Bungo Stray Dogs:

Dazai’s
Entrance Exam
First Light Novel
Author: Asagiri Kafka
Artist: Harukawa35
Prologue, Interludes, and Chapters: Translator, slugtranslation-bsd.tumblr.com
Original Source:
https://slugtranslation-bsd.tumblr.com/tagged/Osamu-Dazai%27s-Entrance-Exam

Conclusion: Translator, dazaimackerelosamu.tumblr.com

Illustration Scans:https://tantei-bozu.tumblr.com/tagged/dazai-entrance-exam

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 “After all, no matter how much you wish to, you can’tlive off ideals!”
–Kunikida, Doppo.Meat and Potatoes,1901.

Prologue
What are “ideals”?
There are countless answers to this question. Idealsare stories, or they are ideologies, or
they are the source of all meaning.
But if you were to ask me, the answer is quite clear.
“Ideals” is a single word written on the cover ofmy notebook.
My notebook has many uses. It leads me like a guidinglight, a master, and a prophet. And
incidentally, it is also the key for unlocking myweapons.
Ideals.
I write down everything in this notebook of mine.I always carry it with me, for this
notebook contains my entire future.
It has every plan from tonight’s dinner menu to whereI should move to five years from
now, from tomorrow’s list of work duties to the locationsof record low radish prices. Schedules,
plans, and goals all guide me. I write them all downin my notebook and always carry it with me to
utilize it.
If I may exaggerate a bit- This notebook with “ideals”written on it is the written prophecy
of my own future.
My ideals are always held in there.
I think it wise to follow them and nothing else.
I follow the plans in my notebook to such an extentthat my future is entirely under my
own control.
To control the future- what a beautiful, brilliantphrase.
However- no matter the brilliance of ideals, if theroad which connects them to reality is
long and dark, then the brilliance is nothing buta fantastic illusion, the ideals nothing but garbled
words.
And so I have written in the first page of my notebookthe simplest rule for following my
ideals.
“Do as one should.”
My name is Doppo Kunikida.
The man who follows the demands of reality is an idealist,and the man who follows ideals
is the realist.
This is a story of myself, a man who begged for theactualization of my ideals, and a
certain new employee, born under the star of chaosand messing up said ideals, and our fierce
fighting with one another.

The tenth.
I turn to this fresh page in my notebook to recountthe past two or three days.

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 The following are such events which have transpired during that time concerning myself
which I deem of particular importance.
Called on Takekoshi. Took an evening walk with him.
Received a message from the hacker Taguchi concerningthe matter of the foreign
warships.
Ate a pear. It was not sweet.
I should not worry about trifling matters.
I must not become warped and prejudiced- ah, and Istill wish for nothing beyond this.

“Wait!” I shouted to the criminal I dashed after intothe heart of Yokohama.

The shopping district’s streets roared with the usualtraffic. You could hear the sounds of
food stall vendors calling out to customers, the hubbubof the crowds walking down the avenues,
the cries of customers begging for discounts, andthe rush of cars racing in every direction. An
argument on the right side of the street would beall but unnoticed on the left side of the street.
I brushed past the pedestrian traffic and chased afterthe criminal.
The criminal was a petty thief who had caused a commotionin a jewelry store when he
seized a few articles and fled. The items were allsmall, but three such incidents had already
occurred by this time, and as such the shopping districtentrusted the matter of apprehending the
criminal to us.
I chased the thief fleeing from the scene of the crimeof the fourth incident. The criminal
had great stamina, never slackening his pace. He dasheddown an alleyway at the end of the line
of shops, and I lost sight of him. I ran through theflow of traffic.
“You’re late, rookie!”
My coworker running after me shouted, “Hold on a moment,Kunikida. I need to tie my
shoelace.”
Accompanying me on today’s venture was my new coworker.He joined the company only
a few days before this incident.
His name was Osamu Dazai.
I could have done quite well without this name everentering my life.
“Oh man, I’m so tired. Kunikida, you’re so fast! Can’twe run a little slower? I’m not in
shape right now.”
“Enough of your whining already! Hurry up and run,you lazy bum. You make me sick to
my stomach!”
“Wow, that’s so cool!”
“Enough!”
I knew nothing of this Dazai’s true capabilities,nor his personal history, but it was clear
that he had little to no motivation. He did whateverhe pleased whenever he pleased and
disrupted thousands of my plans. And to make mattersworse, he had this bizarre interest in-
“Oh by the way, Kunikida, the thief just got away.”
While I had been distracted by Dazai, the runawayhad crashed through a vegetable stand,
turned a left, and ran off.
I clicked my tongue automatically.
I called to mind the map of this entire area. Theman had run off into a residential district
bordered by a thin hedge. Said area had multiple hidingplaces for a runner to get lost in.

3
“Look, Dazai! He’s gone off and escaped into a place where we’ll be hard pressed to find
him, all because you were dawdling!”
“It’s all good. I figured that would happen. Oh andby the way, I saw the most amazing
thing a moment ago. Want to hear about it?”
“Later!”
“It was this super rare book called The Complete Guideto Suicide. I’ve been looking for it
for ages, but then I just stumbled across it on displayin an old book store and- Ah, if I don’t
hurry up and go back, it might sell out!”
I tuned him out as he continued to prattle on.
“If you want to die that badly, should I shoot youto death myself?!” I yelled.
Dazai said with a bashful smile, “Oh, really? Sorryfor all the trouble.” There was
absolutely nothing to be bashful about.
This man practically never put in any effort at work.Day in and day out, all he thought
about was suicide. His was a world I couldn’t evenimagine: doing whatever he wanted, even
superficially, and always earnestly groping aboutfor the means to end his own life. He was, in
short, a suicide fanatic.
A suicide fanatic?
Goodness, what an absolutely disgusting phrase.
At any rate, my partner’s interest in somehow kickingthe bucket got in the way of our
work and was the reason we had failed to apprehendthe criminal.
For you see, I did not have “Fail the case” writtenin my notebook plans.
I turned down a side road after the criminal.
The path ahead was narrow, crooked, and gloomy. Theroad was deserted. Both sides of
the lane were lined with hedges; beyond them I couldsee water wells, backyards of old
residential lots, and the like. Laundry flapped fromthe eaves of the houses.
I called up a map of the area on my phone. The screendisplayed our location as a bright
dot to signify the surrounding buildings and backstreet.The street was surrounded on all sides by
residential buildings, but the criminal was runningstraight through here to the outdated
warehouses in the old factory district. If he managedto run away and hide there, he would be
nigh on impossible to find.
Farther off down the lane, I saw a tiny figure ofsomeone’s retreating back. It seemed like
he was bound for the warehouses too.
“Shit!” I swore. I wouldn’t be able to catch up withhim at that distance. If I failed to catch
him, he would just go on to commit more crimes. Ourclients’ shops would not only struggle to
stay in business, but the Agency would also gain abad reputation.
What was I to do? What could I do?
“Well now, we’d better hurry up and get this overwith, or else I won’t be able to buy my
book. Should I go block off his escape route?” saidDazai with a grin.
Dazai took a deep breath and then yelled so it carriedquite far, “Fire!”
Instantly, the path before the fleeing criminal becamea swarm of townsfolk fleeing from
their homes- women in the middle of cooking clutchingpot lids, drowsy-looking young men, and
old people carrying their chess boards. All rushedout one after the other, the neighborhood a
flurry of people as one by one they materialized inthe narrow street and obstructed it.
It was impossible for the criminal to flee.

4
His escape route teemed with confused people; he could neither go on nor return the way
he came. Even as he attempted to threaten them to press on, no one paid him any mind as they
frantically searched for the source of the fire. Retreatwas likewise impossible for the opened
gates were also plugged with people.
“How’s that?”
“You idiot! You’ve certainly stopped him, but we can’tget through here either!”
“It’s all right, aren’t you the ever-so-skilled detectiveDoppo Kunikida? I made it so it’s
your turn now, so go ahead and give it your all.”
I swore, I would sew that mouth shut later!
I opened my favorite notebook and quickly scratcheda few letters down.
I tore off the scrap of paper with my scribbled writingof “wire gun” on it and focused my
attention on it.
“Doppo Poet!”
Abilities.
There must be a rational explanation for how theymanifest themselves, right? There is no
other way to say it than ‘They simply exist as theyare’. Why only pages from my notebook?
Why do they possess the ability to defy natural lawand change their shape? But there is no one
with a theoretical explanation for the phenomenon.
The notebook scrap I had torn off and concentratedon reformed itself until it was a wire
gun, just like I had written.
Jumping upon a nearby fence, I aimed my gun at thefugitive.
From my point of view, the criminal had reached theend of his escape path in the crowded
streets and in order to frighten the people, seemedon the verge of pulling a handgun from his
pocket.
Here on the edge of town, this thief having a handgunwould spell no end of trouble.
At any rate, it would be horrible to fire a gun inthis swarm of people!
I took aim and then pulled the trigger on my wiregun.
A harpooning fish hook shot out from the gun whichleft a trail through the air as it sped
towards the target.
My wire gun smacked his handgun flying and pinnedthe fugitive’s sleeve to the wall
behind him.
“Jackpot.”
Dazai whistled lamely.
I leapt over a hedge while winding up my steel wire,and then kicked my way past another
hedge. I sailed over the heads of the people and landeddirectly in front of the criminal.
I raised my eyes at the same time as the criminalpulled a dagger from his pocket.
He slashed the dagger down at me from point-blankrange.
He was an amateur at using weapons; it was a lazystrike and did not connect.
I nimbly turned my head to the side and evaded theattack. Seizing the opportunity, I also
grabbed the criminal’s elbow and wrist.
While twisting his wrist one way, I struck his elbowin the opposite direction.
The fugitive flew into the air.
After tracing an arc against the sky, he slammed upsidedown into a wall.
He looked like he had not the faintest idea what hadjust happened as he slumped over and
fainted.
5
This technique was called Tenchi Nage, a throw utilizing the opponent’s strength.
The townspeople stood silently, dumbfounded, as theylooked back and forth between the
criminal and I.
Dazai finally caught up and addressed the townsfolkwith a smile, “We apologize,
everyone, for disturbing you today. Everything isfine now. The fire was a false alarm.”
“Who… who are you guys?” one of the people asked.
I pulled my detective license out from my pocket andheld it up high for all to see. “There
is no cause for alarm,” I said. “We are the ArmedDetective Agency.”

6
 Chapter 1
The seventh.
It rained this morning.
It was a quiet and cold winter’s rain, with such anintense cold as is typical of the season.
I pray that I shall live ideally.
I must play the part of one who follows ideals. Imust walk forward without fear and
without hesitation.
I pursue the honorable future I dream of, for whatgreat satisfaction I receive from my
devotion to my daily duties!

If you were to climb up a certain hilly street nearthe Yokohama harbor and continue just
beyond it, you would find the office of the ArmedDetective Agency.
It is a building with reddish-brown brickwork. Thebuilding has had quite a few years
under its belt, and so the strong, salt wind off theocean has entirely coated the drain spouts and
telephone poles with rust. Despite its exterior appearance,it has been constructed quite sturdily;
an enemy with a machine gun could while away at theoutside without the interior receiving so
much as a scratch.
I can say this with a good degree of confidence, becausein our past experiences, the
enemy with the machine gun has been, by no means,metaphorical.
However, the Agency actually operates out of the fourthfloor anyway; the other floors
house other, quite respectable tenants. The firstfloor is home to a café, the second to a law
office. The third floor is currently vacant, whilethe fifth floor holds miscellaneous storage space.
We often find ourselves in the café’s debt beforepayday, and when on the occasion that our work
causes trouble, we go apologize to the fellows atthe law office.
At the time this story begins, I was riding the elevatoron my way into work.
I stepped out to stand in front of the door as theelevator descended. A sign hung on the
door which proclaimed in a plain font “The Armed DetectiveAgency”.
I checked my watch. I was expected to arrive at workat 8 am, meaning that I had 40
seconds to delay somehow.
Seems that I had run a bit early, hey?
It is my creed to be a strict adherer to scheduledtimeliness. While I waited my 40 seconds,
I flipped through my notebook and double-checked theday’s schedule. I had already checked it
once at breakfast, once when leaving the dormitory,and once while waiting for a traffic light, but I
have never heard of anyone dying from checking theirschedule too much.
I had already committed my work schedule to memory,so I turned it over in my mind as I
read. Straightening my collar, I checked my watchonce more.
… All right.
“Good morning,” I said as I opened the door.
“Oh, morning, Kunikida! Take a look at this! It’sbonkers!” There was Osamu Dazai,
popping up right in front of the door, grinning. “I’vefinally arrived! Ah, and what a wonderful world
this is! For this, this, is the world of thedead, the gate to hell itself! It’s just as I imagined it! Look at
it! Misty haze crawling over the ground,moonlight smashing itself against the windows, pink
elephants whirling and dancing in thewestern sky!”
7
Dazai pranced up and down in front of the door, waving his arms about in exaggerated
gestures. What a nuisance.
“Heh heh heh heh, what a marvelous work of literature!The Complete Guide to Suicide!
Why, to think I could achieve this pleasure, thisdelightful setting off down the road to death by
merely eating some mushrooms growing off some little,backwoods mountain path! Marvelous!
Heh heh heh!”
His eyes refused to focus. His black pupils trembledin little spasms.
One of the clerks beseeched me, teary-eyed, “Pleasedo something, Mr. Kunikida!”
It seemed he had been in this state for a while now.
I glanced over at Dazai’s desk.
There lay that blasphemous book he bought the otherday, The Complete Guide to Suicide,
opened to a page entitled “Death by Poisoning – Mushrooms”.Next to the book lay a slice of
mushroom on a plate which had been bitten.
However, when I peered closely at it, it appeareda slightly different color than the
mushroom shown in the book illustration.
“Hey, hey, Kunikida, you should come with me to helltoo! Look, endless wine, endless
food, and endless perfume of beautiful women!”
“Please help us, Mr. Kunikida, we’ve done everythingwe can already…”
In short, it seemed the mushrooms Dazai consumed wereless of the “death cap” variety
and more of the “madcap” variety.
Every morning when I arrived at work, I always attendedto my predetermined business in
a predetermined order. If a single day did not proceedthe way I had planned right from the very
beginning, do you suppose I could then follow theplan on subsequent business? The answer is a
decisive no.
Ignoring the wiggling and weaving Dazai and the pleadingand sobbing clerk, I went to
my own desk.
I placed my bag on my desk just as I always did. Iturned my computer on. I opened the
window just as I always did.
“Whoa! There’s a huge sea anemone out there, Kunikida!It’s! It’s eating a banana! And
ever so considerately setting aside the nearby, whiteparty-blower!”
I poured myself a cup of coffee just as I always did.I disposed of a few unnecessary
papers from yesterday’s work.
“Oh, I’ve got it- we’ve all gone naked; we’re allnaked, and we’re paid because our
approval ratings are so high! But it can’t be as simpleas that, no, for us all to be naked, so
instead we’ve all gone kitted out in full body tights!Everyone has gone off in tights to the bank and
danced the hopak!”
I checked my messages just as I always did. I tooka sip of my coffee.
“I hear a voice… ooh, it’s, it’s in my head! … Why,it’s a little old pops! He’s whispering
to me, he’s saying, ‘Go to Tokyo; in Tokyo they makefood with miso which tastes different, and
you need to try i-”
I kicked the frolicking, skipping about Dazai in theback of the head and sent him flying.
Dazai hit the wall and passed out.

Let us start at the beginning.

8
 If someone were to give this man an exam to test his ability to be a human being, he
would, without a doubt, score zero points and be disqualified – and he had been my coworker for
only four days at this point.
“We have a new hire?”
One day, when I was summarizing documents, I was calledto the president’s office.
There, I was asked to look after a new detective hehad hired.
That was rather unexpected.
Although we did earn our livings as armed detectivesin a world of violence and battles, I
had not heard word of our present number of detectivesbeing insufficient. Come to think of it, at
the time I myself had a side job two days a week,teaching algebra at a school called the New
Tsuruya Academy.
Of course, recently, what with the azure flag terroristincident, the repeated disappearances
of Yokohama tourists, and conflicts with a criminalorganization called the Port Mafia, the number
of cases requiring an armed detective had onlyrisen. It was also true that the number of violent
cases that our main detective Ranpo couldnot cover had grown as well. So perhaps our
president’s decision to accept a new person was dueto him noticing this issue.
The president contemplated for a moment and then said,“Let us have him introduce
himself. Enter.” He called the last to the officedoor.
A young man, his whole face lit up with a grin, camein. “Thanks for having me.”
He wore a sandy colored coat over a Western styleopen-necked shirt. He was rather tall
and quite skinny, with unkempt black hair and an airabout him like he cared little for keeping his
personal appearance in good order, but nevertheless,his features were somehow graceful. The
bandages wrapped around his neck and wrists slightlydrew my attention.
“My name is Osamu Dazai. I’m twenty years old. It’sa pleasure to meet you.”
Twenty. The same age as me.
“I am Kunikida. If something comes up that you needhelp with, be sure to ask me.”
“Oh! Are you the amazing investigator of the Agencythat everyone talks about? You’re
such an inspiration!” the man who called himself OsamuDazai cried, grabbing my hand for a
handshake against my will and pumping it exaggeratedly.
At that very moment, I suddenly noticed a chilling,piercing light in this man’s eyes that
vanished as quickly as it appeared.
It was like he was calmly appraising his new coworker.No, he stared at me like he could
see right through me to my very personality and mindset,as if he were a heavenly sage-
But in the blink of an eye, the sage’s stare vanished,and Dazai’s face returned to its usual
blankness.
Perhaps my eyes deceived me, or perhaps it was a trickof the light.
I rallied myself and asked, “Very well then, Dazai,how did you come to be a detective
here? This is hardly the sort of place where anyonemay walk in and start.”
“So I’ve heard. Back when I was unemployed and grumblinginto my cups at a bar, I just
so happened to find a kindred spirit in the man sittingnext to me. He challenged me to a drinking
contest with the promise that he would help me finda job if I were to win. Well, he meant it as a
joke, for he would have helped me had I won or lost,but I won in the end, at any rate.”
Who could that have been?
The president said with a serious expression, “Thatman was Mr. Taneda of the Special
Abilities Department. He visited me yesterday andintroduced us.”
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It took my breath away to hear Mr. Taneda’s name dropped so casually as that.
Taneda of the interior ministry’s Special AbilitiesDepartment was hardly someone the
average citizen had ever even heard of, for he wasthe director of a kind of secret service. The
department’s business was to control ability usersand regulate news about them. I had heard that
Taneda was instrumental to the President forming theArmed Detective Agency as well.
Even the President could hardly refuse a referralfrom Mr. Taneda.
“I look forward to working with you, sir,” Dazai said.
Whether or not he was aware of the disquiet nestedinside of me, our new coworker
showed off his white teeth to us as he smiled.
But at any rate, whether or not a great governmentauthority thought him a man of
character, his mushroom eating and subsequent jauntto another world were really an enormous
nuisance to me.
This was the third day of being paired with Dazai.
I knew no peace for even an hour, nor could I focuswhole-heartedly on work, and the
number of complaints pouring
in on the phone continued to
climb higher.
Whenever I took my
eyes off of him, he would say
he was going to drown himself
and then fling himself into a
river, or say to be careful and
then go off to drink at a bar, or
say he received a divine
revelation and run off to flirt
with a pretty girl. Quite
fittingly for a twenty year-old
man-child, he only did what
suited himself and smashed my
schedule to bits.
Well, despite all that, a
work assignment was a work
assignment, and he was my
subordinate, after all. The
President had tasked me to look
after him, so to give up after a
pitiful three days would fly in
the face of the President’s trust
in us and our pride as Agency
members.
“How is our newest
employee?”
Presently, we were in a
chess parlor near the Agency. It
was a small, single room
10
floored with tatami matting, in which both thePresident and I sat together playing a game of
chess.
“He is an utter disaster,” I said. “He’s like if devils,ghosts, and other creatures of
ill-fortune all amalgamated into a single person.”
I moved my rook forward on the cypress-wood chessboard. The piece tapped against the
wood grain with an echoing sound.
“But, well, I will manage at any rate.”
After our duties were completed, the President andI always went to the chess parlor and
played a few matches. The room itself was traditionallystyled and empty apart from myself and
the President sitting on our feet in front of theboard.
“I apologize,” he said, and moved his knight. It wasa fine move which took my bishop.
“Not at all. There is also the issue with Mr. Taneda.… Why did he send a person like that
here?”
Even as I spoke, I searched for my next move. I aimedfor the right side of the board so as
to capture his queen- no, the most I could do wouldbe to place him in check in two moves. Even if
I held out on the other side of the board, he couldcome down the middle, and that would be
the end of me. There were no more efficient movesfor me. It seemed like there was only a bit
more time before our evenly matched game turned intocheckmate.
“Mr. Taneda has a rather extravagant personality,but he has quite a talent for discerning
capable people, which is enough for me. I do not knowif, perhaps, he discerned this young
man’s extraordinary talent or not.”
Certainly, I had heard talk of Mr. Taneda’s judgmentproving truly exceptional. Without
that, such a weighty task as commanding a secret serviceof the interior ministry would be quite
impossible, after all.
But, nevertheless- “extraordinary talent”? Him, theman who didn’t seem to have anything
between his two ears but mud?
“I am of the same opinion as Mr. Taneda. Dazai passedboth the written and the practical
pre-exam with full marks. He is of superb quality-indeed, to a dangerous degree.”
“Dangerous, you say…?”
“I had one of the office staff look into Dazai’s personalhistory. However, there was
nothing. Absolutely nothing. I turned to a friendof mine in the military police’s intelligence
division, but nothing turned up to the point thatit is ominous. It is as if someone has carefully
erased his entire past.”
How strange indeed that even the intelligence divisionof the military police were unable
to turn up a thing in regards to his past.
“Perhaps there is truly nothing there, and he’s donenothing of note thus far in his life.”
“Perhaps. Or if perhaps not-” The president furrowedhis brow more than in his usual
expression as he continued, “Have you heard of Dazai’sability?”
“No, not yet.”
Now that he mentioned it, I was aware at the timethat Dazai was an ability user, but I still
had not heard what powers he possessed.
“Dazai’s ability has the power to cancel any abilityhe touches.”
I couldn’t believe my ears.

11
 The power to cancel other abilities. At first thought, it seemed a simple, hardly flashy
ability, but among abilities, his was especially unorthodox,for this single ability used on its own
could thwart the entire system of abilities.
My ability, Doppo Poet, gave me the power to manifestobjects into reality by writing
them in my notebook, tearing out the page, and focusingintently on it. However, I could not
manifest any objects larger than the notebook itself.Much could be said for its versatility and high
degree of excellence, but it still did not surpassthe stage of being “merely helpful”. I had been
told that it is best to have one’s essentialson one’s person from the start, so I used it onlyin
conjunction with that.
But Dazai’s ability was different.
Theoretically speaking, without Dazai, there verywell might have been innumerable
enemies we would have been unable to defeat. But eventhe strongest ability user in the world
would become no more than an ordinary person beforeDazai.
It would have been no surprise if ability user organizationsthe world over sought after
him.
“So… is this what you are saying? The esteemed Mr.Taneda sits down for a drink and just
so happens to sit next to an ability user with raretalent and just so happens to form a rapport with
him. And this man, with the brains needed to scoreperfect marks on his written exam even while
performing odd words and actions, just so happensto be unemployed and joins the Armed
Detective Agency, a company that one simply cannotjoin without outside assistance, entirely
without a hitch. So you’re saying this is too goodto be true?”
“I don’t know if perhaps we are overthinking the matter.But the Armed Detective Agency
has many connections within the government and militarypolice. Due to the nature of our work,
we must deal with a large amount of information pertainingto secrets of the state.”
Certainly, for a member of a criminal organization,the Agency’s cooperation with the
police made the ratio of ease of entrance to the numberof benefits attractive enough for many
previous infiltrations.
But suppose that Dazai was indeed a secret agent thatinfiltrated the Agency?
Was he really enough of a talented person that hemanaged to hoodwink Mr. Taneda?
The Dazai?
“Kunikida. I want to entrust his entrance exam toyou.”
I nodded. The entrance exam the president spoke ofwas assigned to every generation of
detective- what was unsaid was that there was moreto the exam than met the eye. A detective
wasn’t considered to be a true member of the agencyuntil they completed the exam.
“I will have you accompany Dazai to his jobs to determinethe authenticity of his nature.
The moment you have a suspicion that he is some sortof spy or secret agent, he can be fired
without any hesitation. And if, perhaps, the momentarrives where you find a sign of him having an
otherwise wicked, evil nature-”
The president produced a black automatic pistol froma bag lying behind him and handed
it to me.
“…”
I took the pistol wordlessly.
It was heavy.
“You will shoot.”
“Yes.”
12
If Dazai were involved in some sort of nefarious plot, it would have been the Agency’s
duty to stop him in his tracks.
A person who carried the detective license of theArmed Detective Agency was granted
police-like authority. They were in this conditionallowed to carry a handgun or portable blade.
They could also extract information from the police.More than anything else, through their
investigative authority, it was possible, if one wereso inclined, to disrupt the criminal
investigations of the authorities, falsify policeinformation, wiretap and secretly photograph
important facilities, and every other sort of wrongdoing.In the worst case, it would not have
been impossible for a terrorist to perform subversiveactivities in said important facilities,
stealing the lives of hundreds or thousands of people.
The black steel pistol lay in my hands, silent andunfeeling.

The moonlight washed over the rippling bay.

I walked through the traffic from which one couldoverlook Yokohama Harbor. The
evening hubbub rivaled the sound of the waves whilethe town’s lights rivaled the moonlight
itself.
Dazai followed me, bobbing along behind me.
He had wasted half the day with his mushroom scandaland seemingly only recovered his
ability to attend to his duties now.
“Kunikida, you know your ability that you used before-Doppo Poet? Show me it again.”
“I shall not. I do not reveal my ability carelessly.Moreover, it consumes a full page of my
notebook each time I use it. The artisan who producesthese notebooks creates no more than one
hundred of these products within a year at an exceptionalprice. I suppose you would use it for
some cheap gag or the like, no?”
I checked my wristwatch and looked back over my shoulder.
“Never mind that now. Dazai, pick up your pace a little.We will be late to our agreed upon
time at this rate.”
“All this talk of time, Kunikida, but as far as Ican recall, we never agreed upon a
particular time to meet our informant, correct?”
“No, we spoke over the phone and said approximately19:00.”
“And it’s now 19:00 exactly. The place is only a fiveminutes’ walk from here, so we
won’t be late.”
“You absolute buffoon! When I say ‘approximately 19:00’,I mean the twenty second
interval from 18:59:50 to 19:00:10 by my own watch!”
“You’re the one carrying the watch, Kunikida, notme…” Dazai grumbled as he walked.
Speaking of my watch, every morning as I woke up,I used a special device to synchronize
my watch with the standard time so that any measurementerror would be less than a second off.
“Thanks to someone eating hallucinogenic mushrooms,an entire day’s work went to
waste. Don’t you try that a second time. If you doeat mushrooms again, make sure you actually
get the deadly poisonous ones.”
“Why, but I had such fun for a good while there.”
“Aren’t you better now? Are you still seeing yourpink elephants in the sky?”
“Elephants? Don’t be ridiculous; elephants can’t fly.The flying ones are the purple
elephant shrews.”
Perhaps he was no better after all.

13
Whenever I talked with him, I gained the suspicion that he was an utter idiot.
This man, a secret agent? Evil?
The most evil act he seemed capable of committingwas jumping onto the train tracks and
disrupting the train schedule.
But be that as it may, if Dazai was the average bozo,then the decision would have been
simple- his dismissal would have been the best choice.Or rather, I certainly hoped and dreamed
for that.
“Dazai, you remember the matter of the case we areon our way to, correct?”
“It’s a purple elephant shrew extermination.”
“… I’ve been considering this for a while now, butare you doing this on purpose?”
Dazai responded promptly with a laugh. “Ah ha ha.You mean this case? The haunted
house investigation.”
I scowled at him.
The day before, I had received an email addressedto me detailing a job. It read as follows:

Dear Sirs and Madams,

I hope this message finds everyone at the Armed DetectiveAgency in good health.
I have a most earnest plea for you good folks, andalthough you must surely be otherwise
occupied, please heed my plea.
To be frank, there is a building in which a bizarrehappenstance occurs night after night,
so I request the services of a detective of yours.
The building is supposed to be unoccupied, but everynight, ghastly groans and
whispering voices can be heard coming from it; furthermore,a faint light can be seen flickering in
its windows. I request your services to set myown heart and the hearts of the others living in the
vicinity at ease.
It is such a very basic request, but please discoverif this is a prank or not, and if it is a
prank, please determine the reasons and methods forit. I would be most pleased to learn the
truth of this matter.
It is only a very little, but I have had the fee sentto you. I should like a receipt for it.
Furthermore, I would like you to keep the detailsof this request a secret; although it is
really a very selfish thing to ask, I do request itof you good people.
Thank you very much for your time. Please have a wonderfulday.

Really, what a roundabout, verbose message, but thegist of it seemed to be “Please

investigate the strange noises coming from a nearbybuilding.”
Right after I received the message, the fee arrivedat the Agency by mail. When we
opened it and inspected it, we found they had madeallowances for the expected expense and
paid double the market price for such a fee.
We had no reason to refuse their request. We plannedto do the usual investigation.
But- we did have one concern.
The request was made anonymously.
If we didn’t know who the request came from or wherethey lived, how were we supposed
to contact them to complete the job? Nothing aboutthis was defined. Perhaps they intentionally
hid this information, in which case we couldn’t deliverthe investigation results either.

