The Future Is Japanese Read online

  The truck began weaving back and forth uphill.

  Gripping the Toyota’s roll bar in the crook of his bare arm, Yoshida unfolded a yellowing sheet of old-fashioned notebook graph paper. “You’re good at reading English, right? Kindly read this pirate treasure map for me.”

  The folded graph paper held a map of the city of Tsushima, a modest village that stretched along the island’s eastern coastline. This fiendishly detailed diagram was spotted and dotted all over with bomb craters, skulls, and furious hand-scribbled notes in the English language.

  “Maps are always so complicated,” said Miss Sato, squinting in dismay. “I can read some names of dead men and the dates when they died … This says ‘whacko,’ in English. Here it says ‘wacko,’ which is a different English spelling. Also, here it says ‘wako,’ but that word is in Japanese.”

  “Yes, a computer-vision genius drew that map,” said Yoshida aloud, tapping the side of his close-cropped noggin under the hat. “Computer hackers love puns! When there’s no electricity, and their computers are all dead, programmers get touched in the head. My source used to snort Korean speed and stay up for days drawing this map. With nothing but paper and a pencil!”

  The Toyota loudly crunched over a broad scattering of bricks and shattered glass. “So is this truly a real map of pirate treasure?” Miss Sato said. “It certainly looks mysterious!”

  “Well, this map is mine now, but I’m bad with English,” Yoshida said.

  “But what does it mean, this map?”

  “Well, any treasure map is always news to my readers. I believe this map leads to the sniper death-robot of Boss Takenaka. Boss Takenaka was a ‘King of the Pirates’ for a while. Takenaka is dead now, of course. A drone strike wiped out his whole gang with one blast, just slaughtered everybody. But three years ago, Boss Takenaka was the scariest gangster this island ever saw.”

  Yoshida shook his treasure map triumphantly. “My job today is to write the last big news story of Boss Takenaka’s career. Everybody’s going to read my great scoop too. I’ll sell out that whole issue all by myself.” Yoshida tucked the folded map in his wallet and rubbed his hands with anticipation.

  “Can you stop this truck, please? I need to find this blind pilgrim pirate person. Can you tell me the real name of Zeta One? Where does he live?”

  “Look, Zeta One is so brain-damaged that he doesn’t remember his name! Nobody on Tsushima has any legal identity. Nobody, never! My real name’s not even Yoshida.”

  Miss Sato was hurt. “Your name isn’t Yoshida?”

  “I had a legal identity once, but I’m a Tsushima native. The Americans blew up our city halls and destroyed all our legal records.”

  “Why do they call him ‘Zeta Number One’? A name that strange must mean something.”

  “It’s a pun. It’s a pirate pun. The Zetas were Mexican drug cops who turned into Mexican drug crooks. Pirates here love that idea, of being a pirate, but also a state privateer. All the biggest pirates in history had some state support. Every pirate thinks he’s a master criminal, but he also thinks he’s some kind of superspy cop.”

  Miss Sato wasn’t entirely surprised to hear this. She read every issue of Truth Dawn, and the newspaper always featured splashy glamour stories about Tsushima’s wickedest pirates. Since the tabloid lacked any cameras, the stories were always illustrated with woodcuts.

  “Just remember Osama bin Laden,” Yoshida said, “the world’s most-wanted criminal, living in his mansion as a rich Pakistani spy. This Tsushima story is really an Osama bin Laden story. This is Osama’s world now, and the rest of us just live in it.”

  “I’m getting confused,” Miss Sato admitted.

  Yoshida nodded as he caught a flea with his thumbnails. “You should read this very important pamphlet that I wrote about the ‘Global Pirate Heritage.’ My nonfiction pamphlet is full of revealing facts and figures on the subject. I’m gonna write a whole book someday: ‘Inside Global Piracy.’ Because that’s my ticket out of here. My pirate book will make me world famous someday because, unlike most soft sissies who just write about piracy, I’m a skilled reporter who has really been there where piracy happens.”

  Miss Sato bounced bruisingly from the cab of the Toyota as the wheels hit a fresh patch of rubble. “I can’t afford to buy your ‘important pamphlet on pirate heritage.’ Can you loan it to me?”

