He nodded off and woke about 8:00 to call Suzi. Suzi had been his Japanese girlfriend. All nippophiles get a Japanese girlfriend. It comes with the small apartment and the visit to fertility shrines. Suzi had ended his dreams about being Japanese. They had dated for three months. One day he had mentioned his hope of marriage. “I cannot marry you.” she said, “My family would never speak to me. They want to me marry a Japanese man.”
“But I want to live here all of my life.” said Billy, “I want to be Japanese.”
“If you want to be Japanese, die and be reborn as a Japanese. I date you because you are a foreigner. Last week you told me you loved me. My Japanese boyfriends never say that. You are the same thing for me that I am for you. A fantasy of not being myself.”
Billy did not speak to her for a week. When he started talking to her again, it was as a friend, which was his first woman who was a friend. She found another foreigner to date.
“Suzi, what is a Burakumin?”
“Have you been talking to old people?”
“No, my neighbor said it. I think it means ‘village person.’ ”
“It does mean ‘village person.’ That’s the literal meaning, but it is really a derogatory term—like some Americans calling Arabs ‘towel heads.’ In the old days some trades were considered polluted—butchers, leather workers, people who wash corpses, some sexual entertainers. They are separate like a caste. Pollution beliefs are very strong in Shinto.”
“But they are Japanese, aren’t they? He looks Japanese.”
“Of course he looks Japanese, he is Japanese by DNA. It’s a taboo—your neighbor will make less money, live in bad places, marry into his own kind. The notion of pollution runs deep. Companies used to keep illegal lists of the Burakumin. In the beginning of this century they were almost mainstreamed. Then when kyonshi technology showed up, they were the only ones who could risk the pollution. You aren’t Japanese, you wouldn’t understand.”
Billy remembered his dad railing against the Italians and the Poles. His mom’s maiden name was Polish. Dad explained to him many drunken times, that Mom looked white but . . .
He knew about the human need to hate. His body was full of memories. When he was a geeky teenager obsessed with Japanese pop culture, he was hated. He was marked. In sixth grade two junior high boys beat him yelling that he should have learned karate from his comic books. In seventh grade he was tossed headfirst into the girl’s bathroom. The impact with the door actually knocked him out, so he arrived unconscious. When he came to in the nurse’s office, the principal sent him home because of his behavior. He had to come the next day with his parents to be reinstated. That led to his Dad’s first burning of his manga. Later that year at Halloween he had engaged in cosplay—he was the evilest “hero” of them alclass="underline" Lelouch Lamperouge. Everyone made fun of him, the dark and interesting antihero of Code Geass was called a “Fag Vampire.” Some kids caught him in a park. He called his parents and his drunk dad drove up in his small tan Toyota pickup. It began all heroic-like. Dad drove into the park, across the football field toward the white bandstand. The Hulks, the Spider-men, the one Wonder Woman fled from his dad’s headlights. Billy ran to Dad. Dad got out of the truck and picked him like a trash-bag and threw him in the back of the truck. Billy heard a rib crack when he landed.
But he stood his ground, he watched anime on his computer, and kept his manga under his bed, took Japanese in high school. He swore a samurai oath to help the downtrodden, yet by his senior year he was making fun of the childish tastes of the new members of the Patterson Ottaku Club. “You like Sinji? And you’re potty-trained?” He taunted kids that liked G-force or (Buddha help them!) Speed Racer.
In college he passed his larva stage as a worm-like ottaku and gained the wings of a true Nippophile. He learned Japanese literature, studied Zen, wrote haiku. He majored in English because English teachers can always get crummy apartments. Who cares how bad your apartment is if you can see Nagoya Castle? Of course he had first seen it in Godzilla vs. Mothra or had it been Gamera vs. Gaos?
No one had saved him, no human had reached out to him, so he choose reading over life, the fantasy of Japan over the reality of Patterson.
Tomorrow he would reach out to his neighbor. He would bridge the gap that surrounded the kyonshi workers. His own quest to be Japanese was nothing compared to the Burakumin. He surfed the web into the night learning the history of the kyonshi.
After Capeksen designed the controllers, a major scandal shook the industry. The promise was that somehow cures would come for the wealthy dead. The controlling units enabled them to live with some measure of dignity—which they did when their families visited. But the zombies also worked well as lawn mowers, gardeners, car washers, and—for some people with a taste for geriatric porn—they became sex slaves. An unscheduled visit by a reporter ended the appeal. No one wanted their grandmother blowing programmers who couldn’t get laid otherwise. It did not matter that new safeguards could eliminate this semi-sentient slavery; stock in Capeksen fell like Lucifer from heaven.
It took murder to change the fate of Capeksen again. When the Toronto cannibal, Robert “Taco Time” LeBlanc’s infamous Mexi-Cali Grill had been less than careful with the meat grinder and the mangled diamond wedding ring of Mary Casutto wound up in a food critic’s mouth, a new “crime of the century” dominated the newsfeeds for months. Who can forget the angry, crying Robert Casutto begging the white-wigged judge to sentence LeBlanc to zombie status? Owning a slave became a statement that one stood for Justice, Liberty, and the Canadian way. Humanity’s age-old fascination with slavery re-manifested. At first, zombiehood was reserved for the worst offenders. But the status symbol of owning a (former) human being as a slave began filling the newsfeeds. Every star, every pop singer had a zombie in tow. The Electric Luddites had an entire zombie road crew with their neon orange logo tattooed on their pasty faces.
Soon there weren’t enough criminals to meet the demand. But people still died. What if you elected to be infected? What if you could pay off your huge hospital bills, end debts, put grandchildren through college? Humans have always made greet sacrifices for their families. The peace of mind that came by selling your body into thralldom was immense. Poor families dreading the cost of Granddad’s funeral now had a marketable resource. It was a great deaclass="underline" the living would collect a huge fee for their loved one’s attempt to become infected. Ninety percent of the time, the infection didn’t occur. For the ten percent who made the transition, it meant no more pain (at least this was what was believed), and even more money. The sale of one walking zombie paid more than most average humans made in a year. Japan led the world in kyonshi manufacture. Very few countries opposed the zombies. The Islamic world held out, as did the United States (which had always been based on flesh-worship). From an American point of view, zombies were as bad as abortion, euthanasia, and stem-cell research.
Billy biked to school the next morning. There was a hint of frost in the air, but warmth in his heart. This was the day he would become a man. He would undo the bullying that had haunted his childhood. This was his day to pay Japan back.
When the technician arrived with the kyonshi following along, Billy almost ran from his class to meet him. The technician regarded him dully. Billy offered to take him to lunch. With obvious regret the technician accepted.