14
Therefore, Dazai and I, before heading off to the job together, set off to find the request
giver and fix this mess we had fallen into.
“Perhaps our client is some evil demon that harborsill will for us. They’ve tricked us
detectives and are now lying in wait inside the hauntedhouse for us to come along so they can bite
into us and drink-”
“You’re a fool. Ghosts who send emails only existin horror stories.”
Still, even if we were up against a ghost, I wasn’tscared.
We walked to the harbor’s warehouse district as weidly chatted. The cluster of red-brown
brick warehouses floated up out of the gloom in thedark night which repelled even the
moonlight.
We stepped into an old warehouse smaller than theothers.
It had a high ceiling and walls so damaged by thesalt wind that the plaster peeled off of
them. I sniffed as I pushed the buzzer for the office– it smelled like the iron machinery parts and
motor oil stored there, along with old dust and thesmell of time itself.
There was a sound like sliding metal and the electroniclocks released.
“Come in,” a high-pitched voice answered from insidethe room.
I passed through the heavy birch door equipped witha number of remote locks and walked
into the office.
The room was a bit smaller than 30 square meters.The walls and floors were covered with
electronics, the blinking of diodes illuminating thegloomy room.
At the center of the room sat a line of computers,their fans producing a noise like the
growling of stray dogs. On top of a desk stood fourLCD monitors, each shining a different
image in blue-white light.
“Hey, hey, Specs. Still doing whatever your notebooktells you?”
“Don’t talk so high and mighty, informant. If we turnedin the evidence we have to the
right source, you would spend the next ten years livingin jail. Your late father would sob in his
grave.”
“Don’t you talk about my father.”
The informant, reclining at his desk with both feetupon it, was no less than a fourteen
year-old boy.
He had large eyes and short, cropped hair. No matterif it was summer or winter, he wore
his only good white sweater. He was a small boy, butthe glint in his eyes was as cutting as
broken glass.
“Besides, aren’t you late? That’s pretty rare foryou. What, is this some kind of date?” The
boy lifted his little finger and grinned impertinently.
“You are entirely wrong. A date is done with the womanI have decided to marry. And the wedding
is planned for six years after that, accordingto my ‘Future Plan’ page in my notebook,”
I said while rifling through my notebook.
“What? Specs, you’ve got a girl you plan to marry?”
“That I plan to have in four years’ time,” I answeredseriously.
The boy’s eyes were wide and his jaw dropped. “Ah,I see…”
“An adult is one who lives by their ideals and plans.Watch and learn, boy.”
“Hmm… I already knew the gist of Kunikida’s personality,but that just now was kinda
out there..” Dazai stepped through the door and appearedbehind me.
“Oh, a new face. Who are you?”
15
“Hey. I’d introduce myself to you, of course, but Kunikida here is about to say my name
anyway, so what’s the point?”
“Boy, you should introduce yourself before askingthe names of others. And Dazai, don’t
go making predictions about what I’ll do without permission.”
“Specs sure likes the word ‘should’… well, whatever.The name’s Rokuzou Taguchi. I’m
fourteen.”
“I discovered this fool trying to hack the Agencyand tossed him away myself,” I added,
just to be thorough.
“Man, enough talking about that. Hey, you can handover the report on it already.”
Three months ago, Rokuzou launched an outside internetattack on the Armed Detective
Agency’s records and threw all of our detectives intoa turmoil. Of course, we would never neglect
taking precautions in the electronics department.Once our panic calmed down, we immediately
traced the attack back to its source andcaught our culprit.
In the end, I was able to corner the boy, and he acceptedbecoming an informant working
in cooperation with us on the condition that I didnot hand over a report containing plenty of
incriminating evidence over to the military police.
“Did you find out the sender of the email I gave toyou?”
“You’re a real slave driver, Specs. I couldn’t havebeen working on it before now, now
could I? Give me a bit longer.”
The task I had given him was to determine the nameand whereabouts of our client. What
with Rokuzou’s skill in back-tracing emails, I hardlythought it would be a challenging task.
“I’ve been busy with that other job of yours – trackingdown any traces of those missing
people. Shouldn’t that go first?”
“It should,” I agreed.
The case of the repeated disappearances of Yokohamatourists.
At first glance, none of the victims were connectedto one another save for that each failed
to turn up one day and were never seen again. Thenumber of victims was now up to eleven.
The main investigation had been going on for a monthby this time. The victims had but
little in common, except that they were all peoplefrom outside of Yokohama and that they had
all apparently walked off and vanished on foot. Itwas such a challenging case that not even the
first step towards cracking the case had been found.
I had assigned Rokuzou to make a report of the victims’actions prior to their
disappearances. His job was to discover any recordsof trains taken, taxis ridden, or anything else
of the same sort, but the results were unsatisfactory.
Dazai, his interest evidently piqued, butted in with,“What case is that? This is my first
time hearing you mention it. Do tell me all aboutit.”
“I’ll tell you about it properly later,” I said, changingthe topic.
I had my reasons for avoiding telling him. We intendedto set aside the resolution of this
case for Dazai’s entrance exam. I planned to disclosethe information to him at the right
opportunity.
“Hmm, you’re training the newbie, huh? Specs is upthere climbing the corporate ladder.”
“And what a stubborn superior he is; it troubles meso. – Oh, that reminds me. You are
Rokuzou, correct? You’re a hacker? How about slippingme, real casually, any of Kunikida’s
weaknesses or embarrassing photos?”

16
“Hey, Dazai! Don’t try to find a way to threaten someone when you’re standing right in
front of them!”
“Oh, I got you, newbie. I’ve got the one thousandyen, the ten thousand yen, or the one
hundred thousand yen options – which one would youwant?”
“You mean you really have some to sell?!”
Wait, wait, wait. I needed to calm down.
“Don’t make fun of me. I don’t have any weaknesses.The kid is only bragging; don’t
humor him, Dazai.”
“… Hmm,” Dazai said with a meaningful glance at me.
“Hey, if you don’t believe me, that’s no skin offmy back. I only sell to customers who do
believe. Still, if Specs pays in advance, I’m coolwith you guys deleting that evidence document
now too.”
“Who’s paying you? You haven’t found any of the informationI asked for! We’re leaving,
Dazai.”
Grabbing Dazai by the nape of the neck, I walked brisklyout the door and put the boy’s
room behind me.
… One hundred eleven thousand yen, huh…

That evening in the warehouse district was devoidof any signs of people.
Dazai and I waited at the roadside for a taxi we hadcalled to come pick us up.
The headlights on the cars rushing back and forthdragged drifting tails of light behind
them. Yellow shadows. Golden ribbons. A fragrancedispersing crimson light. The white,
far-reaching headlights shaved away the building shadows.The nightlights reflected in the cars’
windows flowed away like a liquid before my very eyes.
The powerful sea wind sent the clouds off, sweepingthem away, and the moonlight cast
the harbor town into black and white shadows.
“What a delightful boy he was,” Dazai said, staringat the night sky with a smile.
“Introducing you two to one another was a mistake.It would be best if you paid no mind
to that entire affair.”
“May I ask a question?”
“What is it?”
“Why are you caring for that boy, Rokuzou?”
Dazai seemed serious when I looked at him.
“You gave him a job for some reason I don’t know.The Agency should very well be able
to trace the steps of these missing persons, shouldn’tthey? You also could have held that entire
conversation over the phone, but we still came outall this way on foot.”
I was silent. It was challenging to give a simpleanswer to this question.
“Is it related to his father? You mentioned him abit earlier.”
I looked up at Dazai automatically.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Dazai laughed when he saw myexpression.
“… His father was a fine police officer. He is deadnow.”
There was nothing for it; I began to explain.
“He once cooperated with the Agency in pursuing acriminal. This criminal was a true
villain, destroying both state and business institutions.Despite the police frantically searching for
him, it was like they never found him.”

17
“Is this the azure flag terrorist case you were talking about?”
“Yes.”
Such a brutal case it was, with hell breaking looseacross the entire country, that the army
and police were even brought in.
“Our agency was the one who eventually found the criminal’shideout, and we reported it
to the city police.”
“That was nicely done!” Dazai gasped in admiration.
“Yes, it certainly was. But at the time, the army,the public safety group, and the police all
combined into one to work together, and in the process,the chain of command intertwined into a
confused mess. To make matters worse, the criminalcaught wind of us and barricaded himself
inside of his hideout. He also stockpiled an enormousamount of explosives.”
The memories came back to me. The city police barkingout orders over phone calls.
Arrest him. Stand by. Contradictory orders flew pastone another.
“The instructions were so disordered that only fivepeople made it to the scene in a timely
manner. Their orders were to storm the place and takecontrol of it expediently…. But what
could five people, none of them Special Forces norability users, do against the ‘Azure King’?”
But none of the people realized their efforts werefutile. If they had been told to invade the
hideout, then they would have done nothing else.
“In the end, the criminal was cornered and set offthe bombs, dying in the explosion. The
five police officers there perished as well.”
“- And one of the officers was Rokuzou’s father, correct?”
“Rokuzou had lost his mother quite young and livedwith his father. The father seemed to
be quite a respected police officer.”
I clenched my fists.
“I was the one who gave the police the informationabout the hideout.”
What if I hadn’t told any of the higher-ups in thecommand chain? Or what if the Agency
stormed it ourselves?
“It’s like I was the one who killed him.”
“That’s wrong. However you look at it, the policeauthorities giving the orders – and to a
larger extent, the criminal detonating the bomb –are the ones at fault.”
“You could say that. But that’s not how Rokuzou seesit, I think. Or else he wouldn’t have
hacked the Agency as a sort of revenge.”
I thought that Rokuzou bore a grudge against the Agency.I never verified that face-to-face
with him, but-
“Rokuzou’s father is no longer with him. That’s thereality of the matter. Someone needs
to take care of him and occasionally knock some senseinto him instead. And it turns out that I
can do that. It is convenient.”
“You’re quite the romanticist, Kunikida,” Dazai saidwith a sigh and a wry smile.
I did not think myself a romanticist, nor did I understandvery much of what constituted
romance.
And yet all those who knew me well enough to be calledfriends or acquaintances told me,
“You are a romanticist.” I did not very well understandwhy (even though I constantly said the
only way to live was by following ideals).
The taxi pulled up in front of us as I pondered this.The driver waved his hand.

18
People have all sorts of experiences when it comes to taxi drivers.
Ones with clean cars, honest and upstanding ones,those who are experts of all the
backroads about town, perhaps ones who are expertsat driving, ones who are cheerful,
invigorating young men, or those who grudgingly puttheir first thought to economizing the
customer’s meter, for example. Each of these qualitiesare quite fine things in their own way, and
there is little difference of opinion on this fromone person to another.
That being said, there was only one thing I wantedfrom this taxi driver.
“My goodness, it has been a while, Investigator Kunikida.Today is a good day for
detective work, isn’t it? Your glasses look very goodon you, just like always; you see, I go about
my job driving everyone around, and I know when mycustomer’s glasses are good or bad for
them. If they’re elegant, if they’re from good stock,you know. Your glasses are very good ones,
Investigator Kunikida! I can guarantee that, yes Ican.”
“I am begging you; please be quiet for a moment anddrive.”
In the first place, what on Earth determined if glasseswere from “good stock”? What a
foolish statement. – But I was slightly curious.
“A taxi driver should be silent. Have none of yourpassengers told you this before?”
“Oh no, I have never been told that. Rather, duringthe ride, my passengers don’t say a
thing at all. That’s because I’m chatting the wholetime.”
I knew how the public saw this taxi. It was a boobytrap.
Dazai and I were taking the taxi to our job location.I could no longer see the city lights in
the darkness outside of the windows, and the sparsetree shadows swept the cloudy moonlight
and fell away behind us.
Of course, we did not end up in this booby trap ofa taxi due to sheer bad luck or on
accident. I purposefully called for this one. Andwhy was that?
To get information.
“Dazai, do you remember the Yokohama tourist repeateddisappearances case I mentioned
earlier?”
“Yeah, with the guy Rokuzou’s looking for?”
“Yes. There have been eleven victims. There was awitness to two of the victims prior to
their disappearance – and that witness is our driver.”
I pointed at the small man in front of us.
“You may call me an eye witness, but all I did wasdrive them from the harbor to their
hotels, you know. One of these was a woman on holiday,and the other was a man on a business
trip.”
“Are you certain they are the people in these photographs?”
I pulled out a couple of photographs from my breastpocket. They were photos of the
victims captured by security cameras at both hotels.They each fell into one of three categories-
the person entering the building, the person duringthe check-in process, or the person departing
the hotel the next day.
“Yes, I have no doubt that those are the ones. Theywore the same clothes as in the photos.
I drove them to those hotels.”
“Okay, so, Kunikida, when are you going to tell meabout this so-called disappearances
case?”
“… Now’s as good of a time as any, I suppose.”
I began to explain to him the general outline of thecase.
19
About one month ago, a forty-two year-old man who came to Yokohama for a business
trip suddenly vanished. Following his tracks confirmedthat he went from the harbor to the hotel,
checked in, spent the night, and set off into townthe next day. But the man failed to turn up at his
meeting, and he did not return home either. All ofhis belongings were left in his hotel room, and he
seemed to have walked away on his own and vanished.
The other victims all roughly followed the same pattern- all traveling alone, participants
in expeditions and the like - for a total of elevenpeople. They did not share age, occupation, or
residence; their sole strand of connection was thatthey had come to Yokohama alone. The police
were coming to the city for clues as to their stepsafter leaving their hotels, but eyewitness
information was nonexistent. Just like smoke or thefog, these people had completely vanished.
The police were taking great pains in their investigationon the most likely possibility, that
these events were kidnappings. But in this enormouscity, there did not seem to be a single place
where a person could be alone enough to be abductedwithout any eye witnesses. Furthermore,
the families received no ransom notes, and the motivesfor abducting these persons remained
unclear.
Dazai listened quietly up until this point but nowchirped, “But there is a motive, isn’t
there? Trafficking.”
“What?”
“I mean, kidnapping someone and then selling them.As far as I know, the victims were all healthy
adults, correct? Hearts, kidneys, eyes, lungs,livers, pancreases, bone marrow – well, it’s
not like you’d earn a fortune in yen if you sold themin a foreign market, but even then, the
bodies of eleven people would be a treasure trove.A single person could become very wealthy.”
“It’s true, I have heard it said such things are distributedon the black market – but you are
disturbingly well-informed of this.”
I thought the common man’s knowledge would be limitedto films and fictional tales.
“Nothing disturbing about it. You see, you hear themost interesting things at seedy bars
on the edge of town.”
It was a fishy explanation. He sounded as if he weremaking excuses.
Well, then again, everything about the man was fishy.
“… So are you saying that these missing persons camehere for the purpose of meeting
with an organ merchant? Saying ‘Please buy my organs’?Going out of their way in the middle of
their business trip or whatever else?”
“You’re right, it is a bit forced. When it comes downto it, it’s not about buying and selling
organs but the fact that they disappeared. They couldjust as well have employed a service
specializing in disappearances, taken on new names,purchased new paperwork, and slipped
away without a trace, for example.”
“But nevertheless, if they went into town to connectwith the service, wouldn’t they have
been picked up by security footage or seen by witnesses?”
“Aren’t the services supposed to be masters of disguise?”
“Oh, now that you say that, I’ve heard of somethinglike that,” the driver said. “In the
photography industry and such, there are techniquesthat turn even men into appearing as
women. I hear that first you stuff silk floss intoyour cheeks to change the shape of your face,
and-”
“I’m not listening to your chatter,” I said, quicklycutting off the driver who seemed about
to embark on another long monologue.
20
 “Oh, it just occurred to me. Look at these photographs; aren’t they both wearing glasses? I
made a connection! In other words, this is the ‘RepeatedGlasses Disappearances Case’!”
I peered at the photographs. It was true that thevictims in those images wore glasses. One
wore a black frame, the other, a gold.
“All right, Kunikida, now’s your chance to shine!”Dazai cried.
“What are you talking about? Not all of the othernine victims wore glasses. Don’t call this
a connection.”
As far as I remembered, four of the nine wore glasses,two wore sunglasses, and the
remaining three wore none.
“Shoot. … Well, it can’t be helped. We’ll use youto lure out the criminal in some other
way, now won’t we? The culprit is targeting tourists,right? So you should wander around
Yokohama wearing rubber wellingtons, a red and greenplaid shirt, knickerbockers, and a
rucksack. Stand on the side of the road with an enormouscamera, taking picture after picture,
and say ‘y’all’ in every sentence.”
“What are you suggesting?!”
“‘What are y’all suggesting?!’”
“Do you call that a strategy? Absolutely not!”
“‘Absolutely not, y’all!’”
“Don’t be so presumptuous!”
“Oh? Then you should go out naked but for a top hatand barrel down the street on a
unicycle while yelling about your preferred type ofwoman.”
“Now you’re changing the entire purpose of this enterprise!”
“If that’s how it is, Investigator Kunikida, thenyou should read about disguising yourself
as a clo-”
“You be quiet!”
Arrgh, if it wasn’t one, it was the other!
I grew angrier by the minute.
“Dazai! Grow up a little! When are you going to starttaking your work seriously?”
“Oh, but I’m always serious.”
That would be beyond awful if true.
“All right, then how about this?” he asked. “I promiseto become a detective of integrity
starting immediately. I will only perform honest investigations,examinations, and deductions. O,
my worthy superior Kunikida, I shall astonish yousuch that from tomorrow on, you can leave
the entire job to me, no problem – I’ll become sucha fine man that you’ll slap your knees from the
shock.”
I didn’t believe a word of his chatter.
“And how soon is this ‘starting immediately’?”
“From the moment I step out of this taxi.”
Hmm.
“Really now?”
“Of course. A suicide-ist never goes back on his word.… But that being said, what will I
get in return for this?”
Oh lord, here it comes, I thought.
“What do you want? I refuse to raise your salary orgive you only the easy jobs.”

21
“I don’t mean anything that large. There’s only a little something which I’ve been
interested in for a while.”
Dazai stared intently at the driver. His eyes practicallysparkled with curiosity.
“… Let me drive.”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaah!”
“Wa ha ha ha ha! I’m the wind!”
“Wait, Dazai, stop, please, aaaaaah!”
“Whoo hoo!”
“Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no-”

“And look at that, we made it in one piece!”

“I… will never let you drive again…”
We opened our doors and stepped out, Dazai with aspring in his step, and I practically fell
out into the road.
The taxi driver was out cold in the passenger seat.I wondered if he wouldn’t come to his
senses until tomorrow morning.
“What, are you motion-sick? How sloppy,” Dazai remarked.I slightly wanted to murder
the man.
This was not motion-sickness. My legs wobbled so thatI could not stand. I had no sense
of balance. My limbs trembled such that it was allI could do to stand like a newborn calf.
I had never felt so weakened before, even in my vigorousmartial arts training.
“Now, let’s get cracking on that job! I’ll work hard,just like I promised!”
Let me rest for a moment, I wanted to say, but itwas a hard thing to admit after how much
I had nagged him to get moving earlier.
“This looks like the spot all right. … By the way,Kunikida, how do you feel about ghosts
and monsters?”
“Ghosts? … Do you think I’d be fit for the Armed DetectiveAgency if I were scared of
ghosts? Weapons ought to be more of a threat thanevil spirits, I should think.”
“I’m glad to hear that. For you see, that over thereis the place we’re supposed to
investigate.”
I followed Dazai’s pointed finger with my eyes.
There, nestled in the mountainside, stood a ruin ofa black building.
Steeped in shadows, crawling with signs of death anddecay, this mysterious place was
none other than an abandoned hospital.
Why?
Why did we end up investigating this place in thedead of night?
Every person is sure to fall ill at some point intheir life, I thought to myself. There are no
perfectly sound minds and no perfectly sound bodies.The hospital bears witness to every
person’s birth and death. It is, so to speak, theboundary line between this world and the next, the
world of the living and the world of the dead.
That this hospital had been abandoned and left tofall into disrepair only made it all the
more eerie. Moonlight crept in through the brokenwindows and illuminated the subtle, beautiful
blue shadows of fallen rubble and the anemic purpleof stagnant puddles of water.

22
The courtyard in front teemed with spider lilies of a poisonous-looking red.
“It’s dark… I can’t see at all.”
“I still feel good about this.”
Dazai kept up a light pace and soon out-distancedme, who by comparison reluctantly
dragged my feet down the hall.
The walls had largely decomposed and collapsed; wiresdangled from the rotten ceiling.
Most of the equipment had been stolen, and the hospitalrooms were reduced to homes for bugs.
Who in the world would choose to walk into a placelike this, I wondered.
“Our job is to discover the truth about these soundsand lights which come from here,
night after night. We do not know what we might find.Be on your guard.”
“Okay… But of course we know what we’ll find, Kunikida.Aren’t you being too
cautious?”
I glared at him.
“What are you talking about? Preemptively making upyour mind and underestimating an
opponent is barbaric and foolish. Anyone worthy ofthe Agency knows to always prepare for the
worst.”
As I reiterated the importance of caution, I droppedinto a crouch and assumed a stance to
prepare for any sudden attacks as we continued downthe hallway.
“Are you, by any chance, scared?”
“I-I-I-I-I’m not scared! Are you an imbecile?!”
“Okay, then let’s hurry up and go.”
“You fool, in movies like this, those who act cockyand make impulsive moves are the
first to fall victim to the monster.”
“What do you mean, movies like this?”
“Never you mind that; just go on ahead. I will guardfrom the back.”
“But I don’t want to take the lead… Oh yes, it’s toodark for me to see. Can we get a
light?”
I had already thought of that. I did very much wantto use one. But…
“Someone is here in this hospital. I’m concerned thatthey will run away if they see our
light. We’ll have to use the light of the moon fromhere on out.”
“Hmmph.”
We continued into the darkness. The building creakedin the strong wind. The sound of
dripping water came to me from somewhere inside.
The hospital was surrounded by vast forests and sprawling,open countryside, with not so
much as a single house anywhere nearby. The leaveson the columns of the black trees in the
forest flapped in the raging wind, forming their ownrustling song.
I thought back to the job letter. What did they mean,“others living in the vicinity”? There
was no one about for kilometers. The only “others”possibly living nearby were foxes and bears.
- So then, who in the world was our client?
- They did not sign their letter.
- Perhaps, just perhaps, our client was an evil spiritbearing us ill will.
Dazai’s words returned to me.
We could see nothing but darkness surrounding us onall sides. The crying of the wind
blowing through a hole in the building reminded meof a woman’s wailing.
…
23
 I didn’t believe in ghosts or anything of the sort. I was an algebra lecturer and a student of
chemistry and physics, that is to say, a man of thephysical sciences. Tales of vengeful spirits
taking on the form of the living were no more thanwild ideas dreamed up in fear of facing the
dark.
I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t trembling, and I definitelywasn’t crying either.
Suddenly, Dazai screamed, “There it is!”
Aaaaaaaaah!
My heart leaped into my throat.
Dazai glanced back at me with his mouth hung openin shock. He studied my expression
and then slowly, yet deeply, smirked at me.
That little…!
“Should I fire you on the spot?!”
“Oh no, Kunikida, you just seemed a little tense,so I thought I’d take your mind off of
things.”
“I don’t understand you at all!”
I brushed past Dazai and went on ahead.
Shit, it was incredibly dark. I couldn’t see at all.And because I couldn’t see, my eyes
tricked themselves into believing something lurkedin that darkness.
My darkness-blinded eyes suspected a breathing beastwhere only thin air stood.
It was dark.
It was so very dark.
I couldn’t take it any longer.
“Doppo Poet - flashlight!”
And then there was light.

By the end of our search, we did find several signsof intruders.

A trace of some kind of wheeled luggage dragged acrossthe ground. Footprints from a
dress shoe. A scrap of clothing lint. However, therewere no clear signs of either the nightly
intruder nor any other looter.
The small flashlight I manifested with my abilityguaranteed visibility. But it did not begin
to dispel the deep pitch-black of the hospital.
I was quite literally going down a dark path - ifI shined the light in front of me, my feet
disappeared in the great sea of darkness, while ifI shined the light at my feet, the path ahead
became a black void. I continued forward gingerly,but there was no progress to be made in our
search.
Finally, Dazai grew tired of it and said, “This hasto be a joke. Let’s go back.”
“Now, hold on a moment. What ever happened to ‘honestinvestigations, examinations,
and deductions’? Does a detective give up this early?We must find more evi-”
“No need. Take a look at this.”
Dazai held up a dark-colored cord pinched betweenhis fingers. Both ends sunk into the
floor and disappeared. No, that wasn’t -
“Is that - a wire?”
If it was indeed a wire, then it was relatively recent.It was plainly different from the
hospital’s time-worn internal wiring. I presumed ithad been installed some months ago.
“If we follow the wire, we’ll be sure to find something.”
24
Dazai passed the wire hand-over-hand to find its end. It was cleverly hidden and buried,
but we eventually reached it.
Dazai lifted it and said, “This… is a video camera.Someone must have secretly put it
here. This can’t be the only camera either. My goodness,our client called us out here on a fake
job to take secret pictures of Kunikida scared stiffof and crying at ghosts. What a fiend.”
“I-I’m not crying!”
“Of course you’re not. After all, it’s really notso bad. This little darkness wouldn’t even
frighten a child.”
“...”
“Well, in the first place, if there even were anyhospital ghosts, they wouldn’t have a lot of
fight in them, I should think. Because they died sick,right? If they died in an accident, they’re
supposed to haunt the spot where the accident happened.But those ghosts don’t have it in them
to kill you either. Why, at their worst, they’d onlybe regretful or rueful. ‘I didn’t want to die,’,
that sort of thing. Ah, what a shame; I take suchpains to die, and here it is, being wasted on these
ungrateful saps.”
“Dazai… hey, don’t… say that kind of stuff here…”
W… what if a vengeful spirit were listening?
“But at least, if there’s one that does hold a grudgeagainst the living, then she must be
some emaciated woman with tuberculosis. She wouldbe rending her lovely hair in grief, saying,
‘Oh how I hate them, oh how jealous I am of the living,please save me from this dark abyss,
please pull me from this crueltyyyy, oh, how cruel- my blood, my bones, my flesh, my guts,
oooooh’”
“Heeeeeeeeeelp!”
A woman screamed shrilly, and in my surprise, my heartalmost leaped out of my throat.
But a moment later, a realization hit me with theforce of a bucket of cold water dumped
over me-
That scream was from a living person.
“Where did that…”
“This way! Hurry!”
Dazai dashed down the dessicated hallway without anyhesitation.
I ran down a short flight of stairs and across a hallwayin the direction of the scream,
kicking up rubble as I went.
I arrived in an underground area. The ceiling, inits rotten state, had fallen into the hall. A
kitchenette, a pharmaceutical storage room, a radiationphotography room, and a morgue were
lined up next to one another.
Following the source of the scream, I barged intothe kitchenette.
There she was!
A woman’s right arm, frantically waving, stuck outabove the surface of the water in an
enormous clothes washing cistern!
I rushed over to the cistern, and as I looked intothe water, I saw a woman in her
underclothes at the bottom. One arm was shackled toa knob at the bottom of the cistern.
She couldn’t break the surface because of her shackles!She would drown unless I did
something!
“What is this-!”

25
“We need to break these iron bars!” Dazai yelled, seizing the fixed cover on top of the
cistern which prevented the woman’s escape.
I grabbed it with both hands and shook with all mymight. Even if it was locked, it was not
in any way outside of my physical capabilities.
I locked eyes with the woman underwater. Hers werea reddish-brown color. She opened
them as wide as they could go, and they pleaded withme.
Save me.
“We’re rescuing you right now! Go to the end of thecistern!”
I waved my arm to indicate the movement. She noticedand tucked herself into a ball
against the cistern wall.
I pulled out my handgun. Turning off the safety, Iaimed at the cistern.
“Get back, Dazai!”
I aimed so the woman inside would not be hit by thericochet and shot the outer wall three
times.
The bullets etched a series of holes and cracks intothe wall. Water spilled from the cracks.
Then I delivered a powerful roundhouse kick to thecenter of the cracks!
The rotational power delivered through my heel piercedthe porcelain and mortar of the
wall and smashed it to pieces. A huge hole openedup, and a deluge of water poured out.
As the water erupted from the tank, the woman’s facefinally emerged from beneath the
surface of the water and she began to breathe againalmost desperately. A wave of coughing soon
followed. It seemed we were just in time.
Dazai twisted an enormous tap and stopped the water.
“Are you all right?” I asked. I passed her my handkerchiefthrough the grating. The
woman accepted it with still-trembling hands.
“It looks like someone tried to drown you,” Dazaisaid. “Did you see the culprit?”
It was all the woman could do just to breathe throughher violent coughing, but she finally
began to speak with her throat still clogged.
“I was kidnapped. I suddenly lost consciousness theday I came to Yokohama for work -
and when I woke up, I was here.”
Dazai and I exchanged a meaningful look.