  “No! Absolutely not! You have to pay! No sharing and no stealing! My pamphlet is totally analog, a privately printed limited edition! It’s published only here on Tsushima, with a metal press and handmade local paper! My pamphlet is a precious cultural artifact! Now, if you told your sponsors back in Nagoya to give me a mainland bank account, like I said before …”

  “My relief society does not engage in any offshore money laundering.”

  Yoshida sighed. “I keep thinking you’ll ‘wise up’ someday, but you sure are a ‘pill’ and a ‘stick-in-the-mud.’ Never mind—that’s pirate slang. You wouldn’t understand.”

  The Toyota was climbing uphill. The slopes on the spine of the island were treacherous, precipitous, rocky, and commonly mined. Little terraced patches thick with the weeds of neglect, here and there. Feral fruit trees burst through the tumble-down walls of dead vacation homes.

  “When will we return to Tsushima City?” said Miss Sato at last.

  “Well, my story deadline for Truth Dawn is Wednesday. But I could push that to Thursday morning if I’m willing to set type myself.”

  “But I have much more important things to do than hunt for some pirate treasure!”

  “What are you, crazy? There’s nothing more important than treasure! Besides, Boss Takenaka was ten times more important than your stupid female politician hostage from Nagoya. Takenaka was the pirate captain who grabbed your hostage in the first place! Takenaka was a major kingpin—a criminal millionaire warlord wanted in twenty different countries. He was bigger than Chapo Guzman.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Yoshida sighed. “After they killed Osama bin Laden, Chapo Guzman was the world’s second biggest pirate. Since you haven’t read my famous pamphlet, you just have no sense of heritage. Boss Takenaka became the warlord of Tsushima, just like bin Laden in Afghanistan and Guzman in Sinaloa. And you know how Takenaka did that? With Japanese high technology. With an augmented computer-vision system from the Mechatronic Visionary Centre. That’s how he did it.”

  Yoshida retrieved the paper map from his wallet and passed it over. “Look at all these lines and angles and geometric viewpoints. That’s what computer vision looks like when you draw it with a paper and pencil. Takenaka had high-tech killer hardware; he stole it and he deployed it here. And this map shows where it still is. Buried on Tsushima. Just waiting to be dug up.”

  Miss Sato glanced reluctantly. The patient fanatic who had hand-drawn the map, annotating it with icons, Japglish puns, and at least ten thousand geometric lines, was obviously out of his mind. What could drive a person to such fits of unnatural intensity? Revenge.

  Yoshida scratched his whining terrier behind the ears. “So many dead men in this story already—and not one of them dead on Takenaka’s own turf. That was my best clue, see? That’s how I broke this story wide open. Listen! Everybody thought that the Americans were killing those pirates with drones. Just more Americans shooting more terrorists with their robot airplanes. That was a lousy story for Truth Dawn because that story’s so boring, so old-fashioned, so obvious to everyone. Nobody would want to read about that, trust me.”

  Yoshida drew a breath. “But—it turns out—and this treasure map proves it—that story’s not even true! The truth is, Boss Takenaka had a Japanese robot-vision system. He stole it from the Mechatronic Centre and hot-wired it to a machine gun. Then, Takenaka planted that killer thing up in the hills, and that robot vision just watched for pirates, all day and night, like a security camera. So if you carried a gun or a rocket grenade, anything that made you look piratical—pow! Bang! A fifty-caliber round right th
rough the center of your silhouette.”

  “But why would a pirate like Boss Takenaka kill the other pirates?”

  “Because that system was anti-pirate technology. He stole that from the Mechatronic Centre, he didn’t invent it himself! Pirates are stupid, they can never understand high technology! It’s the journalists like me who are smart and always on top of these trends.”

  “Oh.”

  “Takenaka wiped out his competition by remote control. That machine gave him a really good alibi too because he was never around when they died. Boss Takenaka used to go to their funerals with big heaps of flowers, that yakuza hypocrite. We even published his eulogies in Truth Dawn, but I finally figured out the truth about Takenaka, and today, I’m going to prove it! I’ll inform every subscriber! That’s what my career as a trusted newsman is all about.”

  “Some very smart man must have given you that map,” Miss Sato concluded.

