Monsters of the Week

The Catch

If there's one thing you learn in Japan, it's that any time, any case, where someone offers you, a Westerner, a job, you need to keep your mouth shut, and be prepared for any eventuality, up to and including not getting paid. If it was simple and easy and relatively legal, they could get a Japanese person to do it. From AET to the darkest of yamishobai, there's always a catch. There's always something.

I drove my hands down into my pockets, desperately trying to keep the rain from soaking though the rainshell. I was going to need it as dry and not-leaky as possible, if Bill wasn't leading me on – and even if he wasn't, it was a long hike back to Okubo in the rain if this shit didn't work out, and I didn't have the money to get even one round of barbecue when I got back there, much less half an hour of some trafficked girl from Gwangju pretending to care about me. I pressed my back up against the building, trying to stay under the half-assed shelter of the camera sign overhead, but it wasn't working, and the rain kept falling, and then Bill's dingy old Honda Street wheezed its way around the corner and rolled up in front of me. I opened the door, and Bill cleared an old bento bag that still smelled like tuna mayonnaise off the seat and onto the floor; I got in and tossed my bag into the back on top of it.

I sat in silence as Bill picked his way through traffic and up onto the Touhoku Expressway. The engine of the little kei-van whined and howled as we topped out at 90 km/h, hugging the leftmost lane as buses and dump trucks pounded past us northwards.

"So where we going?"

"Iwate, up in the mountains. We got to pick up a guide in Kitakami, someone Seiichi knows."

I racked my brains, thinking back to those carefree times bumming to Hokkaido, before shit fell in on itself. "Aint that on the Touhoku-sen? We coulda got the train up, rented up there, and not had to drive in this shit. We're not harvesting it, are we?"

Bill shook his head. "Too many complications. Too many people seeing us in town. We're not picking this Yamazaka up till we're out in the boonies, and nobody's going to catch our plate in this weather." Fair enough. But I wanted a little more civilization before it was time to live on Pocari Sweat and dried squid, sleeping in the wet jungle on the track of this mythical weed farm.

I owed Bill a favor after he got me out of some fairly serious shit – I got gigged onto doing entourage for something the bastard who recruited me did not mention was gonna include a sacrifice bust to let the Russians move 90 kilos of coke in through Yokohama – and Bill owed Onohara Seiichi's boss the better part of six and a half million yen. Because reasons. It didn't pay to get into shit like that in this country. And now apparently someone had tipped someone in Seiichi's mob about a giant weed farm hidden in the mountains of Akita or Iwate, so Bill had to go do the legwork of actually finding it on the map, and I was the only person he could trust to go up with him and not burn him to the cops or flip the farm to another mob. Good enough; it beat sitting around and waiting for something in town, or walking around all night trying to find a mangakissa I hadn't been kicked out of yet if the police raided the squat. But the drive was dead straight hell. Bill wasn't the most social of dudes at his best and now it was painfully obvious he was coming down off something, and having to give his full attention to keeping the van on the road. He fumbled the radio on and landed on a talk station, and I settled back into what was left of the seat: another five hours, at least, of static and that moon language I could never quite get and the rain, the endless rain, and the noise of the crummy little engine.

A little after noon we had to stop at a rest area, a couple exits past Sendai, to fill up; the van got good mileage but this was a long, long way to come. While Bill sat at the pump, I splashed in to the 7&i to grab a couple of whatever was cheapest on the bento rack and one of those snake drinks for Bill. I nodded when the girl at the counter pointed at the microwave, and when I came out he was already moved over to the parking spaces in front. He gunned the snake thing and dug into his soba without a word. I was still working on my weak, thin curry when he threw his box back in the back and put the van back in gear. At least the rain looked like it was letting up.