Morino points his gunBang! The trainer buckles over and lands on his mastiff. Their blood pools. Morino turns to Frankenstein. 'I warned him. Uncle? I warned him, yeah?' Frankenstein nods. 'Nobody can say you never gave a fair warning, Father.' The crowd is still anchored to the concrete floor. Morino hoicks, aims, and spits on the trainer. 'Guns, and fairy godmothers. They make your wildest wish come true. Every last pigfucking one of you will leave. Except Yamada here.' He levels the gun at the bookie on the crate. 'I want a word in your ear, Yamada. The rest of you scram!

Go!' The horn players fire off a round each. The crowd drain away down the aisles and rows, ushered by the pistol-toting horn players vampires before dawn don't melt away so fast. The bookie keeps his hands raised. Lizard jumps into the pit and tips the trainer's head over with his foot. Between his eyes is a bloodied joke-shop scab. 'Nice shot, Father.' From outside I hear cars screech away.

The bookie swallows hard. 'If you're going to kill me, Morino-'

'Poor Yamada-kun. You backed the wrong dog again. I am going to kill you, but not today. I need you to take a message to your new master. Tell Nagasaki I wish to discuss war reparations he owes me. Tell him I'll be waiting at midnight sharp. The terminal bridge for the new airport. Out beyond Xanadu on the reclaimed land. You think you can remember all that?'

The Mongolian halts ten paces away. His gun is cradled in his hand. The shots and lights from the reclaimed land seem far, far away. My heart shotguns inside my ribcage. My overalls are scratchy and stinking. My final memories of life are the stupidest things. An unclaimed Haruki Murakami novel I salvaged from lost property, half finished, in my locker at Ueno what happened to the man stuck down his dry well with no rope? My mother laughing in Uncle Pachinko's yard garden, trying to play badminton, drunk but happy at least. Regret that I never did my Liverpool pilgrimage. Waking one morning to find a pencil-line of snow over me and Anju's futon, where it had blown in through a crack during an early fall. Is this junk the stuff of life? I hear my name, but I know it was only my imagination. I fight to keep control of my breathing, and sneeze. I never looked at Leatherjacket before, not properly. Yours is the last face I will ever see. Not how you imagine the face of death to look. Quite plain, mildly curious, taut with an immunity to emotion from the acts its master has made it witness. Do it. It would be too tacky to beg for my life. So what are my last words? 'I wish you wouldn't do this.' How profound. 'I suggest,' says Leatherjacket, 'that you crouch.'

'Crouch?' A crouch-style execution. Why?

'On the ground. A how do you say? foetus position.'

Why bother? Dead is dead.

'You should crouch for your own safety,' my killer insists.

I mangle a stillborn huff which Leatherjacket interprets as a no.

Leatherjacket primes his gun. 'Well, I warned you.'

So many stars. What are they for?

Tuna, abalone, yellowtail, salmon roe, bonito, egg tofu, human earlobe. The sushi is piled high. The wasabi is mixed in with the soy to kill any impurities in the raw fish. It clots the soy, sticky blood. I must stop thinking about the bowling alley. I must. We have driven across the night since the dogs, it seems, but the clock here says only 22:14. Little over a hundred minutes to go, I tell myself, but I find it hard to believe in anything good. I am in the grip of a cold that will get much worse before it will get any better. I get some water down my throat; it bloats my stomach. Even breathing is hard. We have the restaurant to ourselves. A family was here, but they shuffled out the moment they saw us. The old waitress stays cool, but the chef stays out back, lying low. I would if I could. Frankenstein lobs a sausage at me. 'Why the starchfart face, cub scout? Anyone would think you lost your parents.' Lizard smears wasabi in the soy. 'Maybe he realized the mastiff I shot back at Goichi's was his long-lost papa.' Morino flicks his cigar-tip at me. 'Grin and bear it! Remember your heritage! You're a Japanese law-abiding straight! You grin and bear it until your Zimmer frame buckles and your drinking water is mercury oxide, and our whole country is one coast-to-coast parking lot. I'm not knocking Japan. I love it. In most places the muscle is at the beck and call of the masters. In Japan, we, the muscle, are are the masters. Japan is the masters. Japan is our our gig. So grin. Bear it.' I may have to bear it, but no way am I grinning about being dragged into a turf war between wolves with rabies. The only thing I can grin about is that until we leave this restaurant nothing can get worse. Lizard points to a corner of the room. 'Father!' Saliva-shiny sushi-cud. 'See what I spy with my little eye they got a karaoke machine!' gig. So grin. Bear it.' I may have to bear it, but no way am I grinning about being dragged into a turf war between wolves with rabies. The only thing I can grin about is that until we leave this restaurant nothing can get worse. Lizard points to a corner of the room. 'Father!' Saliva-shiny sushi-cud. 'See what I spy with my little eye they got a karaoke machine!'

