Street Sweeping Chapter – Part III
March 2017
The snow melts away, and the rustic landscape once again reveals itself. And even in the present day, Shirakawa-go stands as a testament to a time that had long since passed, preserved like a photograph even after all this time. But lurking just past the surface was a village that hardly resembled what it once was at all.
Shirakawa-go had built itself on a profound sense of unity. Where one villager was threatened, two would step up to protect them. But that pact once mutually shared became just another shield for the corruption of the Sonozaki family. Rather than through unity, the people followed out of fear. And even those who had stoned him in the street that day had not done so out of ire, but out of fear.
Day in and day out the villagers absorb themselves in their own lives. They barely greet each other on the streets, and when they do it's to complain about their taxes, or the government, or speculate about their new governor being one of them, though it was not heavily publicized. The children at the schoolhouse drone on among themselves, the younger kids playing games that frequently starred the Yatagarasu, the older trying to reason out which of their classmates was fucking who while fiddling their lives away online. One might have thought the valley hamlet would have been its own little world, closed off from the outside, built on different values. But all you need is a phone to irrevocably become part of the great melting pot that comprised the outer world.
And Shirakawa-go was no different. Boring people living boring lives, sleeping with other boring people just like them, losing sleep at night over their elected officials for all the wrong reasons. It's all the same. And in that sense, Shirakawa-go was incredibly disappointing. All you had to do was peel back the very top layer and it already would struggle to keep itself together.
For the sake of preserving their day-to-day lives, people often find the strength to live alongside fear. But greater fear leads to greater isolation, and so as time went on, many of the village's core traditions were cast aside. And eventually the day came, in all its triteness, when families like the Furude family became entirely obsolete, and life went on without a care in the world.
The first hint of uncertainty for the village in years was the moment the Sonozaki family had vanished, almost as though it had never been there. What had been the true authority in Shirakawa-go for decades did not take flight without leaving behind the vague promise of a flood that would wipe out the village, leaving behind nothing but a Sonozaki dynasty. It was a promise delivered through a rumor that rooted itself in the schoolhouse gossip, but before too long reached the ears of the parents, and eventually the village leadership.
The Sonozaki family had far to the north begun work on creating a new estate – but there was more to it than that. For those that had dared to venture up the mountain path towards the new labyrinthine structures had learned of their intent to build a new village – one that for the time being, the residents of Shirakawa-go likened to Hell's Mandala. Before too long it became just that - Sonozaki Mandala, a place that none of them could enter, and not out of anything other than simple fear.
For the Kimiyoshi family, the only remaining great family left, unifying such a people and forging a path forward was all but impossible. Indeed, the only way was to bind them together by force, to preside over the uncertainty, not with the fear of the Sonozaki, but the fear of god. And for Shirakawa-go, while the fear of god was a distant memory, it nevertheless remained close to the very heart of its people.
However, unlike the fear of man, the fear of god never truly serves the whims of a single leader. Such is the primal nature of faith, and it is from this simple truth that after decades, the will of Rika Furude begins to take shape once more.
The day when the wounds have closed and the scars have formed at last arrives. The early hours of the morning are no less painful, however. The process of removing the plates for someone of Rika's stature isn't easy – he could only imagine how she'd managed to get them on him in the first place. But the process of removing them involved severing sutures that had been protruding from his body the entire time, keeping the plates in place, and then disconnecting them where they were conjoined. Rika was however confident enough that she decided to run the whole procedure in the middle of her hut, rather than in the cavern at the base of the cliff.
The process of cutting them all without starting the bleeding again takes about two hours. Tugging on the sutures produces plenty of reflexive reactions to short bursts of pain. About halfway through he just wants her to stop, but he can feel the plates loosening as she goes along. Before too long she cuts the last of the sutures – but she doesn't pull the plates away just yet. She reaches underneath the plates to open the latch holding them together, also disconnecting the tubing underneath, letting it hang freely. He can feel it brushing up against his lower section as it hangs there briefly. Her hands brush against his sealed wounds as she moves to pull the plates away and his entire body lurches. She stops for a moment, but then continues when he shakes his head.
At last the plates are pulled away, and for the first time he sees what's left of his body underneath.
The patchy mess beneath is revolting. The larger stitches are fairly clean and straight, but around where most of the damage had been done was something that just barely resembled a pelvis. He could now clearly see where the tubing inside his body protruded from, exactly how she'd managed to tuck the tubing in with some industrial tape that chafed the skin beneath as she pulled it off and replaced it. His inner thighs were a paler color from the rest of his skin, and around the sutures was a third pinkish color that seemed a lot thicker than the rest. When she brushed up against it he couldn't feel much of anything at all. And only then he realized that skin wasn't his own.
"Whose is it?" He asks, his voice a tad slurred from the procedure.