Dazai and I worked in tandem to break the grille andcuffs to free the woman. I fired
repeatedly at the lock’s underside to break the cylinderlock the grille had been triple-locked
with.
“My name is Nobuko Sasaki. I’m a professor at TokyoUniversity. I fell unconscious upon
my arrival in Yokohama… and came to this room.”
Miss Sasaki was dripping wet and pale-faced but bravelyexplained her circumstances to
us.
“Miss Sasaki. Do you know how many days it has beensince you were kidnapped and lost
consciousness?”
“Please forgive me… I was unconscious, so I cannotgive any great detail… but from my
health and my hunger, I think it has been more thanthree days…”
The victims of the Yokohama tourist repeated disappearancescase had all vanished in a
period of thirty-five to seven days ago. If this woman’swords were to be believed, then there
was a high likelihood that she was the twelfth victim.
26
Dazai stood silently nearby with his arms folded, deep in contemplation of something.
Miss Sasaki had long, black hair and a fairly slimbuild. She was probably about my age.
She shivered. Her clothes were taken in her abduction,and she was only clad in her
undergarments. She had borrowed Dazai’s overcoat andwore it like a haori, but what with being
half-naked and entirely drenched in the dead of night,it was no wonder she was shivering.
The arms she hugged to herself and the legs she stretchedout on the floor were
surprisingly slender. The clothes clinging to herskin traced bewitching curves. On the other
hand, her skin appeared a pale white just short oftransparent.
The wet hair clinging to her neck shed droplets ofwater that trickled down to her chest.
For some irrational reason, I averted my eyes.
“What is more, I believe there are others trappedin this building as well! I heard voices.”
“What?”
The other victims? Were they confined in this buildingas well?
“I’ll show you! This way,” she said, staggering toher feet to guide us.
But.
“... Wait,” I said, touching Miss Sasaki to stop her.
“Dazai. What do you make of this situation?”
Dazai told me with a straight face, “Miss Sasaki’ssexy.”
“Be serious!”
He folded his arms. “... It’s too good to be true.”
“We came to an abandoned building on the pretext ofinvestigating mysterious lights and
voices. However, we instead discover a victim fromanother case, the one of repeated
disappearances. The two cases have no connection andare supposed to be very different, if you
remove the fact that we are responsible for both cases…Miss Sasaki, when did you last see your
abductor?”
“Forgive me, I never saw them clearly… but when Icame to, the tap was already on, and
the water was close to my face. I think the criminalturned the water on no more than five
minutes before I woke up.”
It was then that she shouted and we heard her. Whatclose timing.
“Then they were here very recently. I can’t believethe culprit wouldn’t have noticed us
walking by practically under their very nose. So whydid they do this?”
“Perhaps they panicked when they realized we werehere, or perhaps-”
Was it a malicious trap?
However, it was out of the question to back out nowin fear of a trap.
If any other victims were confined in this building,it was our duty to free them.
“It has been thirty-five days since the first victim’sdisappearance. If they are still confined
here, even now, then it is now a matter of life anddeath. Dazai, watch her and follow me.”
I headed down the hall carrying my guns.
As soon as I sent a message to the local police forthe sake of caution, Miss Sasaki guided
us to the morgue. Corpses being items of value, thedoor required greater protection from theft
than the others, and as such it was quite solid andmade of iron. Furthermore, it was locked tight.
This made it an ideal place for imprisoning the livingas well as the dead.
I ensured there were no traps, then destroyed thelock and burst into the room. Crossing
both wrists, I simultaneously pointed one gun at thelights and the other in front of me.

27
The morgue was a frightfully dark room no more than ten meters in length. Almost
everything in it had been relocated (or, perhaps, stolen), leaving it empty and desolate. What
little there was to speak of was a broken stretcher,a ripped body bag, and pull-out metal coffins
installed in the wall.
There was nothing else besides that. No one, deador alive. No, there was-
Something in the center of the room moved in the light’sreflection. I shined the beam of
light on it.
“Please… please help us…”
They were alive. Four people were crowded into a metalcage flush against the wall. Like
Miss Sasaki, they were all clad in simple undergarments.
“Where are we?”
“I heard a woman screaming… how did we end up here?”
“Calm down. We’re here to rescue you. We’ve alreadyrescued the screaming woman as
well. Is anyone hurt?” I asked.
“N-no. But still, what is this place? Why are we here?”
I took a closer look at the cage. It was on the wallacross from the door and looked to be
for transporting fierce wild animals or some similarpurpose. I thumped its wire grating side. It
would have proved difficult to remove the gratingwith such tools as I had on me. The cage itself
was simplistic but sturdy, so I assumed it would betime-consuming to destroy.
“Hmm. An electronic lock terminal, huh,” Dazai mused,peering closely at the lock. “An
encryption, a biometric identifier, or a password…Open sesame! Flash and thunder! I have lived a
life of much shame! Aww, you won’t open? Guess I’llhave to break you.”
What was that last one?
“To break it, I probably have to do this-”
Just as Dazai touched the terminal, Miss Sasaki shriekedas if she had been struck. “Don’t!
You mustn't touch the lock!”
Dazai turned in surprise. A red light lit up on theterminal.
A puff of white smoke spread throughout the cage.I ran up to it without thinking and felt
a sharp, stabbing pain in my eyes and throat.
One of the people in the cage screamed, “It’s poisongas!”
The pain flooded my eyes with tears. My vision grewhazy. The world blurred. Everything
seemed to spin. I had accidentally inhaled some. ButI couldn’t abandon those trapped in the
cage. I had to get to them.
“Don’t get any closer! It’s too late!”
Someone grabbed my arm and pulled me back. Shut up,I thought. I have to save them. I
can’t let them die.
That’s my ideal. That’s how the world should be.
“Kunikida! Hurry!” Dazai yelled from behind me.
No. This was wrong.
“You mustn’t!”
Miss Sasaki clung to me to stop me. Why? Why did shestop me? I couldn’t let people die.
I couldn’t let anyone die right in front of-
Dazai dragged me out of the room. I screamed something,but I didn’t remember a bit of it
later.
All four people trapped in the cage died.
28
 Chapter 2
The eleventh.
I returned home in the dead of night, but here mypen falls silent.
I am not equipped with the ability to forget thosememories, but nevertheless, I will not
record them in this notebook.
I should overcome whatever hardship comes my way.I should laugh when fifty liters of
mud are poured over my head.
Silence. Still, only silence.

I sat at my Agency desk reading the newspaper.

Ever since that morning, the news on the televisionand the internet had been in an uproar
yelling over a certain sensational story.
“The victims of the Yokohama tourists repeated disappearancescase have been found
dead.”
“Are their deaths the product of an arbitrary decisionby a private investigator to break and
enter a facility?”
And there were images. The white smoke, the agonizedvictims writhing in pain, and
myself, grasping at the cage.
The newspapers had yet to report on it as well, butit was only a matter of time.
The agency’s phone rang off the hook incessantly allmorning. The calls were all
complaints, but I supposed those would soon be interspersedwith lawsuits from the grieving
families. To make matters worse, we still did notknow what became of the remaining seven
victims.
Someone had photographed those poor souls dying ofpoison gas and released those
photos to the public.
My desk phone rang and jarred me out of my thoughts.I reached for the receiver, but
before I could grab it, Dazai picked it up and immediatelyput it down. The ringing died.
“This was our opponent’s objective, I should think,”Dazai chirped. He carried a photo.
“But here’s some comfort. You look very handsome inthis photo, Kunikida.”
Wordlessly, I took the photo from Dazai, but he quicklyput up his hand and stopped me.
“How about you go home for the day? You look terrible.”
“… I can’t go home. I have work to do.”
“How conscientious of you. Why, when I – I, Dazai!– came to work today, two rocks
were thrown at me.”
I looked outside. A number of protestors had beenyelling outside all morning. There will
only be more tomorrow, I thought.
“Conscientious? You fool, I have extremely importantbusiness. I’m catching the culprit.”
“Well… there is that,” Dazai agreed, playing dumb.
“Where is Miss Sasaki?”
“She’s on her way. Dr. Yosano’s taking a look at herin her office right now, though she
doesn’t seem badly hurt.”
“I have something to ask her.”

29
I stood up. Miss Sasaki was the only living person to personally witness the culprit. She
might have insight into the culprit’s kidnapping technique.
As I rose to follow Dazai to the doctor’s office,my eyes suddenly fell on the photograph.
Miss Sasaki, the other victims, and I were all plainlyvisible, but the only sign of Dazai was the
edge of his coat peeping past the frame.
How did he manage to hide from this candid photograph?

“Please forgive me… I wish I was strong, but I’m afraidI’m really very weak…”
Miss Sasaki listlessly hung her head as she sat inthe doctor’s office.
“My body is by nature quite weak, and I collapse uponoccasion due to anemia. On the
day in question, I already felt under the weather…so that is probably why I fainted.”
That being the case, we knew nothing of the criminal’stechnique nor appearance. But –
“That must mean that someone kidnapped you while youwere unconscious.”
It would have been impossible to kidnap anyone inthe middle of Yokohama Station due to
the sheer number of people. Transporting an unconsciouswoman would have only been all the
more conspicuous. Perhaps the culprit was a skilledrepeated offender or knew some cunning
trick-
“I really must thank you
for… yesterday. I wouldn’t even
be here if you hadn’t saved me
when you did. And not only that,
but you’ve been so hospitable
and given me all sorts of help…
for you see, I have no friends or
family to stay with.”
Miss Sasaki bowed her
slender neck and fell silent. What
with her naturally pale
complexion, she put me in mind
of a Western puppet with severed
strings.
But she was no puppet, and
it was her string of life that was
severed. Some devilish murderer
made an attempt on her life, and
she knew not their identity, their
motive, nor even if they still
wished to lay claim to her life
even now.
“Also, thank you for
letting me stay with you last
night… despite the horrible
bother I’m sure I was.”
… Hmm?

30
“Stayed with you? Stayed with you where?”
“At my place,” Dazai casually remarked like it wasnothing.
…
… And was that the closest place to keep her?
“Mr. Dazai… Thank you very much. And… thank you for…going so far out of your way
to take care of me.”
Why was Miss Sasaki red-faced and embarrassed?
“What’s wrong, Kunikida? You’re making a very oddface.”
“Dazai, you cur… you’re pretty fast with the ladies,aren’t you?”
“No, you have the wrong idea,” Miss Sasaki cried.“I asked him, not the other way around.
It… was definitely me.”
“Why, no, it was my pleasure. Any gentleman would.Besides, it was only natural – I
would have said yes from the very moment we met,”Dazai responded with a grin.
…
I did not approve of superficial love affairs. I believedmen and women should modestly
respect one another in their relations.
Therefore, I always thought one should not condone(and rather denounce instead) the
casual one-night affairs, the intimacy born purelyof feelings, and the fleeting couplings sparked
without planning.
Therefore, therefore, therefore. Therefore I was notjealous in the slightest of men like
Dazai who could “get some”. I was not angry either.
I wasn’t anything close to jealous.

“What a tragic, lovely lady she is,” Dazai said witha smile as, having returned from the
doctor’s office, we prepared to head off to investigate.
“Is she your type of woman?”
“All women are my type. Every woman is the sourceof the sacred mystery of life, you
see. But yes, I’d really love it if Miss Sasaki wouldcommit a lover’s suicide with me.”
“You would marry even a locust.”
I thought the relationship between a man and a womanshould be noble and strong. The
relationship should be that of partners who completeone another and marry for life – that was
my ideal.
Truthfully, I had even written that in my notebook.
“What about you, Kunikida? What do you think aboutSasaki?”
“She is a case witness. That’s all.”
“Oh, ye of little imagination… but what kind of ladyis your ideal woman?”
“Read this.”
I opened my notebook to the “Spouse” page and showedit to him. It contained all my
plans on this particular topic.
“This is long! All of it?!”
As Dazai read the page, his expression froze.
“… Whoa. Man, oh man, oh man. This is you, all right…Oh, wow.”
“Why are you reacting like that? Is this weird?”
“No, I think it’s fine. These are all points everyman could agree with…”
“Yes, aren’t they? What’s wrong with searching foran ideal woman?”
31
 “I agree, I entirely agree, Kunikida. But if I may say one thing – please never, I mean ever,
show this page to a woman. She will recoil from you.Even I am only just holding back from
yelling, ‘This person does not exist!’”
Really?
“All right, I get it all ready; let’s get to work.We’re looking for clues about the kidnapper.
You didn’t happen to notice anything, Dazai, did you?”
“I have one thing.”
“What is it?”
“If you’re looking for the ideal woman, then firstthings first, those glasses have got to
go.” Dazai quickly snatched my glasses and put themon himself. They did not suit him
whatsoever.
“Enough of that already! Give those back!”
My glasses were fine as long as they didn’t impedemy work. No one would have cared
had I changed them.
That being said, Dazai in glasses was really a comicalsight. He somehow managed to
look even more idiotic than normal.
“… Glasses?”
Glasses. The photos of the victims. Their faces. Onthe security footage. The hotels’-
“What’s wrong, Kunikida?”
Those who disappeared all vanished after leaving theirlodgings on foot. They all stayed in
Yokohama alone. And they were all picked up on thehotel security footage.
“Let’s go, Dazai.” I took my glasses from him andput them back on. “I know who the
criminal is.”

The salt wind gusted through Yokohama harbor. Dazaiand I stood at the water’s edge near
the river mouth.
The sun was already high in the sky, and the cloudsformed a blue base through which
white light broke through and showered down on us.But unlike the weather, the storm raged on
in my heart.
A certain taxi I recognized pulled up to a stop infront of us.
“Why, if it isn’t Investigator Kunikida! Now, now,please do get in,” its likewise familiar
driver said, ushering us in. We quickly climbed in.
“Sorry for calling you on such short notice.”
“Think nothing of it; if you say it’s a serious matter,Investigator Kunikida, then I would
gladly drive you through hell or high water! Now,do tell me where we’re bound today and we
will be off at once. I’ll be sure to take no detours;why, I’ll even blow past the speed limit for
you!”
“Heed the speed limit. Actually, we’ve discoveredthe criminal responsible for the
repeated disappearances of the Yokohama tourists casewe discussed earlier.”
“What! Did you know, I took a look at the report onthat abandoned hospital as well?
What a terrible shame those poor souls did not makeit… yes, let us be off to catch that criminal!
We must act with haste lest they get away – so, please,tell me where they are. Do please tell me
where those dreadful kidnappings occurred!”
“Right here.”
“Huh?”

32
“You are the criminal responsible. And the kidnappings occurred here, in this very taxi.”
“Wha… What do you mean? I- I don’t understand.”
“I considered the matter. Who in this city could kidnappeople one-by-one without being
noticed? And where in Yokohama would the victim takeno precautions while being alone in a
room with only one other stranger? The answer is righthere. You forced them to inhale sleeping
gas and abducted them once they fainted. You wereimmune to the gas because you wore a
mask.”
“No… no, no, no, please wait a moment. I had heardthat the victims vanished after
walking away on foot and that there was no evidenceof them boarding any vehicles nor record
of them entering buildings. Is there any evidenceto suggest that all the victims rode in this taxi? A
record of a telephone conversation, or a testimonyof someone at the pickup location?”
“Indeed. It is unmistakable that each and every victimrode in this very taxi. Still, no
matter how many times the city police investigatedthe matter, evidence failed to turn up. This is
because the kidnapping did not occur on the day theybelieved it did. The day the victims rode in
your taxi is not the same day they disappeared.”
“What… do you mean by that?”
“Now, now, Kunikida,” Dazai interrupted. “We’ll behere all day if you keep answering
his questions one-by-one. Let me explain how everythingwent down.
“Mr. Driver, as you go about your daily business,you look for a specific type of customer.
Your criteria are simple. One, they must have cometo Yokohama alone and are looking to go to
a hotel. Two, a portion of their face must be obscuredby glasses, a hat, or sunglasses. Third, they
must be of similar height to you. – You’re a smallman, so that criterion applies to women as
well. It is in this way that you are able to eraseyour relationship with the victim and thus throw
the investigation off its course.”
“What in the world… are you talking about?”
“Now, please wait until I’m done before raising yourobjections. You are a taxi driver who
spends much of your time cruising about this area.This is only a rough estimate, but I assume you
find someone fitting those criteria every coupleof days. When you find someone that makes you
say, “There!”, well, then it’s just as Kunikidasaid; you fill the car with nerve gas. Then you drive to
a hiding house, confine the victim there,and steal their clothes and belongings. That’s why
everyone at the abandoned hospital was in theirunderclothes, right? Now then, it’s time for your
trick.”
Dazai clapped his hands in apparent delight beforecontinuing.
“You wear the victim’s clothing and transform yourselfinto the victim. Just like you
mentioned last night, transformations are possiblewith facial makeup and cheek or body padding.
Of course, you’re likely well-practiced,and on top of that, I assume you only choose those you are
confident you can ape convincingly.At any rate, your goal is not to fool anyone else so much as to
hoodwink a security camera. Yougo to the hotel the victim has planned to
stay at and deliberately make yourself seen on thesecurity footage.”
I remembered the footage from the investigation. Nowthat I thought about it, of the
eleven victims, six wore glasses, and two more woresunglasses for a total of eight- that fraction
was too high to not be deliberate. The remaining threewore hats or had hair long enough to
obscure all but a part of their face on the cameras.This simple disguise was the result of
carefully chosen victims.

33
 “The next part is simple, isn’t it? You drop off the victim’s luggage in their hotel room and brazenly
leave the next day. Therefore the person who gets picked up on the security footage, the
person who checks in, and the person who leaves areall the one and the same, so the police
persist in tracking your steps only after you leavethe hotel. Of course, there’s no way they can find
you, can they? You know Yokohama like the backof your hand, so you know where to go to avoid
being spotted and where to run without securitycameras catching you. The police can look until
they’re blue in the face, but all they willfind is that the victim voluntarily chose to vanish without a
trace.”
“Sir, don’t be outrageous. This – theory you’ve cookedup is no more than a hypothesis
without evidence – yes, you have no evidence.”
“I wonder, do I? It’s possible that you’re Miss Sasaki’skidnapper as well.”
I took over for Dazai at this point and continuedthe explanation.
“That Miss Sasaki fainted at the station made abductingher quite simple – what an
unexpected piece of luck for you. Normally, in anemergency like someone fainting, a nearby
bystander calls an ambulance. But it does take timefor the ambulance to rush over from the
hospital. However, she fainted at the station wheretaxis are always on standby, ready to leave
immediately. In the interest of time, it was decidedshe should ride in a taxi of some good
Samaritan who just so happened to be on hand. Andthen you quite brazenly drove off with her.
You said you would take her to the hospital, and thatwas exactly what you did- the only
difference was in the hospital you took her to.”
“… I …” the driver began as if he wanted to say something,but nothing else came out.
His expression became unreadable.
I ran my eyes over the car’s interior upholstery.I found a white particle almost
imperceptibly clinging to a crack and held it up,pinched between my fingers.
“If you are going to turn yourself in to the authorities,you had better do it soon. Evidence
will turn up sooner or later. For example, here inthis very car… I supposed you cleaned it after
committing the crimes, but there are still residualtraces of the gas left over. Once I pass them
over to analysis, we’d know their chemical makeupimmediately.”
The driver forced out, as if the answer was wrungout of him, “I… have no memory of
this. Perhaps a customer of mine left that there.That is entirely plausible as well. You can’t
possibly count that as evidence.”
But this reply also served as his confession.
“Even without evidence, the culprit could be no oneelse but you.”
I continued to explain my argument. “The method Dazaioutlined just now only applies to
those who rode in your taxi. You said you drove twoof the victims, which is tantamount to
confessing to driving the other nine.”
“Inspector Kunikida. That is not physical evidence.”The driver refused to meet my eyes
as he talked. “Everything you have said is circumstantialevidence. You have found no deadly
weapons in my home, nor have you any images depictingme in the moment of the crime. Even if
you were to indict me, I could not possibly be foundguilty.”
Now it was my turn to fall silent.
He was entirely correct. I would have needed somesort of physical proof linking the
victims and the driver – blood stains, finger prints,video footage, a confession with no plausible
deniability- in order to land him a guilty verdict.What we had so far did not qualify as hard

34
evidence. The case as it currently stood was likely to be thrown out altogether. Judging by the
driver’s words, all proof had likely already beenthoroughly destroyed.
The man was more cunning than I had anticipated. Whatwas I to do-?
But his next words were entirely unlike anything Icould have expected.
“Inspector Kunikida… let us make a deal with one another.If you accept my conditions, I
will turn myself over to the authorities.”
“What?”
“My conditions are as such that the Armed DetectiveAgency will serve as bodyguards to
me and guarantee my security. You would provide witnessprotection for seventy-two hours once
the prosecutor’s investigation concludes.”
“A witness protection deal? What for?”
“I have… no more time. I will be killed. They willkill me.”
“Wait. I don’t follow. Start over from the beginning.Who is, and why are they, targeting
you?”
“I didn’t do business with them… I sold organs onthe black market without any backing,
so now I’ve made them mad! I’m doomed… I’m doomed,I tell you, and even my buyers won’t
contact me anymore. They’ve abandoned me! I don’tknow why… they weren’t supposed to find
out… but they’re already on my tail.”
“Now I understand,” Dazai said, nodding with one handslotted against his chin.
“Hey, Dazai, what the devil is he talking about? Whatis he saying?”
“See, it’s like this. He was selling the victims’bodies to an illegal organ trade syndicate.
But he flooded the market in a single month, so theprice on organs collapsed. Let’s suppose that a
large enterprise holds a fine control over the supplyof some product, but a single individual
suddenly drops that market on its head. What do youthink would happen next?”
“The enterprise would – be enraged?”
“A legitimate business would view it as healthy competition.But blood and violence are
the currency for black-market companies which feedupon the local populace. And they grow mad
when someone encroaches upon their territory-”
At that exact instant, something slammed into thecar.
Or rather, several things struck the car repeatedly.A shrill sound rang out.
The right side of the taxi shuddered. The window shatteringaccompanied the sound of the
bullets flying in.
“Gunshots! Get down!” I yelled. Shards of glass rainedinto the car, and it shuddered again
as if it were pummeled by hammers.
“It’s them! Oh god, help… I don’t want to die!”
The driver opened his door and fled.
“Hey, wait!” I shouted after him, but it was alreadytoo late.
“Kunikida, we can’t let the driver die or get away,not while we’re so close to figuring out
the truth! We need to catch him before the enemy does,”Dazai, lying prone on the floor of the car,
yelled up. Even though I had told him nothing,he understood immediately. We were in a fix! “I’ll
go after the driver, so you need to face thegroup!”
“Wait, fighting alone is dangerous! Dazai!”
Dazai fled, deaf to my plea. But I couldn’t make arookie take on his first gun fight alone,
and we really had no other alternatives but to splitup. So be it, I thought.

35
Cursing, I sized up my assailants. There were three of them, clad in black clothing and
black glasses, armed with foreign, contraband sub-machine guns. That, coupled with their
merciless attitudes, high degree of skill, and theirability to turn this street into the scene of a
shootout in an instant made me realize-
“Shit, this is bad! It’s the Port Mafia!”
The Port Mafia was a criminal organization headquarterednear the Yokohama harbor. It
was the cruelest, least merciful of all the localcriminal organizations; its boss’s orders became
absolute laws of steel used to pulverize their enemies.They were by far the most evil group in
Yokohama.
And I faced an armed force of three of them. Wastingtime there spelled certain death for
me.
“Doppo Poet – stun grenade!”
I scribbled the word onto a notebook page, tore itout, and focused my attention on it. The
paper undulated and transformed into a fist-sizedexplosive projectile.
I aimed the grenade at the Mafia members and tossedit out the broken window.
It exploded near the enemy and produced such a flashand a thunderous roar that I feared
anyone ill nearby should surely have suffered a heartattack. The Mafia members crouched and
clutched their heads, seemingly unable to offer theslightest bit of retaliation.
At that moment, I leapt from the car and charged atthem. I dropped the nearest person’s
neck to their elbow and slammed them to the ground;I sent the next person flying with a high-
kick.
The last person swung the barrel of their gun at me.I twisted my torso and avoided it.
Their attack left them off-balance, so I grabbed theirwrist and twisted it. I yanked it
forward while wrenching it laterally and threw himin shihou nage.
The Mafia man flew through the air, hit the groundhead-first, and immediately fell
unconscious.
“Thank God.”
I checked that they were all unconscious and walkedback to the taxi.
Now, if only Dazai were as successful in his effortsas I…
Suddenly, I felt a great evil behind me.
I quickly leaped to the side before looking back.A torrent of darkness crashed through the
space I had just occupied.
The torrent smashed into the car and sliced it inhalf.
The car body was cut in two, and axles and screwspoured from the cross section,
sprinkling on the ground and flying through the air.There was no time to be surprised. I dodged,
and dodged again, as a nearby sign and a railing werecut to pieces.
Half-turning from the ground, I saw in the distancea small young man wrapped in a black
overcoat coughing away.
He was the source of the evil I felt.
He coughed once more and began, “What splendid skillyou have to best these three in a
single instant. But next you will face my Rashoumon.”
The young man carried no weapons nor assumed any fightingstances, but nevertheless
advanced towards me with occasional coughing fits.The man gave off a horrible aura, a gale of
fury and mad dog malice.

36
A short man in a black, Western-style greatcoat. An ability like a black maelstrom. The
hell hound of the Port Mafia.
“You’re – Ryuunosuke Akutagawa!”
“That I am. I have come on my boss’s orders to removethe head of a man foolish enough
to believe he could infringe upon our territory. Whereis he?”
“He is not here. He turned tail and ran the momenthe saw you.”
I pointed in the direction the taxi driver had fledto, keeping my eyes trained on
Akutagawa all the while. I dared not look away foreven a second.
The vilest of all these vile fiends had arrived. Eventhe toughest criminals cried and ran
when they heard the name “Akutagawa”.
The black-fanged hellhound. The ability user of destructionand disaster. The harbinger of
tragedy and despair. There was not enough time inthe world to enumerate all the dark
pseudonyms Akutagawa wore.
Although it was my first time encountering him, thematter of his slicing the taxi in two
proved him to me even more dangerous than from hearsay.What could I do?
Simple. Akutagawa was focused on the kidnapper, notme. It would not be logical for me
to put my life on the line to protect a kidnapperagainst such a dangerous foe as him. My best
course of action was to point him in the right direction.
“That man is a witness. I cannot let him be killeduntil we determine the location of the
remaining kidnapping victims. If you want to go afterhim, you’ll have to defeat me first.”
“Risking your life for a murderer? How foolish ofyou.”
Shit. What an utter fool I had almost been.
A man of the Armed Detective Agency did not allowcase witnesses to be slaughtered by
criminals.
“Do as one should.” Those words were emblazoned onmy notebook.
Akutagawa’s overcoat rippled. It looked as if it werecomposed of a thousand vengeful
spirits temporarily condensed together. It ceasedto be a thing of cloth and took on the shape of a
thing of blades and sharp fangs.
“Meet me in battle, oh Port Mafia hound, RyuunosukeAkutagawa.”
“Come, man of the Armed Detective Agency, Doppo Kunikida.To battle.”
An explosion of black blades radiated away from theman and surged forward in a sudden
deluge.
I leapt to the side. A number of the blades tore atmy clothes, and the rest bored countless
holes into the wall behind me.
The blades wheeled around for another attack, andI quickly scratched a word into my
notebook and tore its page out.
The page rippled in the air and transformed into awire gun. I squeezed the trigger and
shot the hook.
But the metal wire was stopped and repelled by aninvisible barrier just before it hit
Akutagawa.
“What the…?!”
The man did not appear to make any move to defendhimself. Was this a part of his ability
as well?
Before I could fully wind in the wire, a portion ofAkutagawa’s overcoat transformed into
the head of a starving beast. The beast howled, andits head surged forward. It was fast!
37
I leapt to the side once more, but a fang tore into my right shoulder. Blood spurted from
my wound. But I had no time to stop the bleeding.I dodged the beast’s next attack, this one
coming from behind me. I had no time to counterattackor even close the distance!
“Are you only going to run away, Agency man? How tiresome,”Akutagawa spat, standing
fully upright and motionless as I leapt about.
A cold sweat trickled down my cheeks. He was strong.
If I had hoped to hit him, I would have to come withina few meters of those lethal blades
of darkness, but he had me so I could do nothing butdodge. He could also easily repel any
projectiles. And just my luck, even if my aim wastrue, there was the issue of that mysterious
barrier. The man had no weak points.
I continued to dodge the blades’ incoming attacks,but I felt an inexplicable chill run up
my body the moment I landed on the road.
Black blades pierced and sprouted up through the pavementlike spears.
While my attention had been focused on the aerialones, other blades had drilled
underground!
I tried to jump again, but my weight pulled me tothe floor. I was too late!
A blade stabbed my torso and passed through the otherside at my back.
“Gah…!” Intense pain
clouded my vision.
I couldn’t bear it. I fell to my
knees. I knew I was done for the
moment I stopped moving, but there
was nothing I could do.
Rashoumon’s black cloth
wound itself about my neck. My feet
left the ground as it lifted me. The
cloth wrapped itself into a serpent’s
diamond shaped head and violently
slammed me into a nearby wall.
“What a trifle you are. You’re
merely a detective as a day job, I
presume? At this rate, I might as
well wring your neck.”
The black cloth constricted,
and my world was dyed red.
“I won’t… let anyone…
interfere with… our work!”
As the cloth constricted even
tighter about my neck, I fired the
wire gun still clenched in my right
hand. But my target was not
Akutagawa this time.
The wire sailed past
Akutagawa and struck the water

38
pipe running down the side of the building. The pipeerupted.
“What the…?”
Akutagawa raised his arm to shield himself from thewater, but the high pressure stream
doused him and the road alike.
“You fool. Do you suppose I will flinch at a littlesplash from a puddle?”
I tore another page out of my notebook with my otherhand. When I had written for the
wire gun earlier, I had also written something elseon a second sheet of paper.
“Doppo Poet- stun gun!”
The paper instantly transformed into a portable high-voltagestun gun. I snapped the
power on and fired at the puddling water.
Flash! Stars sparked across the ground.
“Nnnnnnnuuuuaaaaghhh?!”
The water acted as a conductor, emitting beams ofpurple and white light.
The purple lightning, coiling and undulating likesnakes, surged through Akutagawa’s
drenched body.
A second sun, this one a purple twin to its brotherin the sky, illuminated the road, split
open with a pop of steam, and gradually disappeared.
The cloth of Rashoumon about my neck loosened, andI fell to the road. I pressed on my
aching neck and side while watching Akutagawa.
He squatted on the ground. White smoke and steam rosefrom his entire body.
“Gh… Gwa ha ha!” Akutagawa cackled, shoulder shaking,even in the midst of coughing.
Could he even move after the electricity?
“I see today that the Agency is no mere collectionof jesters. Splendid. Truly, splendid
indeed.”
“...If you intend to fight, then fight me once more.My notebook has pages to spare for
you.”
I lifted my arms once more and swung the wire gunaround to him once more.
“By all means, I should like to test if you have theability to destroy me… but
unfortunately, it appears we have an unwelcome guest.”
I followed Akutagawa’s line of sight and saw a patrolcar pulling up, its siren screaming. I
supposed the police had caught wind of our gun fight.
“I must flee before it is this criminal they catch.Come, let us be done for now. We will
continue this soon.”
He turned, still coughing all the while, and left.He was as relaxed as if he were merely
returning home from a walk, not a battle. For thisman, it seemed there was hardly a large
difference between fighting or fleeing.
“I do not relish the prospect of meeting him again…”
I fell to my knees as I watched his retreating back.
That was Akutagawa of the Port Mafia. The rumors toldno lies, no - he was more of a
hellhound than the rumors did him justice for. I hadno desire for a rematch.
All I wanted was to go home and sleep like the dead.

