Souichi's Guide to Dating a Demoness

I may not own the rights to either Tomie Kawakami or Souichi Tsujii, but they are my favorite Junji Ito characters. With the recent (though not so good) Junji Ito Collection I think it'd be the perfect time to pen something for a fandom mostly without story contributions in it.

Chapter I
By the Pricking of My Thumbs

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair
So I can climb up and get into your underwear."
- Beastie Boys, "What Comes Around" (1989)

"Weather report on TV said that it's going to be pouring the next couple of days."

"I hope they finally allocated the proper funds to fixing the sewer system. I don't think anyone wants a repeat of '87 all over again…"

"You think? I didn't get a chance to go to the last town hall meeting. Everyone knows that the mayor pockets most of it anyway. We'll be lucky if the streets don't stink for a week afterwards. Highway robbery, Misako, I'm telling ya."

Souichi only half bothered to listen to his parents sitting in the living room and their prattle as he walked through the doorway, kicking off his sopping shoes by the front hall's coat rack. The storm that had settled itself over Fukazawa was one of the worst that it had experienced in years. The clouds that had only a few days previously been so innocently fluffy and white now looked as if they had absorbed iron filing, thick and almost impenetrably dark as they peeked over the trees that lead into town. He had barely survived the torrential onslaught of raindrops as he'd carefully made his way through the winding road back to his house, the umbrella he'd been given earlier that morning to protect him being tossed this way and that by the uncaring wind.

Absentmindedly he reached for one of the many nails sticking out of his mouth, his finger sliding along the cool metal as he slung his backpack over his shoulder. If the downpour did keep up the right of the week he'd probably end up burning through the package of nails in the garage faster than he normally did. It didn't matter, of course, that his dad would end up yelling at him again that there were other places he could get his iron fix – he'd long since learned to tune his parents' whining out – but money these days was tight for him and he loathed having to ask for something that would only earn him a lecture for his trouble.

"Souichi? Is that you?"

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes at the question Souichi slowly trudged past the dim light of the television that was glowing through the slightly cracked doorway. Giving nothing more than a grunt in response to his mother he made his way down the hall of the Tsujii household.

"Souichi…"

His mother's tone was more forceful than usual. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that as the baby of the family he was the only child she still had left at home but it annoyed him to no end just how much she felt the need to know where and what he was doing at all times.

Or maybe it was menopause finally kicking in.

Whatever.

"Yeah," he grunted voice flat letting it be known their conversation would go no further than it had to. "I was late because of the rain. Sorry I didn't call earlier."

His mother's tone softens slightly as she calls to him through the barrier. "That's alright. Your father and I are just glad that you're safe. Dinner will be in an hour."

Sniffing the air Souichi finds he can't determine the food. Not that he particularly cares much about that either. His mother can't cook worth a damn on the best of days anyway. It's frankly a miracle unto itself that his parents' marriage has lasted as long as it has. Souichi lingered for just a moment to head off any further interruptions, and received nothing but the inane drone of whatever sitcom his parents had the TV tuned as a response, he continued his trek towards the stairs and, more importantly, the linen closet nearby. Carelessly jerking the wooden door open he reached inside to grab a beige towel from one of the racks before closing it. There was no reason to continue looking like a drowned rat any more than he'd already had to that day.

"I almost forgot, Souichi."

His father is choosing to be the interruption this time but he knows better than to complain too much. Souichi turns to look back at the slightly ajar door to where his parents sit and mindlessly consume whatever programming NHK provided.

"Yeah…?"

He hopes that the irritation in his voice doesn't come through but his hopes are dashed when he hears the audible groan.

"Show a little more respect, first of all. You live under my roof. Holding a conversation with you shouldn't be like pulling teeth."

A nail gives a small 'thwack' as it lands on a space in the wall that just so happens to look like his father's face in his mind's eye across the hall.

"Before the storm hit earlier the mailman delivered a package for you. Your mother put it on your desk."

In spite of himself Souichi's ears immediately perk up at that information. Finally. He'd been considering putting a curse on customer support from the book publisher's web site for all the non-answers they'd been giving him last week on when his prize would arrive.

