The Monster on the Road Is Me Read online

  “That’s enough!” Ikeda-sensei barked from the corner. “Everyone shut your awful little mouths!”

  “But Koda threw that ball at my head!”

  Technically the ball was chucked at the basket, and somehow in all the bouncing that ensued her head got in the way.

  Good point, brain.

  “Quiet, all of you,” Ikeda-sensei shot back.

  “Koda hates me,” the random girl cried.

  Not true, not true. I don’t hate you. I barely know you.

  It’s the gods that hate her, my brain said.

  Obviously.

  “Stop fooling around,” Ikeda-sensei bellowed, lifting his huge frame from the bleachers. “Get back to your drills.”

  The girl with the basketball head wound receded into a gang of her supporters. Kenji walked up behind me and slapped me on the back. “Couldn’t have done it better myself.”

  He’s going to choke on a salmon bone one day and pee himself in front of the whole class, said my brain.

  I laughed. If you’ve ever seen Kenji maul his food at lunchtime, you’d know he was bound to choke on something sooner or later. And after he does, I’m going to slap him on the back and say, Couldn’t have done it better myself.

  Good one, my brain said.

  * * *

  I rode my bike slower than normal along the backstreets after school. I’d been lucky that no one important was on the second floor when I took my little tumble in the math room. That was three sleep attacks in just a couple of weeks. My narcolepsy was definitely getting worse.

  Moya had asked if I’d seen the crows. Aiko had been searching for a three-legged crow named Yatagarasu, and Ichiro wrote karasu on the floor before he died. Maybe the crows had been following other kids at Kusaka High. Maybe they’d been following me. If I could do something to stop them, then it was definitely worth a ride to Moya’s mysterious address.

  I jerked my bike to a stop in front of an old, abandoned house. Not a kitten graveyard, exactly, but not a place you’d want to be walking around at night. I took off my helmet and unfolded the piece of paper Moya had given me. Yep. This was it. I swung my foot over the seat and walked through the front gate, which was almost welded shut with rust. I stepped up to the front door and slid it back with a loud, metallic scrape.

  “Gomen kudasai,” I called inside. My voice echoed through the musty genkan.

  Nothing.

  “Gomen kudasai,” I called again.

  No one answered. I was about to shut the door when I heard the muted sound of laughter. From a television set.

  “Daremo imasen ka?” I called louder.

  “Who is it?” came a raspy voice from down the darkened hallway.

  “Okita Koda desu.”

  “Who?” the hoarse woman called back.

  “Koda. I, um, deliver mushrooms.”

  “What?”

  “I got your address from this girl … in a parking lot. She said you might have something for me.”

  You are the worst thief in the entire world! “Excuse me, ma’am, I’m interested in possibly stealing something from you—if you have the time, that is.”

  Shut up, brain.

  “Who?”

  “Her name was Moya. I have this piece of paper, if that helps.”

  Why would that help?

  “Go away, young man. We don’t need mushrooms here.”

  “No, I don’t want to sell you mushrooms. My name is Koda Okita.”

  “I don’t know who that is, young man.”

  “Right. I did just explain this, though. I’m Koda Okita. I received your address from a girl at Lawson’s. I think you have, um, a memory for me?”

  “I’m very busy,” the voice said. “I don’t have time for salesmen.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Thank you, goodbye.”

  “Um.”

  “Please shut the door.”

  “Right. Ojama shimashita.”

  I slid the front door closed. Well, that was a big fat fail. The dusty placard on the front read “Yamamoto.” Which didn’t help much. How many Yamamotos live in Kusaka? Fifty? A hundred? It might be the most common name in all of Japan. I still didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for. Or how it could possibly stop the crows that were killing people in this town.

  Maybe this was a bad idea. When a girl who snubs cigarettes with her fingers hands you an address late at night, you don’t visit that address. That’s how people end up getting murdered. “Mountain Street.” Moya was probably just some stress-head who actually knew nothing about me or Kusaka Town.