That being said, I had much to do before sleep, soI took a short moment to catch my
breath and then set off for work once more. I neededto make a detailed report of this encounter. I
received first-aid for my stomach wound in the Agency’sinfirmary and then returned to the

39
office, whereupon I found Dazai sipping a cup of tea and a pleased expression which told me he
had finished his first job.
“Dazai. I presume you caught the cab driver.”
“Of course I did. I restrained him immediately andthen handed him off to the police. He
seemed happy about it; after all, Port Mafia assassinscan’t reach him under police protection.”
What a relief. So it seemed Dazai wasn’t as much ofan incapable idiot as he first
appeared.
I doubted that Dazai ran away because he anticipatedthe Mafia attack, but his convenient
pretext for leaving and the clean resolution of thecase filled me with needless anxiety.
“So the taxi driver was the culprit behind this stringof cases, huh? Is that the plot of this
act?”
There was no reward for working ourselves to the bonesand dashing all over the place.
The police would give us a small acknowledgement orthank-you gift, and that would be the end of
it all. Goodness.
“You don’t need to bother about going out any moretoday. Once we finish our routine
duties, let’s go grab a drink.”
“Are you paying?” Dazai asked, suddenly all smiles.
“Shouldn’t you be the one trying to impress me here?But fine, I’ll pay for you now, so
you need to take your work seriously tomorrow.”
I returned to my desk and dealt with my remainingbusiness.
The work phone rang somewhere as I looked over thedocuments passed over to me. I
wrote up the case for this report.
I happened to glance over at my computer and saw thatwe received an email. Not
particularly concerned, I skimmed its contents. Assoon as I finished reading, I started over and
read it properly.
I began to call, “Dazai,” and then realized I hadstopped breathing. “Drinking is cancelled.
We have a job to do.”
“Aww, what? I’m so ready to go I have a sake-shapedhole in my stomach already.”
“A request came in. It’s from the same anonymous personwho asked out to scope out that
ruin.”
My throat felt dry. My tongue stuck to the roof ofmy mouth. I didn’t want to say the next
words.
“The job is to deactivate a bomb. If we don’t findit and deactivate it by sunset tomorrow,
over a hundred people will die.”

40
 Interlude 1
It was late at night.
A quiet roadside overlooked the far-off, twinklinglights of the loud and bustling city.
Someone lay in wait unseen, hidden inside of a carparked in a deserted parking lot.
His face was faintly illuminated by the fluorescenceof diodes.
“Let’s get this tedious job wrapped up now, shallwe?” the man muttered to himself.
He tapped away on the slim laptop he balanced on hisleg. The screen was covered in tiny
characters.
“I’m no good at these electronic games after all,”he said with a faint smile. The characters
on screen danced.
“- But still, it’s not like I can trust anyone elsewith this.”
He smiled to himself in the dim light.
“Now then, Agency, and by extension, Kunikida, canyou see through this trap - can you
protect Yokohama?”
The man - Dazai - looked out the car window.
The flickering lights of Yokohama swayed in theirupside-down reflection on the black
ocean.

41
 Chapter 3
The twelfth.
The morning after a night spent in transit.
I spent half the night alone without slumbering, squattingin my anger under a solitary
light.
The innumerable dead, and yet the even more innumerableliving.
There is no difference between them and myself, andalthough each man is given one
corner of heaven to himself, there is no man who hasever returned once vanished into the
infinitude of heaven.
God, I beg of you to return them to me.

“Let us begin the company-wide debriefing.”

I addressed those seated at the table before me.
This was a reception room which doubled as the company’smeeting room. Office staff
and detectives alike sat about the table with a totalof seven of us in attendance. We were not
quite at our full strength, as it was extremely rarefor our full lineup to meet in a single room.
I consulted my papers and then began explaining.
“Please refer to the documents you have on hand forthe particulars of this incident.
Excuse me for this summary, but the Agency has receiveda targeted threat and is presently also
under attack from a cruel and thorough scandal.”
The Agency’s exclusive doctor, Dr. Yosano, spoke up.“Everyone here knows about the
Agency’s poor press. Tell us about the bomb case.”
“Very well. We received this threatening email earlier.Please read it so we may determine
its sender.”
I distributed copies of the email. The letter waswritten in the polite manner as follows:

Dear Sirs and Madams,

I pray this letter finds everyone at the Agency ingood health.
I am deeply grateful for your most expedient effortsin the matter of investigating that
building a few days ago. I apologize for making anotherrequest so soon after the first, but I
really must ask this one thing of you.
I have placed a rather large-scale explosive at acertain location in the nearby area. I
should like to employ you to please locate and removethe bomb for the sake of the city’s safety.
Furthermore, the bomb is programmed to detonate bysundown tomorrow, so I do hope
you will resolve the matter within this time limit.
The bomb I have manufactured is the twin to a bombin a certain case which robbed some
hundred people of their lives. These casualties werean extremely sorrowful thing.
There will be an unquenchable flame as bright as ifthe sun had fallen to Earth. Nearby
buildings will crumble to their foundations; peoplewill attempt to flee while on fire. The roads
will melt, and fragments of exploded cars will lodgein the ruins of blazing buildings. The world
will become like Hell. I beg of your Agency to putin your best efforts so that Yokohama will not
be reduced to this nightmare.

42
 Forgive me my redundancies, but as in my previous request, I will have images recorded of
your actions. If in the unfortunate situation that the bomb is not disabled in time, the images will
be released in order to place the blame on your company.My apologies for this, but I do hope
you understand.
In closing, I pray for your continued health and goodfortune.
Yours,
The Azure Apostle

“... What a revolting letter,” Dr. Yosano spat.

“Exactly so. If you recall the surveillance equipmentwe found in the ruined hospital a few
days ago, it’s apparent that this ‘Azure Apostle’,as he calls himself, is the person who leaked those
reputation-ruining images and the one behindthis bomb threat. It appears his goal is to broadcast
our failure to the world at large if wecannot find and defuse the bomb.”
The president said calmly, “Then he means to destroyour good-standing?”
“I would say as much.”
The Agency had overcome more than its fair share ofdifficulties over the years. We
refused to surrender to levels of violence even divisionsof well-seasoned soldiers could not
handle.
But we were still a commercial enterprise, and wewere kept afloat by our clients’ trust in
us. We could not afford to fall prey to this scandal.If the news that we failed to defuse this bomb
had spread too far and we had ended up facing judicialintervention, the Agency’s reputation would
have plummeted, and our name would have beenforever soiled by this situation we had been
driven into.
“Our immediate goal must be to determine the bomb’slocation.”
“The office staff will look into locations from wherean explosion could cause upwards of
a hundred casualties. But Yokohama is filled withtrain stations, skyscrapers, and the like; it will be
next to impossible to search them all in our timelimit.”
“How about tracing the security footage back to thesource?”
Certainly, as it said in the letter, the criminalmust have needed to capture footage in order
to broadcast the Agency’s failure to the public. Thatmeant hidden equipment, as in the previous
case.
However-
“If the recording equipment, or even wiretapping equipment,is of the new
battery-powered variety, then it’s possible it canrecord video and sound for a few days without
charge. The equipment could also be as small as apen or a die, and even then it could still
transmit data right up to the explosion. It couldvery well prove to be harder to find than the
bomb itself. But for the sake of caution, let us askthe manufacturers about any large purchases of
these objects-”
There was no good solution to our plight.
“Does this ‘Azure Apostle’ title correspond to anycriminal that we’re aware of?”
“Not that I know of at the moment.”
The “Azure Apostle”. This case differed from the firstby the culprit identifying
themselves as such. I did not know if this carriedany significance.
To review the situation, this “Azure Apostle” personwas someone with a large knowledge
of bombs and a plan to cause the Agency’s downfallfor some reason.
43
“For the time being, I am
having a bomb expert be contacted
and a list of those with grudges on the
Agency drawn up.”
“Have you not spoken to Ranpo
yet?” Dr. Yosano asked.
Yes, the president himself
should have contacted Ranpo, but-
“We cannot reach him right
now. He is in the middle of a case in
Kyuushuu. There are plans for him to
return to Yokohama, but it will be
challenging for him to arrive in time
to help,” the president said, crossing
his arms.
This “Ranpo” that Dr. Yosano
mentioned was none other than Ranpo
Edogawa, an ability user known as the
Agency’s best detective. He had a
marvellous ability called Super
Deduction which allowed him to spot
the truth in any case, be it a murder,
assault, or abduction. Were Ranpo
present, this case would have been
solved in minutes. However, he was
unfortunately occupied in Kyuushuu
in a case for a government official. He
could not immediately return to
Yokohama until he completed the bizarre murder casehe was currently embroiled in, in which a
white-haired corpse came to life and murdered bothits wife and dear friend.
The president spoke up once more. “Is there no wayto question the taxi driver while he is
in police custody?”
“He is currently on the police’s specialty air transfercraft. They are holding him in
isolation to keep him safe from Mafia assassins, soit would be a trick to meet with him.”
Even the Mafia could do little when their target wassuspended above their heads. But in
the process of protecting him, we lost our accessto gathering information as well.
“I shall have a word with the police’s secret intelligencedepartment. I will make them
establish a line of communication with the aircraftand write the answers to our questions.”
“I will collect all the letters at once.”
I found it hard to believe the taxi driver was theAzure Apostle. The man had no reason to
tell the Agency the whereabouts of the confined kidnappingvictims. It seemed more like
someone else turned him in than anything else. Butstill, even with that, there was some
connection between the driver and the Azure Apostle.
In any case, I expected he knew something pertinent.

44
 “Listen to me, everyone. This case is a cowardly attack against the Armed Detective
Agency. Our investigation will be two-fold. First, discover the Azure Apostle responsible for the
attack, and second, neutralize the bomb. Our top priorityis the bomb’s deactivation within the
time limit. If we fail to find this bomb and humanlives are lost, then we will be unworthy to call
ourselves detectives. You must understand that thisis not a matter of your pride as members of
this company, but as individuals. Let the investigationcommence.”
At the president’s command, we rose as once and rushedto our duties.

The investigation began with such frenzy that therewas scarce time to breathe. The
deadline was this very sunset. In that short timeperiod, we had to sniff out a bomb somewhere in
the city without knowing its location. There simplywasn’t enough time.
I was struck by a memory in the middle of my searchand placed a call. The boy Rokuzou
was tracing the source of the first email. If he wereto discover the truth of that particular
mystery, then this case could be resolved at the sametime.
Rokuzou picked up after letting the phone ring fora long time.
“Heeeey… this is Taguchi. Thanks for…” He let outa huge yawn. “Thanks for waiting.
What’s up?”
“Quit playing games with me. This is an emergency.”
“What…? Is this Specs? What time do you think it is,man? It’s still nine am.”
“Only you would be so unprofessional as to be asleepat nine am. Early to bed and early to
wise, I tell you.”
“What’re you lecturing me for? Who are you, my dad?”
“No. I-”
Can’t replace your father.
I bit back those words before they came from my mouth.
“At any rate, the situation has changed. We must findthe sender of that letter as soon as
possible. Have you made any progress on it?”
“Nope. It’s harder than I thought it would be. I’llcut the tech jargon, but basically, it’s got
some trick that makes it that no matter how many timesI make it connect to the network hub, I
can’t find the origin. This isn’t an amateur prankyou’ve got on your hands.”
I had already confirmed from first-hand experiencethat this person was no amatuer.
“I received a second email from the same source. Wouldyou be able to pinpoint the
source from that one?”
“There’s a good chance, but I can’t say for sure.- Well, it’s not like I haven’t got any other
options.”
“What do you mean?”
“See, I can sneak an attacking program into the hub.And from there I can back-trace the
email to its source. But it’d take me a long time.Also, it’s just a little illegal.”
“I’m not concerned with its legality. That’s a triflingmatter in the face of this situation. Do
it.”
“Oh ho. Are you sure? That’s an odd thing to say forol’ neat-freak Specs. This
conversation’s being recorded, you know. Whatcha thinkabout trading the record of the time I
infiltrated the Agency for this convo?”
“I’ll give it to you, so make haste.”

45
From the start, we never intended to turn the record over to the authorities. My slip of the
tongue was done on purpose as a pretext for creating an exchange, but it seemed the boy did not
realize that.
“You’re a generous guy, Specs. Make sure you pay myfee for this separate job.”
And with that, he hung up on me.
I held the receiver and spent a moment in contemplation.
There was no time to waste on sentimentality. My toppriority was the bomb. The amount
of casualties would have been catastrophic if thedeadline passed. But that being said, we lacked
any clues to go off of.
Dammit, where the devil had Dazai gotten off to ata time like this?

I soon found Dazai in the shopping district.

He was running his mouth off with a woman in an old-fashionedcoffee shop facing the
road.
“Is this your first time here in Yokohama? I can showyou around if you’d like.”
“Oh my, I couldn’t… Would it really be all right forme to monopolize your time? I
thought the Agency was dreadfully busy in light ofthis bomb threat. Mr. Kunikida was up ever
so early coordinating the investigation, you see.”
“Kunikida is a demon at work. Do you know what I mean?If he has an appointment at
noon, he’ll arrive within ten seconds of it. He’sas punctual as a railway train.”
“My… is he really?”
“Now, look here, Dazai! Enough playing hooky. Andquit using me as a topic to hit on
women with!”
“Later, okay? So you know, when were at the abandonedhospital, Kunikida was so scared
at a woman’s ghostly voice that he sc-”
“Listen to me!”
Dazai went right back to cheerfully twittering awayat Miss Sasaki, so I delivered a
ringing thump to the back of his head.
“Ow! What was that for, Kunikida? Oh, is that reallyyou, Kunikida?”
“Don’t give me that ‘Is that really you’ business.You knew it was me, and you kept on
going anyway, didn’t you? The Agency is in a stateof emergency, and you’re out here having a
cute little date. And to make matters worse, yourpartner here is the case’s victim.”
“Are you jealous?”
“I am not jealous!”
I was absolutely, positively, 100% not in any wayjealous.
“How mean. Someone tried to kill her; don’t you thinkshe’s traumatized? I’m guarding
her and helping her recover. Is that not a crucialand pressing matter for the Agency? Besides,
from my personal experience, a woman who suffers aterrible experience can lose her
open-mindedness, kindness, and laughter.”
“That last sentence ruined your entire excuse, youfool.”… But, I thought to myself, I
should make a note of that. “Still, can you reallyrun all over town and be frivolity incarnate? A
girl this beautiful surely has a boyfriend already.”
“Oh, you would think that, Kunikida. If you had onlyasked her, you would have known
that here she is, lacking even a single friend orrelative to her name. She’s only ever had one
boyfriend, and they broke up only a bit ago.”
46
I had heard she had no one to rely on at this time, but no more than that.
“So, Kunikida, you’ve got a chance,” Dazai said withan impish grin and a poking finger
in my side.
“What are you talking about?” I pulled a face to showI didn’t have the faintest idea what
he meant. “All right, that’s enough of that, Dazai.I came here to explain what’s happening since
you decided to ditch the meeting this morning. Ifyou skip out again, then so help me, the day
you finally kill yourself, you’ll be dealt with soquickly that Hell will practically spit you back
out.”
“Ooh, what a vulgar thought…” Dazai whined.
Satisfied with his reaction, I placed my documentson the table.
“This is the latest information. The military policeheard the driver’s testimony during
confession. He confessed to preparing the gas to preventthe trapped victims’ escape. But his
testimony ends there. He claims to have no memoryof installing hidden surveillance cameras. I
have a hard time believing he would lie this latein the game, so in other words-”
“- There are at least two people involved, yes? Thekidnapper and the photographer. The
former is the taxi driver, and as for the latter -do you suppose this is the Azure Apostle?”
“I believe so.”
“Excuse me,” Miss Sasaki piped up timidly. “Am I allowedto hear this? This is a secret
investigation, after all… Outsiders should not beprivy to this information.”
“Sasaki, you’re the case’s victim, hardly an outsider.Don’t worry about it. Otherwise the
great stickler of rules himself wouldn’t start lecturingme in front of you.”
“I’m not especially strict about rules. I’m just likeanyone else.”
“Oh? Why, I never knew you could deliver such goodjokes. So, then how about it? Do we
have any leads?”
“I’m just like anyone else, I tell you.”
“... Sorry. Yup, you’re perfectly normal. Keep lecturing.”
Why did he apologize?
“Then to continue, I looked into our driver’s history.From what I can tell, he never had
any contact with any sort of criminal organizationand was otherwise a very normal taxi driver.
No criminal records or shady friends either. It’shard to believe he planned the abductions and
sold the bodies to an organ harvesting syndicate entirelyon his own. There must be someone
who touted the organ trade as a get-rich-quick schemeand started him on his way.”
“And is that the Azure Apostle? Then shouldn’t weask the driver about that name?”
“I don’t think we can. The man’s out of our reach- we could tear our hair out trying to
make him confess, but he wouldn’t hear a word of itsince, unfortunately, he is strongly guarded.
By the time it would take for us to go through thepolice and secure an interview with him, our
time limit would have long since passed.”
Who in the world were they?
Telling the driver about the organ trade, installingsurveillance footage in the abandoned
hospital, planting a bomb somewhere, and then threateningthe agency - just what were they
trying to do?
Miss Sasaki suddenly spoke up. “Excuse me. If I maypropose an idea… You were
speaking of a person called the Azure Apostle… Wasn’tthat the person in the Azure Flag
Terrorist case?”
“Oh, that case?”
47
The Azure Flag Terrorist incident…
The very case in which Rokuzou’s father passed away.
I also had a flash of suspicion when I saw the word“azure”.
“But the guilty party in that case, the Azure King,was supposed to have died by his own
bomb. The dead are no threat to the living.”
“Well said, Kunikida. So I take it you’re no longerafraid of ghosts?”
“Don’t you dare bring up ghosts again.”
“But… I heard that the explosion was so large theywere unable to identify even a trace of
his body. Perhaps he faked his own death and ran intohiding…”
I had considered that as well and broached the subjectto the military police. But the
answer was no.
“According to the analysis the police performed atground zero, there is no doubt that the
Azure King died in the blast. Their methods of analysisare sound. Besides, one of their fellow
policemen died in the line of duty at that very spot,so I can’t think they would make a mistake or
overlook anything.”
“But…”
“Why, I may not know much about the Azure King,” Dazaipiped up, “but does he seem
the sort of person to crawl up from the depths ofHell to exact his revenge on the Agency?”
How lazy this man was. He couldn’t even take the timeto do his own research. I had to
explain everything.
The Azure King was responsible for the so-called AzureFlag Terrorist incident in which
he attacked and destroyed several government facilities.The sheer scope and influence of his
actions as a single domestic terrorist led to hisinfamy in the public eye.
Before he let his azure flag fly, the Azure King was,by all accounts, no more than an
upstanding bureaucrat.
After graduating at the top of his class from a prestigiousinstitution and studying at
university overseas, he harbored the lofty ambitionsof living his life as a citizen in the world of
the government and the law, as was quite a reasonableexpectation for this young man. Therefore
it was unclear how leading a political purge throughsuch destruction contributed towards his
goal.
One day, the national broadcasting station receiveda piece of footage. It was a confession
to a crime made by a young man who concealed his facewith a flag dyed azure blue. In the
video, the man introduced himself as the Azure King,said that he weeped for this imperfect
world, and claimed that only the imperfections couldmake amends for themselves.
“No matter what we aspire to, our neighbors fall ill,our parents die, and only a fraction of
the wicked are ever condemned. If this is the resultof our aspirations, then let us aspire to an
ideal world. Let us aspire to it not with the noblehands of God, but with our own imperfect,
blood-stained hands.”
His beautiful words came simultaneously with a tripartiteattack on government facilities:
arson at a city police building, a rear-end collisionin commuting traffic, and a bomb at the
military police station. The casualties were a murdererof eight who was found innocent due to
lack of documentation, a member of the ruling partyin the Diet who embezzled money from the
budget to supply refugee aid in developing countries,and a troop of military police who was
revealed to be responsible for the assault (and subsequentmurder) of a young member of a
separate police force. Every one of them died in theattack.
48
 The Azure King passed judgment and sentence both with his actions on those the law
could not condemn.
This blitzkrieg tactic shocked the world. Multiplehigh-security government institutions
were simultaneously destroyed. No one even imaginedan attack of this scale possible.
After that, the Azure King’s crimes (or his convictions,if you prefered) continued.
The military and government officials who completelylost face in the process promptly
began a nation-wide search for him. Even the Agencywas called in to help.
I had already explained everything after that point:finding the safe house, the infiltration,
and the suicide bombing. The situation was resolvedon the backs of piled corpses.
“But still, supposing the Azure King were the criminalhere, it is unclear as to why he
should want to ruin our reputation.”
“Couldn’t he hold a grudge against you, Kunikida?”
The Azure King, holding a grudge against me?
True, it was I who obtained the information abouthis hiding point. I was the one who
delivered said information to the city police whichorchestrated his arrest. But - no, it couldn’t
be.
The evil domestic terrorist, the Azure King, as aghost?
If death only furthered his deep resentment towardsthe Agency and myself, then if he
were to take revenge-
“At any rate, we should keep our guards up until weknow who we’re up against. We don’t
know who or what they’re after. We’d better hide Sasakisomewhere safe too.”
“How about the Agency building? But it is unoccupiedat night. Where-”
Suddenly, I realized Dazai’s crafty plot.
“Are you trying to say you should shelter this youngwoman in your room for the sake of
her protection? You fiend, carrying on this lascivious,indecent, salubrious relationship at all
hours of the day and night! Are you a cur? This isentirely disgraceful; if you were I, I should
think I’d show a little more restraint-”
“Hold on, Kunikida. There’s nothing going on betweenSasaki and I…”
“Huh?”
“I keep telling you. The first night she stayed withme, I slept in another room, and I
haven’t so much as touched a hair on her head since.And no matter how you look at it, wouldn’t
it be downright ridiculous for me to seduce this poorwoman on the very day she was nearly
killed? Even you, oh stubborn one, should be ableto see that.”
Oh… was this true? My god, how quick I had been tojump to conclusions.
“Well, to be honest, I knew you had the completelywrong idea, but it was funny for me to
watch, so I let you keep thinking that.”
That little…
But for such a pure and upstanding citizen such asmyself to have made such a gauche
mistake, someone might very well say, “What, suspiciousof a single night in the same house?
Kunikida must be some sort of a closet pervert,” andignore all sound reasoning. With no means
to refute such an accusation, I would have been forcedto die in agony. I supposed it was a
blessing that such a thing did not come to pass.
… But I was suspicious. Was this not Dazai?

49
In any event, the fact that Dazai was not some idiot who made passes at every woman the
moment he saw her was some comfort. It was difficultto maintain the proper sense of formality
with a case victim.
“Don’t word things so ambiguously, then. But it’sall for the better if there really is
nothing between you. From here on out, you shouldmind your familiarity with witnesses and
treat them appropriately. That is what it means tobe a professional.”
“... Yes, sir.” Dazai nodded earnestly and in thenext breath turned to Miss Sasaki and
asked, “By the way, what’s your type in men?”
“What just happened to ‘Yes, sir’?!”
I retracted my previous words. This man was a womanizer,through and through.
“My- my type…? I must say, how frightfully presumptuousof you to assume I have a type
of man I seek out… but I think… I find men who arepassionate about ideals and devote
themselves to something… as extraordinarily wonderful.”
What was that just then?
“Aww, well, that’s too bad. That’s Kunikida to a T,isn’t it? What a shame, no hope for me.
Damn, but you two should have a talk sometime. Andwhile you do that, I’ll be over here
counting my fingers.”
“H-hey, Dazai! Don’t leave the conversation!”
“I’m a little busy; I forgot what number I’m on.”
“Quit sulking! Enough is enough. Get back over here!”
Now that the two of us were alone, I couldn’t thinkof what to say!
“You see… I’m a normal woman, so being with me isno help to anyone striving towards
his ideals. I’ve only had my heart broken for ideals,and the two of us expended fruitless effort
and tired ourselves out… And then in the end, he choseideals over me, and I was thrown away.
That’s why I think I shall refrain from dating idealistsfrom now on.”
Miss Sasaki smiled faintly. What had happened to her…?
“Boy, Kunikida, your expression sure is easy to read,”Dazai piped up.
“T-there’s nothing to read here! Look the other way,Dazai!”
“Ow!”
I twisted Dazai’s head around forcefully so he couldmind his own damn business and not
mine.
“First you tell me to stay, then you tell me to leave.Make up your mind, man. Let’s go
back to the original conversation.”
… What had we been talking about?
“Ah yes, the topic of Miss Sasaki’s safety. For thetime being, it’s not like we can write off
the police’s help as an option…”
“Um… thank you for lodging me, and I truly do appreciateit, but it does seem to be
causing a strain on you… So from now on, I can stayin a hotel room or some such place. You
needn’t concern yourselves about me any longer.”
“We can’t do that. Hotels may say they’re safe, butthis most recent case is like a bad
omen of that. But I can’t imagine how long you couldstay in Dazai’s room without him
transforming into a perverted beast. Come stay withme.”
“Huh?”
“Huh?” Dazai echoed.
“No, I - I didn’t mean it like that- I don’t haveany ulterior motives, I swear!”
50
“No, no matter how you look at it, this is riddled with ulterior motive. You don’t know
when to give up, do you?”
“No! My intentions were entirely pure.”
Dazai chuckled. “What a lie. Sasaki, it’s absolutelytrue that you’ll be safe at Kunikida’s
house. And don’t worry about him either - he doesn’thave the courage to make any further
moves. He’s a man of eminent virtue who lives hislife according to his ideals, you know. You
see his notebook? His image of an ideal woman is reallysomething else.”
Dazai passed Miss Sasaki my notebook. I patted mynotebook in surprise. It was not there.
“Dazai! When did you steal that?!”
“Here, look at this page,” Dazai said, pointing witha finger.
“Oh my… are you sure I may?”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Yes… Well, I’m sorry, but I won’t lie. I am a littlebit interested now.”
Miss Sasaki began to read with an embarrassed giggle.
Her face turned pale by degrees as she read.
“Oh my…. I see. But then this…”
My image of an ideal woman.
Eight notebook pages, fifteen categories, fifty-eightitems - enough to classify this as an
enormous work.
“Oh… Ah, so in other words, that’s… well, I don’tknow…”
Dazai’s words came to mind. “Please never, I meanever, show this page to a woman. She
will recoil from you.”
When Miss Sasaki finished reading, she looked up again,but no traces of her earlier
laughter remained.
In its place was a chilly grin with all the life drainedfrom it, as if she were a plaster statue.
“Mr. Kunikida.”
“Yes…?”
“This person does not exist.”

Someone bring me a drink, I thought.