Oh well.

Maybe he'd still send that tsukumogami to possess their automated phone system anyway.

Trying to keep his cool, Souichi squares his shoulders and sets his hand on the rail before giving a mumbled "thanks." There's no need to involve his parents whatsoever if he can help it. They're only liable to make things worse all things considered given their belief in his socially maladjusted nature.

Luckily his room is only a few short steps away from the landing. Casually striding into his room, and trying not to grimace at just how little things have changed since he was 12, he lets his bag fall near the entrance and begins using the towel to dry himself off before slipping into a t-shirt and sweatpants. Even with the light switch he flicked on the room's angles seem perfectly suited to keeping him shrouded in darkness. Souichi didn't have a problem with that. Night is his element and stormy nights especially so. Nor would the various spirits that come and go as they see fit who board with him have it any other way. After all he'd tried to get a brighter lamp for his high school entrance exam without giving his 'friends' any warning and he'd managed to have half of his study materials eaten before he'd managed to banish a particularly loathsome yokai that seemed to have the ability to mentally project music onto its victims. If only the people who looked down their noses at him at school had to deal with something that had a twelve step banishing ritual required you to listen to enka music endlessly looped inside your head then maybe they'd treat him with more respect.

Souichi's lack of popularity wasn't something that particularly mattered to him. He'd long since come to accept the fact that those around him simply had no capacity to understand the supernatural. They'd shuffle through life, awkwardly bumbling through the world around them, trying desperately to grasp what it all meant. Grandma had taught him everything he needed to know about the world hidden just beneath the surface of the one that surrounded them all and how best to manipulate it to his advantage. He almost pitied them in a way. Maybe if they knew just how insignificant it made them in comparison they'd treat their future emperor with a little more respect. But Souichi knew that there would be plenty of time for groveling for forgiveness once he rose to power as their next emperor.

Tossing the towel onto the mat flooring Souichi dropped in front of his desk, spitting out the nails into his hand and then carelessly tossing them into an empty chip bag. Much as he'd like to immediately dive into his purchase there were other, more pressing matters to attend to. Kouichi was off at university studying architecture and, despite his own disbelief on the subject, Sayuri was studying modeling at some hoity-toity fashion school in Tokyo. The other chicks had long since left the nest and his parents had inevitably turned their attention to his future. 'We don't want you to end up as a NEET,' his mother would tell him. 'I'm sure there's at least one thing you're interested in at school, Souichi. Just one.' Try as they might he never divulged anything more than he had to, not even when he'd begun taking odd jobs over spring break to help pay for the latest book to add to the small mountain that had taken up residence in his closet. Useless as school was, however, it wasn't something he could afford to ignore either. Letting his grades slip too much meant an earful from his parents and a lecture by the homeroom teacher on his poor studying habits.

It was the reason that he'd dug into the bag and begun sifting through the homework that'd been assigned for the evening. The words from his English workbook, literature, and math classes began running together even as he pulled out scratch paper and a pencil to get to work. At the very least the sooner he was done then the sooner he could crack open his ticket to success. Despite the boredom that almost immediately set in from the torture in front of him (not the fun kind that was for certain), not even the mandatory busywork could bring his spirits completely down. Indeed, he felt practically invincible even with the raging weather just outside his house's thin walls.

Souichi was in love. Not that he would ever admit it aloud to anyone of course.

Or at least he was pretty sure the feeling that had crawled into his gut was love. Oh, he thought he'd been deep in it before. Anjou Yuriko had been the class beauty in primary school and he'd spent more hours than he'd care to admit doodling them together, his lack of artistic talent notwithstanding. He'd hated Mr. Yanagida for butting his head in where it didn't belong, hated Michina for having the temerity of snooping in his room, and he hated Yuriko most of all for embarrassing him in front of his entire family. There were many mysteries in the world, many of which Souichi knew the answers to, and there were those that he didn't understand whatsoever. Women happened to fall into the latter category. Up until recently it wasn't a pressing concern either. Now, though…

When school had begun in spring, a girl had transferred to their high school. Right out of the gate this would've been a remarkable fact due to the out-of-the-way nature of Fukazawa itself. What made things infinitely more interesting was the third year in question. She'd made all the men in school prostrate themselves before her, the girls muttering to one another jealously behind cupped hands, and her very presence sent ripples through the carefully constructed social hierarchy in place in their small town. Souichi hadn't paid her much mind when he'd first heard about the debutante whose temper was a mile wide; if you met one, you met them all as far as he was concerned, and they were just as shallow as any other.

