Spanner 12.1: Gangster in a Strange Land

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Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 12: Bad Girls Can’t Win
Part 1: Gangster in a Strange Land (Final Revision)

Good girls go to heaven,
bad girls go everywhere.
Mae West

Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, I won’t get fooled again.
George W. Bush

27 september 2014.
somewhere in seattle. She’s a beauty, this bright-eyed blond reporter girl. Those eyes make her look as moé as the idol singers and magical girls back home in Nippon. You don’t understand half of what she says. Your English sucks. But at least she takes your mind off Nenene.

The apartment is a complete dump. Nenene never had a talent for housekeeping. Sometimes you think she’s feeding you to the rats, bedbugs, and cockroaches. You slurp up inferior American ramen in your boxers. You don’t deserve this. You are Yakuza.

You feel the spatula hit your cranium hard. You hold the back of your head and whimper in pain. When your eyes return to the TV, the bright-eyed beauty is gone. Nenene sneers, “Baka Koji.”

a secret diary. I am a woman. I am a beautiful body who lives in pleasure, hurt, and desire. A am a soul who years for joy and love. I am a mind who longs to know, learn, and experience.

But I am not my name. I don’t have a name at all. I never felt I needed one. If you must give me one, call me Alice.

What’s a name, anyway? Isn’t it just another kind of number the System controls you with? When you’re born, the System demands a name; your parents must provide it one, or it’ll throw them in jail and give you to more pliable parents who will. The System then pronounces your name like a sorcerer commanding a spirit, and from then on you belong to it.

A psychologist friend tells me that it used to be gods who named people so they could control us. How is the “advanced,” “enlightened,” “modern” way any different? She says she chose a name of her own once, only to lose it to a record company.

Oh, how I wish I could be like those women who have the courage to risk their names by living free! My own name won’t let me. Something even worse than a record company controls it, and my life with it.

But I know a way out. I know of a worldwide secret subculture of women without names. They gathered up the courage to abandon their names, their families, their entire former lives, to start new lives unburdened by names, dedicating their lives to the fulfillment of their desires. They have no desire for family, fame, ambition, or anything else that would destroy their freedom and which require names. They refuse to think of themselves as special or even unique. They were once housewives, students, professionals, models, even celebrities. Some live for art, some for pleasure, some just to be free from social obligation. They know their lives are limited, so they live passionately while they’re still alive. They live for their own sake, not for anyone else. They call themselves anonymous free individuals.

I need to escape my name and everything that goes with it. I need to erase my name before I kill myself. Oblivion is better than the hell I’m living in now. But how do I erase my name? I know of two ways. One is to somehow get the Law to erase your existence. That involves doing things like faking your death or joining a cult. I much prefer the celebrity way: give your identity away to someone who wants it more than you do. But where do I find someone who does? Will she kill me? I don’t care anymore. I’m no longer afraid to die. After all, I am dying to my old life.

Yes, I will erase my name, end my old life, relieve myself of the crushing burden of celebrity, and become an ordinary nameless beauty who lives only for pleasure and desire. Let someone else take up the burden of my name. Let the world know her as what I once was. The world will never know my own name. I can live without one. I refuse to have one. From now on, I have no name.

cpmc headquarters. Governor Brinkman sits alone in the boardroom and glares at the image of Richard Becket on the big screen. The Chairman tells his nephew, “Walter, it’s looking from my vantage point that the marriage you and Dr. Heiler arranged to save your arse is already failing.”

“Uncle, you and I know it doesn’t matter if Leila and Oliver like each other or not. All they need to do is give me heirs. Dr. Heiler told me himself.”

“Poor Oliver keeps whining to me about your precious granddaughter and how much she hates him. They tried to kill each other just last night. He says she tried to castrate him with his own shovel. That tells me your Everson acquisition is about to fail. And once it fails—not if, but when—Leila belongs to me.”

Brinkman impatiently raises his voice. “We need to conclude the Everson acquisition, Uncle, if the Brinkman clan is to have a future.”

The Chairman glares down angrily at him and says coldly, “You’d better pick a better grandchild and another Everson, then.”

“There isn’t another Everson left! Oliver Thorwald is it!”

“Then your acquisition has already failed. Oliver will die, and Leila will be mine.”

“What does Grandmother say about it?”

The Chairman pauses for a moment. “Stop Leila, or the prophecy is fulfilled.”