The capital city of Tokyo lay situated at the heartof the country, a metropolis formed from
a huge collection of economic and political facilities.
One of these facilities was a building in which allsorts of people passed in and out. A
diverse blend of foreigners - some with dark skin,others, light - went about their work there.
This was the Embassy of the United States.
It was the largest foreign-owned territory in allof the country.
The line for general admission stretched so long thatsome waited well into the afternoon,
but nevertheless, everyone in the queue waited theirturn in silence. They stood as silently as if
awaiting the moment of total judgment, unable to seeany but themselves as they stared, fixedly,
at something beyond the concept of waiting itself.
A monitor installed there broadcasted live coverageof a major league baseball game;
presently, it showed a young white man almost listlesslycriticizing the fan-favorite team for
losing a run.
I glanced to my side at Dazai. He smiled away in apparentlysincere enjoyment.
51
 The operation will begin momentarily, so I might as well look forward to it, right? Dazai’s
grin seemed to say.
It was not a laughing matter.
“Are you ready, Kunikida?”
“I already feel sick to my stomach. It’s all ridingon you, so don’t slip up. If this goes
wrong, we’ll be tried by international law.”
“International criminals… I like the sound of that.Okay, here I go!”
“Hey, wait!”
I made to stop Dazai with a surge of anxiety, buthe had already walked off beyond my
reach to the reception desk.
It is worth noting at this point that Dazai was garbedin a ratty, patch-riddled under robe
while I wore a fine navy blue suit and a necktie.
He went up to the embassy employee working the reception,popped open his mouth, and
practically yelled, “Hey, why am I still waiting?Come on! I’ve been here for six hours already!”
Nearby heads swiveled to stare at him. The receptionist,a Japanese woman, blinked in
astonishment.
“Come on already, man! I can’t take it anymore! What’sthe deal? You keep sending in all
those bigwigs before me!”
Dazai continued to wail at the receptionist, flappinghis arms and legs and generally
making a scene. A mature adult would have coughedup blood if they were caught using this
pathetic strategy. I myself would have rathered totake poison and die than to stoop to this level.
“Beg pardon, but what business do you have here?”The poor receptionist asked as Dazai
continued to throw his tantrum. It was a commendableattempt, but her opponent was ruthless.
“I literally just said it! Come on, weren’t you listening?I’m defecting! De-fec-ting! I want
only from the bottom of my heart to run away to yourhonorable land of America! But you keep
me waiting and wasting my time here! Are you sayingI can’t go? Is that it? You’re only a clerk,
miss, and overstepping your legal authority is a seriouscrime!”
“You there! What’s the meaning of all this? Causinga disturbance in the embassy is a
serious crime too!”
Naturally, a security guard heard the commotion andcame charging over to Dazai.
Now it was my turn.
“Hold on. I happen to be the companion of this loudyoung man. May I ask if you really
have the authority to arrest him?” I stepped in frontof the charging guard and blocked his way.
“Article 31, Section 2 of the Vienna Convention onConsular Relations! ‘The authorities
of the receiving state shall not enter that part ofthe consular premises which is used exclusively
for the purpose of the work of the consular post.’This man is an honored guest of the embassy
until he is recognized as obstructing the work ofthe consular post. If you disrupt his complaining
without appropriate authorization, we will have aninternational incident on our hands.”
My sharp rebuke gave him pause.
Of course, he likely knew the gist of the Vienna Conventionas well, but it was only
human nature to back off when faced with the threatof an “international incident”.
“I’m deserting, I tell you! I want to speak to yourmanager!”
As if in celebration of his luck in being an unstoppableforce, Dazai fell to the floor in
front of the reception desk and carried on his tantrumthere. It was all according to our plan, but
nevertheless, I had to suppress the absurd urge tothrottle him.
52
 Now, just how was it that two fine members of the Armed Detective Agency were reduced
to carrying out a high-stakes diplomatic mission inthe American embassy with a method that
better suited a five-year-old whining for a toy?

“The bomber is a foreigner?” I asked. We sat in thesame coffee shop in the shopping
district.
“Yes, and likely a professional at that,” Dazai said,sipping his coffee.
This was immediately following a message we receivedfrom one of Miss Sasaki’s
colleagues.
“My major in college is criminal psychology, you see.I may have information that may be
some kind of help to you,” she said.
The message said that Miss Sasaki was a world-knownresearcher of criminal psychology.
She had been presented with no small number of awardsat famous academic conferences and
was a talented young associate professor. Thus shehad conducted her own investigations into
previous similar cases from her colleagues’ filesfor us.
“There don’t seem to be any cases among my fellowcriminal psychologists records of
previous cases that detail an explosion with overone hundred casualties within Japan itself. …
Of course, this is ignoring the bombings of the WorldWars.”
“What about international cases?”
“Yes. … There are many international cases relatedto political conflicts or ideological
struggles. But there are precious few details, evenabout the types of bombs or their
manufacturers…. My apologies.”
“No, this is good information,” said Dazai. “In otherwords, this Azure Apostle, being as
they created this bomb, should know about the makeupand composition of the bombs in those
cases. Now that’s the first step to building a criminalprofile for them, isn’t it?”
“I disagree. We’re still no closer to finding eitherthe bomb or the Apostle. Do you really
think this is good enough?” I asked.
At the very least, we needed the criminal’s name andface. We had no way of investigating
otherwise.
Dazai tapped his thumb to his lips, apparently lostin thought. “This criminal is in
disguise… we’ll never find them,” he murmured. “Isuppose… I have no other choice.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hey, Kunikida, the threat letter plainly said they‘manufactured’ the bomb, correct? But
it’s not a simple thing to manufacture a bomb capableof killing over a hundred people.”
“It would indeed be a difficult task for the layman,but an expert would find it simple
enough.”
I had acquired some knowledge of dangerous chemicalsubstances from my studies in
sciences and mathematics and my experience at theAgency.
The chemicals necessary to build a bomb require extremecaution and care in regulating
their conditions such as temperature. Even the slightestdeviation from the process can result in
an explosion. However, the ingredients themselvesare commonplace; even a grade-school
science classroom keeps them in large quantities.Hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, nitrogenous
fertilizer, and aluminum are all legal and inexpensiveto acquire. The trouble in bomb
manufacturing arises from the exact ratio of ingredientsand the manufacturing process itself, not
to mention the process of transporting and detonatingthe completed bomb.

53
 “On the one hand, there are several recipes through which a professional can build a bomb
on their own, but I have also heard of commerciallymade brands available for purchase-”
“That must be it. It can’t be as simple as all thatto create this ‘twin to a bomb from a
certain case’.”
“So… you’re trying to say… that the same person createdthe bomb for this case and the
aforementioned case…?”
“Not only that. Didn’t you think the letter’s descriptionof the explosion was unusually
graphic and realistic?”
I thought back to the letter. “There will be an unquenchableflame as bright as if the sun
had fallen to Earth. Nearby buildings will crumbleto their foundations; people will attempt to
flee while on fire. The roads will melt, and fragmentsof exploded cars will lodge in the ruins of
blazing buildings.”
“Yes,” Dazai agreed, “I thought the letter writersurely must have witnessed such a scene
themselves.”
“What?”
“Sasaki, do you have any news footage of internationalexplosions of this caliber?”
“No… not as far as I can tell. I don’t believe anyonecaught up in an explosion of this size
would be recording the event.”
“As is to be expected. But the letter described thescene as clearly as if the author
first-hand witnessed a city after an explosion. Andwitnessed only a few minutes after the
explosion, I might add. I can’t help but wonder ifthis person returned to ground zero after
planting the bomb and running. That would have enabledthem to see this scene.”
“You’re saying… you think the Azure Apostle was behindthe previous case as well?”
If that were the case, that would certainly have wrappedup our criminal profile nicely - a
professional bomb builder, responsible for a bombexplosion overseas, now infiltrating Japan.
But-
“No,” I said. “It won’t work.”
“Why’s that?”
“You wouldn’t know since you were busy ditching themeeting, but through our
connections with the Public Security Bureau and themilitary police, we already had a local
bomb manufacturing expert look into this. They turnedup no suspects. There are no terrorists in
Japan who have the skill to create a bomb capableof causing over a hundred casualties who are
not already being monitored. With that being said,we can hardly go around questioning every
foreigner in the country one-by-one.”
Dazai cackled at that.
“What’s that evil laughter for?”
“There are lists that even famous detective agencieswith assistance from the military
police aren’t allowed to go snooping about into. That’sinformation from foreign secret
intelligence agencies. I’m sure they’ve sniffed outthe suspect from that case.”
“Foreign secret intelligence, you say?”
Foreign secret intelligence agencies are organizationssuch as America’s CIA and NSA.
The United Kingdom’s MI6 is another famous example.Every nation has some such
organization which operates in secret in order toprotect the well being of their country. But that
being said-

54
“There is no way a foreign secret service would hand over their secrets to a Japanese
private enterprise with a ‘by your leave’. And do you even have any connections with the secret
service in the first place?”
“I don’t.”
“Well, there you go.”
“But I know somewhere we can go to meet one.”
I had a very bad feeling about this.

That was how we ended up on our espionage missionin the American embassy.
Dazai’s plan was simple: Raise trouble at the embassy.
If all went well, there was a good chance we wouldbe directed to someone higher up in
order to smooth everything over. We would then negotiatewith said higher up. A foreign secret
service agent would view their own embassy as a placeof peace. The ambassador would be sure
to have connections to them.
Certainly, all this was an absurd and excessivelyoverbearing measure.
However, I had to admit that Dazai’s plan was a sparkof hope for me, as I would have
otherwise found myself trapped in a dead end.
Dazai occasionally let me catch glimpses of his quickthinking and discerning eye as we
worked together. He was complex, a pool so deep Icould not see its bottom. I couldn’t help but
gather the impression that something else hid behindhis eccentric behavior - something chilly,
an almost demonic intellect.
I couldn’t picture him as a simple vagabond with noprevious achievements. He
side-stepped every personal question I tossed hisway; was he hiding a dark and shifty past?
Perhaps something criminal -
“Hey, just let me out already, lady! Hey, hey, lookat me when I’m talking! Are you even
listening to me? Quit looking away! Yeah, my eyesare up here, lady! Come on, give me some eye
contact!”
No. Never mind. He was just an idiot.
“Um, excuse me, you need to fill out this form tothen wait your turn…”
“I already filled that out ages ago!” Dazai wailed.This was a lie, of course. “I literally
filled out every line every single itty-bitty linewith my favorite pen, and nothing happened, so I
wanted to talk to someone, you get me?”
He pulled a black fountain pen out of his breast pocketto show her.
“My favorite pen is the same type as once used bya Middle Eastern dictator. Cool, huh?
You can look at it if you want. Look, it’s reallybig and heavy, so it’s super hard to write with. I’m
going to get pissed if you keep making me fillout those tiny forms with this. Didn’t think about
that one, huh?”
You’re the greatest evil who has ever used that pen,I thought, but I said nothing.
“Hey, lady, I’m kind of a writer. You ever read anythingof mine? How about I make you
the main character in my next book? All you gottado is let me talk to your boss. It’s gonna be a
story about you and me committing a lover’s suicide.I swear I’ll write it with this very pen once
I’ve deserted.”
Dazai was oddly at home in the role of a bad author.I had a hunch he often acted like this
to pick up women at bars.

55
 “Hey, you seriously gotta do something, or I’m gonna be screwed; these scary Public
Security dudes are gonna kill me! It’s ‘cause I write whatever I want. Can you believe it? What,
all a man’s gotta do is write that some big hotshotin the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wears a wig,
and now the authorities are after him? That’s a violationof my freedom of speech! The tyranny
of the government will not stand! And fake hair willnot stand either!”
“Hey, shut up, dude! I can’t hear the game! And whatthe hell’s wrong with a wig?” A
young Caucasian man in a black cap shouted from hisseat in the waiting room.
But this booing wouldn’t deter Dazai.
“What’s your problem, man? He shouldn’t have beenmad about me revealing his wig! If
he was going to be that mad about it, he should havelet the elements shine on his head from the
start!”
“Sir, excuse me, your companion-” the confused clerksaid, shifting her attention to me in
a plea for help. I mentally apologized to her, butlives were at stake here.
The drained, half-dazed clerk sighed and staggeredout of her chair with a nod. “Please…
please wait a moment.”
I thought that no one of any higher power than herwould have wanted to deal with Dazai
either. I entirely understand the feeling. I feltsympathetic towards them.
Our wait was short. When the clerk returned, she usheredDazai and I into another room
with a “This way, please.”

“Your little stunt has troubled us greatly.”

After we were led into a separate reception room designedfor diplomatic talks, we found
a bald, Caucasian waiting for us. The business cardhe proffered to us named him the Third
Attaché. Not a bad catch, I thought.
However, it still wasn’t enough. He did not have theclearance to know confidential secret
intelligence. This is where the real game began.
“I understand your position,” I said, bowing my head.Knowing that his culture did not
place an importance on bowing as ours did, I judgedmy action might bewilder him and put him
off ease. “Political refugees from this peaceful countryare all but unheard of. You would surely
hear the same if you corroborated with the Ministryof Foreign Affairs as well. It is therefore-”
“Oh, enough of that already. Yeah, sorry about allthat, pops, but we needed to be seen
separately. The truth is, I’m not actually an author.”
I pulled an ID card out of my breast pocket. It wasmade of black cloth and bordered in
golden letters.
“We are members of the Metropolitan Police DepartmentPublic Security Bureau.”
“The… the PSB?” the attaché squeaked, and no wonder.If your receiving country’s
security police showed up on your doorstep, somethinghad gone terribly wrong.
“Circumstances exist such that we were unable to contactyou in the normal way.
However, we are indeed the police; please feel freeto verify our identification.”
I displayed the card to him. The gold writing namedme a police officer next to a
photograph bearing the same claim.
The attaché took my card and compared me to the photo.
Of course, the ID was fake. I had created it identicalto a real officer’s ID with my Ability.
Therefore, the attaché could not spot the lie fromit.
Now our acting would have to be just as fool proof.

56
“Due to unavoidable circumstances, it is absolutely necessary we receive secret access to
American security information. I am asking for informationfrom American secret service agencies
regarding expert bomb manufacturers locatedin our country. This is a security matter of utmost
importance to us, so I ask for your quick cooperation.”I blurted out my pre-memorized speech in
a single breath.
“This… this is absurd.”
“I agree; it is.” I continued to press him. “If youdo not have access to this knowledge,
please forward us along to someone who does.”
“The embassy does indeed have frequent dealings withsecret service agents… but I can’t
authorize it as simply as all that.”
“We don’t have a moment to waste arguing. This isa critical moment for us. Hundreds of
people could lose their lives.”
The attaché's face paled when he heard the words “hundredsof people”. What a
kind-hearted fellow.
“P-please give me a moment.” He wiped his brow ofsweat, looking dreadfully frightened,
and called someone on the room’s telephone. Aftera whispered argument with the person on the
other end, he hung up the phone and turned to faceus.
“My, what good news. I am not able to fulfill youroriginal request, but…” he said,
smiling.
Relieved by the apparent progress, I breathed a sighof relief. “Thank you very much.”
“I spoke to the minister’s secretary just now, andby a stroke of luck, it appears that my
superiors are currently at lunch with the Chief ofthe Public Security Bureau. We would be happy
to negotiate if that request were to come from him.My, but how lucky we are.”
“... What?”
“Your police chief will be here shortly. Please makeyourself comfortable until he arrives.”
Still wiping his sweating brow, the attaché reassuringlybeamed at us.
…This was bad.
This was very bad.
The Chief of the Public Security Bureau held the bureau’stop position as its
superintendent general. But top position or no, theylikely knew next to nothing about this bomb
scandal threat. Even if they did, they most certainlydid not know of us or our attempts to take
information from foreign secret intelligence agencies.
And that was to say nothing of us ordinary citizensattempting to pass as PSB officers.
“Ah, well, Mr. Attaché. Excuse me, but… that wouldnot work for us.”
“What? Oh, no, no, you have no need to worry. Eventhe secret service boys can’t possibly
refuse the Chief of Police. Don’t worry about a thing.”
What could I do? Everything would be ruined if theChief of Police showed up.
“That really won’t do for us. That is because… well,I’m trying to say. Um.”
“I am this man’s editor. I sympathize with your pain,but as you can see, he won’t listen to
a thing you say. I’m sorry, but will you please delivera message for me? I believe he will give up
once an official of power delivers their verdict.”
The drained, half-dazed clerk sighed and staggeredout of her chair with a nod. “Please…
please wait a moment.”
I thought that no one of any higher power than herwould have wanted to deal with Dazai
either. I entirely understand the feeling. I feltsympathetic towards them.
57
Our wait was short. When
the clerk returned, she ushered
Dazai and I into another room
with a “This way, please.”

“Your little stunt has

troubled us greatly.”
After we were led into a
separate reception room designed
for diplomatic talks, we found a
bald, Caucasian man waiting for
us. The business card he proffered
to us named him the Third
Attaché. Not a bad catch, I
thought.
However, it still wasn’t
enough. He did not have the
clearance to know confidential
secret intelligence. This is where
the real game began.
“I understand your
position,” I said, bowing my head.
Knowing that his culture did not
place an importance on bowing as
ours did, I judged my action might
bewilder him and put him off ease.
“Political refugees from this
peaceful country are all but
unheard of. You would surely hear
the same if you corroborated with the Ministry ofForeign Affairs as well. It is therefore-”
“Oh, enough of that already. Yeah, sorry about allthat, pops, but we needed to be seen
separately. The truth is, I’m not actually an author.”
I pulled an ID card out of my breast pocket. It wasmade of black cloth and bordered in
golden letters.
“We are members of the Metropolitan Police DepartmentPublic Security Bureau.”
“The… the PSB?” the attaché squeaked, and no wonder.If your receiving country’s
security police showed up on your doorstep, somethinghad gone terribly wrong.
“Circumstances exist such that we were unable to contactyou in the normal way.
However, we are indeed the police; please feel freeto verify our identification.”
I displayed the card to him. The gold writing namedme a police officer next to a
photograph bearing the same claim.
The attaché took my card and compared me to the photo.
Of course, the ID was fake. I had created it identicalto a real officer’s ID with my Ability.
Therefore, the attaché could not spot the lie fromit.
Now our acting would have to be just as fool proof.
58
“Due to unavoidable circumstances, it is absolutely necessary we receive secret access to
American security information. I am asking for informationfrom American secret service agencies
regarding expert bomb manufacturers locatedin our country. This is a security matter of utmost
importance to us, so I ask for your quick cooperation.”I blurted out my pre-memorized speech in
a single breath.
“This… this is absurd.”
“I agree; it is.” I continued to press him. “If youdo not have access to this knowledge,
please forward us along to someone who does.”
“The embassy does indeed have frequent dealings withsecret service agents… but I can’t
authorize it as simply as all that.”
“We don’t have a moment to waste arguing. This isa critical moment for us. Hundreds of
people could lose their lives.”
The attaché's face paled when he heard the words “hundredsof people”. What a
kind-hearted fellow.
“P-please give me a moment.” He wiped his brow ofsweat, looking dreadfully frightened,
and called someone on the room’s telephone. Aftera whispered argument with the person on the
other end, he hung up the phone and turned to faceus.
“My, what good news. I am not able to fulfill youroriginal request, but…” he said,
smiling.
Relieved by the apparent progress, I breathed a sighof relief. “Thank you very much.”
“I spoke to the minister’s secretary just now, andby a stroke of luck, it appears that my
superiors are currently at lunch with the Chief ofthe Public Security Bureau. We would be happy
to negotiate if that request were to come from him.My, but how lucky we are.”
“... What?”
“Your police chief will be here shortly. Please makeyourself comfortable until he arrives.”
Still wiping his sweating brow, the attaché reassuringlybeamed at us.
…This was bad.
This was very bad.
The Chief of the Public Security Bureau held the bureau’stop position as its
superintendent general. But top position or no, theylikely knew next to nothing about this bomb
scandal threat. Even if they did, they most certainlydid not know of us or our attempts to take
information from foreign secret intelligence agencies.
And that was to say nothing of us ordinary citizensattempting to pass as PSB officers.
“Ah, well, Mr. Attaché. Excuse me, but… that wouldnot work for us.”
“What? Oh, no, no, you have no need to worry. Eventhe secret service boys can’t possibly
refuse the Chief of Police. Don’t worry about a thing.”
What could I do? Everything would be ruined if theChief of Police showed up.
“That really won’t do for us. That is because… well,I’m trying to say. Um.”
The attaché stared at me in bewilderment.
“The chief can’t come due to… certain circumstances.”
“Oh, really? And what would those circumstances be?”
It was no use. This ad libbed excuse really wouldnot cut it.
“The chief is… incredibly busy. He has much to dotoday.”
“Yes, of course he must be. But they said on the phonethat it would be no trouble for him
to come today.”
59
“Yes, they may have said that, but that is not what they meant. Despite what they say, he
has… you know, this and that going on.”
“Huh…?”
“All sorts of things, like… he accidentally spenttoo long catching up with an old friend,
and he needs to go buy his dog more food, and… heneeds to turn in papers at the town hall.”
“Is he a housewife?” the puzzled attaché asked, tiltinghis head. Oh lord, even I didn’t
know what I was saying.
“At- at any rate, the chief mustn't know about thisissue.”
“He mustn’t know…? Do you mean to say that you aredoing this without your superiors’
knowledge?”
“Not exactly… well, no, we did come in secret.”
“Why, that’s terrible. Why is that?”
“It was an accident.”
“An accident?” he squawked.
“Yes, it was an accident. Well, you see, it is a bitof an emergency, so we accidentally
forgot to tell them. So when it comes right down toit, I mean, it’s a bit of an emergency… and
we accidentally forgot to tell them.”
“Why are you repeating yourself?”
“I- I can’t say anything else for reasons of confidentiality.Anyway, please contact your
secret service agent!”
Who knew what would happen if I kept babbling?
“This is absurd. Your purpose for the agent is confidentialas well. And your explanation
is… well…”
“My goodness… I suppose we have no other choice.”Dazai bent forward, sighing in
disappointment. “My good sir. Let me explain in placeof my tongue-tied fool of an assistant. I’m
afraid we really have no choice but to keep this asa secret from the chief. We have reason to
believe the bomber has planted a spy somewhere withinthe PSB, particularly at the chief’s side.
“What? How can this be?”
“This is why we are depending on your cooperationto keep it a secret. We are working
with an inner-division inspector to pinpoint the perpetratorand the spy within the PSB. If the
chief comes here today and the spy catches wind oftheir blown cover, we stand in danger of the
bomb detonating. We must locate the bomb before thatcan happen.”
The attaché paled as he listened to Dazai’s speech.
“That is… indeed an issue of grave concern. But whydid you not inform me of this
earlier?” His eyes flicked to me as he spoke.
“He could not tell you for fear of disclosing theentire incident. The man is a poor liar, but
that, too, is for secrecy and non-disclosure. If youwere in our shoes, would you take your
concern of a spy among your own superiors to the Japanesepolice?”
The attaché mumbled, “Perhaps not…”
“We have narrowed down our list of suspects to includeonly those capable of
manufacturing a horrible bomb of that caliber. Weknow the criminal has already committed a
great act of international terrorism. This is an investigationcritical to worldwide security, even
the safety of America itself. We wish to cooperatewith your nation’s secret intelligence agencies
in order to eradicate the anti-government factionswithin our own police force. Would you be so
kind as to assist us?”
60
“I understand. You have my full support.”
Dazai… you’re incredible, I thought.
The attaché rose to his feet in a hurry and usheredus along with a, “Let me show you to
him. This way please.”
He led us to a private office room in the embassy’sbasement.
He said, “Please wait a moment,” with a nervous expressionand hurried out, leaving us
behind.
We recognized the young man who finally entered theroom to receive us.
“I wish you would quit bullying our attaché. He’sa good man. And, if I may add, an
ordinary good man.”
“You were… you were watching baseball in the waitingroom…. Are you the American
secret service agent?”
It was the Caucasian man in the black cap. Yes, thiswas the one who had lounged around
in apparent boredom earlier.
“My ID says I’m the janitor,” he said while grabbingand showing us the name tag on his
chest. “So? What are you doing poking around here?Shouldn’t you be investigating a bomb
threat, Armed Detective Agency?”
Dazai and I exchanged glances.
“You knew?”
“It’s my job to keep on top of issues that arise herein Japan. That’s to say nothing of the
fact that news of an ability organization runningaround like headless chickens all morning has
already reached the other side of the globe. I’vebeen monitoring you ever since the moment you
stepped foot inside the embassy.”
So they really say that outside of the books and movies,I marveled.
“We’re looking for a person threatening to detonatea bomb within the city,” I said. “This
person once used a similar bomb overseas.”Don’t youhave records to this effect? According to
the criminal, this is a bomb capable of killing overa hundred people with ‘an unquenchable
white flame as bright as the fallen Sun’-”
“Yeah… It’s gotta be him,” the secret service mansaid with a shake of the head.
“Do you know who this is?”
“An unquenchable flame and a white light means it’sAlamta’s aluminum powder mix.
Here’s his file.”
He removed a stack of papers from a cabinet.
“Zadkiel Alamta. He’s of Japanese descent. Used todo business making bombs for
terrorist groups in the Middle East. We’ve been keepingtabs on him ever since he came to Japan
a year ago.”
“And you didn’t notify the PSB?” I asked as I perusedthe files.
“We had our reasons. We wanted to catch him ourselves.He was setting off his own
bombs and selling them to other terrorist groups aswell. If we got a hold of his list of customers,
we’d be able to round up an entire crew of anti-Americanadvocates.”
I flipped over a page. On its reverse was a photographof Alamta’s face and details of his
previous bombs.
“What an evil device,” I snarled through gritted teeth.“If this detonated in Yokohama, the
death toll would not end at one hundred people.”

61
The file said that Alamta’s method was to mix together a slurry bomb from aluminium
powder and plant it inside of a car. He then would load the car with several hundred kilos of blast
powder and remotely detonate it with a wireless device.Ammonium nitrate served as his main
ingredient while armor piercing blasting powder servedas an aid. It is possible, the file
continued, to refine large quantities of both ingredientscheaply.
Alamta uses aluminum powder in order to ensure totalcasualties for all nearby persons.
Aluminium powder facilitates combustion, which meansthe fires burn strongly while emitting a
great white light. At the same time, it also disperseson the shockwave at temperatures reaching
600oC which cooks to death the body of anyone it passesthrough. To top it all off, aluminum is a
kind of metal that combusts in water to form hydrogengas. In other words, efforts to put out the
flames with water would only spread them further.
“An unquenchable flame and as bright as the fallenSun” indeed. This bomb was the work
of a devil.
If such a bomb were to go off in the densely populateddowntown areas, then the death toll
(including that from subsequent blackouts or accidents)could easily surpass a thousand.
Furthermore, a bomb carried via an automobile couldeasily slip past police surveillance.
We could not let it be detonated within Yokohama.
I asked, “Where is Alamta now?”
“He gave my colleagues the slip two days ago, andwe don’t know where he is now. He
could be anywhere at this point.”
Shit, so in order to find the bomb, we needed to lookfor Alamta first.
But still, even learning his name and background wasprogress. It was highly probable that
this Alamta was our Azure Messenger.
It was still unclear as to why Alamta was threateningthe Agency. Perhaps he resented us
because one of the cases we resolved led to a cluetowards his arrest.
“So? What is the cost of this information, sir?” Dazaiasked with a small grin.
“Nothing. I can hardly turn a blind eye to the deathsof hundreds of Japanese civilians. I
gladly give you this information for the sake of justice.”
“I don’t buy it. Or at any rate, my sourpuss of acompanion doesn’t buy it,” Dazai smirked.
He had a good point. An American secret service agent’sduty was to American safety and
prosperity only.
The agent spent a few moments in contemplation andthen spoke. “Don’t turn him over to
the PSB if you nab him. Give him to us instead. Iwant him to cough up every detail for the people
he’s worked for.”
“You don’t want the police to take him under custody?Is that correct?” I frowned. “If he is
the one responsible for this case, shouldn’t Japaneseforces interrogate him as well?”
“That’s not it, Kunikida,” Dazai said. “They’re notgoing to interrogate him. They’re
going totorturehim for information. You know, thatsort of thing which is illegal by
international law. They can’t do that if they cooperatewith the police. That’s why they want him
detained off the record.”
I stared in silence at the agent in front of me. Hestared back, expressionless, and made no
comment. Was he not about to refute Dazai’s claim?
Immoral criminals weren’t the only lawbreakers inthis world. But an ordinary citizen like
me could never change the mind of a foreign secretservice agency with a simple lecture.

62
“This is an unofficial meeting. You didn’t give any information to anyone. Therefore, we
are under no obligation to repay you. Come, Dazai,we’re leaving.”
I walked to the door.
“Identify yourselves at the reception desk as ‘FenimoreTransportation’ the next time you
come in. They’ll come get in touch with me,” the agentcalled. “It was quite impressive watching
you land yourselves a clue. If that Agency gig doesn’twork out, give me a call. I’d like to scout
you for a job in the secret service.”
“My, my. What do you think about that, Kunikida?”Dazai teased.
“They aren’t going to hire you for a position whereyou don’t so much as lift a finger
when you hear of a bomb.”
I left the room without waiting for a response. Theagent didn’t deign to give me one.

Dazai and I returned to the Agency to process ournew information.

There were approximately two hours left until oursundown deadline.
We needed to find Alamta and make him cough up thelocation of this bomb - and all
within two hours.
However, we did have good news. The Agency informedus we were saved.
The moment I heard the news, I was convinced we wouldbe able to stop the bomb in
time.

“Ah ha ha, you’re all hopeless! You really can’t handlea single case without me!”
I heard the familiar raucous laughter the moment Istepped into the office.
“Ranpo! What about the Kyuushuu case?”
“It wasn’t even a case. I only needed one look atthe corpse to know the culprit, so I
solved it and came home in a jiffy.
He sipped a glass of water while answering as if hehad no other care in the world. Yes,
this carefree man was none other than the senior detectiveRanpo Edogawa.
“I heard all about you, Kunikida. All this runningin circles for one little bomb, huh?
Come on now, do I have to hold your hand and walkyou through everything? It’s all your fault
that I had to come home without doing any sightseeingin Kyuushuu first. I wanted to try a hot
spring egg!”
“I apologize. However, your help is crucial.”
“Mine, you say?”
“Yes… we have a case we are unable to crack on ourown… I’m sorry, but I must ask you
to help with your unrivaled talent, Ranpo.”
Ranpo looked me up and down and sighed deeply. “Geez!Well, if I must! Nah, don’t be
sorry, Kunikida; it’s my fault for being too competent.My Super Deduction is the best in the
world, so it’s no wonder you have to rely on it!”
He thumped my shoulder, roaring with laughter.
“I completely agree with everything you said.” I boweddeeply.
“K-Kunikida, are you all right?” Dazai fretted. “Areyou faking this?”
Faking this? What was he talking about? Ranpo wasright.
“Dazai, give him the files.”
“Oh, yes. Here you go. I’m Dazai, the new guy. It’snice to meet you.”