Souichi's home room was on the second floor and overlooked the track and field. He couldn't recall the exact date – all of his schooldays seemed to blur together in a mélange of mediocrity and boredom – but he had been sitting down with his lunch. For all of his lack of social skills, it was still important to observe others, learn about what their habits were like. Yet he hadn't been able to pay attention to any of the other students that day. He was seated in the very center of the desks that sat along the window, perfectly situated so that he was one of the first students who got a onceover to make sure they were paying attention to whatever lesson was occurring at any given moment, when he'd cast a glance outside to alleviate the monotony of eating alone. The schoolyard had been filled with third years decked out in plain t-shirts and shorts that left little to the imagination, starch-and-sweat soaked underneath the baking afternoon sun. He didn't think of himself as a pervert, of course. So what if he took a glance or two at the girls outside? Whoever had designed and later assigned the uniforms in the first place had clearly far more underhanded intentions in mind than he ever had.

She'd been hard not to notice even without the reputations she'd quickly began building for herself at their school. Every other girl around her seemed to pale in comparison to the ravenette who was skipping in time to the rope in her hands, her single braid jostling about on a delicate shoulder blade, and sweat the only thing blemishing her otherwise perfect features. Souichi's mouth, despite the curry rice he'd been halfheartedly eating a moment ago, had gone utterly dry in that moment. He always had a snide comment to say, something in him somewhere that would be quick to tear someone else down but for the first time in his life he felt at a loss as to what to say.

It hadn't even mattered when Hayate, the class bully who sat diagonally from him with a pencil thin mustache and beady eyes, had sneered at him that there was something horribly wrong with the girl. He'd flashed a photo in Souichi's face, a token of his own attempts at having some way to get closer to the goddess just outside their classroom window, and informed him that she was at least 50 miles of bad road and that if he knew what was good for him even Souichi should run away with his tail between his legs. Souichi had snatched it out of his hands with the speed of a jet lifting off for takeoff and looked it over. It had been a few seconds before he realized just what Hayate had been talking about. There, plain as day, was another head growing out of the side of the entrancing girl, eyes bloodshot and wide as they stared into nothingness, teeth jagged and jutting forth from a slit of a mouth, along with a uselessly lolling tongue. Its flesh looked puffy and malformed almost as if it were a kind of grotesquely forming pimple.

Souichi had felt his heart melt then. She wasn't just a pretty face after all. There was something far more special about her. The aura that clung to the girl was a mess, like a yarn ball tangled in dark Gordian knots, and it practically radiated straight off of Hayate's attempted sabotage. Spite, avarice, jealousy, rage… all were there roiling within the cloud that seemed to linger over her form. It was the most intricate spell work Souichi had ever laid eyes on before, even inluding all he'd heard about from his grandmother. Nor could he identify exactly what she was either, not that it really mattered. An alien feeling had crept into him then in that moment. It wasn't the kind he'd felt with Anjou; no, that had just been stupidly finding her 'cute.' What now filled his mind with long walks through Fukuzawa's forests while trying to find unsuspecting victims together under the shroud of darkness was something much more meaningful than that. This was the kind of thing that Souichi was sure was what all those stuffy, pretentious writers had talked about and dedicated hundreds of thousands of words to for centuries.

Plus, as he turned his gaze briefly out the window once more to catch a glimpse of her bending over to pick up a kickball that had wandered its way over to her, she had a great ass.