'Joy of joys.' Morino looks at Frankenstein. 'Let loose the wings of song.' Frankenstein sings a song in English with a chorus that goes 'I can't liiiiiiiiive, if living is without yoo-ooo-ooo, I can't giiiiiiiiive, I can't take any moooooore'. The horn players bay along with the vowels. The noise is so bad I watch for the sushi to sprout maggots. Leatherjacket sips a glass of milk in the corner. He doesn't seem to belong here either. Morino calls over the elderly waitress who has been nervously serving us. 'Sing.' Without arguing she performs an enka number called 'Cherry Blossoms of the Inland Sea', about a mah-jong gambler who dies to honour a gambling debt, but only after ninety-nine verses. Lizard sings a song called 'Electrode Incest' by a band of the same name. It contains no verses, choruses or chord changes. The horn players clap wildly as Lizard does a turkey dance on the table and wanks the microphone. Finally the song is over and Morino gestures me up.

'No,' I say flatly. 'I don't sing.'

A hail of sushi slaps my face. The horn players boo.

'I don't like music.'

'Bollocks,' says Morino. 'My pet investigator said you have twenty CDs, loads by that Beatle who got snuffed, a file of sheet music and a guitar.'

'How do you know that?'

'Nightmares do their homework.'

I swab rice off my face. 'You had my room broken into?'

Morino holds his glass for the waitress to fill. 'If I thought you had touched my baby girl, you virtual-orphan brat, I would have had you you broken into. So be grateful.' broken into. So be grateful.'

'I hate karaoke and I'm not going to sing.'

Lizard does a squitty imitation. 'I hate karaoke and I'm not going to sing 'I hate karaoke and I'm not going to sing.' Then his fist fills my eye and the table becomes the ceiling.

I pick myself up. My eye sort of sings, throbbing up.

'I wanted to do that all day.' Lizard examines his knuckles. 'Father told you to sing.'

I should be afraid, but I shake my head. There is no blood.

Frankenstein places a chopstick over his index and ring fingers, belches, and snaps the chopstick with his middle finger. 'I say Miyake is in danger of a breach of contract, Father.'

Morino wags his finger. 'You have to make allowances. He was never the same after his sister drowned. They had their own little country. Fuck, they had their own language. What a pity he buggered off to Kagoshima the day she died, selfish fuck that he is. Hey!' He clicks his fingers at the waitress. 'More edamame beans!' Drugged with cold germs as I am, I can't guess whether Morino has a gift for inspired guesses or a skeleton key to the basements of minds. Either way, I want to spike his eye with my chopstick. I imagine myself doing it. Squirt. His wart throbs. I swear, the thing is watching me.

According to the Cadillac clock we enter the reclaimed land perimeter road at 23:04. Thirty minutes later we are still driving. Military band music pumps through the car and a fever pumps through me, or maybe the fever is in the car and the military music in me. Millimetres away from being a killer, I was. I am. Can a chance difference in spin and angle really make me not guilty? I threw. I had to. But I threw. One more hour and the document wallet will be mine. Plus a magnificent black eye. I was expecting the pretender to the Yakuza throne of Tokyo to be joined by fleets of armoured personnel, but no. Just these two Cadillacs. My nose streams uncontrollably, and my neck feels clamped in some sort of truss. Maybe some code of honour binds the two factions to non-violence. Or, please no, maybe this is a suicide mission. I tell myself if Morino was the kamikaze type he wouldn't have made it to his age, or even his body weight, but I no longer know what to think. Nobody says much. Morino calls Mama-san, at Queen of Spades, I guess. 'Is Miriam at work yet? I called her place. Tell her to call my mobile the moment she gets in.' Lizard and Frankenstein smoke their Camels, Morino his cigar. I am too ill to want to smoke. Popsicle whimpers in her narcotic sleep. The sea is calm enough to walk on and the sky is stars, acre after acre. The full moon is a thirty watt bulb no more than several inches away. Morino makes another call, but nobody answers. 'Suicides tend to check themselves out when the moon is full, a nurse once told me. Suicides, and, for some reason, horses.' Finally we slow to a halt, parked at a strategic angle to the horn players' Cadillac, I guess. I get out. My cramped muscles hurt. Yet another building site. Tokyo suburbs are demolition dumps or building sites. The giant terminus building is still a giant foundation. Flat as a pool table, the reclaimed land extends all the way to the mountains. A bridge, with the central section missing, rises on either side of where we stand. I can hear the lazy sea a short distance over the embankment. 'Say, Miyake.' His lighter flame dances. 'You can monkey up that bridge.' I wonder what the catch is. 'Nagasaki is the opposition, and you don't fit the image. I don't want anyone thinking I'm recruiting from kindergarten.' Lizard snickers.