63
“Oh yeah, I heard about you. Keep your eyes peeled for a case out there. I’ll solve it for
you.”
As Ranpo took the file, something about Dazai suddenlycaught his eye.
“Hey, rookie. Uh, Dazai, was it…? What’d you do beforethis job?”
“Pardon?”
Ranpo’s face was blank. He stared at Dazai as if lookingfor something.
“Not much once I finished with school. I mostly loafedaround a lot.”
Ranpo continued to steer at him as if he said nothing.Finally, after a few seconds, he said,
“Really? That’s fine, then. Okay, go work hard.” Hebegan laying out the files on his desk as if
nothing ever happened.
What was that?
“Hey, Dazai, what was that about?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. By the way, what sortof Ability does Ranpo have?”
Changing the topic to get away from explaining yourself,eh, Dazai?
“His Ability is called Super Deduction. It’s incredible.With it he can see the truth of a
case with a single glance.”
“Are you serious?!”
So it seemed even Dazai could be startled.
“I am. Ranpo has many devoted followers even in thehighest ranks of the government and
the police force who call on him when they have atough case to crack. He’s the backbone of the
Agency.”
“It’s hard to believe a claim like that right offthe bat,” Dazai mumbled, looking only
halfway convinced.
“Watch and learn.”
“Kunikida!” Ranpo barked. “You want me to find thebomb with Super Deduction, right?”
“Yes. We have no time. The bomb is our top priority.We’ll defuse it as soon as you find
it.”
“So I don’t need to track down this Alamta guy?”
“The bomb is more important than anything else.”
“Good!” He chuckled. “Sorry. Now that I’m here, yourwild goose chase was all for
nothing. Dazai, bring me those glasses.”
Ranpo put on the black glasses Dazai passed him. Thoseglasses were necessary to
activate his Ability.
He narrowed his eyes.
All of creation was laid out before his eyes, andhe became an oracle receiving the
thoughts of a god.
“Super Deduction.”
He sat in silence for a while before putting downhis glasses and mumbling, “I see.”
“Oh! Do you really?” Dazai cried from behind Ranpo.He released the breath he had held
while apparently spellbound by Ranpo’s Ability.
Ranpo crooked a finger. I pulled an enormous map ofYokohama from a bookcase and
spread it out over the desk.
A devil of a weapon capable of ending over one hundredlives and the professional who
crafted it, the apostle of screaming and panic - whatdiabolic place were they stationed?

64
A train station, a large hospital, a school - perhaps even a skyscraper, the city hall, or a
shopping mall. The awful possibilities crossed mymind one after the after.
“The bomb is-”
Ranpo’s finger descended on the map. I watched withbated breath.
“-here.At this fishing tackle shop.”
……. Huh?
A fishing tackle shop?
Was I mishearing something? Perhaps this was reallysome sort of top secret facility or a
shop dealing in dangerous substances?
“... I see. Incredible,” Dazai murmured. “I see, Isee it now! Ranpo, your Ability is the real
deal! Yes, the bomb has to be at the tackle shop!Come on, Kunikida, let’s hurry!”
“Seeing something this awesome makes you excited,huh, rookie?”
“Yes! You’re incredible; there’s no doubt in my mindthat you’re an exceptional detective!
You’re the best. I’m so glad you’re here! Now, let’sgo, Kunikida. What are you sitting around
looking dumbfounded for? If we leave now, we’ll makeit before sundown!”
“Hey… Dazai, wait-”
“I’ll explain on the way! Hurry! Chop chop!”
“Good luck!” Ranpo called.
Dazai dragged me by the sleeve out the door.
We drove off in one of the company cars towards thetackle shop. I drove so as to prevent
Dazai turning the car into a murder machine.
“Now explain yourself, Dazai. What were you goingon about back there?” I asked Dazai,
currently sitting in the passenger seat.
“Of course I’ll explain, but surely you don’t doubtRanpo’s deduction?”
“Well, no, since Ranpo is never wrong. The bomb willbe at the tackle shop. But why did
you believe that too?”
Ranpo’s Ability allowed him to perceive the truth.It had never failed us before. But my
concern was with what convinced Dazai of that.
“It was obvious once I saw the map.”
I thought back to that map. There was nothing in thesurrounding area but roads, business
offices, and small shops. The damage would not havebeen small, but this was hardly brutal
enough for a national bomb threat.
“Quit trying to test me. I have a great deal of otherthings on my mind right now. Tell me
already.”
“I also thought, after looking over the files, thatan international terrorist like Alamta must
want to cause a large scale explosion. He also neveruses the same place twice. Remember some
of the other ones? A tourist’s five-star hotel, amilitary communications base, and the foundation
of a high-rise building, just to name a few. He alwayspicks locations which have the greatest
possible effect on his target. And so what is he aimingfor this time?”
“Don’t put on airs; spit it out already!”
“Alamta’s target is - the oil storage facility.”
The words hit me with all the force of a mighty hammerblow.
Yokohama’s oil combine!
Of course. How did I not notice it before?

65
Yokohama, as one of Japan’s most distinguished port cities, is the most prominent place
for ship fuel transport in the country. A huge area of the bay coast is dedicated to the storage of
oil and natural gas. This fuel sustains industry forthe entire Kanto region, colossal quantities of
which are carried in and stored here at all hoursof the night and day.
To make matters even worse, the combine is surroundedby chemical processing plants for
crude oil, iron, and steel, along with an oil refineryplant which altogether power much of
Japan’s most notable industries.
I imagined an explosion occurring nearby and the storagetanks catching fire. It would
certainly have spread to ignite the entire port area.It would have likely taken several days to put
out and would have gone down in history as the worstindustrial fire ever recorded. The chemical
fires would have been a challenge to extinguish withwater alone and would have caused
long-term damage. There would also have been humancasualties, and above all, the effects on
the economy would have been nothing short of unfathomable.
“I see now. So you were impressed with Ranpo for thiscorrect deduction?”
“No.”
Huh?
“I was amazed that Ranpo managed to discover sucha novel idea of aiming for the oil
combine without using an Ability.”
“Then how?”
Dazai chuckled. “What surprised me more than anythingwas thatSuper Deduction isn’t
an Ability.”
What?
“What are you talking about? Don’t say such foolishthings. How could he have possibly
pulled that off without an Ability?”
“That’s why it’s so amazing, I tell you! To tell youthe truth, I crept up behind him while
he was making his deductions and touched his hair.”
“What?”
I remembered seeing Dazai standing behind Ranpo theentire time. But when did he-
“As you know, my Ability negates other Abilities whenI touch their user. I only need to
touch a single body part, and then they can no longeruse their superhuman powers. So in other
words-”
Ranpo’s Super Deduction really was no Ability?
“Then that was-”
“That wasregular deduction. Just a single personinstantaneously drawing a logical
conclusion on the basis of observations and inference.He had a map of Yokohama, our Alamta
file, and a knowledge of fires. He threw those alltogether and formed his conclusion in a blink of
the eye. He’s like a legendary detective characterin a novel - no, for the character’s book ends
when the case is solved. Then I don’t think any fictionalcharacter could hold a candle to Ranpo’s
powers of observation which let him find the bombwithout going to the crime scene or meeting
the suspect.”
That was just deduction, he said?
Not even an Ability or a supernatural phenomenon,but only the result of ordinary
thought?
“Is that even possible? How does-”

66
“That’s why I was amazed. That would be commonplace for an Ability user. Impressive,
to be sure, but nothing shocking. Yet Ranpo achieved that with the same reasoning anyone could
use. Alamta evaded the American surveillance two daysago. That’s not enough time for him to
have gained permission to enter the oil storage facilityor disguise himself as one of the workers.
The most simple thing would have been to rent a carwith the cash he had on hand, load it with
the bomb, and leave it in a parking lot close to thestorage facility. If the bomb’s range of damage
is limited to a two hundred meter radius, the onlyplace close enough on the map of the harbor
is-”
“The fishing tackle shop?”
“Correct. Besides the wind direction, the challengeof detecting the bomb there is his other
main reason for planting it there. My, but what powersof observation to determine that with a
moment’s look! And even Ranpo himself treats it asan Ability. Really, what an incredible
person. I should be as diligent.”
I finally understood Dazai’s admiration. Certainly,a level of divine talent is nothing out of
the ordinary for an Ability. But Ranpo’s deductivepowers were a different story. He didn’t have
a mere ten or twenty cases under his belt at thispoint. And in each of those cases, all he needed
was a single glance at the
information in order to uncover the
truth - and that was from pure
deductive reasoning. Calling it
miraculous didn’t even begin to do
it justice; it was an unbelievable
feat.
This ordinary man was more
powerful than an Ability user. I
couldn’t think of anyone else with
such genius in the nation - no, in
the entire world.
But that being said-
I glanced at Dazai in the
passenger seat.
“This is the first time I’ve
ever seen you surprised by
someone else’s skill.”
“Oh, really? I’m often
surprised. Once I went to pick up a
clam with my chopsticks, and it
was still alive. Now that scared the
daylights out of m-”
“That’s not what I meant.
You always seem like you can see
everything there is to know about
everyone.”
I had the feeling that while
Dazai played dumb with his
67
unique mannerisms, his actions were somehow areflection of his philosophical view of the
world. I didn’t understand why, but there was alwayssomething artificial about Dazai’s
emotions. Was this man hiding an ability to see anythingand everything behind his wayward
mannerisms?
“Well, I suppose it’s true that I know just abouteverything about you, Kunikida. I don’t
think you can surprise me anymore. That’s becauseyou’re far too simple and straightforward to
ever think about yourself.”
“What was that?!”
“See, even that reaction was honest. There you go.And I can predict you’re going to be
asking yourself in private later, ‘Am I really thatsimple?’ Once again, there you go.”
“You little-”
I wanted to retaliate somehow, but I had the awfulsuspicion he would respond with
“Exactly as I predicted.”
“Well, in that case, I’ll make sure to shock you.My power will exceed your expectations.”
“I will look forward to that. How about if you actuallyshock me, I’ll take you drinking?”
“You said it, not me. Don’t forget now.”
“I won’t forget. After all, I don’t stand to loseanything either way. Look, there’s the tackle
shop coming up.”
I slowed the car and parked it on a side road fromwhich we could see the shop.

I stepped out of the car and faced the shop. Onlyone hour remained until sundown. If we
didn’t run into trouble, I assumed we would make itin time.
“How do we find the right car?”
“It’s simple. We should look for a big minivan withtinted windows to hide whatever is
inside.”
I cautiously walked to put a bit of distance betweenmyself and the company car. We
couldn’t discard the possibility that someone layin wait to guard the bomb.
The tackle shop was closed for the day, so only adozen or so cars were scattered through
the parking lot. None of them were occupied. The entireparking lot lay bathed in shadow due to
the slope of the western side of the lot.
When I turned my head, I saw the oil tanks toweringimmediately behind me and the
ocean beyond them. The closest tank couldn’t havebeen more than 100 meters away. If the
parking lot went up in flames from the explosion,the fires would easily reach it.
“Kunikida, look at that car.”
I looked where Dazai was pointing. It was a smallcommercial vehicle. Its license plate
revealed it to be a rental car. Even from far away,I could tell it had tinted windows. Also, even
though there appeared to be no one inside, the car’stires betrayed that it carried several hundred
kilos more than its neighbors.
I emblazoned the words “radio jammer” onto a notebookpage, tore it off, and focused on
it. The paper immediately transformed into a portableradio wave inhibitor.
“Dazai. Put this near that car, and be mindful ofbooby traps. I’m going to scope out the
area.”
The jammer’s shape resembled that of a cellphone.However, this device interfered with
radio waves and prevented nearby devices from receivingor transmitting signals. Its range had a
radius of 500 meters. It would block the remote activationsignal once it was near the bomb.

68
I lifted my handgun and began searching near the parking lot for the enemy.
As alert as I was for enemy interference, I saw nosigns of an enemy ambush or any
snipers. Instead, I discovered a surveillance camerahidden in the grass. It was a smaller, wireless
version of the kind we found in the ruined hospital.This proved to me without a doubt that this
was the bomb’s location.
I lifted my head when I heard sudden voices.
What was that?
A small crowd of people was forming across the road.Approximately ten people formed a
loose circle around some object at the circle’s center.Their uneasy expressions gave me a
horrible premonition.
I concealed my gun and approached the group. I pushedmy way through the muttering
throng and saw the object which attracted their attention.

My breathing stopped.
The object that lay before me shouldn’t have beenpossible.
It was Alamta’s corpse.

“The jammer’s in position, Kunikida. What’s next-”Dazai called over his shoulders, but
he, too, fell silent once he saw the body.
How?
How could he be lying here dead?
I stepped up to the corpse and examined it. Livormortis had not set in. The jaw had not
locked post death. Body warmth still clung to it underthe armpits. Clearly, he had died only just
before we arrived.
Beyond that, the body had no obvious injuries. I couldfind nothing hinting at the cause of
his death. Instead, a series of black numbers - “00”,scratched all over his body - stood out on his
skin like flecks. What could those mean? Were theytattoos, or perhaps-
“Kunikida. The police bomb squad will be here soon.Let’s leave this up to the experts,”
Dazai said, placing a hand on my shoulder.
I hesitated. “All right.”
I searched the body, but I only found a handful ofsmall change and a counterfeit driver’s
license, nothing useful to speak of.
Still puzzled, Dazai and I shouldered our way pastthe growing crowd of gawkers and put
the crime scene behind us.

I thought about the situation as I drove.

Why did Alamta have to die? And who killed him?
“Kunikida, I know you’re thinking about somethingimportant, but please don’t forget to
watch the road,” Dazai said from the passenger seat.
“I know,” I responded while gripping the steeringwheel.
Let’s review the facts, I told myself.
On the surface, there were two cases: the case ofthe repeated disappearances of
Yokohama tourists and the bomb threat. Their perpetratorswere, respectively, the taxi cab driver
and Alamta. That was where the obvious ended.

69
However, an ulterior motive lurked behind both of these cases, namely a targeted scandal
at the Agency’s expense. At the moment of the Agency’sfailure, images would be broadcasted to
the entire world. I did not think the taxi driver(or Alamta, really) was involved in that. I believed
someone else was pulling their strings from behindthe curtain.
The name of this puppet master was the “Azure Apostle”.
The Apostle first controlled the taxi driver, followedby Alamta, and passed them off as
the perpetrators responsible for their crimes. Thusthe Apostle avoided dirtying their own hands
while creating the illusion of those crimes beingvoluntarily committed as part of their attack on
the Agency.
It was next to impossible for us to target this puppetmaster. They gave their proxy
criminals next to no direction and let them carryout the crimes as they saw fit. Both the driver and
the bomb maker used their own methods as bestsuited them. Perhaps they themselves were not
even aware they were being controlled.
As long as we failed to thwart the puppet master,there was sure to be a third attack sooner
or later. Yes, the Agency was able to throw a wrenchin their plans this time around. But could
we reach the Azure Apostle with so few clues?
And then there was my additional concern.
What crime could we actually charge the Apostle with?
The only crimes they themselves had committed weresecret photography and delivering
threats. They had committed no murders nor plantedany bombs themselves. It would have been
infeasible to construct a case around the Apostlecoercing the other criminals to willingly murder
or kidnap. Did I really expect them to leave any incriminatingevidence lying around? However-
It was then that my cell phone rang. It was the Presidentcalling. I pulled over to stop on
the shoulder and picked up the call.
“Kunikida? We received word from the police.The taxidriver is dead.”
What-?!
“But he’s airborne and under police supervision.”
“Correct. He suddenly began to exhibit pain duringquestioning and died without warning.
The cause of death is unclear, but the numbers “00”appeared written on his skin in black. Return
to the office at once. We must place this situationunder scrutiny.”
He hung up. My mind was awash in a storm of questionmarks.
This completely severed our connection to the AzureApostle. The person who told the
driver about the black market organ trade was ouronly clue about the puppet master, but the trail
now ran cold with the driver’s death.
It was as if the enemy knew our every move. They werealways one step ahead of the
investigation.
They murdered Alamta just before we arrived at thebait shop, and now the driver, our last
clue, was gone as well.
Just who was our enemy? They had to be someone whoknew everything about the
Agency down to the last detail of our actions.
They had to be someone capable of meddling with thecrime scenes and controlling the
events from the shadows.
“You’re making a scary face, Kunikida. Are you okay?”Dazai asked, but I didn’t have it
in me to respond.

70
How was the enemy obtaining this insider information? How were they staying ahead of
the Agency?
My cellphone rang again, jolting me from my thoughts.It was from Rokuzou.
“Hey, Specs. You got a minute?”
“What is it?”
“It’s… about that job. I finished tracking down theguy who sent those emails.”
“What?!”
This was it. The person who sent those threateningemails and pointed us towards the
kidnapping and bomb cases signed those emails as theAzure Apostle. Once we could pinpoint
the sender, the case was closed.
“To cut right to the chase, both emails were sentfrom the same computer. It was pretty
well protected, but hey, I got through somehow. Sothen-”
“Who are you talking to, Kunikida?” Dazai asked. Iheld my hand up to silence him.
“Keep going.”
“So y’know, it’s my job to track down this guy tothe bitter end, but giving you the results
was never in the job description. If you ask me about‘em, we’re gonna have a real problem.
Now if you really, really want to know-”
“Quit being full of yourself. Hurry up and tell me.”
“Fine, I’ll tell you. So the thing is-
“The emails were sent from the Agency. They came fromthe computer of that new guy,
Dazai.”
--------------------- What did he just say?
My mind froze, entirely blank.
It was impossible. Was this some sort of trap? Dazaihad been busy working with me the
entire time. He had been on the investigation theentire time-

Someone who knew everything about the Agency downto the last detail of our actions.
Someone capable of meddling with the crime scenesand controlling the events from the
shadows.
“I’ll call you back later,” I said and hung up.
“What was that for? Judging from your tone of voice,I bet that was Rokuzou, right?” “Be
quiet.”
My thoughts spun in circles.
Dazai. Osamu Dazai. The rookie Agency detective whopopped up right out of the blue.
And this series of cases all began immediately afterDazai appeared in our lives.
I turned to a friend of mine in the military police’sintelligence division, but nothing turned
up to the point of it being ominous.
It is as if someone has carefully erased his entirepast.
It was Dazai attempting to rescue the trapped kidnappingvictims in the abandoned
hospital which triggered the poisoned gas.
But even then, not so much as a glimpse of him showedup on the security footage.
How did he manage to hide from this candid photograph?
Oh, that crafty Azure Apostle. The puppet master whonever dirtied their own hands.
Brilliant mental powers. Acting skills fine enoughto hoodwink half an embassy.
Knowledge of the black market organ trade.
I started the car and resumed driving.

71
“Dazai.”
“What?”
“We’re going to take a detour.”

I turned the steering wheel and drove us onto a mountainroad.

This road was an isolated one with no watching eyes.
We drove further up the mountain into an abandonedwarehouse.
Dazai looked at the warehouse and asked, “What isthis place?”
“It’s a warehouse I’ve used before for work. It wasonce used to store industrial processing
materials, but it was left here when the company relocatedoverseas. Now nobody even comes
near it. I go here to hold private conversations.”
“Wow. Sounds fun,” Dazai said half-heartedly.
Once inside, I parked the car.
All four walls of the warehouse still stood, so Ihad no need to worry of anyone nearby
seeing in. If any reinforcements came, the sound wouldbe sure to tip me off.
“Get out,” I ordered.
Dazai stepped out without a word. Before I followedhim, I opened my handgun’s
magazine and checked the bullets.
I opened my notebook, added a few words to it, andthen left the car.
“Sure is quiet in here. This really is the spot forsecret conversations. So? What did you
want to talk abo-”
I pointed the gun at Dazai.
“... What is that gun for?”
“Take a guess.”
“Please wait, Kunikida; I’m begging you. I thoughtyou hated these kinds of jokes.”
“That I do. That’s why this isn’t a joke.”
“- What did he tell you on the phone earlier? Whateverit was, you have the wrong idea. If
you just tell me, then I’ll be able to explain thewhole thing to you.”
“Yes, tell me,” I said, readying my finger on thetrigger. “Why is that at the abandoned
hospital, when the poison gas killed the victims…you very nicely avoided having your face
caught on the security cameras?”
“Oh, that?” Dazai asked with a puzzled expression.“That’s because I happened to notice
them right as we walked in. But we noticed the kidnappingcase victims right away, so I just
couldn’t point them out to you in time. I’m sorryabout that, but-”
“Really now? So you knew what those cameras were forfrom the moment you saw
them?” I continued pressing him. “Now for my secondissue. You were the one who suggested
we go to the embassy in order to find the bomber.How did you come up with that immediately?
Was it because you already knew about Alamta?”
“My god, are you serious? Right on the nose, yes,praiseworthy, yes, but when have I
given you reason to doubt me? Where is this distrustcoming from?”
“Where did you learn about the black market organtrade syndicate?”
“Well, that was… you know, at the bar…”
“You need to learn to come up with better lies. Wasmeeting Mr. Taneda of the Special
Abilities Department really a coincidence?”
“Wait… wait, I say! Won’t you please put down thegun? Then I’ll talk.”

72
“Why were the Azure Apostle’s emails sent from your computer?! Answer me!” I
shouted.
Dazai’s face went blank.
“I see. So that really was Rokuzou on the phone? He’sgood for a kid of his age…. He’d
make a good detective someday.”
His voice was calm and didn’t display a trace of emotion- not one single trace.
I couldn’t begin to guess what Dazai’s true characterwas, not even if I tried. He was one
part an impression of a strong warrior and one partpersonification of crafty intelligence and
artifice.
Who could say if Dazai’s current persona was no morethan a feat of acting as great as the
one he displayed in the embassy?
“Give me a proper answer now, or else I’ll shoot.”
“You won’t shoot,” said Dazai with a shake of hishead. “You are a scrupulous idealist. It
is your ideal to solve all the mysteries, arrest allthe guilty parties, and deliver them to justice.
You wouldn’t shoot a possibly innocent suspect.”
“Justice is ineffective in the face of the Azure Apostle.”I knew I would be hard pressed to
have him prosecuted without him committing the kidnappingsor murders himself. “I will shoot
if that is what it is right.”
“If, perhaps, the moment arrives where you find asign of him having an otherwise wicked,
evil nature - you will shoot.”
Those were the president’s words to me.
He entrusted me with this heavy gun.
“You should do what is right.”
“Kunikida. Even supposing I were the Azure Apostleand your ideals dictate you shoot me
- you still wouldn’t be able to do it.”
A cruel light twinkled in Dazai’s eyes.
They were eyes of penetrating intelligence, eyes whichsaw through everything.
“Recall, if you will. The only things you found onAlamta’s dead body were pocket
change and a driver’s license.Then where was thebomb activation switch?”
The switch was a device which remotely activated thebomb.
Lacking that, this bomb threat was an only empty onethe entire time.
“The puppet master pulling Alamta’s strings- theyhave it.”
“Yes. And what about, just supposing, the puppet masterknows the Agency’s every
movement? Then suppose they also knew the Agency discoveredthe bomb’s hiding spot?
Wouldn’t the puppet master simply move the bomb somewhereelse and engage a backup plan?”
Dazai had slipped his hand into his right coat pocketwithout my noticing.
The hand gripped something in that pocket, but I wasn’tabout to check what it was from
this distance.
Did I want to ask if there was another bomb?
He could press that switch any time now.
Therefore I could not shoot him.
Oh, I had been too naive.
“I already know what you’re thinking. Look at this.”
I took “this” from my pocket and put it on the groundin front of me.

73
 “This is the same radio jammer I used earlier at the tackle shop. It blocks all radio waves
in a five hundred meter radius of me. Your remote detonation switch is not an exception to that
rule.”
“Wha-” Dazai began, surprise evident on his face.
Keeping my gun trained on him, I thrust my hand intoDazai’s pocket. I felt two objects
and pulled them out.
A fountain pen and a blue cloth.
“What a shame. Couldn’t fool you, could I? It’s justan ordinary fountain pen,” Dazai said
with a grin.
Yes, this was Dazai’s “favorite pen” he had flauntedat the embassy.
“I might believe you if I were like anyone else. Butyou’ll need to work a little harder to
trick your partner who already knows your methods.”
I twisted the pen cap off. Extending out of the tipwas not the ink capsule which had
originally been there but a long, thin electricalapparatus.
It was a miniature transceiver.
“Is this the detonation switch?”
“... I knew you would figure it out, Kunikida. Brilliantwork.”
Dazai’s smile was cold and inhuman.
“I’m glad that you are my partner after all.”
His words boiled my blood.
“Shut up!”
I shifted my aim and fired off a warning shot.
The bullet smacked into the floor at Dazai’s feet,but Dazai didn’t so much as pale.
“What are you trying to do?! Why did you orchestrateall this and threaten the Agency?!
What reason could you possibly have for murderingthose poor victims and planting a bomb?!
You are… you are…!”
No matter how talented he was- so talented, in fact,he had proved an exceptional partner.
No matter that.
“This is your final warning. Explain everything, orelse I shoot.”
Who was Dazai?
Who was the Azure Apostle?
The Apostle did nothing themself, but forced criminalsto commit terrible wrongdoings
and then murdered them.
They murdered criminals to-
Aspire to an ideal world.
Not with the noble hands of God, but with our ownimperfect, blood-stained hands.

74
It couldn’t be.
I looked at the blue cloth in my hand. The very samecloth I had grabbed from Dazai’s
pocket.

75
 Hadn’t I recently seen a cloth like this?
“I heard that the explosion was so large they wereunable to identify even a trace of his
body.
“Perhaps he faked his own death and ran into hiding…”
The was already aware of the Azure King’s identity.He was once an elite bureaucrat.
But it wasn’t impossible for him to have changed hisface and obfuscated his past with the
help of a professional.
Perhaps he also had methods through which he hoodwinkedthe police crime scene
analysts.
“I had one of the office staff look into Dazai’s personalhistory. However, there was
nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
Perhaps he was Dazai.
“Are you - are you the Azure King? Did you hatch thisambitious plot to exact your
revenge on the Agency?”
He said, “Please shoot me.”
Dazai’s smile moved beyond mere happiness. He worean expression of tranquility.
“This is your victory, Kunikida. Shoot me now. That’swhat you said you would do, and it
is the right thing to do. And you have the correctqualifications.”
“What qualifications do you mean?!”
“I don’t mind as long as you’re the one shooting me.”
This was wrong. I didn’t want to do this. But as longas Dazai refused to tell me the truth-
“If, perhaps, the moment arrives where you find asign of him having an otherwise wicked,
evil nature-”
This was wrong. I needed to find the truth.
“You will shoot.”
He said he wouldn’t mind being shot as long as I shothim?
Oh.
So this was what was going on.
“I understand now.”
I aimed the gun to point in between Dazai’s eyes.
I pulled my arms into my sides, shut one eye, andfocused my aim. I could not miss at this
distance.
“I will shoot you, Dazai. I truly will. You mightat least show a bit of fear.”
Dazai’s calm smile never wavered. He said once more,“Please shoot me.”
I hesitated no longer.
I pulled the trigger.
The bullet exploded from the barrel.
My aim was true. It cleaved the air in two beforestriking Dazai dead between the eyes.
The impact knocked his body backwards. It floatedin the air for a moment before it
collapsed to the ground.
I lowered the gun. A stream of white smoke waftedfrom the barrel.
I stood there in silence.
I had not missed, and the bullet had struck Dazaiin the center of his skull.
There was no way I could have missed at that distance.

76
 I put the safety back on to prevent it from accidentally firing and returned it to my breast
pocket.
I took the detonation switch disguised as a pen whichhad come from Dazai and smashed
it with all my might. Now it was crushed flat in mypalm, its function effectively destroyed.
I needed to think about my next move. I began walkingback to the car.
I had only gone a few steps when my cell phone rang.Now that I was out of range of the
jammer, messages could come through once more.
I blankly checked the caller ID. It was from the Agency.
“Hello.”
Dr. Yosano was on the other end of the line.
“Is this Kunikida? We’re in big trouble! We receivedanother threat from that oaf who
calls himself the Azure Apostle! I’ll forward it toyou, so get moving now!”
“But I’m-”
The phone switched screens to show me her forwardedtext, cutting off the call.
I pulled up the letter, and this is what it said.

Dear Sirs and Madams,

I must request your efforts a third time.
I have taken the liberty of having an interferencesignal transmitted to the engine and yoke
of a passenger aircraft currently in flight knownas JA815S.
I ask that you neutralize this signal and ensure thesafety of its passengers.
My apologies, but I thank you for your understanding.
Yours,
The Azure Apostle
“An… airplane?”
What awful timing.
Stopping an attack on an airplane would be even moredifficult than the kidnapping case
or the bomb case. It would be nigh-on impossible toboard the craft and remove a transmission
device itself. One would need a military fighter aircraftfor that. But no, even with the army’s
support, a passenger plane would be sure to have countermeasuresagainst skyjackers. Back to
the drawing board.
Suppose the engine and steering of a plane ceasesto function, I said to myself. What
exactly would that entail?
It is possible for aircraft, once in flight, to shutoff its thrust and cruise for a short period of
time on its lift alone. But even then, if the planecan’t be piloted, it will lose altitude and
eventually crash. If steering is impossible, evenperforming a relatively safer water landing is
tricky. Never once in the history of the universehad a plane crashed to the ground and had all of
its passengers survive.
This third threat promised that inescapable fate.
There was only one way I could stop it.
I looked over to Dazai’s body.
It lay where he had fallen, facing upwards with itseyes closed.
I walked over to it.