He'd thrown the photo back in Hayate's face then and a new feeling of determination had settled into him. So what if her reputation as someone whose very existence seemed to revolve around being a heartbreaker? He knew that they were kindred spirits, two beings that deserved to sit above the rest of the garbage around them, and that she would surely recognize that fact accordingly. Or at least he'd thought at the time. But the more the desire for the girl lingered in him the more Souichi had begun to worry. He'd done his best to remain discrete as he followed her around the school the next few days and as much as it hurt him to admit he knew that he wasn't her type. He'd had no money, wasn't tall, didn't play a sport, and at best his social standing was 'weirdo that mumbled to himself when he thought no one else was around to hear him' (not a hard thing to realize after having one of Hayate's stooges deciding on his very first day of his first year to give him a swirly after he'd spoken just a little too loudly about people to experiment some of his new curses on).

Pushing aside the useless piles of paper at last and setting his pencil down, Souichi's fingers found the corners of the small brown package that he'd laid oh so carefully down on his desk, not even bothering to read any of the return information as he tore into it. He'd been stumped for quite some time on how to resolve his predicament. Sayuri would only make fun of him, Kouichi would just end up running his mouth, and he'd rather end up in the burn ward of the ER again than talk to his father given the lingering awkwardness between them after he'd come to drag him downstairs for dinner one night and caught him looking at a fairly explicit website on his computer. At the very least there'd be no lectures this time given the object of his affection was a woman…

So he'd turned to the only place he could think of in a situation like this: self-help books. Going to his parents for money to purchase one had been out of the question, so Souichi had resorted to odd jobs around the neighborhood – repairing shingles on roofs, mowing lawns, repairing gutters, and much, much more grueling menial labor than he'd care to admit – to scrape together enough pocket change. He'd scoured countless catalogs, online web sites and more before finally settling on the thickest, easy to digest dating guide he'd managed to find. In a way Souichi supposed it was humiliating but with the low price of only a couple hundred yen he couldn't complain much. He had no clue how much stock he really put into the so-called 'expert' behind the work but if it could offer him at least a little insight then it'd be worthwhile. Cracking open the spine he rested a hand on his cheek as he began to read.

Hey there suck – er, sport! Ever feel like the whole 'dating' thing is beyond you? That sometimes the fairer sex is just impossible to relate to? Well, worry no more! With our handy dandy guide we're going to transform you into the most suave gentleman that the ladies in your life have ever seen. Romance doesn't have to be painful – unless you're into that kind of thing, no judgment here, we've already taken your money – and we're going to show you how.

Despite the tone Souichi had to admit that even for him the entire thing was overwhelming. He could send others into months long comas at will if he put his mind to it, dealt with monsters on a frequent basis for favors, but he simply had no idea what to do in a situation like this. The magnificent oni at school was an enigma, something that deserved all the attention and dues that her presence required, but to woo her would require a skillset he simply didn't have yet. Flipping ahead he stopped at the first chapter.

First thing's first: whatever you've got in your wardrobe right now is going to have to go. Women like a guy who make them feel beautiful and that means you've got to start by looking the part yourself. It might cost you an arm and a leg, and maybe even donating a few organs in the process, but a new look is a must before approaching the maiden you've set your sights on. Find a new barber and change your haircut if you've got to. For God's sake, don't forget to properly bathe either!

Lifting himself up from his squatting position, Souichi moved over to the mirror sitting in his room's corner. Wiping his hand across its dusty surface and moving aside one of the many spirit conduits hanging from his ceiling, Souichi sized himself up and immediately grimaced. The raccoon-like rings under his eyes from long nights furiously scribbling away in his diary over magic were about as attractive as a hornet infestation, to say nothing of his slouched shoulders or hair that he'd become painfully aware of looked greasy even in the dim light of his lair. As things stood right now, he was sure he stood no chance. It was going to be a long road to win her over, of that he had no illusions about, but Souichi loved a good challenge. He hadn't spent all of his free time studying the occult to be stopped by something as pedestrian as 'dating.' If he put his mind to it, there was nothing he couldn't achieve.

Tomie Kawakami was as good as his. Souichi was sure of it.