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Diane Joplihe afternoon in her hotel room surfing the Japanese sector of cyberspace. The hotel’s in-house Mitsubishi sole did a fairly good job of translating the Kanji on the fly. She pored through so many news stories aures related to the Yakuza and to Kenzo Yamamoto that she now sidered herself somewhat of an expert oopic. Several hours later, eyes tired from the stant stream of words scrolling down the s and the void iomach screaming for attention, she ordered room service.Ten minutes later the bell rang and she opehe door, a bit self-scious since she was wearing only the white terry-cloth robe with nothing underh. There was no ohere except a room service robot, its sensors blinking rapidly. The trolley moved smoothly past her into the room and positioself at right ao the desk and the in-house sole. Xybo, sensing food, was on the alert, its tail wagging expetly. Diane wondered whether now that robots where doing everything, the people who used to work in hotels were now all making robots. The good thing was you no longer felt like you were pelled to tip.
She had opehe cover of the trolley and marveled at the exquisite artistic creations of sticky rid colorful slivers of raw fish and seafood. The blob of wasabi was carved into the shape of aic dragon plete with scales. She khat within the oblongs of sticky rice hid a generous helping of wasabi so she left the dragon intact while she ate. She had then taken a quiap after instrug the house puter to wake her up at 6.00PM. That was two ho.
Her father had appeared in her dreams, urgio be vigilant and to take care of herself. His face had been wracked with guilt and in the dream he had begged her tive him for leaving her all alohen he had asked her to search for the maker of sole and find out what it was for. Diane wasn’t sure whether she had subsciously ied her own will into the dream or vice versa but with Yamamoto dead there was not much more she could do. The e to Takahashi was too remote. Then her mother had also appeared in her dreams, face as white as the snow that was falling outside, tracks of dried tears trailing down her face, black with dislodged mascara. Her mother had spirited her father away without saying a word, just that look in her eyes that said she was sorry but at least now they were together.
And Diane, all alone, had cried in her sleep and woken up with tears streaming down her face. Her pilloarts of her hair that had covered her face as she slept were soaki. She’d showered and ged and spent an hour on the in-house sole searg for something very specific. She was about to give up after an hour when an obscure out-of-date ior relations site gave her what she was looking for. Kenzo Yamamoto sat on the board of Tokyu Nanoteology Corp., a start-up pany formed less than two years earlier to researd manufacture chips based on nanoteology. What was iing to Diane was who else was on the board of directors. One Akio Inoue, seventy five years old and the foremost mind in Japanese microprocessor design. Further searches on Akio Inoue resulted in something even more iing. Several news articles indicated that Inoue, a master sole builder, had been hospitalized just two weeks ago. He had suffered a stroke. One of the articles stated with authority that he was being treated in a private wing at the Tokyo Medical Uy Hospital. And that was also located in Shinjuku.
***
Diane emerged, through the revolving doors, from the relative calm enviro of the Keio Plaza Hotel into a tide of moving flesh aing snow. Shinjuku had a different feel at night than it did during the day time. It was still crowded with pretty much the same mix of passers-by. Yet, underh the harsh artificial daylight of the relentless neon, the people seemed more alive. The stress of their daytime jobs had been replaced with the anticipation of pleasure and relaxation at the numerous bars, restaurants and gaming parlors in the neighborhood.
Her first plan of a was to get to know the Shinjuku area, especially the locations of immediate i. She’d bookmarked the locations on the AR unit so that it would pull them up automatically as she walked into their viity or on demand if she requested. On the AR unit’s reendation, she headed north towards the imposing twin monoliths of the Tokyo Metropolitan Gover Building, which was where the alleged Yamaguchi-gumi oyabun Miakahashi supposedly kept his goveral offices. The voices were now saying that it was to<dfn></dfn>o dangerous to attempt to approach him and this piece of advice mirrored Diane’s own thoughts oter so no surprise there.
From the news articles, it was obvious that Takahashi was stantly surrounded by a wall of Yakuza meatheads. She would either have to re with the Yamaguchi-gumi thugs or the minister’s official gover bodyguards. heless, she had availed herself of a steak knife from the room service robot’s dinner serviventory. It was one of those knives with a serrated edge and a poiip. Another search had armed her with valuable information on how to use it, if she did indeed happen to get close enough to the oyabun. She could slice through his jugular or just push it between his ribs right into his heart, twisting as she went. She had studied the explanatory photos carefully. The heart was on the left side of the body. She could hear hers thumping away at the thought of murder. She shuddered. The e between Takahashi and Kenzo Yamamoto was too remote to justify su a but it wouldn’t hurt to hide the knife in the leg pocket of her vas bat trousers anyway just in case the opportunity preseself and she ged her mind.