The screen goes dark. Brinkman stares at it with dread.

nenene’s apartment. You are Koji Mizoguchi. You used to be a badass gangster back in Japan, the son of a Yakuza boss. Then the nationalist hero Shotaro Ishihara overthrew the American puppet democracy to make himself supreme patriarch of a new dictatorship dedicated to the blood purity of the Yamato Race and rewarded the Yakuza families with awesome political power for their fanatical loyalty to the Race, and where are you but in a run-down apartment on the other side of the ocean, trapped in a hostile gaijin city with the world’s most evil kogal.

Nenene Sasakawa is a bitch and a half. She beats you up if you ever bother to do anything. Then she beats you up for not doing anything. You’re convinced she beats you up just because. She calls you her baka. Koji-baka this, Koji-baka that. You desperately want to escape. But every time you escape, Nenene tracks you down, drags you back to her filthy lair, and beats you up again. She had to leave Japan for the evil empire that had raped and then corrupted Japan for seventy-some years just so she can continue to control you. You and that sweet little loli of hers, Ai-chan.

You remember another loli. Aya Shibata, the charismatic halfbreed with the cinnamon skin and wild red hair, was your obsession. You could not take your eyes off her. Obsessively you watched Aya-chan’s Little Love Hotel on illegal pirate TV channels that then-Governor Ishikawa’s merciless old-maid pedo hunters could not reach. The more your father Boss Mizoguchi punished you for your obsession, the more obsessed you became. At the end of every episode, she always said the same thing, always in a tone of voice that hinted she was hiding something secret and special:

“Rabu rabu neeee!”

Eventually your obsession got so extreme that you knew you had to have Aya Shibata for yourself. You sent your father’s mob soldiers to track her down, to find out where she lived and where she made those videos that became your obsession. You stalked her and you captured her and you made her your own. The Law would have chewed you up and spat you out for this. But you were Yakuza. You spat in the Law’s ugly bitch face.

Aya-chan was a mutant. Even at only nine years of age, she was insatiable. Three years of exploiting the Lolita complex for profit made her a sexual expert. She could not stop. She was the ultimate drug; you could not get enough of her, ever. She exhausted you. You could not handle her. She was not your slave; you were hers.

You started to get insanely jealous. Aya-chan was a free spirit and would not tolerate your possessiveness. Before she left you, she beat you up. You were seventeen then; she was only ten. But you were Yakuza; you spat in the face of reason. But little Aya-chan spat in the faces of Yakuza, and still they came back for more.

Almost four years later, she came back. This time she claimed to be an exchange student from America and that her name was Mirai Shiratori. You groaned at her pretentiousness when you heard her new name. “Mirai” is Japanese for “Nefertiti,” or “the beautiful one cometh” in ancient Egyptian. Nefertiti was the name of a great queen of Egypt. Aya-chan was no longer the sweet, perverted little vidgirl of your dreams. Now at sixteen (or was it thirteen? she always looked older than her age), Mirai-chan was a woman, and she looked as regal as the name she chose. Currently she was making millions of yen selling her body to repressed and horny salarymen in those love hotels that now-Prime Minister Ishikawa was determined to purge from Nippon’s sacred land.

Mirai, of course, is also the Japanese word for “future.” “I’m the future,” Mirai-chan once told you, ”but you’re just a piece of trash buried at the bottom of the jumbo skip of history.”

You had already fallen under Nenene’s spell. She too was different then. She was sixteen but had the aura of an innocent yet strong-willed princess. The goth loli style she preferred then was white and lacy. She was a video dancer, beautiful and evil. You could not resist her. But Aya Shibata was the goddess of loli, so when she returned in the now womanly form of Mirai Shiratori, Nenene became insanely jealous. She knew the absolute power Aya-chan had had over you. She would not allow Mirai-chan to regain the power she once held.

But Mirai-chan had other plans for you. She lured you to your favorite love hotel, where you had spent many a satisfying one-night stand seducing sailor-suited schoolgirls and then making them cry. She knew you had become obsessed with fantasies of being an innocent and large-breasted young girl, raped by Yakuza such as you, just like in the hentai manga you were so addicted to. She laughed at you, strapped on an evil-looking black dildo, slammed you face first against a wall, and raped you with the kind of wicked glee possible only to the evil seme of yaoi manga. You were Yakuza, but she was badass beyond the impossible. You could not get enough. You begged her to rape you again.

When Nenene found out, she challenged Mirai Shiratori to a Style War in a fit of irrational rage. Her mistake proved fatal.