  “Oh no, don’t you dare try that with me,” said Yoshida airily, pulling a Korean candy bar from the baggy pocket of his army-surplus shorts. “I will never betray a source.” He broke the bar and tossed a sugared morsel to the terrier. “Me and the pup here are gonna sniff out the robot of death! We’ll bring it back into town as our trophy. An exclusive scoop! Think how great a machine gun will look next to our big mechanical printing press. Now you see why this matters so much, don’t you? Military high tech is always a fantastic story!”

  Miss Sato was meekly quiet for a while. Distant thunder rumbled to the west—a big storm brewing over mainland Korea, or possibly Korean artillery. “Yoshida, can I wait for you back in your newspaper office? It sounds like you might be some time.”

  Yoshida stared at her. “What urgent task do you have now—taking bento boxes to your jailbirds? You’ll never understand Tsushima if you don’t go up into the hills. Sea pirates may seem strange, but wait till you meet those Afghan misty-mountain monsters up in their opium patches.”

  Miss Sato smiled politely at this bluster. She was older than Yoshida. Furthermore, she had seen stranger things than the blue shores and green hills of his little island. Miss Sato had worked with salvage crews in the ruins of Tokyo. She had even seen what the furious Americans had done to North Korea in their vengeance for Tokyo.

  That was why Miss Sato was not afraid of the pirates of Tsushima. Everyone back in Nagoya assumed that she must be very brave to do her relief work among savage pirates. But pirates were merely people, evil people, and evil was a weakness. Miss Sato feared no evil, but she did fear the righteous wrath of the just. Pirates merely robbed and then fled. The vengeance of the just lasted seven generations.

  The Russian Toyota forged from a steep track onto an abandoned parking lot, all thigh-high weeds. Up here at the makeshift rendezvous, some hapless pirate drug trucks had been surprised by American missiles. To judge by the shiny bits of scattered high technology, the bombs had cost ten times as much as the trucks.

  Miss Sato endured a further hour of smelly engine-gunning, scary skidding, drunken maneuvering, and much cursing in Russian. The precipitous slopes were daubed with feeble lines of mildewed cardboard and spray-bombed graffiti tags. These were long-departed pirate gangs, ferociously warning other dead marauders never to cross the line.

  Then a more serious boundary appeared: a kind of pirate Chinese Wall. This barricade was all cheap cement and poorly stacked concrete cinder blocks, but it was as tall as a man could reach and topped with razor wire. There were guardhouses too. Once upon a time, someone had clear-cut the forest to create clean lines of fire along the wall. Now crooked weed trees were engulfing all of that.

  The Russian driver carefully unfolded an ancient paper map of Tsushima Island. He conferred with his colleague, a scarred and helmeted global guerrilla who was even drunker than he was.

  “We’re lost,” said Yoshida with relish. This was an exotic, pirate-island thing to say, because people in the rest of the world never got “lost.” The rest of the world featured smartphones and tower antennas and satellite locators. But not dark little Tsushima, where all such things had been bombed back to dust and mud.

  “Takenaka’s walls aren’t on any maps,” said Yoshida. “Look what he did to that precious old-growth forest, that rascal. You know what? I’m gonna get my Russian friends here to level a chunk of this wall with their antiaircraft gun. Then we can just drive through it.”

  “Maybe there are mines in that death strip,” said Miss Sato.

  “You’re always carrying on about mines. Takenaka’s smart mines ran out of batteries long ago. Why do you think Truth Dawn hires these Russian guys? Takenaka’s long dead, nobody’s gonna mind. Let them limber up the Russian artillery there, this will look great in my story.”

  Yoshida engaged in some pidgin shout-and-gesture with his mercenaries. The Russians, who were no older or wiser than Yoshida, had no trouble catching on to his idea. They were very proud of their big gun. They whooped with glee as each deafening round punched a massive hole in the pirate barricade.

  Every bang from the jolting gun blew through Miss Sato’s scarfed head. It made the very hills ring. From somewhere in the sullen hills came answering blasts. Protest? Celebration?

  Yoshida’s terrier leapt from the back of the Toyota. The dog bulleted off through the weeds, his furry legs a blur. He disappeared through a freshly blasted hole in the pirate wall.

  Yoshida reached down and hooked up a stack of his newspapers, bound with a thick hemp string. “Now we follow the dog,” he said, dismounting from the truck.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s my dog. You want to stay here breaking bricks with Yuri and Leonid? Give them my best!”