Diane walked past the perimeter walls of what the AR informed her was Shinjuku tral Park. She wasn’t that ied in the park’s history but was intrigued when the AR told her that ihe park was a massive makeshift shanty town of Tokyo’s homeless. And surely enough a few meters up ahead, one of the park’s inhabitants was urinating against the wall, a bowl of steaming Nishin instant noodles held aloft in one hand, another hand at the trols. The man wore an ill-fitting battered suit that had once been blue but now had turned brown and shiny with filth. One of his brokeher shoes was missing the froion. Diane could see a dirt-caked big toe ed with a black rown toenail stig out like the head of an aging tortoise. Diane crossed the street to give the man a wide birth in case he was dangerous but not before she was assaulted by a powerful whiff of stale vomit and alcohol. She felt sorry for him but there was nothing much she could do.
She took a right westward into the skyscraper district. You couldn’t miss it. The sky above this se was fluorest white and the air was alive with the sound of various forms of eleic activity. Behihe gover building cast an invisible shadow, its twin towers weighing heavily in the air, oppressive. A light snow was falling but there was very little actual snow on the ground. It was as though the glare of neon and the stampede of eager feet had dissolved the snow into the crete. It was cold but Dian<var>藏书网</var>e was well prepared with layers of insulated clothing and a black wool hat with leather flaps that covered her ears. With her puffy blaorth Face jacket and Evisu vas bat pants she could easily pass for a boy, which explained why nobody paid her any attention. Her rucksack taining Xybo and the sole in a of hotel towels added to the urban look.
One of the voices was back again asking Diane a question that had not occurred to her to ask. What was that salaryman in black still doing in the lobby of the hotel when she came down from her room? She hadn’t really noticed or paid attention but now the voice had reminded her, she did recall that there had indeed been someone of a similar description sitting there. Diaopped iracks and everything sped up as the crowd of people shifted past her in both dires. She turned around and sed the people behihere was too much flesh and too many black-clad salarymen. She didn’t even know what the man iel actually looked like but she was sure she would reize him if she saw him again.
The voice had mentio out of the blue so there had to be something in it. She decided she would be more vigilant and stay alert. It was obvious that if ihe man had been watg her, he was just following her and not actually planning to do her any harm. Otherwise he could have easily found out her room number and paid her an unwele visit.
And then it dawned on her. Her father had died under suspicious circumstances and she had disappeared. The FBI might be after her and this guy might be a local FBI guy. He definitely looked Japanese. Yet, he didn’t really look like the FBI type. She had seen FBI agents in a on many occasions. That guy was definitely not FBI. That meant only ohing. He robably Yakuza. Why would the Yakuza just follow her though? Were they waiting to see what she was going to do?
She tinued walking past a phalanx of massive brightly-lit department stores with names like Odakyu, Keio, Mitsukoshi and Isetan. Their display windows offered Diane a ve mirror of sorts to s the crowds for anyone who ayioo much attention. There was nothing out of the ordinary although at one point she thought she saw a dark shadow ing towards her in the window and whipped around only to find that it was a trick of light and it was just a fner in a stylishly-cut black Sherloes cloak walking past. Diaed that the man had probably had a bit too much plastic surgery as his face was all taut and shiny, not a pimple anywhere. Obviously Ameri, probably in the movie business. Some kind of Hollywood producer, she thought. Everything from his cloak, scarf and black crocodile skin boots looked expehere were many of those rich fn types in Shinjuku.
She crossed the West Exit of Shinjuku station a a warm gust of stale air blasted from the depths of the station by two giant air vents. There was a faint but unmistakable smell of sweating flesh and urine. Diane wrinkled her nose as she transitioned into a totally differeion of Shinjuku sisting of small lanes lit with even marish neons. The AR informed her that she had just entered Kabukicho the red light distrid home to some fifty thousand Yakuza gang members. Closer iion of the signage in front of the mostly smallish lookiablishments firmed this.
Some of the facades had backlit boards showing photos of stily-clad Japanese girls dang aroual poles, dressed up as nurses, manga characters or school girls or just standing there as though they were in the bikini line-up of some beauty pageant. Above the photos were various prices in Japanese Yen. Intermingled between these establishments were what looked like noisy video game arcades but there was this thunderiallic king sound and when Diane looked through one of the windows she saw people, mostly men and young boys, sitting in front of these elaborate looking maes with plastic bowls of what looked like little silver metal balls and more balls p out of the maes making that loud thundering noise.
The AR described these noisy establishments as Pako parlors and started explaining the rules but Diane overrode it with a flick of a switch. The small lanes pulsed with the sound of musiputer-geed beeps and melodies, the chatter of tele and the sounds of those Pako balls. At the er of one of the lanes, a group of drunken salarymen leered at her but she just kept on walking past gangs of young men with crazy haircuts and black suits trying to stuff leaflets in her hands and speaking to her in Japa seemed as though they wanted her to go into one of those places with the half-naked girls in the pictures. Diane just shook her head a on moving.