'Will you give me the document wallet?'

'You are boring me! Not until after fucking midnight! Go!'

I walk several paces, when Leatherjacket, standing on a mound of boulders, whistles. I thought it was to me but it wasn't. 'Our friends are coming. Nine vehicles.'

'Nine.' Frankenstein shrugs. 'I had hoped for more, but nine is not bad.'

I begin running up the slope. The bridge is the nearest thing to a safe haven. On the other hand, it is a perfect cell to keep me in. I get within a few metres of the top. I guess I am thirty metres up high enough for vertigo to clamp my lungs and make my balls retract. I peer over the parapet and watch Nagasaki's cars draw up. They park semicircling Morino's two Cadillacs and flick their beams on full. They kill their engines. Four men in each vehicle file out, each with combat jackets, helmets and an automatic rifle, and take up firing positions. Not for the first time today, I feel I have strayed into an action movie. Morino and his men put on sunglasses. No guns, no night vision. Morino holds his megaphone in one hand and keeps the other in his pocket. Thirty-six heavily armed men to seven. A man in a white suit climbs out at leisure, flanked by two bodyguards. I wait for the order to fire. No document wallet. It was all for nothing. Morino's voice reverbs over the reclaimed land as if his megaphone is a pinhole for the night to talk through. 'Jun Nagasaki. Do you have any final requests?'

'I stand here frankly amazed, Morino. Have you really sunk so low so quickly? Rumours of your demise appear to be under-exaggerated. Five tired goons, one ex-arms dealer I shall kill you myself, Suhbataar, so painfully that even you will be impressed and an unarmed catamite hiding up a bridge.' So much for my safe haven. 'This is your comeback squad? Do you have an aircraft carrier waiting offshore? Are you hoping to kill me by sheer anticlimax?' is your comeback squad? Do you have an aircraft carrier waiting offshore? Are you hoping to kill me by sheer anticlimax?'

'I summoned you here to deliver my verdict.'

'Are you a tertiary syphilitic? Are you Ultraman?'

'I'll allow you to apologize with honour. You may kill yourself.'

'This is beyond stupid, Morino, this is rude. Let me get this right. You seriously seriously fuck up my opening day at Xanadu. Persuading the press that Ozaki fell by accident has been a logistical hernia. You hurl bowls at my three managers until their skulls are eggshell original, I grant you, but annoying in the extreme then you kill two innocent bouncers the old-fashioned way and shoot my finest dog. My dog, Morino, is what really hurts. You fuck up my opening day at Xanadu. Persuading the press that Ozaki fell by accident has been a logistical hernia. You hurl bowls at my three managers until their skulls are eggshell original, I grant you, but annoying in the extreme then you kill two innocent bouncers the old-fashioned way and shoot my finest dog. My dog, Morino, is what really hurts. You amateur amateur. No operator of style ever, ever ever harms an animal.' harms an animal.'

'Style? Importing uninspected shitferbeef burgers from the US and killing off Wakayama schoolchildren with O-157, and then getting your Ministry of Agricultural poodles to blame the radish farmers, is this "style"? Blackmailing bank executives over the figures you made them cook by refusing to pay back your bubble-economy loans: "style"? You call the "pay up, Mr Food Manufacturer, or pay for a razor blade in your baby products" scam "style"?'

'Your failure to grasp the fact that the world has progressed since 1970 is why I inherited and expanded Tsuru's interests and why you are still drawing your operational revenue on scaring loose change out of Shinjuku bar owners. How, oh how how, do you suppose you will still be alive in five minutes?'

'You forgot my two secret weapons.'

'Did I! I am ablaze ablaze with curiosity.' with curiosity.'

'The first weapon is your blazing curiosity, Nagasaki. Even in the old days, you spoke before you shot.'

'Is your second secret weapon as terrifying as your first?'

'I present to you, ladies' it is hard for me to catch the next word 'NimQ6.'

'"Nim Q 6"? A magic pissing goblin? A drain unblocker?'

'A plastic explosive developed by the Israeli secret service.'

'Never heard of it.'