  Miss Sato followed Yoshida as he pursued the eager dog. They ducked through the fresh rubble of the blasted barricade. No human foot had stepped here in years. The three of them were in utter wilderness, snagged by briars, scratched by weeds, and bitten by whining mosquitoes.

  “You told me once you could get me an audience with the Pirate Queen,” Miss Sato called out, groping at damp boughs and stepping over wet nettles. “Khadra may be ‘hiding underground,’ but that doesn’t mean that she can hide from you. Not if you really want to find her.”

  “Look, you need to stop trying to be clever,” said Yoshida absently. “Khadra is just a gangster moll. Khadra’s boyfriend Takenaka was a ‘King of the Pirates,’ but he got blown to bits. Khadra’s just a Somalian hooker. She takes her men as they come along, and there’s always some new one.”

  Miss Sato ignored this impropriety. “But the Americans, the Chinese, the Koreans, they uniformly agree—she’s the ‘Pirate Queen of Tsushima.’ They all agree that if an act of mercy can resolve my hostage crisis, then Khadra would be the key actor.”

  “That’s the lying mainstream media! They just say that for their own political advantage. Khadra doesn’t rule this island, she is just some pretty Somali girl who got mixed up with pirates! Every man she ever kissed gets killed. And I’ll tell you why—it’s because Khadra is a police informant. She rats out her lovers to the Chinese, or the Koreans, or the Americans—whoever pays her most.”

  Miss Sato considered this assertion. She and Yoshida were both lost in the tall grass.

  “Doesn’t anyone in this world have any sense of decency?” Miss Sato said at last.

  “It’s the truth! Think about it. Once you’re a pirate’s woman, you can’t just divorce your pirate and walk away. He’s evil, he’s a killer, and to be free of him you have to have him killed.” Yoshida insistently stamped a path through some windblown, rotten bamboo. “It was Khadra who betrayed Boss Takenaka. Khadra got him blown to bits, eighty men dead in one night. A real massacre. Someday I’ll find the proof that Khadra herself did that. Then I’ll write that story and publish it. People will be totally amazed!”

  “Maybe Khadra isn’t a pirate queen or a police spy or a hooker or a gangster moll, or any of those cruel things you say about her,” Miss Sato offered. “Maybe Khadra’s just a refugee woman
who is cruelly exploited by violent men. At least, Khadra would know what that means to a woman. And why that oppression should end.”

  “Oh no, Khadra’s evil, all right,” said Yoshida. “But I’m not in any hurry to denounce Khadra. That’s because Khadra is such great copy. Hot news stories about exotic, promiscuous pirate beauties will practically write themselves. Hey, hey, wait, look at this, look what my dog just found here! Good boy!” Yoshida fell to his bare knees in his cargo shorts. “This is Tsushima ginseng! Still growing up here in the good old mountain wilderness, imagine that! Wild ginseng is as rare as a Tsushima wildcat! This must be my lucky day.”

  “You could sell that ginseng to a rich Korean,” Miss Sato said, “if there were any rich Koreans to eat ginseng anymore.”

  “That was a joke of yours, wasn’t it,” said Yoshida, rising to his feet with a scowl. “Ginseng is Tsushima’s truest buried treasure. I could dig up this root right now if I had a shovel instead of my newspapers. Ginseng roots are shaped just like buried men, you know. They’re full of mystical vitamins.”

  Miss Sato reached into her woven handbag and produced a half-empty bottle of multivitamin pills. “You don’t need any dark, ancient roots.”

  Yoshida wiped wet dirt from his hands and dry-gulped a vitamin. “Well, let’s dig up one pirate treasure at a time. Boss Takenaka’s robot gun is buried somewhere on this hill. My map says we’re standing near it right now.” Yoshida waved his hands around the rugged woods, which had a commanding view of the island’s eastern slopes. “This was Takenaka’s favorite turf. He wanted to dig in deep, up here, with secret forts and pillboxes. Dig in and fight it out to the bitter end, Pacific-War style. Just like the kamikazes from World War II, a hundred years ago.”

  “The kamikazes flew airplanes,” Miss Sato corrected him. “They didn’t dig any secret forts in hills.”

  “Well,” said Yoshida, offended, “I meant to say the original kamikazes—the samurai who fought Mongols here on my island, one thousand years ago.”