  I shut the gate to the Yamamoto home and walked out into the street. Everyone in the world has stress, but in Japan we’ve turned it into a national art form. Think about all the stress heaped on us students: If you don’t pass your exams in high school, you won’t get into a good college. If you don’t get into a good college, you’ll never get hired by a decent company. If you don’t get into a decent company, you’ll become an outcast and probably die alone in an apartment the size of a broom closet while your ancestors look down and weep from shame. Or you’ll become a shiitake mushroom farmer. Which is pretty much the same thing.

  Stress starts when you’re a kid, and it doesn’t let up until … I guess, until you die. There’s social stress: Am I part of the in-crowd? Do people know my name? There’s job stress: Am I the last one to leave? Does the boss know my name? There’s romantic stress and parental stress and transportation stress and stress you get from walking down the street and wondering if that girl passing you will nod, or smile, or pretend you don’t exist at all.

  That’s a lot of stress. Everybody has it. Old or young. Rich or poor. Nobody wants to be left on the outside. Nobody wants to be alone. And sometimes that stress builds up until something cracks inside.

  I had met this guy the summer before on a train from Kōchi City. He smiled and sat down next to me, ignoring all the other empty seats in the car. I kept on looking out the window, but I could feel him watching the back of my head. I started to think he was one of those train perverts. You know, the kind who waits until the train lurches to the side, then reaches out to grope you. I scooted over a bit.

  “I’m a very generous man,” he told me.

  I scooted over a lot.

  “Do you know how generous I am?” he asked.

  “Nope,” I said, looking up at the ceiling.

  “I would give you this book here.”

  He set down a tattered pile of loose papers on the seat between us. I looked over. They were pages ripped out of a 1996 Honda owner’s manual. Looking back, I don’t think he knew that.

  “I like the part when the rōnin is caught between two warring families and he tricks them into killing each other,” he said. “You should read that part.”

  Yep, I’m pretty sure he didn’t know it was a car manual. Of course, I hadn’t actually read that particular car manual. It could have been the most awesome samurai-themed Honda owner’s manual ever.

  “I’ve been more generous than this,” the man continued. “I had a friend who’d been in a car accident and was paralyzed from the waist down. He came to me and said, ‘I wish I could go to the school dance.’ So I let him borrow my legs.”

  “Your … legs?”

  The man frowned. “He gave them back, of course.”

  Stupid me.

  “Just like he promised. Returned them the next day and the doctor sewed my legs back on. No problem.”

  Not a glint. Not a wink of the eye. Not a corner of a smile. Nothing. He was as serious as an old man with reattached legs could be. The brakes screeched as we pulled to a stop.

  “Kusaka Station,” the voice buzzed over the intercom. The doors slid open.

  “This is where I get off,” I said.

  “Yes, me too.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  “I have to get to the doctor’s office by noon. I’m lending out my brain today. I can’t be late.”

  “Good luck, then
… with your brain and everything.”

  He bowed.

  I’m sure he won’t miss it, said my own brain.

  And that’s what the daily grind can do to people here. It creates a nation of stress-heads. Moya was probably just one of them.

  “Oi!” someone yelled.

  I looked back at the house to see a man poking his head through the second-story window. He was pretty old—forty or something—and from what I could tell, he was wearing welding goggles, a cape, and a sugegasa straw hat. Speaking of broken.

  “Koda-kun?” the man yelled. “Koda Okita?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean ‘yes’? It’s me!”

  “I…”

  He removed the hat and peeled the goggles off his face.

  “Yori-san?” I said.

  “Come on up, Koda. I’m really glad you came by.”

  “I didn’t know you lived here, Yori. I would have asked your mother—”

  “Sister.”

  “Yes … your sister. I would have asked your lovely sister if I could speak with you.”

  “She’s not lovely. She’s a hag, but don’t let her scare you off. She won’t move from the floor in the front room. Come in, come in.”

  So Yori the Bus Driver was my mysterious contact? Okay. I walked back through the overgrown garden and slid open Yori’s rickety front door. “Gomen kudasai,” I called in again.

  “Upstairs, Koda.”

  “Sumimasen,” I said, ducking inside. Yori’s sister grunted and turned the volume up on the TV.