'Of course you never heard of it. The Israelis do not advertise in Time Time. But microcells of NimQ6 are imbedded in the triggers of the guns your dumb fucking apes are holding. The casings of your swanky Kevlar helmets are peppered with the stuff. My colleague here, Mr Suhbataar, oversaw the customization of your equipment when he diverted them from his Russian military supplier.'

Some of Nagasaki's men turn to look at their boss.

Nagasaki folds his arms. 'In the sad history of sad dumb bluffing fucks with no real cards in their hands, Morino, you are the saddest, dumbest bluffing fuck of them all. Which weapons do you think I used to wipe out Tsuru, for fuck's sake? If there was a gram of truth in this booby-trap shit we would have found out by now.'

'You did not find out, because I needed you to bury the Tsuru faction. For this, I thank you-'

'Thank me when your lying guts are leaking through bullet holes. Now, I have a city to run. Stand away from the motors, you puppy dogs. I ordered those cars myself via our mutual Mongolian and I don't want to damage the paintwork.'

Morino stubs his cigar out on the paintwork. 'Shut up and learn. A gram of truth, you said. NimQ6 microcells weigh one twentieth of a gram. A dot on a page. It is a perfectly stable explosive, even under repeat-fire ricochet conditions, until until here is the beauty of the piece it is oscillated by a specific VHF frequency. Then the microcell explodes with a force ample to blow away body parts. The single oscillator east of Syria is built into my mobile phone.' To me, shivering with cold heat thirty metres up, probably with a sniper aiming at my head, this does not sound overly convincing. here is the beauty of the piece it is oscillated by a specific VHF frequency. Then the microcell explodes with a force ample to blow away body parts. The single oscillator east of Syria is built into my mobile phone.' To me, shivering with cold heat thirty metres up, probably with a sniper aiming at my head, this does not sound overly convincing.

Nagasaki acts bored. 'Enough of this pseudo-science wank, Morino, I-'

'Humour me for ten more seconds. NimQ6 is the stuff of the future. I enter the code I took the precaution of doing this prior to your arrival tonight and simply press the dial button. Like this-'

Blossoms of explosions boom and flame and thunder.

I duck.

Shock waves scalp the air.

The reboom echoes off the mountains.

Finally I peer over the parapet. Nagasaki's men are scattered around where they were standing. The men who are out of the glare of the headlights are shadowy piles, but the ones who fell in the light red as a slaughterhouse floor. Most of the torsos still have their legs attached, but the gun hands are blown away. And their heads imploded by their combat helmets are nowhere. I never learned the vocabulary I need to take this in. Only in war movies, horror movies: nightmares. The Cadillac door opens and Popsicle falls on to her knees. She gives a yelp of disgust, as if surprised by a spider in the bath. 'Yaaa!' Lizard bounders around. 'Yaaaaaaaaa! Fucking yaaaaaaaaa yaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaay!' Nagasaki is still alive no helmet to remove his skull and trying to get to his feet. Both arms are shredded stumps after the elbows. Morino struts over and puts the megaphone into his enemy's ear. 'Isn't science wonderful?' Bang! Bang!

The megaphone turns to me. 'Seasonal fireworks, Miyake. Now listen. Midnight has passed. So the document wallet in the Cadillac is all yours. Yes. Father keeps his word. Unfortunately, you won't be able to appreciate your hard-earned information because you'll be dead as a fucking dodo. I brought you along just in case Nagasaki wheeled your father out of retirement. I credited the cretin with too much cunning, so it seems we have one witness too many to the night's entertainment, instead of a possible bargaining chip. Mr Suhbataar has asked to put the bullet through your head, and as he is the chief architect of my master plan, how could I say no? Goodbye. If it makes you feel any better, you were a totally forgettable boy who would have lived a bored, stifled, colourless life. And yeah, your father is a meaningless jerk too. Sweet dreams.'

Why bother? Dead is dead.

'You should crouch for your own safety,' my killer insists.

My fear mangles my response to a stillborn huff.

'No?' Leatherjacket primes his gun. 'Well, I warned you.'

In his hand is not his gun but his mobile telephone. He enters a number, leans over the parapet, points down at the Cadillacs, and crouches.

The night rips open its guts, I am knocked over by a sheer wall of noise, the bridge shakes, a metallic, stony hail falls, I glimpse a flaming piece of car arcing overhead, and the document wallet containing my father is cinders. The night rezips. The echo sonic-booms off the mountains. Gravel presses into my cheekbone. I sort of stand to my surprise, my body still works. Smoke pours upward from the craters where the Cadillacs were parked.

