The Zashiki Warashi of Intellectual Village:Volume1 Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Regarding Uchimaku Hayabusa

Part 1

I’ll be blunt.

I don’t like rural areas that much. That is why I jumped at the chance to start living alone in the city while going to a college prep high school. It also has a lot to do with why I joined the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. Unfortunately, I’m only in a low ranking, dead end position. I went as far as to use the old branch family system to alter the family register despite being unmarried in order to escape the confines of Intellectual Villages. No matter how bad for your health it’s supposed to be, I wanted to live in the city and die in the city.

The thing is…I hate Youkai.

I don’t know how things were in ancient Edo, but Youkai don’t appear among the asphalt and concrete of a city. The only exceptions are places that thoroughly prepare the scenery like Nara or Kyoto. That is why I had always longed to live in Tokyo.

But the funny thing is that Tokyo has rural areas too.

And when certain pain-in-the-ass incidents crop up, I have to head there.

“…So this is the third victim.”

Zashou Island was a lone island close to the Ogasawara Islands but just far enough away to not be considered a part of the World Heritage Site. And that is exactly why a lot of businesses wanting to use its abundant resources for business purposes financed the creation of one of the country’s leading Intellectual Villages even though the island technically fell inside the Tokyo metropolitan area.

At first glance, the blue sea looked like something out of a documentary, but a closer inspection showed something like buoys floating at fixed intervals. They used sunlight and buoyancy to generate enough power to constantly monitor the flow of the currents and the amount of oxygen and plankton in the seawater.

Apparently, fishermen these days moved their fingers smoothly across waterproofed and salt-proofed tablet computers when they fished.

I was standing on a small fishing pier that was (made to look) run down. On that pier that was held in place with concrete sat a metal drum you could just barely reach your arms around.

The outside of the drum was wet, so it had likely been floating in the ocean.

A police officer in a soaking wet navy blue uniform gave me a report in a bewildered tone. The officer had likely pulled the drum out of the sea with the help of a local fisherman.

“We tried to deal with this on our own at first, but this is the third in a week. To be honest, this has gotten to be more than we can manage. I know it is a bother, but we have been forced to leave this with your department.”

“Don’t worry about it. This is my job. But…this is a rather unpleasant corpse.”

“Is there such a thing as a pleasant corpse?”

“Well, no. But this one is off-the-charts levels of unpleasant. He wasn’t just killed. They didn’t end there. They gave it more thought. This gave the victim fear greater than that of a simple death and it gives the same sort of fear to anyone who sees it.”

I suppose I should thank them for saving me the trouble of laying a blue tarp over the body, I thought as I peered down into the drum.

Inside was a single adult man, dead.

He had likely died two or three days prior. Due to floating on the sea, he had no maggots or flies on him, so he was in a better state than a normal corpse would be after that long.

He certainly did not look like a decent Tokyo citizen though.

The thickness of his neck was much greater than normal and he had a very aggressive-looking face. Also, I could glimpse a tattoo through the collar of his shirt. Western tattoos had become pretty common, but this looked like the “real deal”.

The man’s arms and legs had been severed and blood covered the insides of the drum.

“The other two were the same,” said the uniformed police officer. “The limbs seem to have been forcibly severed with a dull blade such as a machete. Also, wires were tied around near the point of amputation, seemingly to prevent as much blood loss as possible.”

“So the cause of death was…?”

“You will need to ask the medical examiner for the details, but it does not seem it was due to blood loss. It was multiple organ failure due to dehydration. …In other words, it is highly likely he died of starvation.”

Tch.

This was exactly the method used by the pirate mafia near Okinawa. I believe “exile” is the term used. The victim had his arms and legs chopped off, was put inside a barrel or a drum, and then set afloat in the sea. The poor victims would either flip over and drown or be dried up after days of direct sunlight. Rumor said a third fate of being pecked to death by seagulls also existed, but there was no saving you either way.

“What a pain.”

“I know.”

I had no idea if this was really a job for Department 1. If the pirate mafia was really involved, it seemed more like something for the anti-organized crime department or the PSIA. You didn’t often hear about people getting promoted by getting into turf wars, so it seemed I had gotten stuck with a horrible job once again.

“Just to make sure, he’s Japanese, right? He isn’t some foreigner who was involved with some pirates, is he?”

“He is most likely Japanese. His nationality may be hard to tell from his looks, but the implant in his front teeth seems to have been done in the Japanese style. And no matter how quickly the current might have been, he would have mummified if he had floated all the way from the open sea.”

“And he seems to have a tattoo. Maybe a large criminal organization is involved.”

“It could have been forcibly given to him before he died or even after he died.”

“True. But a tattoo is basically a type of injury. The medical examiner will be able to tell.”