  8

  Yori’s house was filled with junk. Newspapers. Picture frames. Broken-down appliances. Bicycle horns. Rusted tools. Stacks of old CDs and clear plastic bottles to keep away cats. Ceramic lawn ornaments. Piles of souvenirs collected from shrines. Folded paper decorations. Square pots for bonsai trees. His house hadn’t been properly cleaned for generations. Not years. Generations.

  In Japan it’s not strange for several families to live under the same roof at the same time. Kids, mothers, fathers, grandparents, even great-grandparents, eating and sleeping and living together. Yori’s house was like that—except without the people. It was filled with the clutter of three, four, five generations, stacked up against the walls, lining the stairs, touching the ceiling. But even though all these things had been collected over the years, only Yori and his sister remained. An ex–bus driver and an old woman who grunted at television sets.

  I walked up the stairs, careful to avoid the piles of anime figurines and manga comic books. Through his bedroom door I could hear Yori talking. Shouting, actually.

  “Donna shigoto demo, Sunabōzu kanarazu dekiru yo!”

  A couple of days after Ichiro died, Yori had stopped driving the bus to school. He didn’t say a word to any of us. He was sitting in the driver’s seat one day, and the next he was gone. Haru was right about one thing—Yori had told the school board that a river troll tricked Aiko and Ichiro into killing themselves. Some of the students said he got fired for that. One of them said Yori’s sister called in a few favors and got him an accounting job in the Kusaka town hall. That made sense. Numbers and spreadsheets and small marks in notebooks? That’s the kind of work only someone like Yori could enjoy.

  “Ojama shimasu,” I said, pulling back the door to Yori’s room. From the worn tatami mats on his floor to the splintered rafters of the ceiling, from the dusty shelves on his walls to the stained windowsills, on every centimeter of free space I could see piles of souvenirs and figurines. Some had bright costumes or plastic accessories. Some were large. Some were old. Some were worn, and some were still in the original packaging from years before. But all of them, every single one of them, were kappa. Yori’s entire room was a collection shrine to the most famous river troll in Kusaka Town—Shibaten, part turtle, part freaky human child.

  And in the midst of it all, like an emperor in his treasure house, stood the bus-driving accountant. Goggled. Caped. Holding out a military canteen with the word 水 painted across the front.

  “Um, hi,” I said.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t go to the door, Koda. You never know what creatures are lurking around out there. Come in. Sit down. Not there … or there. You know what? Let’s just stand.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let me turn this off.” Yori stepped carefully over to the desk and pushed a button on a small video camera.

  “What were you recording?” I asked.

  “Cosplay. I can’t post it to the Net if I don’t record it.”

  “Makes sense, I guess.”

  “My name is Kanta Mizuno,” Yori started, folding his arms dramatically across his chest.

  “Okay.”

  He stepped between the figurines and swept his cape toward the window. “I am Sunabōzu—the Desert Punk. I have joined forces with Kosuna to defeat Rain Spider in the wastelands of Tōkyō. Donna shigoto demo, Sunabōzu kanarazu dekiru yo! Whatever the feat, whatever the run, Desert Punk gets the job done!”

  I just stood there. I mean, what are you supposed to say to that?

  Yori turned back to me and held out the canteen. “Would you like a refreshment, weary traveler?”

  “Um, is your camera still on or something?”

  He lifted his hand to the sky. “There are no cameras in the deserts of Tōkyō, traveler! Drink this.” He poured me a small cup of water from his canteen. “Nothing is more important in the desert than clean, clear water.”

  “Mmm,” I said, sipping gingerly. “Just a little sour, though.”

  “That’s the chlorine. River water is not safe to drink without chlorine.”

  I coughed water back into the cup.

  Yori reached out and grabbed it from me. Before I could say anything, he poured the used water back into his canteen and screwed the lid on tight. Gross.

  He walked over to his desk and pulled off the goggles and straw hat. “Fantastic, Koda, fantastic. Welcome to cosplay. Now to the business at hand. You are here because of Shibaten.”

