Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 1 Read online

  Author’s Bio

  “Ever since visiting the birthplace of the vampire in Transylvania,” Hideyuki Kikuchi recalls, with a gleam in his eye, “the experience has been stoking a desire to write my own vampire novel.”

  Fans won’t be able to tear their eyes away from Yashakiden, one of Kikuchi’s defining works. In 1985, the highly-anticipated Makaikou was published to great acclaim, propelling Kikuchi into bestselling author status like a rocket. Today, his reputation as a versatile “writer-of-all-trades” remains unquestioned among the Japanese reading population.

  Hideyuki Kikuchi was born in 1949 in Choshi, Chiba Prefecture. While studying law at Aoyama University, he participated in the college’s “mystery and detective novel” club. After graduation, he published stories in doujinshi magazines and translated science fiction while working as a magazine reporter.

  His debut as a novelist came in 1982 with the publication of Demon City Shinjuku.

  Yashakiden: The Demon Princess Vol. 1

  Yashakiden:The Demon Princess vol.1 - Yashakiden 1 (c) Hideyuki Kikuchi 1997. Originally published in Japan in 2007 by SHODENSHA Publishing Co.,LTD. English translation copyright (c) 2009 by DIGITAL MANGA, Inc. All other material (c) 2009 by DIGITAL MANGA, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders. Any likeness of characters, places, and situations featured in this publication to actual persons (living or deceased), events, places, and situations are purely coincidental. All characters depicted in sexually explicit scenes in this publication are at least the age of consent or older. The DMP logo is (tm) of DIGITAL MANGA, Inc.

  Written by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  Illustrated by Jun Suemi

  English Translation by Eugene Woodbury.

  English Edition Published by:

  DIGITAL MANGA PUBLISHING

  A division of DIGITAL MANGA, Inc.

  1487 W 178th Street, Suite 300

  Gardena, CA 90248

  USA

  www.dmpbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request

  First Edition: December 2009

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56970-145-4

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in Canada

  Author’s Note

  I’m excited to present this novel to the world. Creating a heroic, vampire-themed, supernatural conflict has long been a dream of mine. In these pages, Demon City Shinjuku confronts its greatest enemy. I can’t say this is the sole reason, but Yashakiden has grown into an epic fantasy series of over a thousand pages.

  Ideas bubbled up in my head, and I couldn’t bring myself to discard any of them. I sense that what’s coming next will exceed anything I imagined. My allegiances to the subject matter have changed along the way. I’m fond of my vampires, breathing new life into them as the haunted air of Demon City Shinjuku becomes its own worst enemy.

  This story is why this city exists.

  Hideyuki Kikuchi

  Part One: Ghost Ship

  Preface

  This will be an attempt to explain the “demon” in Demon City Shinjuku. But there are facets to the city that even the old-timers can’t wrap their heads around.

  Starting with human beings, an inorganic city incorporates the organic. It grows, divides, renews itself, and thus achieves a kind of asexual reproduction. Shinjuku similarly remakes itself in a flash, moment by moment revealing to mortal eyes entirely different aspects of itself.

  For example: Women’s Fashions on the third floor of the New Isetan Department Store. Ever since its construction, the southwest wall of the third floor has mysteriously expanded and contracted day in and day out, mutating into the shape of the human female pudendum. All the while maintaining its polished finish and the hardness of the stressed concrete beneath.

  As a consequence, now only women work and shop there.

  A huge department store like Isetan wasn’t about to ban male customers for reasons of architectural modesty. But as soon as men caught sight of the cursed wall, they couldn’t resist curiously drawing nearer and touching it. Medical facilities were located on the third floor, with specialists standing by.

  Except that most of the doctors, not to mention the delivery boys, were men as well.

  Entranced by the wall, falling into stupors, their faces contorted in ecstasy, many of the male customers climaxed on the spot. In severe cases they collapsed from sexual exhaustion. According to rumors spread by the shop girls, this was a consequence of them getting randy with the women doctors.

  But nobody could really say for certain.

  The transformations of the wall continue, and computer simulations predict that in several years it will develop the capabilities of a fully functioning female reproductive tract. Finding this an intolerable prospect, store management is said to be seriously considering taking a jackhammer to the whole thing.

  For example: A tree that grows in a corner of Kabuki-cho, one of Demon City’s pleasure districts. In this decadent and corrupt city, not a branch is broken and no obscene graffiti mars its trunk. Not only because apples, pears, grapes and persimmons mysteriously appear on its branches day and night, but because everybody knows that anyone who touches it will meet a bad end.

  Botanists from outside Shinjuku speculate that the tree is undergoing mutations at the cellular level. But the cause is unclear. Psychics hired by the Shinjuku ward alderman claim that the tree has its own objectives in mind, but they can’t say what those are.

  For example: The street that goes up the hill from Kagurazaka to Yaraicho. The buildings lining this street change every twenty-four hours like clockwork.

  The bookstores, appliance dealers, music shops, restaurants, houses—those wishing to see the transformation of these run-of-the-mill structures must climb the hill at dawn. No other time of day will do. The magic never occurs while descending the hill, either.

