cyanide in his water?
It was something he'd never told the orderlies. More likely than not, they'd just tell him his mind was playing tricks on him again.
That was what he was afraid of.
He received meals twice a day. Colorless, calorie-free things that tasted like chalk. Usually, they were the most exciting things he got to see. Or at least taste.
More than once he'd tried to skip them. Tried to hold one of those hunger strikes the papers had talked so much about in the old days. If a bunch of old Indians and South Africans could pull it off, why couldn't he?
The orderlies had been happy to show him why. With leather straps and metal gags and plastic tubes and mush. He'd learned quickly enough.
It would probably be the last thing he'd ever learn.
Well, no, that wasn't quite right. He'd get to see what the gallows looked like right before he got to feel them. Unless they blindfolded everyone who went in there. They didn't do that anymore, did they?
The boy might know.
(He gave a start.)
The boy probably did know.
He'd forgotten the boy's name (if he'd ever remembered it), but not the face. Never the face. When that rope finally tightened around his neck and cut his windpipe in two, that face would be the last thing he saw. He knew it.
The first time he'd seen it, he'd been chained in that attic on Mount Taka. And so hungry that he'd been ready to eat his own fingers.
He'd thanked every god he'd ever heard of when the cops - real cops, not insane driving teachers wearing a cop's skin - had found him. He'd thanked them again when those cops had let their guards down just enough for a getaway.
Then he'd been running, sliding that knife between the boy's ribs with that sweet, familiar squishing noise. The boy wanted to play hero? He was happy to oblige.
And the next thing he knew he'd been on the floor, arms behind his back, feeling like his hands were going to be ripped off one joint at a time.
(Later, he'd learned that the boy had lived. Little weirdo kept a piece of chain in his pocket for some reason.)
He'd thought no more of that face until the next summer. When the urge to see his friends - his real friends - one last time had finally swallowed the rest of him.
And so he'd spun them a yarn about the fourth body in Gunma's forests, about how sorry he was and how he'd be so happy to put it to rest at last. It'd taken time, but they'd finally swallowed it.
(There were more than three bodies, of course, but none of them were in Gunma. A man's homeland was no dumping ground, and he would fight anyone who said otherwise.)
Slipping away from his chaperons had been easy enough, but he'd never really expected the forests to hide him forever. Gunma was too small for that, and its cops couldn't all be as stupid as that fatheaded lieutenant was.
All he'd wanted was to say 'goodbye' to his friends. And he had.
But not before he'd gotten tangled up with some stupid little runaway from the big city. A friend of the boy's, it turned out.
And a friend of his friends too.
(That was when he'd learned that the boy knew things that most adults from the city didn't know. The easiest explanation was that the boy liked to read. A lot. Something told him that that was also the least likely one.)
He could've used the little runaway as a shield. Bought himself a little more time, maybe even a getaway car or something. He'd been empty-handed, but how much effort would it take to break a kid's neck?
Instead, he'd taken the kid to see his friends.
The cops had caught up to them right after, but what did it matter? He'd gotten what he'd come for. The boy's friend had gotten what he'd come for. And the boy had two closed cases to gloat over.
From time to time, he would wonder about the boy. There was something strange about those big blue eyes behind those oversized glasses. Something sharp and cold and... for lack of a better word, inhuman.
He never saw the boy - or the boy's friend - anywhere in his room. Or outside it, for that matter. A small relief, but one that he'd savor whenever he could.
For he was sure that when he took the plunge down the gallows, it would be the boy who came to whisk his soul off to Hell. Or Purgatory. Or Limbo. Or wherever men who did bad things were supposed to wind up.
Perhaps it would be today.
Unless it had been yesterday...
Maybe tomorrow then.
If tomorrow hadn't been abolished too...
So. Ki'ichiro Numabuchi. He's about as obscure as you can get with an "important" character in the series, having appeared in two separate storylines and possessing a tangential connection to the men in black. You can find his wiki page here; if you want to see his appearances for yourself, the anime has them in episodes 118 (the Naniwa case) and 289-290 (the Missing Mitsuhiko case), while the manga has them in Vol. 19, chapter 5-8 and Vol. 35, chapter 8-10.
Most of my motivation for writing this piece came from me wanting to explore what would be going through the mind of a man on death row. My primary sources on how Japan's death row operates are these two links, though I admit to taking certain liberties (an inevitability when you realize that even members of the Diet had to wrangle for a deal to be let into a death row detention centre, and even then they weren't allowed to take photographs). The trait that struck me as most hellish was the fact that prisoners aren't told when they're supposed to be executed until it's actually time; that, combined with the fact that it would almost certainly be impossible to keep track of time in those cells, would probably crack many a man's mind.