She doesn't have to think too hard about what he was trying to say. "It's better to just imagine where I got it from."
"Tell me whose it is."
"You're really just a glutton for punishment, aren't you?" She sighs. "It came from Manaka Sonozaki. I had to go back once I realized how much this was gonna need."
He'd taken that girl's flesh into his own – he was held together by the remnants of a girl who he could still see on the witness stand if he closed his eyes.
How fitting. You've finally run out of ways to use her.
Shut up.
His hand drifts up to the side of his neck as the usual itchiness starts to settle in, but Rika smacks it away.
"Nope. None of that."
He moves to throw up off the side of the cot he's lying on, but Rika has a bucket ready for him.
"We can bandage it up if you want. Your choice."
"I'll be fine. It'd just be more shit I need to change."
"You sure? It's not gonna smell any better."
"Did you bury her at least?"
"...Yeah, I did."
He moves to sit up.
"If I take a hit to any of this, would it be lethal?"
"If you got stabbed again, sure. But the skin graft will hold otherwise. In another month or two if someone kicked you between the legs you probably won't feel anything at all."
"And until then?"
"It'll hurt like hell, but it'll hold. I promise you that."
He stands. Without the plates everything feels so much lighter. His jumping could take him that much further, and having practiced in the snow for so long, moving around on solid ground was that much easier. He tries bending his right knee – he has better control over the prosthetic now too, with his right thigh having built itself up quite a bit. It wasn't enough to compensate for the lack of balance, but there was less of a risk of his leg slipping unintentionally now. He walks around the room after putting his pants back on – the feeling against his lower half is still extremely foreign, but it's still a much better state to be in. And further, the way he could move now – it was a lot more familiar, and a lot closer to what life had been like before the surgery.
That's right. This is a beginning. Not the end. He could live with this horror below his waist. And it wouldn't deter him. Not anymore.
His path forward is clear. He would take his revenge on the Sonozaki family, and then he would return to his uncle. And to that end, becoming the Furude family's shinobi is the first step.
"Not bad. And I didn't even need insurance."
"Actually, you're gonna be paying me upfront for this one."
Rika had left the room for a moment, and just returned carrying a long object wrapped in cloth.
"Do I have a target now?"
"I need you to break into the Kimiyoshi estate."
"What am I looking for?"
She sets the object down on the cot and pulls back the cloth.
Underneath is a vibrant sword – a heavenly looking thing, radiant like gold, adorned with a series of branches that comprised the blade, a design that was at a glance Korean in nature.
"That's sure fancy. Does it have a name?"
"The Onigari-no-Ryuou. Something that's been around in this village from the very beginning."
"Do I need to stab something with it?"
"This is what I need you to find. This is a fake. Technically it won't be theft either since the original is mine by birthright." Sure, there was just the prospect of breaking and entering that hung over this request.
"And the Kimiyoshi family has the real one?"
"For a good decade now, I think."
"Hmm… Alright, and I guess we're not going to make it obvious we took the thing, right?"
"Right. I need you to replace the real sword with this fake. We need the Kimiyoshi family to think they still have the original leading up to the council meeting, so you can't leave any traces."
"Do we have any idea where it is?"
"There's five buildings, all within the limits of the exterior wall marking the property. The Residence to the north that Natsumi and her immediate family occupy, the Annex to the west, and the Guesthouse to the east, all joined by exterior walkways that lead to the Gathering Hall in the center, which is where the village council always meets." Rika recites this all right off the top of her head like it was the most natural thing in the world. "The Residence and the Gathering Hall are two stories, but the rest are only one. Just northeast of the Guesthouse is a Storehouse. You'll find it in there under lock-and-key."
"Who has the key?"
"Natsumi herself. It's hidden, either on her person or kept somewhere in the Residence."
"Any idea what it looks like?"
"It's old and rusty. A week ago, it had a big red ribbon attached to it. She's kept it that way so it's a pretty safe be that it'll still have it."
"Is that info reliable?"
"Yes."
"What's the end goal in retrieving this?"
"You'll see."
"How do I get in?"
"That I've got figured out. Well, part of it." Rika once again leaves the room. A moment later, she comes back with a large bag. "I don't exactly have a blueprint of the property, and there's no point trying to scope things out at night when we can't get over the wall without tripping the alarm anyway. On top of that, neither one of us can get in close during the day without drawing attention. As it would happen, though -" She empties the bag onto the cot next to the sword.
Inside is a mascot costume – it's Keropoyo, a popular frog on social media.
"Wait, wait, wait. Wait. No."
Rika pauses for a moment, and then bursts out laughing. "Wait, you thought I was going to put you in this? This isn't even your size, dumbass."
"Well why else would you have brought it in here?! What was I supposed to think?!"