No goth loli kogal could have withstood Mirai-chan’s Wild Style. She looked psychedelic. She mixed and matched colors and styles that deliberately clashed with each other and assaulted your eyes. She bared whatever she could get away with. Mirai was a sleek and flamboyant cat, and Nenene was the mouse she preyed on; she even called her “Ne-chan,” meaning “little mousie,” “like Koji-kun’s penis,” she said. Nenene was so enraged that she challenged Mirai-chan to a Dance Challenge on Japanese national TV. She had been the video dance champion of all Japan the year before, but Mirai-chan so outdanced her, danced so wildly and beautifully, that she dealt Nenene a crushing public defeat. She shouted out to the whole world that she was the future in the flesh. “Boku wa mirai da!”

Nenene never recovered. She mourned her defeat ever after by wearing nothing but black, deliberately ripping and dirtying her dresses, slathering on that hideous makeup, and kicking you into a whimpering mass of self-pity with her new high-heeled, steel-toed leather boots. By the time Mirai-chan returned to America, Nenene had become completely insane. She kidnapped sweet little Ai-chan, then fled with her and you across the ocean to America, indifferent to the glorious empire of the Yamato Race being restored by your own Yakuza. She wanted to beat you up and make nonconsensual love to Ai-chan as much as possible, and she didn’t want any interruption from the eugenics police even if they were Japanese.

Nenene was a bitch squared. But she was no Yakuza. She spat in your face, not Fate’s.

Little did Nenene know that the cat had lured the mouse into her lair. In her native Seattle, Aya-chan’s real name was Shira Thomas, and “Shira” is (among other things, she explained) Persian for “tigress.” Suddenly you realized that she was the feminine manifestation of Shere Khan, the king of tigers. In the videogame palaces of Seattle, she fought and danced under the name of Aya Shibata. And you found out that just as Mirai Shiratori was simply “Shira Miranda Thomas” partly respelled, Aya Shibata was just another name behind which the infamous Rebel Styles hid.

One day Ai-chan saw Mirai-chan on a Pirate Television Network broadcast. Mirai-chan had made love to Ai-chan once back in Japan; Ai-chan worshipped her ever since. Now she found out that her adored Mirai-chan was here! She found out Mirai-chan lived with her mother in a cute little ferry town across the water under the name of Shira Thomas; she stole all of Nenene’s money and bought herself a ferry ride to Bremerton to be with Mirai-chan. Now Ai-chan is free.

But you are still a slave.

You are Koji Mizoguchi. You were once Yakuza. You used to spit in the face of all human decency. Now you are merely a hikikomori trapped in the corner of the spare closet in Nenene’s filthy apartment far away from home, doing nothing but pretend to play games on your Nintendo 3DS-X while actually watching a grown-up Aya-chan molest all her favorite Vocaloids and the danmaku youkai girls of Gensoukyou, whenever Nenene’s not beating you up for every reason and no reason. Little does she know that you managed to install the Google Maps app on your 3DS-X without her knowing it. You know where Shira Thomas, the tigress, your lifelong obsession, lives. You installed the Foursquare app; she loves to tweet her location when she’s on the prowl, so you know where she’ll be on a Saturday night. You plan to meet her. You plot your escape.

You vow to be Shira Thomas’ sex slave forever. But first you have to get free of Nenene’s claws.

You lean against the corner of the closet and gradually work your way up to standing position. You open the closet door. You force your feet to move one after the other until you leave the closet. The bedroom door is open. You hear no one.

“Nenene-san?” you ask. No answer comes back. “Nenene-san?” Again, no answer. Nenene’s gone. You guess that she’s taken the ferry to Bremerton to harass Shira and try to take Ai-chan back from her.

You run into Nenene’s room to steal some money and a suitcase. You return to your own bedroom and hastily cram clothes and games into it, then force it shut. You know how Nenene takes her time, so you rush into the shower for the first time in a week and a half. You dry off, slap on some jeans and a Hawaiian shirt and leather laceless shoes without socks, drop your no-name Chinese phone into your shirt pocket, and rush out the door.

Soon you’re on the ferry to Bremerton, where Shira lives. You don’t know that Nenene is on the ferry passing by on the way back to Seattle, but you’d be overjoyed if you did. Nenene will not be happy when she finds out you left. But you don’t care anymore. Nenene is nothing to you now. You want to take your goddess back, away from the distractions of Vocaloids and danmaku youkai. You pray to the Yakuza demon gods whose terrifying images were painfully tattooed onto your skin, beg them to lead you to Shira Thomas so she can punish you, torture you, and rape you again and again and again.

Amanda: This is Amanda Currie. Thank you for letting me your bright-eyed companion in the morning.

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Copyright © 2012 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

[Revision 4 Final, 11/26/12: 12.3 R2 now the long main section, slightly revised. Everything else is new to the Final Revision.]