  “I’m sorry, the river troll?”

  “Yes. Shibaten is killing the students of Kusaka High.”

  Yori turned away from me, and for a moment I thought he might still be acting.

  “Some people say Aiko and Ichiro committed suicide. But it isn’t true. They were murdered.”

  He was not acting. He was serious. Well, as serious as a grown man in a cape can be.

  “You’re telling me Aiko and Ichiro were killed by a kappa?” I asked.

  He turned back to me. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. He didn’t murder them with his own hands, but he tricked them into killing themselves. Which in my books still counts as murder.”

  Maybe spending all day collecting and obsessing over one thing isn’t good for a person.

  “Why would you think that, Yori?”

  “Because I saw him. Lurking around the school. Watching us. Watching the children. I tried to tell them, the teachers and the headmaster. I tried to warn them, but they wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “You actually saw a kappa sneaking around the high school?”

  “Well, not with my regular eyes, Koda. I could feel his presence around the school. And that’s as good as seeing him.”

  Such a shame. I’d always liked Yori.

  He frowned at me like he’d heard that. “You don’t believe me, do you, Koda?”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you, Yori, it’s just that … the words you’re using are not, well, believable to me right now.”

  “Stories have been told about kappa for hundreds of years,” he continued. “Countless people have been murdered by them for wandering too close to their rivers. Bodies have been found floating downstream all swollen and bloated, each one broken, with its life-energy sucked out. This isn’t anime, Koda. This isn’t manga. It’s real life. The school sits dangerously close to Kusaka River. If not kappa, then what? If Shibaten didn’t kill those kids, then who did? And why?”

  “I … really couldn
’t say.”

  Yori untied the string at his neck and folded the cape over a used ramen box. “Shibaten is the only kappa in Kusaka. It had to be him.” He walked quickly to the window. “Something has changed in this town, Koda. I can feel it everywhere. There is a monster out there with murder in his heart. He’s obsessed with it. Driven to madness by it. I don’t know why he killed those children, but I know this—he isn’t finished yet.” Yori turned back to me. “We have to watch the river, Koda. Never take your eyes off the river. Shibaten is watching us.”

  9

  I clicked the tire lock on my bike, pulled on my tuba-sized helmet, and pedaled away from Yori’s house. The kappa Shibaten is pretty famous here in Kusaka Town. Kappa trickster trolls were a scare tactic that mothers in ancient Japan used to keep their children away from rivers. Did I mention that a kappa is made from gluing turtle parts to a human child? Okay, then. You can see how that might have been an effective scare tactic. Anyway, kids who somehow ignored all that would still wander too close to the rivers and drown.

  “Do you see the body that just washed up on shore?” the mothers would say. “That’s what happens when a kappa gets its claws on you.”

  And the children would be totally freaked out. I mean, wouldn’t you if your mother was shoving you at a bloated corpse? Then the children would ask, “Why do they look like that, Momma?”

  Real answer: They drowned and their tissues are engorged with water and gases.

  A mother’s answer: “Kappa break your bones and drag you into the river, child. They stuff you into their secret lairs and suck out your life-energy—through your anus!”

  That’s right. Your anus. Why it couldn’t be your neck, or your fingertips, or pretty much anywhere else that isn’t your butt, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that the kids of ancient Japan fell asleep each night crying and squeezing their little cheeks together.

  Even today you can find irrigation canals with pictures of kappa posted as warnings not to swim there. So Yori’s conclusion that kappa are real-life serial killers? Well, I got the feeling that the school deaths were a bit more complicated than that.

  Yori knew nothing about the crows. He didn’t have any memories of the suicides that would help Moya at all. He was just a middle-aged man whose brain was a little cracked. Being locked up in a tiny house or a tiny office all day makes some people go kuru kuru pa. Real life is so disappointing or painful that the only way they can survive is to pretend their problems away. Cosplay. Short for “costume play.” Maybe they’re dressing up in a cape to save humanity from sexy robots, or donning goggles and a straw hat to battle Rain Spider in the wastelands of Tōkyō. For some people, cosplay is the only way to cope with real life.