  The buildings become shrouded like phantoms in a mist. Then overlapping and eclipsing them, as if being born from within, a different row of buildings appears.

  Even though none of the visitors who hike the hill work there, they keep coming back. Because at that instant they might catch a glimpse of a lost husband or wife, or child or lover in the row of houses, as if frozen in amber from before the city’s violent destruction and resurrection.

  But the visitor is just as likely to see the ancient past or vistas from distant lands. White stone buildings in Greece overlooking the vivid blue Mediterranean. Ancient cities of the Gobi Desert shrouded in blowing sand. Eastern European villages surrounded by deep, dark forests.

  They appear before the eyes; and disappear with the light of dawn.

  Nevertheless, the “demon” in Demon City Shinjuku will not be found there. The incomprehensible nature of these ongoing transfigurations must be accepted for what it is. Shinjuku’s demonic nature persists, stubborn and undeterred, and such mysteries serve only to hint at the deeper truths hidden beneath.

  And yet, every now and then, as if stepping into the wan glow at the borderline between light and dark, the incomprehensible is made visible. The joy felt in those moments comes from that mysterious thrill in the brain when it solves a puzzle or gains some new insight.

  But there is also forbidden fruit that must not be eaten. Things that must not be seen. Even in Demon City.

  What occurred on a summer night marks the beginning of one such story.

  Chapter One

  The night was so steaming hot that just thinking about breaking a sweat was enough to break a sweat. People were dropping like flies from dehydration
. The street vendors sold everything they had on hand to quench the thirst. Before they knew it, they’d bartered away their own supplies and were collapsing from the heat as well.

  It wasn’t hard to read a foreboding symbolism into these events.

  Rubber-soled shoes stuck to the asphalt and let out a pinched squeal with each step. The ward mayor ordered the sprinkler trucks to raise a curtain of steam. Not because it accomplished anything, but because it put on a good show.

  The weather wasn’t like this during the day. It had suddenly turned at midnight. As if choreographed.

  A pale hand raised a glass. The amber liquid that half-filled it barely stirred. Lips beautiful enough to make even a man shudder at the sight pressed against the transparent rim. The young woman sitting on a barstool several seats away exclaimed in a long, low voice that sounded like a sigh.

  Her boyfriend reacted with a fierce glare at the owner of the glass, and then he gaped as he tried to glower. Setsura Aki silently set the empty glass down on the counter.

  “You sure can put ’em down,” the bartender said with a straight face. He and the customer went way back. “That makes three. I’ve got five more bottles cooling in the refrigerator.”

  “Much appreciated,” said Setsura, sheepishly brushing the tip of his nose with his forefinger. “But barley tea doesn’t make me much of a customer. Not compared to the typical beer drinker.”

  “Don’t give me that. I charge the same for a whiskey and water.” The bartender’s leathery face split into a boyish grin. “Still, you pull a rabbit out of the hat every time I see you. Here it is the dead of summer, and you’re all in black. It’s not natural, even assuming you were one for putting on airs. Not a thread out of place.”

  Setsura laughed with youthful awkwardness.

  “You couldn’t tell from looking at me, but my mom’s a fashion designer in the outside world. When I was a kid, she’d tan my hide if she caught me going goth. That’s not a color that belongs in the real world, she’d say. It’s the same reason people wear black to funerals, trying in their own simple way to stand apart. Black belongs to the other side, suited to the dead and the gods of death. Fits you to a T, Aki-san.”

  “I’m very much alive. I even cast a shadow.”

  “But you aren’t sweating.” The bartender wiped his dripping forehead with a damp towel. “My old air conditioner gives up the ghost on nights like this. I’m soaked all the way down to my drawers. And there you sit in that black duster like it’s Antarctica.”

  “Business hasn’t been so good lately.” Setsura thumbed the cuff of his right sleeve. “Look, I’m down to my last good suit.”

  “Still, it’s been an awfully quiet night. Strange.”

  As a rejoinder like that’s for sure would logically follow such a statement, Setsura looked up at the bartender in a gesture of agreement.

  “The nights are never quiet when it’s this hot. Maybe during the day. But when the evening comes, everybody kicks back under the trees in the shade of the buildings, and the street musicians and the soapbox preachers entertain them. None of that at all tonight.”

  “At all?” Setsura echoed.

  The bartender caught his breath, suddenly drawn into the ominous, endless depths of those enchanting eyes. No—it was only his imagination. There was some vast, calming force adrift in that penetrating gaze. That was all. The same as always.

  “Nothing,” said the bartender, smoothing over the moment with a smile.

  Setsura said shortly, “It’s like a funeral.”

  “Eh?”

  “Or the exact opposite.”

  The bartender didn’t have a comeback for that.

  “Death is the second life. I read that in a Chinese book somewhere.”

  “It’s from the Sankoshou,” said the young woman on the barstool. She’d been studiously ignoring her boyfriend while eavesdropping on the conversation between Setsura and the bartender. “A book of aphorisms compiled by Shu Yuan during the Tang Dynasty. ‘Death gives birth to the second life. And so we wait, our heads bowed, defeated in spirit, waiting as if for the mighty emperor and empress to appear.’ ”

  “Indeed—” Setsura turned and smiled at her.

