The Future Is Japanese Read Online Free Page B

beautiful.

The last time I’d eaten at Yasukuni Bar de Café, I’d ordered the sweet potato Mont Blanc. This time I picked the castella with natto ice cream. The waitress took our order and glided away over the Pacific, chiming softly. Overhead, a Zero fighter strafed a swarm of UFOs.
    My target had made a big effort with his appearance—false eyelashes, decals on his toenails, the works—but nothing could disguise the scared look in his eyes.
    I felt sorry for him. Now that we were face to face I could see he was physically harmless, biceps like chopsticks. We could have done this at his place, where he would be more comfortable. It had been mean to drag him out. But we were here now, so I might as well get it over with.
    “This is goodbye,” I said. “It’s better to end the relationship before anybody else gets hurt. Sorry.”
    “I understand,” he said to the horizon.
    I had to make sure he really did understand. “She doesn’t ever want to see you again. She’s divorcing you today. She’s also unfanning you and canceling your access to her WORLD. And I know you wouldn’t do this, but don’t try and stalk her under a false identity, because she’s got your ID from the time you killed her.”
    He flinched. He wasn’t eating anything, just cradling a durian soy frappulatte. I used my OPU toolsuite to check for incoming packets. He was streaming a slasher-kei opera while we talked. He and his wife were both into slasher-kei, only he hadn’t known where to draw the line.
    He watched me chasing my ice cream around my plate. “When I was little,” he said suddenly, “natto had a smell. It doesn’t anymore. I wonder why?”
    “Maybe people didn’t like it,” I said, shrugging. I seemed to remember that too, now he mentioned it. A dollop of natto on rice fresh out of the cooker before school. A smell of fermentation.
    A big gray battleship chugged past our island. A caption popped up against the sunset to identify it as the Yamato, Marshal Isoroku Yamamoto’s flagship, on its way to Midway. Wherever. I just liked it here for the sea. They did a great job with the waves lapping on the beach. You could fool yourself that if you went down to the waterline, you’d really get wet.
    I finished my dessert—I might as well, since I wasn’t paying for it—and we deboxed. The waitress zipped down the aisle, bowed from her thoracic hinge, and debited the bill from his Life Support account. I also got her to log the visit on my reward card. I knew I’d be back. We walked toward the exit between the rows of boxes. From outside they looked grotty, covered with printscreens for assisted-suicide services and meds for noncompliant personality disorder, which had been the hot disease at least six months ago. Clearly, the Yasukuni Bar de Café had problems attracting advertisers.
    Outside, segway cops patrolled the asphalt in front of the main attraction, a building with red pillars and curly-edged roofs encased in a transparent polythene tent. We put our masks on. There’d been a fallout warning today.
    He stopped beneath the giant torii gate on the way back to Kudanshita station. “What about the kids?” he said. “What’s going to happen to them?”
    My client had specifically instructed me to tell him the truth about this, if he asked. I’d been hoping he wouldn’t. “They’ve been liquidated,” I said. “Sorry.”
    “No. No! Ayumi’s about to start first grade. Tomitake’s only three. You can’t just snatch their lives away from them like that!”
    “She’s their mother. It’s her right.” He was crying, his mascara dripping onto the pink-skull-patterned fabric of his mask. I didn’t feel sorry for him anymore. “Anyway, you should have thought of that before you killed her,” I said.
    “But she asked me to,” he whispered.

    I called my client while I was on the train. She wanted to know if he’d asked about the kids, and I said he had. “Good,” she said vindictively. “I want the