“How long are you going to play dead for? Get up,fool. We need to get moving.”
I kicked his body.
77
“Aww, come on! Can’t I sleep five more minutes?” he pouted.

“Is it the next emergency?”

“Uh-huh. The real culprit threatened us with a planecrash. If you’re not responsible for all
of this, then help me.”
Dazai grinned with his eyes closed. “I knew you wouldn’tshoot me with your real gun.”
“You are despicable. That was a fine piece of strategy,but you didn’t need to rope me into
your little skit.”
I tossed Dazai the gun with which I had shot him.
He reached up and caught it.
Itreverted back to a notebook page in his hand.
“But how did you know for sure? The president gaveme an identical model. What if I
shot you with that instead?”
“Because I trust you, of course. There’s no way thattheprim and proper Kunikida would
ever threaten me with a real gun.”
“You sully the word ‘trust’.”
The gun I had fired at Dazai with was created fromone of my notebook pages and Doppo
Poet.
I created the bullet likewise so it would vanish theinstant it hit his body.
“What tipped you off?” he asked.
“What you told me.”
Dazai didn’t really mean that he wouldn’t have mindedme shooting him. I had learned
from my time working with him that a good 90% of suchdisgusting lines as these were only
meant to tease. What he was really saying, practicallyjumping with joy for, was “kill me with
that.” It was an odd situation, but in truth, Dazaiwas an odd man.
“It was also the pen. This isn’t a detonation switch.It’s a listening device, correct?”
Dazai beamed. “How insightful of you.”
I didn’t go around putting on airs by calling myselfa detective. Once I looked at it up
close, I could see it was no detonation switch.
Dazai acted out this scene in order to disable thelistening device with my signal jammer.
“When did they switch this with the other pen youhad?”
“At the tackle shop. Remember when we pushed asideall those people who came to gawk
at the body? It was one of them who did it. Crap,and it really was my favorite pen! You should
reimburse me for it, even though it was awfully hardto write with.”
“Is that when you acquired this blue cloth as well?”
They probably intended to frame Dazai as the mastermindof these events.
However, they were not successful.
“Look now. You knew they touched you but didn’t eventell me you so much as passed by
them?”
“Of course,” he answered. “Rather, it was for themoment when you thought I had been
playing the role of the puppeteer the entire time.I let them get close enough to me to plant a bug
on so I could actually plant a tracker on them. Theyhave to get up much earlier than this to
outwit me.”
Dazai had seen through the enemy’s entire plot andplayed along with it.

78
The Azure Apostle consistently used other criminals to their dirty work without letting a
drop of blood fall on their own hands. Every aspect of the kidnappings, the bomb threat, and the
murders was designed to avoid drawing suspicion tothemself.
Then who was to say that even the Apostle role couldn’tbe handed to anyone else?
That was what Dazai thought.
“I first realized something was up when the gas appearedback at the abandoned hospital.
You see,I didn’t even touch the terminal. And yet,poof! Gas. That meant that the puppeteer was
watching me and meant to frame me for it, but theyhad to have been watching remotely. Why
would they do such a thing? That was when I beganto have my suspicions.”
The Apostle intended to make acounterfeit Apostle.
And a newcomer with a murky past made the perfectscapegoat.
However, Dazai made no move to disrupt their scheme.
“The opponent that we’re dealing with will never stepinto the limelight. They destroy
every possible clue or piece of evidence. But thereis also a moment when they must make a
point of contact with the outside world. That’s themoment when they make their puppets. They
must allow themselves a single chance to contact thereal perpetrator; I am speaking of the bomb
maker and the taxi driver. That is why I became aperpetrator as well. It is the only way to catch
them. If you hadn’t realized what was really goingon, Kunikida, I would have been locked up like
a common criminal.”
Then Dazai, continuing to act like a perfect framedpuppet, disabled the listening device in
a very natural turn of events. The puppet master,now noticing the end of the transmission, surely
thought their plan worked as intended.
He only had mere moments without being monitored.
In order to throw them off their guard, he refusedto explain the situation and let me be
consumed by doubt.
Once again, I was filled with admiration.
What a remarkable man.
The enemy was likewise the embodiment of cunning inmanipulating such a veteran
bomber. One needed quite the discerning eye to seethrough the false accusations of our foe.
And yet Dazai took all that into account for his ownplan and retaliated with a scheme like
a harpoon, dragging the Apostle out of hiding.
“Well now, I’m sure the person who planted that devicecan’t stop laughing. My own
Agency doubting me and blaming me for the crime, justas they planned! And now is the perfect
time for them to make their next move.”
I nodded. The timing with the latest threat was surelyno coincidence.
Our foe must have heard my conversation with Dazaithrough the listening device and
believed I executed him. Well, that wasalmostthecase.
Then they waited for the moment of Dazai’s fall tolaunch their third threat.
“What awful timing for the Agency this would be. Wecan’t exactly hop on the plane and
put the device out of commission that way. And justwhen you had thought you had shot the man
sending the letters, it turns out you were mistaken!You would have been at a loss. It would have
been the end of the Agency.”
He was right. That was exactly how it would have goneif we had all played along with
their script.
That is to say, if anyone but Dazai had been my partner.
79
 “There’s only one method we can resort to now… follow the tracker you planted on them,
andstrike the foe in their lair!”
Dazai rose to his feet. “Catching ‘em off guard, eh?”

Leaving the listening device with the signal jammerin the warehouse, we set off in the
company car.
Dazai booted up a portable GPS tracking program. Thetracker had stopped relatively
nearby, in the mountains. I asked the Agency to gatherintelligence on the area for us. If it was
the enemy’s base, then we couldn’t ignore the possibilityof it being guarded.
But before we could hear back from the Agency, wereceived a message from the airplane.
It was a video call from some device a passenger hadserendipitously found on board the
plane.
We forwarded the call onto our own device. The screenshowed a young passenger filming
from her seat.
“I’m… I’m a p-passenger on this p-plane. This is M-mommy’sphone, but Mommy
doesn’t feel very good… so it’s m-me instead. Theairplane is f-falling, and a ton of people are
s-screaming, and crying, and…”
“Shit!” I swore.
The girl couldn’t have been more than ten years old.
The camera shook, and tears streamed down her faceas she talked.
“The captain t-told us to stay in our seats…. butno one’s l-listening, and some people are
f-fighting…”
“You have reached us on the ground. Can you hear me?I know it must be very hard for
you, but please tell me what is happening on the airplanenow.”
“It- it keeps d-dropping. T-they said the engine’snot w-working and they c-can’t steer it.”
The girl’s face was a mask of fear, but she seemedto sense that this was critical for her
survival and described it to us like her life dependedon it.
“Can I ask you something? A-are we all going to d-die…?I’m r-really scared.
M-mommy’s not moving, and she’s not responding tome either. S-so, please, please, do
something. Please save us…”
Dazai cut in. “Excuse me, miss. Can you hear me? We’rea team of airplane experts. It’s
okay. You’ll be all right now. We’ll make the airplanework again. What is your name?”
“Ch… Chiyo.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Chiyo. Don’t worry any more.Do you have any snacks with you?”
“Just a candy… Mama gave it to me.”
“A candy? I like candy too. And you know, I alwaysfeel better after I eat one.”
“Come on, Dazai.”
“It’s fine. Give me a moment. … Chiyo, go ahead andeat that candy slowly. Make it last.
And while you do that, please take this device tothe pilot’s cockpit. Do you know where that is?’
She nodded while wiping her tears.
“There won’t be any shouting people in there. Thenyou’ll be okay. Then your mommy
will be okay too.”
“I… can’t go by myself. Mommy’s right here.”
“Your mommy will be fine. The pilot will know whatto do. So please go find them and
give them this device. Okay?”

80
The girl hung her head, trembling, for a moment before rising, candy in hand, and finally
setting off toward the cockpit.
I gripped the steering wheel with all my might.
“This is the pilot for passenger aircraft 8185S speaking.Our engine is stopped, and we are
currently coasting on our inertia. May I ask who youare?” the pilot asked. He was a man past
forty with the look about him of an accomplished pilot.
I answered, “We are the Armed Detective Agency. Thepolice can’t make it in time, so we
are handling your situation. Please tell me what’shappening.”
“The Armed Detective Agency?” said the pilot. “Thepeople who let those kidnapping
victims die from poison gas? Oh god, will we be allright? By any chance-”
“My apologies, but we are the only ones who are fullyinformed of your situation. It will
take a few hours for the news to fully travel themilitary police chain of command.”
“We don’t have a few hours! Virtually all deviceson this plane are non-operational. Forget
turning the plane; we can’t even accelerate it. Bymy reckoning, we’ll hit the ground within an
hour!”
“Please listen to me,” I said. “This is the work ofsubversive human agents. Are there any
suspicious devices or signs of tampering in your plane?”
“... The copilot spotted a huge metal box in the cargohold. As I understand it, it is
connected to the plane’s wiring and welded to thefloor of the plane itself. We can’t break it or
remove it with the tools we have on hand.”
Now I understood. It was probably this device thatinterfered with the plane’s systems.
The criminal responsible had infiltrated one of thepassenger planes in the the airplane
hangar and had welded in a device which paralyzedall the operational systems. The device was
remotely activated after liftoff, and the rest washistory.
I remembered a paper I had once read. The old nationaldefense force was supposedly
developing equipment designed to stop enemy planesin flight; ultimately, they abandoned the
project before its completion, but it still bore astriking resemblance to this current situation.
If this was the same sort of device, then that meantit could be controlled by radio signals
from the ground. Therefore, if we disabled it viathe ground device, the plane stood a strong
chance of returning to normal operations.
I said, “Sir, we will now disable the device paralyzingyour plane. Please prepare to
ascend once you receive our signal.”
“Rodger that. But if we lose too much height, we won’thave enough time to regain
altitude. Please hurry. We have four hundred passengerson board. By my calculations, we have
one hour before crashing into Yokohama.”
One hour.
No matter how they came down, there was no way toavoid almost every single passenger
dying. Furthermore, if they crashed into any secretivetax haven on the ground, the damage
would only multiply. This was a bigger disaster inthe making than even Alamta’s bomb.
We had no time.
I floored the gas pedal.

We raced through the mountains, following Dazai’stracker.

The surrounding area was uninhabited, and the overgrownshrubbery threw shadows
across the car tires.

81
“Is this the place?”
I stopped the car. In front of me was an iron doorin the very face of the mountain itself.
This was a relic of the war, the entrance to a bombshelter and an old military installation
for the former national defense force.
Now out of use, the base lay abandoned, waiting tofall into disrepair. I understood why
our foes chose it immediately. No one would pay anyattention to people carrying machinery in
or even firing off artillery here.
Suddenly, gunshots rang out on all sides, and a stormof bullets bore down on the car. The
car’s metal body screamed under the onslaught.
“We’re under attack! Get out of the car!”
I floored the accelerator, and the car shot into motion.At the same moment, we leapt from
the car and dashed into the woods.
“That proves it! This has to be the place…”
We were being shot at with rifles from behind thecover of a rock higher up the slope.
There were three… no, four of them.
“What should we do?” Dazai shouted as he hid in theshadow of the slope.
“They’re trying to stall us! I’ll cover you; get inside!”A bullet whizzed past my ear.
I quickly sized up the situation. All the gunmen weredoing was shooting randomly from
behind cover. Their guns were good, but they couldnot hold a candle to anything like a Port
Mafia weapon.
“Doppo Poet - flash grenade!”
At this rate I would run out of pages in my poor notebook!
I tossed the grenade, and it exploded in a burst oflight over the enemies’ heads. Their
attack faltered.
I grabbed my handgun and returned fire. “Now go!”I yelled at Dazai. He snapped up and
broke into a run.

Dazai left Kunikida and sprinted into the abandonedbomb shelter.

The transmitter signal came from the maintenance buildingbeyond the shelter itself. Dazai
scrambled through a shaft and bolted across a switchyard.There he found the two-story iron
maintenance building.
The abandoned building consisted of a first-floorautomobile and airplane hangar and a
second-floor communications room overlooking the hangar.He hurried up the stairs and into the
room.
“Is it here?”
The flooring was discolored, but everything was coveredin rust except for a brand-new
hinge on the door. An empty liquor bottle sat on thedesk, and cigar ash still floated through the
air. Someone used this room frequently.
A large transmitter on the wall was lit up to indicateit was still in use.
Just as Dazai drew near it, a shadow loomed up behindhim.
A large, foreign-looking man cast it. How long hadhe stood behind Dazai, watching and
waiting?
The man had dark brown skin and a muscular build.A camellia flower was inked on one
arm. His pupils were a dark green. A pattern of oldscars ran across his bald head.
He stared down Dazai silently before barking, “Whatare you doing here?”
82
“What, you say? Well, isn’t it obvious? I’m here to warn you!” Dazai said, looking back
over his shoulder. “The detectives found this base!If you don’t hurry and get out, it’ll be your
head on the line. Where’s the boss? They’ll breakthrough the entrance in minutes! We don’t
have any time!”
He scrambled to his feet.
“I don’t recognize you,” the giant said.
“Of course you don’t. I’m a spy; no one but the bossknows who I am. You know how
they are. Everything’s top secret, right? Whatever,just hurry up and call the boss already! I’m
begging you!”
The confused look on the man’s face evaporated. “Onit,” he said.
He turned on his heel and began to leave the room,turning his back on Dazai in the
process.
Smash!
The man fell to the floor in one slow movement. Hisbald head now sported a huge, new
bruise.
Dazai stood behind him with a grin and half of a brokenliquor bottle.
“Everything about the boss is top secret. I have afeeling you’ve never even met them.”
He tossed aside the bottle and turned back to thetransmitter.
“This bad boy will only be fit for a stoplight whenI’m done with it.”

After suppressing the rifle squadron, I set off afterDazai.

Compared to the attack I had faced at the entrance,the military complex was as silent as
the tomb. Judging from the fresh footprints and tiretracks scattered here and there, this was
definitely the group’s hideout, but I couldn’t makeheads or tails enough of them to follow Dazai.
Besides, he was the one with the tracker, not me.
But just as I walked past an iron maintenance building,I heard the sound of shattering
glass.
Was that Dazai fighting an enemy?
I pressed my back to the wall and raised my gun beforeleaping through the entrance and
swiveling the muzzle back and forth, searching forthe enemy.
The first floor appeared to be an armored vehicleand aircraft hangar, but it was now
deserted, the ground bare. The second floor was likelya communications room and an office. If
the transmitter were in here somewhere, the secondfloor was the best bet, but-
Just then, my body shivered with an intense feelingof discomfort.
It felt like countless invisible bugs were crawlingaround under my skin. It was
unbearable. I fell to my knees.
I noticed a kind of pattern sketched into the groundat my feet: a collection of circles and
lines forming various figures and letters from anindecipherable ancient language. It looked like
a summoning circle from a magical grimoire for somesort of ritual. It was stepping on this, I
realized, which caused the awful sensation.
Struck by a sudden horrible intuition, I rolled upmy sleeve.
The number “39” stood out against my skin.
I checked my entire body. I found nine of the tattoo-likenumbers etched onto every part of
my skin I could see - my chest, my arms, my ankles.They were definitely not there a few
minutes ago.

83
 “Your, your numbers are late,” a reedy voice said. I reflexively pointed my gun in its
direction.
The voice’s owner was a short boy - no, a short youngman. He staggered over to me as I
kept the gun trained on him.
“Don’t move!” I yelled. “We are the Armed Detective-”I was unable to finish my
sentence as a blow I never saw coming struck me inthe side and sent me flying.
I was knocked flat. Then another blow violently slappedme into the ground once more
before slamming me into the iron wall. It contortedunder my weight.
My head spun. The world turned circles around me.Those violent attacks had thrown off
my sense of balance. I needed to retaliate-
I somehow managed to grab my handgun which had fallennear me.
A transparent shockwave hit me again and bent me backwards.My bones screamed in
agony. The gun flew out of my hands.
“You, you sure are a lively one. You must have a goodnumber on you,” the skinny young
man said. He picked up my gun and looked down itsbarrel as it were some sort of curious
object.
One thing was clear - he was an Ability user, andhis Ability was suited for long-range
fighting.
I happened to glance at one of the numbers on my skin.It now read “32”.
No way-
“The Armed Detective Agency must be pretty good attheir jobs to sniff us out. Yeah,
that’s what I call a real detective.”
He aimed the gun at me and fired off its bullets.He emptied the magazine until the firing
pin struck at empty air.
The bullets hit the ground in front of me.
“Aw man, that’s no good,” the young man said. “You’vegot a great number, so a gun’s not
gonna do the trick, huh? That’s no good at all.”
He walked toward me with a faint, morbid grin. “Thatnumber drops whenever you get
hurt. It also drops as time passes. And when it reacheszero-”
“Are you… are you the one who killed Alamta and thedriver?” I asked.
The young man cackled. “You, you really are a detective,aren’tcha?”
I looked him up and down. He was slim, blond, andclad in a parka which had seen better
days. Overall, he certainly didn’t look like the typesuited for combat.
Yet I had no doubt.
This man was the enemy boss.

Dazai fussed over the transmitter’s terminal.

“This machine is practically archaic!” he muttered.“With these frequencies and those
directions-”
A shadow moved behind his back.
“Oh shoot, it didn’t recognize the last instruction- what, can I not modify its programming
without a control key?”
An enormous fist swung through the air and struckhim in the temple.
Dazai flew like a ragdoll. He skidded across the flooruntil he collided with the desk and
stopped with a dull thud.

84
“... That’s going to leave a mark,” Dazai joked as he staggered to his feet. His smile was
gruesome. Blood trickled down his cheek.
The large man, expressionless, walked up to Dazai.His fists were like two huge hammers;
he could have been a character out of a fighting game1.
He swung his fist for another blow. Dazai pushed offfrom the desk and avoided the hit.
The fists of steel slammed into the wooden desktopand pulverized it.
“Wow, that’s strong!” Dazai called. “You should takeup being a porter.”
Dazai’s movement across the floor opened up the distancebetween himself and the giant
man.
“Oh, poor me! What a plight I am in. If I were tofight a big, manly man like you, I’d be
smashed like a china shop by a bull… but I swore Iwould rescue fair Chiyo!”2
“I will not let you use that transmitter,” the giantsnarled. He stood in Dazai’s way.
“Really now?” said Dazai. “Then I’d better run away,now shouldn’t I?”
He suddenly turned tail and sprinted away.
“Wait!” the other man cried.
Dazai dashed out the door. The large man gave chase.
As Dazai ran, he closed the door behind him. Justas the large man reached out to open it,
Dazai smashed through the door and delivered a flyingdropkick!
Unable to withstand Dazai’s weight and prevented fromany defensive maneuvers by the
door itself, the man staggered backwards. The smasheddoor rained splinters of wood down
around him.
“Strrrrrrike!” Dazai howled. He stepped forward foranother attack.
The large man recovered as quickly as if he hadn’tbeen hurt at all. He aimed a low kick at
Dazai’s knee. Dazai anticipated the kick and jumpedaway to avoid it.
“Boy, are you tough!” he called.
The man put his back into throwing a right hook. Dazaitwisted his upper body to dodge it,
but a scrap of his clothing caught in the man’s knuckles.The man dragged Dazai forward,
throwing him off balance.
“Shoot-!”
The giant drove his fist into Dazai’s stomach. Hewasted no time before winding up
another punch to finish Dazai off, and then smack!Dazai flew across the room.
After taking a blow from a man who could pulverizea desk with his bare fists, Dazai’s
body crumpled into a sideways “v”3. He crashed intothe wall on the opposite side of the room.
Blood trickled out from between his lips.
The man chased after him. His powerful arm descendedlike a club and caught Dazai’s
cheek with a backhand blow so hard it about snappedDazai’s neck.
Dazai shakily climbed to his feet.
“Not only are you a behemoth, but you’re fast as well….Were you raised by gorillas?”
Dazai joked as he sized up the situation.
He couldn’t win.
He glanced out the window to the sprawling hangarbelow.
And there he saw Kunikida, embroiled in battle withhis own opponent.

1
The original text references a 90s fighting game,Kaiser Knuckle, aka Global Champion.
2

To the best of my knowledge, this isn’t a referenceto anything and is pure nonsense.
く
3
The original text uses the letter “ ”. 85
 I charged at the young man. Having lost my gun, theonly way I could gain the upper hand
was with hand-to-hand combat.
He stepped back, but I paid that no mind and advanced forward, reaching out to grab his
arm.
My martial arts repertoire was by and large a collectionof throws designed to use the
opponent’s speed against them. Therefore in situationslike this where they would not come to
me, I had to catch them first.
The man pulled back, almost collapsing on himself,to avoid me. As I stepped forward to
grab him, he raised his arm once again. I stoppedin my tracks.
Here comes a shock wave!
I dropped flat to the ground and dodged the wave radiatingfrom his arm.
Or rather, I tried to, but the wave hit me anyway.
I snapped backwards and flew up into the air. Everybone in my body screamed with
agony. My mind couldn’t keep up with the sudden acceleration.It was like I blacked out for a
moment.
But yes - I had meant to dodge. So why-
“You can’t escape my Ability. It’s not a shockwave.I can make anyone with my numbers
move in whichever - whichever - whichever way I want.So-”
“Gh?!”
My spine groaned. The young man dropped his hand,and I slammed to the ground. It was
as if at that very moment, my weight increased tenthousand fold.
“Like swatting a bug!” he crowed.
As he raised and lowered his arm, I struck the groundagain and again. It felt like being hit
repeatedly by a train. A bone snapped; my skin tore.
The numbers dropped to “21”.
“Those numbers are your remaining lifespan! And whenthey reach zero, you’ll writhe in
agony and die! No one can escape their fate! No one!No one! No one! No one!”
My body finally stopped jumping about, but I couldno longer lift even a finger. It felt like
my muscles were torn to shreds. A hot liquid trickledfrom my mouth in tandem with my
breathing.
“Giving up already, Mr. Armed Detective?”
The man drew carelessly close to me, but I could notmove from where I was pinned to the
ground. My joints whined in pain.
“I’m glad that right from the start, I got to killyou all off one by one. It’s too bad that the
rookie we framed never brought you all down from theinside. You ended up finding him out,
huh?”
He stepped forward and kicked my head. Red fireworksdanced behind my eyes, yet there
was nothing I could do to counter him.
“But look on the bright side,” he said. “If I kill-if I kill you here, and my men take out the
rookie upstairs, then the airplane will crash, andeveryone will know that it was the Agency’s
fault. Then Yokohama will be a pretty good place todo our business, don’t you think?”
“What… business do you speak of?” I asked.
“Sorry, but we smuggle the kind of stuff that makesus wary of private organizations like
yours. We do a brisk trade buying organs and sellingweapons.”
86
Organs for - weapons.
These people were the black market organ trade syndicate!
The Port Mafia served as the vendors for organs, chemicalweapons, and criminal
personnel. Dealing entirely in illegal products forunderhanded organizations, this group was the
general trading company of the criminal underworld.They oversaw countless shady operations
and formed connections with criminal organizationsacross the globe.
“We learned from the Azure King case you know. Youcan’t afford to underestimate the
Armed Detective Agency. We’re cautious in our transactions,and we destroy dangerous threats
right off the bat. Those are the first rules of ourtrade.”
I stole a glance at one of my numbers. 11. And oncethat number reached 0, I would meet
the same fate as Alamta and the taxi driver.
“I was under the impression… that weapons are quiteexpensive in the foreign market.”
“This place is home to the Port Mafia, foreign disputes,and lawless districts within the
city itself. It’s a good town for business.”
I had to agree with him; Yokohama was a perpetualhotbed of violence.
For an arms dealer, arriving in Yokohama must havefelt the same as a navigator landing
their ship on the shores of a new frontier. They couldbuy organs or even reckless hoodlums to
sell to foreign organizations while simultaneouslysmuggling weapons and veteran soldiers into
the country.
Laws and morals didn’t apply to the criminal undergroundwhich drew in new dealers of
death from overseas.
However.
“... You can’t hand out weapons as simply as passingout flowers. Even the most trivial
argument on a street corner somewhere can end in deathif one party has a knife or a gun. This
whole thing is…”
“Oh ho, whatcha up to over there?”
The young man raised his arm, and I flew upwards.The air was squeezed out of my lungs
at the same moment as my notebook tumbled from itshiding spot at my chest.
Shoot!
“Playing for time and writing in your notebook, weren’tyou? But it’s pointless, I tell you,
utterly pointless. I know how your Ability works.And now your notebook is mine.”
He lifted it overhead and waved it about.
My Ability has always had two weaknesses. Writingin the middle of action has always
proved a challenge, and I am powerless if my notebookis taken.
Now my Ability was entirely sealed.
I had a wiregun I had created in a previous fightstowed away behind my back, but it
wasn’t powerful enough to do enough harm to my opponent.
Yet I still could not give up. That was the one thingI simply could not do.
After all, I always did what was right.
I struggled to my feet, ignoring the intense painshooting up and down my whole body.
“Look at you... not dead yet, huh? Then I better giveyou another serving of pain!”
He attacked again. I found myself flung backwardsand cast to the ground.
I coughed up blood. The world grew dim. I no longerhad the faintest clue what shape I
was in anymore.

87
“Now, just to be on the safe side,” The young man pulled a tiny key from his pocket. “I
have a key with me. It is the key which disables the device sending interference signals to the
airplane. You can’t save the plane without it. Doyou want it? You want it, don’t you?”
I stared at it. It was a brittle-looking, dirty, yellowkey.
“If you want it, then here.”
The man put all his strength intosnapping it in half.
“Wha-”
He cackled. “And with this, the Agency is doomed!No one can prevent the crash now.
You’re finished. You’re finished, I tell you!” Heroared with derisive laughter once more. It was a
laugh that could boil mud, a scornful cackle likethe end of the world.
“Come now, let’s put an end to this. I’ll kill you,and then I shall cry in triumph!”
He raised his arm once more.
The number on my skin read “01”.

Without thinking, I glanced at the communicationsroom on the second floor.

And there was Dazai. Dazai covered with injuries,Dazai about to be struck-

Kunikida was below the

window. He was wounded from head
to toe.
The large man attacked again.
The force of the blow to Dazai’s cheek
crashed him into the window glass.
The glass shattered.
Dazai saw Kunikida.
Their eyes locked.
Dazai screamed.

“Kunikida!”
“Dazai!”

And with only that, I knew

exactly what I had to do.
I quickly whipped the wiregun
out andfired it at Dazai.
My aim was true, and the gun’s
hook struck the wall immediately
behind him.
I wound in the wire, and my
body sailed into the air.

Dazai leapt out the window.

He kicked off the frame as he
went and twisted his body in midair.

88
As he writhed, his eyes locked on Kunikida.
Likewise, Dazai caught Kunikida’s eye. He shot hiswiregun and used it to leave the
ground.
They met in midair, silently communicated with another,and went their separate ways.

The strength of the wiregun’s shot catapulted me away.

Dazai jumped out the window, and I passed him as hetwisted in midair.
I landed just below the communications room window.I used the gun’s upward
momentum to run up the wall the last few meters.
“Ohhhh!” I roared.
I jumped into the room, spraying glass shards everywhere.
A man with dark brown skin stood before me with bothhands curled into fists.
Those fists look like they could have easily beatenme to a pulp. He immediately took a
swing.

The huge man went flying.

The umpteenth throw crashed him through the windowand fall to the floor below.
When I looked out the window, I saw him lying unconsciouson the ground. I judged he
would likely wake up.
I glanced down at myself and found the numbers haddisappeared. So Dazai had likewise
defeated his opponent, I presumed.
My goodness. What an ordeal that was.
I now turned to the transmitter. The only thing leftto do was switch it off.
Using an old-fashioned terminal, I scoped out thefrequency and the direction of the
signal. Even though it was quite an older model, Iwas able to make it work after a fashion.
“Kunikida!” Dazai came galloping up the stairs. “Weneed to use a key to stop the
transmitter! But that fool used his final momentsto break it!”
Wide-eyed, he presented the broken key to me.
“I know that already,” I informed him.
“We can’t use the transmitter! The airplane-”
“I’m always running into trouble, but this? Everydaystuff. That’s why I have this.”
I reached into my back pocket and produced a sheetof paper.
“I always carry a notebook page for emergencies.”
I unfolded the paper and traced a few words in myblood onto the page. “Doppo Poet –
cancellation key!” I yelled.
The paper shapeshifted into a copy of the yellow key.
“You know, once I take a good look at something, myAbility can produce an exact replica
of it.”
Even Dazai, of all people, grew wide-eyed at this.“R… really?”
“Yes. Are you surprised? I surprised you, didn’t I?Now you owe me a drink.”
I put the key into the transmitter and turned it.A green light lit up on the console.
I jabbed the override button.
“That should let the plane resume normal operations!Dazai, tell the pilot!” I cried.
“I’m already on it,” he replied.