Leatherjacket enters another number into his mobile phone. I crouch, wondering what could be left to blow up is he a walking bomb who explodes his own evidence? but this time the mobile phone is only a mobile phone. 'Mr Tsuru? Suhbataar. Your wishes regarding Mr Nagasaki and Mr Morino have been realized. Indeed, Mr Tsuru. Just as they sowed, they reaped.' He puts his phone away and looks at me.

Burning and crackling.

My lip is bleeding where I bit it. 'Are you going to kill me?'

'I am thinking about it. Are you afraid?'

'I am very, very afraid.'

'Fear is not necessarily a weakness. I disdain weakness, but I disdain waste. To survive, you must persuade yourself that tonight was another man's nightmare into which you accidentally strayed. Find a place to hide by daybreak, and stay hidden for many days. If you assist the police in any way, you will be killed immediately. Do you understand?'

I nod, and sneeze. When I look up, smoke swallows up the night.

Five.

STUDY OF TALES.

MARGINS.

Goatwriter peered out at the starless night. His breath misted up the windscreen. First frost floated a wafer of ice on eidelweiss wine. Goatwriter counted three noises. The candle spluttering on his writing bureau; Mrs Comb battling in her sleep, 'Don't care was made to care, Amaryllis Broomhead!'; and Pithecanthropus, snoring in his undercarriage hammock. The fourth noise, the whisperings which Goatwriter was waiting for, was still a way away, so Goatwriter rummaged for his respectable spectacles to leaf through a book of poems composed by Princess Nukada in the ninth century. Goatwriter unearthed this volume one thundery Thursday in Delhi. Since midsummer, every night went the same. The venerable coach parked, Goatwriter woke, and nothing would make him sleep again. One, two, three hours later the whisperings came. Goatwriter told nobody about his insomnia, not even Pithecanthropus, and certainly not Mrs Comb, who was sure to prescribe a ghastly 'curative' worse than the complaint. In the beginning, Goatwriter believed the whisperings were the local Aberdeen waterfalls, but this theory was scotched when the whisperings followed to other locations. Goatwriter's second theory was that he was insane. But with no other mental faculty affected, Goatwriter had come to believe that the whisperings had their origins in his fountain pen the selfsame pen Lady Shonagon wrote her pillow book with, over thirteen thousand crescent moons ago. Goatwriter heard a hush, a rustle, and his heart raced faster. He slid Princess Nukada back on the shelf and pressed his ear against the pen shaft. Yes, he thought, here they come. But tonight, the words were more distinct listen! A 'queer' here, a 'pear' there, an 'ebony mare' everywhere. Goatwriter picked up the fountain pen and began to write, slowly at first, as the words spattered singly, but soon sentences flowed, filled and overspilled.

'Oh, sir, this is the giddy limit!' Mrs Comb opened the morning curtains. 'If you go gallivanting in the wee hours, wrap up proper! If your rheumatism plays up again, Muggins here'll have to do your lugging and carrying, mark my words.'

Goatwriter unpeeled his sticky eyes open. 'Unquiet slumbers, Mrs Comb I dreamed of m-metal detecting for Norse nonagons in a delta where it was Wednesday m-morning for all eternity.'

Mrs Comb tied her apron strings tight. 'I told you ninety-nine times, sir "Creams and honey, dreams turn funny." But you insist on your Devonshire suppers. Now, up and about with you. Your breakfast is done. Earl Grey with Zanzibar kippers, grilled to your fancy.' Mrs Comb looked out at the landscape. 'A right dreary spot, and no mistake.'

Goatwriter found his pince-nez on a monocle chronicle and peered. The venerable coach had rolled to a cold shoulder of more still moored still moors. 'Inky landscape, paperpulp sky. I remain in little doubt, Mrs Comb, we are in the margins.' Hawthorn huddled in well-wallowed hollows.

'Drab name for a drab place,' Mrs Comb pronounced.

'The soil is too acidic for colour to take root. A m-marginal duke once tried to station a daffodil plantation, but the yellow bleached away. Even evergreens never greened. No bird is heard, no low crows fly by.'

'Aye, well, sir. Your kippers'll be growing cold.'

Goatwriter frowned. 'Strange to say, Mrs Comb, but of appetite I am bereft. Perhaps I might ask you to put the fish on a dish, and I shall eat them by and by. For now, a splash of tea would suffice-' Goatwriter lost the tail of his sentence. 'How vexatious! I wrote dozens of pages last night but where are they now?' He looked beneath, between, behind his table but the pages were gone. 'This is disastrous! I wrote fragments of a truly untold tale!'