"One of the Kimiyoshi tots had a birthday recently. Akira put in the request himself with Chie-sensei to have one of the villagers dress up, and -" Rika sticks her hand inside the head of the costume and pulls out a small camera. "I happened to slip this in when Chie-sensei was out for lunch the day of. The sorry fool wearing it had no idea. I even got him on camera trying to grab Natsumi's ass."
"Wait, so you've watched it already?"
"Just the ass grabbing part."
"So basically we need to review the footage and work out the finer points of the layout from the perspective of a dude in his forties entertaining a bunch of kids in a frog costume."
"Yep."
"How much is there?"
"Six hours. Tonight's gonna be a movie night."
And naturally, she'd meant every word of that. Rika didn't have a TV, but she was able to work with some electronic devices thanks to an old portable generator she would frequently charge up while skulking around town. She had a camera that could project onto a flat surface, and she set up a big white sheet in the middle of the hut that she made Kanbei hang from the ceiling for her. From that, they had a distinctly DYI film projector and movie screen. With how quickly she'd thought of the setup, he could only imagine the amount of inane shit she'd been doing while living out here entirely on her own for the last ten years.
He wasn't sure from where, but while he was intently trying to pour through the potentially valuable parts of the first person footage they had, Rika managed to produce a huge popcorn bucket, and while he was skipping around and rewinding the footage looking for the slightest hint of workable material, she was munching away. Very loudly.
"Take a look at this." Kanbei resumes the footage at a certain point and sits next to her. "It's only there for a few seconds, but there's some kind of a manhole."
"Where?" Rika talks with her mouth full.
"Right here, when he bends down – you can see it just to the left of the Guesthouse."
"That's some kind of a service entrance for the Guesthouse."
"Do they have anything underneath the property?"
"Ahh… Maybe for flood control."
The Kimiyoshi property was entirely enclosed, but much of the surrounding area wasn't. It rains in Shirakawa-go very frequently in the spring – it made more sense for a lot of the area to have been worn down by flooding, but now that he was thinking about it, it really didn't seem that way.
"Is there some kind of precedent for that?"
"Back in the late eighties the water level was a big issue, so we had sluice gates built up and down both stretches of the river. Sonozaki and Kimiyoshi didn't want a sluice gates set up on the properties, so for both areas the contractor built things out underground. I didn't know you could get in from inside the property, though."
"Maybe it doubles as a torture room or something."
"Could be. Does he get any closer?"
There was only one other part of the footage where Keropoyo made it anywhere near the Guesthouse, so Kanbei skips through the footage to that part.
"Wait, wait, go back." Rika suddenly stops him.
"Did you see something else?"
"You skipped the part where he grabs her ass."
"Are you still on about that? It can wait."
"Mii..."
They manage to find another angle on the service entrance in a scarce few frames towards the end of the recording.
"Yep, that's definitely the same hatch they put in by Mii's. That has to be for the sluice gate."
"Would I actually be able to get in through the outside, though?" These were sluice gates that connected to the river – the chances of this gate being one designed to keep trash, fish, or pesky home invaders out are fairly high.
"Not normally, but those gates actually open fully from the side. There should be a latch somewhere around the middle-right. You won't be able to see it, but if you jab right around there from the outside it should come loose. Then you can push it open the rest of the way."
"How sure are we of that, though?"
"Very. We used to hide down the hatch by the Sonozaki property all the time."
"Uh, okay..."
"Good job, though." Rika pats him on the head. He reaches over to grab some of her popcorn, but she slides the bucket away from him before putting another handful in her mouth.
"So you're going down there, right?"
"Hah. No."
"You could probably swim better."
"Oh come on, that leg doesn't weigh that much."
"Says you. I feel like a fatass whenever I go anywhere. Like someone should be playing a tuba behind me every time I take a damn step."
"You know, that's actually a great idea."
Where once he would stammer his way through a response, Kanbei just shakes his head at her. "Where the hell are you gonna find a tuba?"
"I can dig one out of the junkyard, probably."
"With those arms?"
"I could probably get one of the older boys from the schoolhouse to do it, too. They like buying those herbs I grow out back."
"Please don't."
"Only if you do the job."
"Alright, fine. But you also have to stop selling kids weed." He adds.
"Wow, your mind went straight to drugs? What kind of girl do you take me for?"
"The kind that brews poison apples."
She suddenly makes a loud screeching noise.
"What the hell was that?!"
"That was the sound of the usagi-san you were gonna have for dinner escaping. I think he also said 'wow, thank god I'm not gonna get eaten by that Kanbei fucker! I almost turned into his green shit!'"
"Hey, that was a one time deal, alright? I had no idea what the hell those plants were."
"It's your own fault I found out."
"Screw you."
Another day ends.