  The flash of his brilliant white teeth alone was enough to make her press her hand against her ample chest.

  “Hey, get a grip,” said the boyfriend in obvious consternation, shaking her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry. I just can’t. I’ve never seen a man so fine before. God, I love this place.” She hung her head.

  “I told you,” the bartender said to the boyfriend with a knowing smile. “You probably don’t want to hear it from me, but it’s not his fault. You were trying too hard to close the deal. Three vodkas are too much for any woman.”

  “Maybe you should call a cab then.” Though he had a round face, the girl’s boyfriend was handsome in his own way. He both precisely articulated and rushed his words at the same time.

  “Sure thing,” the bartender said, the smile staying on his face. He reached for the cordless phone nearby. The number of the cab company was a single button push away.

  As the bartender brought the phone to his mouth, Setsura mumbled something to himself. He always had an air about him of having just crawled out of bed. But now he said, for no particular reason, in a deadly serious tone of voice that raised the hairs on the bartender’s arms, “Our heads bowed, defeated in spirit, we wait for the mighty emperor and empress to appear. This is that kind of night.”

  The bartender didn’t answer. Instead, he stared at the dark scene beyond the reinforced glass windows behind Setsura. “Shinjuku Taxi,” he heard on the other end of the line.

  The moon was rising. It was a night so beautiful he could imagine hearing the music of the heavenly spheres. Not a cloud in the sky. Instead of clouds, long shadows darker than the transparent night struggled for a place in the empty air.

  Some shadows reached straight and tall. Others slanted against the horizon. During the day, the countless fissures running along the walls plainly pointed to a future time when a grotesque tragedy would befall Shinjuku.

  The once glass-smooth roads held the scars of terrible cracks and fractures. On starlit nights, the wind whistling through the trees seemed to be singing a funeral dirge.

  Everybody knew it wouldn’t be long before the soaring, chalk-white buildings at the center of political activity in the new city would be lying beneath the brilliant moonlight like broken sepulchres. The word old had already been attached to Shinjuku City Hall and the forest of high-rises surrounding it.

  To the west was Chuo Park, Shinjuku’s DMZ. The skyscraper district was a no-go area surrounded by chain-link fences and razor wire. But the view of the moon was just as beautiful no matter where it was observed on the planet.

  But perhaps—because the foreboding air that enshrouded the city drove the boorish obstructions of the sky from the senses—whether a new or full moon, the lunar orb took on a brilliant glow as if lit from within. On most nights, the shadows falling here and there on the streets would be cast instead by photographers transfixed by its beauty.

  And with guides and bodyguards at the ready, the relatively safer grounds of the Park Hyatt and Hilton Tokyo housed an even larger crowd of artists, poets and writers.

  This night though, the whirlpools of heat had the artistic spirits on the run. The only shadows were cast by trees lining the roadways. And at the northern border of the skyscraper district, the all-night bar on the corner facing Fifth Street—normally busy with admirers of the moon—was dead as a doornail.

  “The moon’s almost too bright tonight,” said the bartender. The taxi company he’d dialed had at some point hung up.

  In this city, something too beautiful was cause for suspicion. The bartender glanced at Setsura, but not in expectation of a reply. The exquisite young man had his eyes closed.

  Setsura then opened his eyes. Looking down into his barley tea he said, “There was a river.”

  “H
uh?” The bartender knitted his brows. He’d heard him distinctly, but the words made no sense. This city was stocked to the gills with the bizarre and the unnatural, but it did not have a river.

  The bartender had settled in Shinjuku just five years before. But those words would have struck fear through the hearts of the old-timers who knew the place before the “Devil Quake.”

  There was no swift-flowing river. But there was a river—a river entirely appropriate to this city. Setsura again closed his eyes. Invisible colors were visible to this beautiful, haunted man. Unheard sounds were audible to his ears. “You can’t hear it?” His voice almost sang the question.

  “Nope.” The bartender shook his head. He looked out the window at Fifth Street. At the glittering white light pouring down.

  It was—water.

  “What the hell!?” The drunken girl’s boyfriend cried out.

  This wasn’t an apparition created by the dazzling moon. The glittering silver current coursing down the concrete surface of the road was the real thing.

  A young woman was singing the blues. A fair-skinned lass in a black dress, only in her twenties, but the timbre of her voice was as full and rich as it was relaxed and unforced. When she sang the blues it swept the regulars away to a different place.

  As if a youngster like that could sing!

  And yet the songs of this “youngster” impressed professional singers to tears, while tough-skinned veteran performers grieved in private knowing they’d never be her equal.

  That was the power of the blues. It was said of this girl on stage that the blues had chosen her.

  The applause swelled as the reverberations of the final stanza drifted through the dimly-lit room. Not a single boorish catcall or cheer.

  “Man, she’s got a set of pipes!” The man spoke passionately, rubbing his palms together. He took a deep breath and exhaled. “What do you think, Doctor? Good as any out there. Word is, she’s been singing here for five years, absorbing the mood of this city into her music. I gotta say, this is one helluva town.”