89
Just as we turned to leave the building, we heard a low rumbling sound like the sky itself
was trembling.
That sound was-
As we ran outside, the sound grew to a deafening level.
“Pilot!” Dazai yelled. “Can you hear me?! We stoppedthe blocker! You should be able to
fly again, so hurry and go up!”
“We’re working on it! But we’ve lost too much altitude!Oh shit, we’re not going to make
it!”
That sound was the rumble of the jet engines drawingtoo close to the ground!
Dazai and I skidded outside.
The plane cast a huge shadow on the ground. The skyroared with the thunderous noise. I
looked up.
There directly in front of me, hanging low in thesky, was the behemoth plane drawing
closer! It passed over my head and continued on itscollision course –in the direction of town.
Don’t crash, I thought at it. You can’t crash.
Don’t crash. Fly up. Fly.
“Fly!” I howled.

The plane’s shadow receded, and the craft surged upinto the air.
It climbed steadily, stirring up a surge of tornado-strengthwinds below it, and flew off into
the setting sun.
It did it. It flew.

We had made it in time.

Dazai and I continued to watch the white airplanesteeped in the deep red evening sky
long after it vanished from sight with a twinkle.

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 Chapter 4
The thirteenth.
I returned home after a lengthy absence and now penthese pages.
A life’s worth of fear were instilled into this singleday.
It is due to the efforts of myself and my colleaguethat several persons narrowly escaped
the jaws of death, yet be that as it may, not allshare this lucky fate.
Thus is the state of reality. The problem emergesfrom reality itself. If we were to break
away from the realm of the real, then some problem-riddledhuman world would surface. It
would be a reality such that no man would be capableof change. Ergo reality must depend on
both the facts of our births and our deaths. We knowthis reality to be the truth.
We can view this other reality lacking death onlyin our own minds.

And thus the series of cases drew to a close.

The Agency and I worked to deal with the aftermath.We were subjected to inquiries from
the city police, damage reports from the insuranceagencies, and the clamoring press. The office
was swamped in a mountain of work. We were so busywe didn’t have the slightest bit of time to
be lost in sentimentality.
Perhaps sensing the volume of work, Dazai abandonedall his usual duties and vanished on
the pretense of “investigating something”. He wasgoing to get it the minute I found him.
The victim of our last case was an airplane and itslarge cargo of civilian passengers. Once
it was reported that a foreign terrorist group wasresponsible, tracking down the group’s
ringleader was added to our list of duties as well.
We received quite a bit of praise for defending thecountry against an unprecedented
tragedy, but there was still much public outcry forus to be held accountable for our inaction in the
first case. I supposed the criticism from thedeath of the kidnapping victims would fade in time.

One day after finishing the usual elephantine quantityof reports, I was called into the
president’s office.
“Excuse me,” I said, stepping in.
The president did not look up from the paperwork spreadacross his desk. “How goes the
work?” he asked.
“I’m still buried up to my eyeballs in it. To makematters worse, that fool Dazai ran off
again. He can’t abide paperwork, so he delegated itall to the office staff and is now probably off
investigating for the police. He deserves to be pushedinto a vat of boiling water. If he lives,
good. If he doesn’t, all the better.”
All the president said was, “Don’t get caught.” Hegathered up his papers and stored them
in an envelope before looking up at me. “You did well.You earned a certificate of merit from the
general of police. ‘A paragon of detective work forour city’, he says. It is a weight off my shoulders
as well. For a time, I considered closingthe agency.”
Oh my.

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Before I could say anything, the president continued. “No business exists more precious
than the human life. And if the Agency’s existencewere to encroach upon a life - but that matter
is now resolved. Byyourdoing, Kunikida.” He pointedat my forehead.
The president never shared his personal anxietieswith anyone; perhaps he was exhausted.
“And now. Did you complete your assignment?”
My assignment. The entrance exam.
Dazai’s judgment with which the president had taskedme.
“I’ve already made my decision,” I said. “That manis the worst. He ignores my orders,
wanders off in the middle of jobs, obsesses over suicide,womanizes, detests labor of any kind,
and shirks all his office duties. He is charismaticto an extent that he is an utter misfit. He wouldn’t
last three days in another job without beingshown the door.”
Here I paused and recited the words I had alreadyplanned on saying.
“But as a detective, Dazai is the most able giftedman I know. I imagine that it won’t even
be a few years before he is one of the greatest detectivesour agency has to offer. He – passes.”
“Very well. Your judgment is sound.”
The president signed the new hire paperwork and stampedit with his seal. It was official –
Osamu Dazai was now a member of the Armed DetectiveAgency.
“While I’m here,” I said, “Could I possibly ask forthe afternoon off?”
“By all means, take it. What for?”
“Just a small piece of business.”

I turned off a small path winding through a groveto a small graveyard overlooking the
bay.
The graves dotting the slope shone white in the moonlight.I picked my way among them
until I stopped at one more recently erected thanthe rest. I laid a bouquet of flowers upon it and
pressed my palms together in prayer over the grave.
“Visiting the grave of some poor soul, Mr. Kunikida?”a clear voice asked.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Miss Sasaki, clad ina white kimono, standing beside me
cradling a bundle of white chrysanthemums. She placedher flowers next to mine and bowed her
head.
“The kimono suits you,” I said.
“It is suitable for mourning, but I do regret we havenot met upon a happier occasion than
this. … Mr. Kunikida, do you habitually leave flowersupon the gravestones of those whom passed
away during your cases?”
The grave she and I both stood before belonged toone of the victims of the kidnapping
case in the abandoned hospital.
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t have a particular reason fordoing so, other than that I feel I should.”
She neither agreed nor disagreed with me but simplysmiled. The leaves on the nearby
trees danced in the sea breeze.
I continued talking as if I was alone. “… The firsttime anyone died on one of my jobs, I
wept so hard I wasn’t able to get up and go to work.I still don’t think I’ve fully recovered. But the
tears don’t come anymore. All I can think to donow is that I ought to visit their graves instead. At
the very least, if I didn’t do this, thedead would not be able to rest in peace.”
“Do you… do you suppose they could rest in peace ifyou wept for them?” she asked.

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“I don’t know. Perhaps they will pass on peacefully, or perhaps they are already beyond
hope. My tears and prayers can’t reach them. Time has already stopped for them. All I can do is
grieve their passing. That all the living can do isgrieve for the dead is the sole fact which makes
me believe we live in a proper world.”
“… You’re a cruel man, Mr. Kunikida.”
I turned to look at her and was astonished to findtears glistening in her eyes.
“I… lied to you earlier. When I said I broke up withmy boyfriend, it was… death itself
which separated us. My boyfriend was a man who burnedfor his ideals. He did so much for
me… and yet he died alone, without a single word oflove to me.”
A compassionate person would have been able to respondwith some comforting phrase,
but all I could do was produce the meaningless platitude,“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“The dead are cruel cowards,” she said. “You are absolutelyright, Mr. Kunikida. Time has stopped
for him, and thus my loved one can no longerembrace happiness nor laughter. Oh – I am so tired
of it.” Her eyes could no longer hold backher tears, and a river of them surged down her
cheeks.
If there lived a wise man who knew everything in theworld, would he have known the
words to dry her eyes?
Certainly, I did not know them. I pursued my ideals,filled whole notebooks with them,
and withstood anything to implement them. And yetthere I stood, wondering if there were really
no perfect words for her or perfect salvation forall the world’s problems. For all of my efforts, I
was powerless in the face of a crying woman.
“Excuse me,” she hiccupped. “I’m afraid I lost mycomposure…. I, I had best be on my
way.”
“Will you be all right?” I asked. God, what a foolishquestion.
“Yes,” she said. “Actually, the police has left methis case to me as an outside consultant. I
am an expert in this field and since this case israther complex… From here on out, you had best
arrange your business with the case workers.”
It was a matter of course that any outside consultantof the police would be a superior
individual. Even allowing for solving cases with collaborativehelp, they must have had quite track
record to begin with.
“Then I shall be sure to turn to you if I become stuckin my work,” I said.
“Yes, by all means.” Finally, Miss Sasaki smiled.
The ocean wind blew in over the horizon and caressedthe mountain ridges as it passed.
Miss Sasaki left with a silent bow. After watchingher go, I stared off at the scene of
Yokohama below without actually seeing it.
Suddenly, my cellphone rang. It was Dazai.
“Kunikida, could I have you come here for a minute?”
His tone was surprisingly dark.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Dazai had called me out to the abandoned hospitalof our very first case together.
What was an eerie, unsettling hospital in the deadof night was no more than an ordinary
faded, run-down building in the light of day. Sunlightslanted in through the broken windows of
what was probably once a sick room, forming brightwhite patterns on the floor.

93
“How do you remove the safety on this gun?” Dazai asked. He carried a handgun as if it
was unfamiliar to him. The gun itself was a small company gun with double columns. Agency
members were allowed to carry one just like it atall times.
“Did you make me come all this way just to ask that?”I grumbled, exasperated, as I
removed the safety.
Dazai aimed the gun at a patch of empty space andsaid, “I really don’t think any of those
arm dealers were the Azure Apostle.”
What?
“Don’t you think?” he continued. “They weren’t responsiblefor any of the other cases.
They don’t have any motive either.”
“Well, I was told a motive – namely that we were anobstacle to their importing weapons
into Yokohama.”
“That’s true. And that’s what they themselves believed.But why did they have to think
that?”
“… What are you driving at?” I asked.
“They viewed the Agency as a threat because of theAzure King case,” Dazai said. “But
the Agency is by no means the only organization thatresists illegal arms dealing. Think of the
police, the coast guard, or the Special AbilitiesDepartment. Why did none of them receive the
same treatment we did?”
“Tell me what you came up with.”
“Someone warped their perception of us. Rather, someonefed them information which led
them to overestimate us as their worst enemy.”
No. Could it be?
Could it be the Azure Apostle had pulled the stringson yet another case?
“Dazai. Tell me. Do you already know who is responsible?”
“Yup.”
“Then who are they?!” I grabbed him by the collarwithout thinking.
Dazai’s facial expression never wavered as he lookedme straight in the eye and said, “I
sent an email to bring them here. I told them we hadproof connecting them to their crimes, that
sort of thing. I expect they’ll be here shortly.”
What did he just say?
I took a quick glance around the room.
I figured it had once been a sickroom, a very ordinarysort; there was a door before me and
a window behind me. Two decrepit bed frames for hospitalbeds stood in front of me next to an
empty medicine cabinet. The room was otherwise empty.The floor was even relatively free of
dirt and debris. The true criminal was coming here?To this empty room?
Dazai suddenly remarked, “Footsteps.”
I reflexively looked to the door.
I could hear them: the sounds of feet plodding onthe floor, slowly growing nearer.
I noticed Dazai clutching the gun. Was this why hehad it?
My own gun had already been returned to the president.I would have to make a gun from
my notebook – but no, there wasn’t time enough forthat.
A trail of sweat trickled down my cheek.
The footsteps were close. They were almost here.
In the doorway materialized a leg, then a torso, thena face I knew well-
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 “Whatcha doing here, Specs?”
The young man standing before me – he was -
“Why… why are you here?” I asked.
“I asked you first. Come to find out the truth?”
He was the boy hacker, Rokuzou.
You’re the true criminal?
You’re the Azure Apostle?
My mind automatically leaped into action. If Rokuzoutruly was responsible for this, then
he could have possibly remotely controlled Dazai’scomputer in order to send the emails. No,
even before that, Rokuzou was the one who plantedthe seeds of doubt about Dazai in my mind.
Additionally, contacting a foreign criminal organizationand feeding them biased
information was not outside the realm of possibilityfor a skilled hacker.
And above all else – he had a motive.
A reason to detest the Agency.
A reason to detest me.
“Why, Rokuzou?” I asked. “Is this my fault? It is,isn’t it? It’s my fault your father died, so
you must resent me for it.”
“I resent the man who killed my dad,” he said. “That’sonly fair, yeah? But Specs-”
Dazai suddenly spoke up. “Oh, I see now. Rokuzou,did you snoop into my email?”
What?
Didn’t Dazai say he had sent an email to the truecriminal?
And just then.
A gunshot.
A hole opened in Rokuzou’s chest. Blood sprayed outof it.
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out as he collapsedto the ground at my feet.
Someone had shot him. I immediately looked at Dazai,but his gun still lay limp at his
side. His face was frozen in place.
Then I heard a voice from the entranceway, behindRokuzou’s prone body. It said, “Pray
forgive me… Mr. Kunikida.”
Her figure appeared in the doorway.
Long, black hair. A slender neck. A white kimono.
In her hand was a gun, a stream of white smoke risingfrom its barrel.
She stepped over Rokuzou’s body and walked towardsme.
The great mystery of it all was that she was stillutterly beautiful.
“Are you the Azure Apostle?” I asked. My voice soundedto me like it belonged to
someone else.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was so frigid it chilledmy eardrums.
Dazai said, “Sasaki, this entire plan is yours. You…do admit to this, don’t you?”
“Mr. Dazai,” she responded, “I must ask that you grantme one request. Please… drop the
gun. Or else-” She pointed her gun at him.
“I’ll drop it,” he said, “if you allow me to ask yousome questions.”
“That I do not mind. I shall answer them all.”
“All right. Here, I’m dropping it.”
Dazai casually let the gun fall to his feet whereit hit the floor with a clatter.
“Sasaki, why did you target the Agency?” he asked.
95
“Why, I believe you already know the answer to that, Mr. Dazai.”
“Well, you’re right. You tried to hide it from us,but your mind moves at a pretty brisk
clip, doesn’t it? No wonder you’re a respected researcherin the world of criminal psychology at
your age.”
Dazai continued as if he had surrendered. “You didtwo things: executing criminals and
taking revenge on the Agency. Is that correct?”
Executing criminals? That was just like-
“It was… the only method I could come up with,” sheadmitted.
“So you had a reason for your revenge, I take it?”
“Mr. Dazai, all revenge is pointless in our society.And yet… there was nothing else I
could have done. I understood the flaw in my reasoning,as my revenge was for the sake of a
dead man, but I had to or else I would have lost myself.”
Revenge?
Our Agency cultivated a good reputation. I couldn’tthink of anyone with complaints
against us warranting revenge.
“I see. Even though you knew it was pointless, youhad to have revenge anyway. And to
your sorrow, there was no one else whom you oughtto have revenge on.”

Death itself separated us.

He was a man who burned for his ideals.
“You were powerless as an individual. But you hadyour intellect and a great knowledge
of criminology. With these two tools, you had takencountless criminals to justice. Therefore the
Azure Apostle incidents were critical to you, weren’tthey?”
Dazai paused, and I realized the truth at the samemoment as he said it.
“Everything you’ve done was a battle of revenge foryour deceased boyfriend – the Azure
King.”
The Azure King.
The extraordinary terrorist whose crimes brought othercriminals to justice.
The very man whose whereabouts the Agency discovered,leading to his death.
“One of the rumors floating around says the King hadan accomplice. His crimes were just
a little too perfect, you see. But, disregarding anyhired thug, no criminal shared the King’s
ideologies, or so the authorities thought. Such coordinatedcrimes normally require the
cooperation of a whole faction of conspirators orelse a group bought for a fortune. Yet the Azure
Flag Terrorist incident showed no sign of either ofthese. Somehow no one ever imagined the
Azure King’s girlfriend was a far better strategistthan he was himself.”
“He… was a noble man. This unstoppable villainy woundedhim dearly. He searched in
vain for an ideal, beautiful society free from oppression.He knew he could not save everyone
through current legal recourse, so he became a bureaucratin order to create new legislation.”
Sasaki spat the next words out like she had a lumpin her throat. “The system’s vices, his
meddling colleagues, and his superior’s lack of sympathyagonized him. His failures agonized
him. Even I, from my position as a bystander, couldsee this road to justice was paved with
knives, and he walked it barefoot. One day, he finallybroke. He lost faith in all his ideals and
was on the verge of slitting open his own stomachin suicide. All I wanted… was to never see
such pain in his eyes again, and thus I had no choicebut to tell him my plan.”
Crime as a wicked judgment.
The road to ideals paved with bloodshed and carnage.
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“Sasaki,” Dazai asked, “you came up with almost every aspect of the Azure King’s
attacks, didn’t you? For the sake of your loved one.”
“I do not regret it,” she said. “His ideals are mineas well. If he will reap the reward, then I
shall become the Devil himself for his sake.”
“But the Azure King is dead. The Agency tracked himdown, and he blew himself up
along with that boy’s father. It could have all endedthere.”
“No, I could not let it end. My plan was but halfcomplete. There were still criminals
awaiting judgment. And… oh, you’ll ridicule me, nodoubt, but I simply couldn’t bear to do nothing
in the face of his death.”
“So you made a plan to have the remaining criminalsvoluntarily commit more crimesin
order for the Agency to be the ones to bring themto justice. And by threatening us with a scandal
to motivate us, you ensured the arrest of these criminalswithout you ever having to lift a finger.”
The taxi driver who committed multiple kidnaps withoutever leaving a trace.
Alamta, the undocumented bomb maker running loosein Japan.
The group of arms dealers who secretly smuggled weaponsand participated in the black
market organ trade.
Each and every one of them nearly impossible to persecuteotherwise.
“The most glorious aspect of this plan,” Dazai continued,“is that it required you to do
nothing illegal. I imagine you had the arms dealersset up the surveillance equipment and execute
Alamta for you. You didn’t participate at all. I betthat every single thing that group did was
based around whatever you wanted them to do. That’swhy there’s no evidence of your actions.
They never once thought that you, their informant,were intentionally manipulating these
situations to your will. And that’s why no matterhow the authorities investigate it, they’ll only
come to the conclusion that it was all a mistake inthe group’s intel.”
I felt the same way I had when we had tracked downthe kidnapper and when I had
interrogated Dazai: This criminal will not dirty theirown hands.
By the law, a person who committed no crime couldnot be taken to justice by anyone.

Is this fair?
Is this really fair for such absurdity to go unpunished?
“Next, to throw off the scent of you as the mastermindof the plan, you disguised yourself
as a kidnapping victim for your first meeting withthe Agency. But the taxi driver never
kidnapped you.Now, for consistency’s sake, we neverquestioned this that deeply, but there was
no reason for a man whose M.O. involved kidnappingtourists on route to hotels to kidnap an
unconscious woman at the train station. It was certainlynot for lack of prospective victims.
Furthermore, it made no sense that he claimed to notknow who you were when he fully admitted
to recognizing the other victims. By doing such, youmanaged to slip through the cracks in our
armor and find shelter in the heart of the Agencyitself.”
Dazai’s brow furrowed. “Sasaki,” he said, “I’m havinga hard time understanding this. A
woman of your intellect who has established such aglowing reputation in the world of criminal
psychology and perhaps with a connection to the heartof the criminal underworld could very
likely have organized a group dedicated to takingout great criminal leaders. Perhaps it would not
have been in line with your ideals, but it would havedone a great deal towards ridding the world
of crime. And yet you chose to do this.”
“I… am not an ambitious person,” she said. “All Iwanted… was to never see sorrow on
his face ever again.”
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 Why? This single question continued to run through my mind. Why, why, why? Who was
in the wrong here? Who was the person who had forsakentheir ideals?
“Sasaki, your crimes end here,” Dazai said. “To speaknothing of your invisible crimes,
you can’t hide the fact that you murdered this youngman Rokuzou. We were your targets, not
him. You will be arrested and tried for this.”
“No, I will not be.” She aimed her gun at Dazai. “Ihave no target. And you will not be
able to testify against me. If you attempt to relayto the authorities any of the events which have
transpired tonight,the Agency will come under attackonce more.”
Was this a threat? Calculated up to this point, forthis very situation-
“Stop.” The word crept out of my throat, dry and hoarse.“Stop. I give in. Do not attack
the Agency again.”
“Please do not move, Mr. Kunikida,” said Miss Sasaki.
“Stop!” I wailed. “Why?! Why, I ask you! We’re notthe ones you should be aiming your
gun at!”
“Then please enlighten me, Mr. Kunikida. Who shouldI aim at? Who should I feel this
resentment for?”
“At-”
There had to be someone. There had to be a sourceof all this treachery and corruption.
There had to be an ideal world in which all were justlyrewarded and fairly served. Evil had to be
the roadblock on the journey toward achieving sucha world. Something, something had to be-
Did she take my hesitation as a lack of reply? MissSasaki scowled and lowered her eyes.
“Everything I have done up to this point,” she said,“was continue to be a loaded gun as a
piece of martyrdom for his – the Azure King’s – ideals.There is nothing you can do to stand in my
way. Therefore, let us-”
She slowly lowered the gun. “Let us make a deal. Youwill not interfere with me, and in
return, I will not attack the Agency. I will leavethis place. And in another area, I will use another
organization and cause the same events. Again andthen again. I will not let you deter me.”
Dazai fixed his piercing gaze on Miss Sasaki and said,“That works.”
“I knew you would understand, Mr. Dazai,” she said.“You always look one step ahead
and choose the best option for all involved, neverminding your feelings. Then you also must know
there is one more thing that must be done here.”
“Yes. However, I am not the one to do it.”
“Then-” Miss Sasaki turned to me and gave me a faintsmile.
So her plan would only continue from here. So shewould continue all her deceptions and
all her manipulations as the pile of the dead onlyrose higher behind her. She would continue to
be the speaker for this azure ghost, as the AzureApostle.
Time has stopped for the dead, and thus my loved onecan no longer embrace happiness
nor laughter. Oh – I am so tired of it.
She did not have to cause deaths. This was not theideal way to live. There was, I was
sure, most certainly an ideal world.
But who was the roadblock on the journey towards it?No matter how I approached the
problem, no matter how her actions resulted in ideals-
“Mr. Kunikida,” she whispered. “It may have been aploy to deceive you, and yet… you
came straight to my rescue without any hesitationwhen you found me in the water tank…. It

98
made me happy. These are our final moments together, Mr. Kunikida, so I want to tell you one
thing.”

Gun shots.

Three bullets pierced her chest.

Blood welled from the gaping holes in her torso.

Clad in her white kimono, she swayed like a dancingflower petal. And then, like a
marionette with its strings cut, she collapsed.
“Sasaki!” I cried. I rushed to her side and cradledher body in my arms. She was so light.
She was a doll with no weight to her. The blood fromthe wounds in her chest stained her torso
crimson.
“… Serves… you… right.”
I raised my head. The boy, still prone on the floor,clutched a black handgun. “The…
Azure… King… killed… my father…” he groaned. His facewas ghastly pale from blood loss,
and he bore a gruesome grin. The gun in his hand smoked.“He was… my father’s… enemy! My
father was… a just man…! Serves you right…!”
The gun dropped from his hand. Rokuzou let his facefall into a pool of his own blood,
twitched feebly once, and then moved no more.
Miss Sasaki whispered from my arms, “Mr… Kuni… kida…”A dribble of blood silently
trickled from her lips. “In… some ways… you remindme… of him.” Her reddish-brown pupils
caught the light and trembled. “Your ideals… they…cannot be stopped… I… liked… that…
about…”
She said no more. She was dead.

“Kunikida,” Dazai said, “she was a murderer. Therewas no other way.”

Upon hearing him, all the blood rushed to my head.“Dazai!” I roared. I grabbed and lifted
him by the collar.
His expression never changed as he weathered my fury.“Kunikida, there is no such thing
of this ideal world as you think of it. You need togive up.”
“Shut up, Dazai!” I yelled. “She may have been ourenemy, but she was only one woman
who barely knew how to use a gun! She never killedanyone! You should have taken the time to
make a better plan to prevent this case from takingany more lives, but now look what you’ve
done!”
“I wasn’t the one who killed her,” he said. “Thatwas Rokuzou.”
I pointed to the black handgun lying at Rokuzou’sside. “That is your gun!While I was
talking, you stealthily kicked it behind you to giveit to Rokuzou! Then Rokuzou knew to shoot
her!”
From where Dazai had stood, he could have kicked thegun under the bed frame to pass it
along without Miss Sasaki being able to see it.
“I didn’t kill her,” he repeated.
“It’s the same as if you had killed her!”

99
 “Sorry, but you can’t prove I had any intent to harm her. Rokuzou was the one who picked
up the gun and fired it with intent to kill. All Idid was kick a gun.”
A murderer who would not sully his hands-
Dazai’s actions and Miss Sasaki’s actions were thesame. They killed vicariously,
capitalizing on a third party’s ill will. Legal channelscould not have proven they had any intent
to do harm. Neither could they have been indicted.
“Kunikida, this is the kindest thing we could havedone for her. It’s better this way,” said
Dazai.
“You’re wrong!” I shouted. “This is not the way itideally should have happened!
Something was supposed to have happened; there wassupposed to be some kind of true
underlying problem! Therefore-”
Perhaps if Miss Sasaki truly resented the world atlarge –
Perhaps if she truly intended to destroy us –
Yet I recalled the moment in this very hospital duringwhich I charged into the poisonous
gas. If Miss Sasaki hadn’t stopped me, I would havebreathed in the gas and died. If she had
meant to kill me, she could have simply let me die.Revenge complete, just like that. It would
have looked like an accident. She would have committedno crime.
And why did she save my life?
Was it no more than an instinctual reaction?
I spit the words at Dazai like they were pulled frommy throat. “By that very logic, then
She
Missdidn’t even
Sasaki waswant a world in for any of these recentevents!
not responsible
which all criminals are rightly judged! She only-”
All I wanted… was to never see such pain in his eyesagain.
Don’t! You mustn’t touch that lock!
“Tell me, Dazai! Was it right for her to die? Is thisthe ideal world I’ve sought for…?”
Dazai stared at me and whispered, “Kunikida. Thereare those who believe in your just,
ideal world, and thus they grow to resent this one.The Azure King was one such person. While
championing his causes of justice and idealism, hehurt the weak around him.”
He looked far off into the distance. “The phrase ‘seekingjustice’ is a weapon. Once it
hurts the weak, it can no longer be a force of good.This justice the Azure King sought was what
killed Sasaki.”
His accusation wounded me. Seeking a world of justiceand ideals, indeed. All this
suffering had come to pass by seeking to manifestideals.
“Kunikida, as long as you continue to eliminate thosewho would thwart your ideals in
your quest for the ideal world, the flame of the AzureKing still burns inside of you. And it will
consume those around you. I have seen this happenmany times before.”
Dazai looked far beyond me to someone I could notsee. He spoke to the shadow of one I
would never know, one I would never be able to reach,one trapped in the abyss.
“I-” I began. I brushed Dazai’s hand off. I understoodwhat he said. Perhaps what I was
looking for was not outside the realm of justice butwithin myself.
But nevertheless, Miss Sasaki and Rokuzou both laydead.
I felt helpless to only pursue justice in my own self.
I stared out the hospital windows. The crimson spiderlilies bobbed in the breeze wafting
through the ruined garden below. Even when I closedmy eyes, the red lingered on the back of
my eyelids along with an imprint of her smile.
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 Interlude 2
A prisoner transport vehicle sped down the seasideroad which overlooked the twilight
over Yokohama Harbor when, suddenly, the vehicle flippedover and went up in flames. The two
police officers inside died as the vehicle jolteditself over.
“N-no, no, no. W-what does the Mafia want with m-m-me?”
Two living figures were silhouettes against the sunset.One was the young arms dealer
who had been recently arrested and now injured inthis sudden ambush en route to prison.
“What, you ask? Must you really question my presence,arms dealer? Are you a fool?”
The second man was a black shadow. His overcoat writhedlike a worm as he stepped
towards the young man.
“You made a mockery of the Port Mafia,” Akutagawacontinued. “You purposefully
leaked information about the organ harvesting taxidriver to us in the hopes that we would
dispose of him for you. It is always in our best interestto devour those who would cheat the Port
Mafia. You are no exception to this rule.”
Akutagawa advanced. The young man fell onto his backand yelped, “N-no can do away
with me that easily! Die!”

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 Conclusion
I sit on the office desk of The Detective Agency,scrolling through the notebook. “That’s
it. It’s the case of two years ago-It’s all aboutthe ‘Azure Messenger’ case.” After a long speech,I
close the page of the notebook.
“It was the first case Kunikida-san worked togetherwith Dazai-san.” Tanizaki who’s
listening to the story gives an impression.
“That’s it. That guy really unchanged after that.He teases people as usual, his habit
doesn’t change and he puts me into trouble. Despitesaying that today is a working day too, he
doesn’t show up. Naomi, can you grasp the signal ofthe transmitter?”
“The result comes out. It seems that the transmitterhasn’t been moving since about 20
minutes ago. I wonder if the location is the river.”
The river?
I look at the map that Naomi spreads. A small cointype transmitter that I handed over to
Dazai is standing still at the middle of the river.It’s contemplating for a brief period. “I see. That
idiot jumped into the river while walking, sendinghis wallet into the river along with the
transmitter. The wallet was washed away at that place.The person himself will be more
downstream.”
While I’m talking with Dazai under investigation onmy cell phone, I think that there is
something when the call just ends as he says, 'Whata nice river it is’. Just how much trouble that
he will gave me if he keeps bothering me for workingas partner with his suicide habit. “I will
search for that oaf. Indeed, how sad it is, it shouldbe done before I start the detective work.”
“Take care, Kunikida-san. What’s your work for today?”Tanizaki stands as he calls me.
“It’s about the tiger. I should capture the 'humaneating tiger’ that caused trouble in
Yokohama.”
It’s a troublesome request, even so-
-without waiting for a few years he will be one ofleading detective investigators.
Even so, it can be solved easily if it’s Dazai.
I take my notebook and then leave the Detective Agency.
Dusk is approaching and the sky of Yokohama is dividedinto blue and red. I stop as I
smell something that tickles my nostrils. I watchthe city. In this town, with people here, there are
cases and sadness sometimes. Every time I run intoa deep sorrow, my ideals are beaten up. The
adventure loses its meaning and the mind sheds blood.It’s too hard and useless to follow ideals.
But challenge is still a challenge. I start to walkagain, leaving the crowd of Yokohama.

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