Acc to the AR unit, Kabukicho was the capital of Tokyo’s sex industry. It was sex packaged in every form imagihere were strip clubs, role-playing clubs, S&M clubs, nude shows, praphiemas, unlikely-looking bathing houses and massage parlors all packed one on top of each other o<dfn></dfn>her side of these small lanes. All these services were announced boldly in Japanese, English and ese in flashing or pulsating neon.
The AR unit explaihat in the eighteenth tury Shinjuku had been a refuge or resting place for long-distanuters to Tokyo. The name Shinjuku, it said, translated roughly as “new lodgings”. It was just a matter of time before the inns realized that their tele was willing to pay for more than rice, sake and a place to sleep for the night. The quintessentially Japanese solution was to have young female “rice servers” serve food to the guests who could then request additional services. Once again Diane overrode the AR. This was way too muformation and there were all these young guys in black, drunken salarymen and elaborately-dressed and made-up young Japanese girls to look at. Some of the girls, despite the chill, wore these impossibly short skirts that revealed parts of their underwear and exposed pale translut legs to the elements. This is really, really crazy, Diane mumbled to herself.
The AR unit was stantly marking off places Diane should not veo and as Diane moved deeper into Kabukicho she noticed that the unit had designated huge swathes of the area as dangerous. The AR displayed a s of additional information on the glasses that made the hairs on the back of Diane’s neck stand on end. Young girls were routiricked into going into some of these bars and rag up huge drinking bills which they had to pay off by engaging in the sex trade. Diane shuddered at the thought that earlier she had beeed to enter one of the bars to see what it was like inside. Once again the AR roving itself invaluable. She gave those areas a wide berth, stantly cheg the map in the AR’s cheap plastic glasses. The AR was also dividing the tiny map of Kabukicho into areas with translut color-coded overlays labeled with the name of the Yakuza gang that trolled it. The Yamaguchi-gumi and some ese gang trolled most of it, including the real estate and the various dodgy lines of business.
Diaurned round a er into a lahat was not as crowded or as brightly lit as the others. As she pressed forward ing her o peep into one of the windows of a small bar, she got that prig feeling again at the back of her neck. She straighteurned round and her mouth opened in surprise. The fner in the black cloak who she had seen on the pavement in the business district of Shinjuku was standing there, that plastic face lit up with blue neon from one of the facades, his left arm reag for something tucked into his waist belt. The few people walking in this part of Kabukicho stopped iracks, with the exception of three salarymen who just walked straight past the man, oblivious. The fner wasn’t looking at her. He was looking behind her. Diane whipped her head around, her thoughts coalesg around the steak knife in her pocket, the voices in her head screaming, willio stay alive. She stifled a gasp as she realized there was another man behind her. It was the Japanese man in black she had seen in the lobby when she was cheg into the Keio Plaza hotel. She was sure of it and she reized the bulky earpiece, his phone.
The fner’s hand came away from his waistband and there was this thing in his hand that looked like a gun, except the barrel was shaped like a funnel expanding outwards. Diahought he wasn’t as young as she had previously thought, more like in his fifties. Yet he was fast and he wasn’t Ameri either. There was something vaguely European about him. The gun sp<u></u>asmed in his hand and Diane expected to hear a gunshot but there was no sound at all. All Diane could see was the air in front of the man suddenly e alive and assume some kind of blob-like shape but it wasn’t actually a blob, just a se of air moving separately from all the other air around it. And the vibrating mass of air rushed past her causio take a deep intake of breath. She whirled around again and all she could see was the Japanese man go totally stiff, both hands to his sides, and just fall straight down to the pavement.
Diaurned round but the fner had already reached her. Thin bony fingers with a strong grip grabbed her and pulled her in the dire she had e from. Then the fn man started running, pulling Diane along with him and as they turhe er awo men joihem. One of them was Blad the other was Caucasian but Diane could swear they were identical twins, just different colored skin. They kept running, scattering crowds of Japanese. Diane had lost any will she had to resist. The lights were dang in her eyes, the thunder of Pako balls threatening to deafen her.
Yet, the voices were tellihat it wa<big>藏书网</big>s OK and that this man with the sloping jaw had saved her from the Yakuza. They reached one of the main streets b Kabukicho and Diaiced that there was a massive black van with heavily tinted windows idling on the curb. One of the other men slid open the van doors and she was bundled inside. She half expected it to be some kind of delivery van but was amazed to find all these puters and plush leather sofas ihe men got in, slid the doors shut and sat down on the leather sofas breathing heavily. The van began to move silently through the evening Shinjuku traffic.
百度搜索 上海梦想 天涯 或 上海梦想 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.