I may have sounded a bit cold and uncaring, but that was my stance on things, so it couldn’t be helped. To be honest, I had no interest in corpses themselves. When there was a murder, I of course wanted to catch the criminal, but that was only for the sake of the victim’s family and to prevent the next crime. In other words, my desire to work was for the sake of living humans.

That said…

This did seem to have the possibility of future crimes, so I did have some motivation. Some.

“Now then…”

There was one more annoyance I had to deal with.

I turned my gaze away from the gruesome drum and to the pier.

“Hey, mystery freak.”

“What?” said a girl in response.

However, the voice came from lower than you would normally expect. It came from about the height you would expect of someone wearing a swimsuit and lying on a beach chair placed on a pier.

Oh, that is no analogy.

A middle school girl with a mostly flat chest really was sunbathing in a yellow two-piece swimsuit.

“What are you doing here?”

“How rude. I was here before you were, detective. I’m simply trying to make the best of my summer break.”

“That’s not what I mean!! Look! See this tape!? You’re inside it!! You’re supposed to keep out of here!!”

“Give that a rest and just let yourself be enchanted by my lovely body.”

“Quit writhing around creepily like a snake shedding its skin and get out of here. Move, move.”

I picked up the entire beach chair and carried the kid named Enbi outside of the yellow tape.

Why didn’t someone else kick her out already?

“Oh, that’s because of my bold presence.”

“You may have the aura of a Dosojin, but you’re just a middle school girl. Nothing more than a middle school girl.”

Unlike me, she was interested in the corpses. Unless there was a murder, she had no interest in other people. As such, she had no discretion. However, this actually brought excess benefits along with it, so I suppose society was fairly well balanced.

It did seem she thoroughly hated the higher ranking police officers who were always focused on demarking their own turf, though.

After moving the beach chair away, I started to head back to the crime scene, but Enbi’s slender fingers grabbed at the collar of my suit.

She then whispered into my ear.

“…You don’t really think this was the work of the pirate mafia, do you?”

“What?”

“Once you’re done here, I’ll tell you.”

She way she set that up was incredibly noncommittal.

That mystery freak then pulled out a leather memo pad hooked to her swimsuit bottom. No, it was actually a smartphone with a cover that made it look like a leather memo pad. While still lying on the beach chair, she moved her index finger smoothly across the screen to operate it. She seemed to have completely lost interest in me.

She was happily sunbathing next to the corpse from a bizarre murder. That middle school girl had held complete control of her conversation with a police detective from Department 1. For some reason, she had a way of destroying the boundaries of how things normally worked like that. There was certainly something wrong with her mind, but I was a bit jealous of how she could do that. That said, I had no interest in walking down the same path as Enbi.

Mine may have been a completely dead end job, but I had enough of an attachment to it that I was not willing to completely abandon it.

I did not have the guts to quit and open a ramen shop or something.

Of course, it was possible that lack of guts was exactly how I had ended up in this dead end anyway.

I reentered the taped off area and the uniformed police officer asked me a question.

“What should we do now?”

“Good question.”

If the man had been both killed and stuffed into the drum on the island, we would only need to do a thorough search of the entire island. Unfortunately, he had floated here.

This was not the kind of crime scene where forensics could search for hair or fingerprints.

If the victim was from outside the island, turning over every stone on the island would not even turn up his identity.

Of course, the island would be investigated, but there was not much guarantee that anything would be found. Things you had to do but could not expect results from had a way of really eating away at your motivation.

This had been sent up to a larger investigation headquarters since it was a case of serial murders, but the detectives including myself, the forensics team, and the others who came only added up to about 20. This was because of how unlikely it was we would find anything on the island. The nearby islands also had to be investigated, the records of the ships that had passed by had to be checked, and the companies on the mainland related to the Intellectual Village known as Zashou Island had to be investigated. Since it was unknown where the actual crime took place, the area of investigation had to be spread wide. This had lowered the number of personnel working at each individual place.

“For now, we can go with the standard practice. Call in the islander who first discovered the drum and the one who helped you pull it out of the water so I can question them.”

“I can do that much. You’re a Department 1 detective from the mainland, so isn’t there anything a little…y’know…flashier you can do?”

The uniformed police officer made some kind of gesture on the word “flashier”, but I’m not quite sure what he was trying to get across. He was a surprisingly absurd person. It was possible he had gained a mistaken admiration for people in my position from watching too many police dramas. In reality, if a Department 1 detective went off on his own in a “flashy” way like on TV, he would only end up being shot by the killer he was trying to catch. The power of the police was the power of an organization. Going off on your own was the same as casting aside the power of that organization, so it was quite dangerous.

If you wanted that kind of thing, you would be better off going to that mystery freak.

Or perhaps Enbi’s older sister.

At any rate, it was true there was one thing I had to do as a Department 1 detective.

“I guess I’ll go get our rooms at the inn.”

“Hah?”

“I need to make sure we have a place to stay tonight. We’re a group, so that can be surprisingly difficult.”

Notes

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