End of the World Blues Read Online Free PDF

shiny stuff. And he’d liked the eel, very much. After a few seconds’ thought, the cat trotted after her.
    Violent crime is still rare in Japan. That’s the official version. The truth is somewhat more complex, though nothing like as grim as the hipper guide books suggest, with their dark rumours about heavily massaged figures and officially sanctioned underreporting. Violence happens. It’s still relatively common within families, between senior and junior classes in school, and remains the currency of choice inside gangs, but it occurs within rigidly defined hierarchies. Everybody understands that.
    It felt out of place on darkened steps leading to a Roppongi graveyard.
    Maybe this was why Kit was so slow to realise he was being followed. Alternatively, his slowness might have been down to the sake sweating itself out of his body and making him stumble on the steps, already aware he was too late to do anything but hope Yoshi had left No Neck in charge and gone to visit her sister Yuko as originally planned.
    He was inside his own thoughts, oblivious to the cloying humidity around him. His life was not right, it was not even wrong, it just was…and had been that way for so long Kit found it impossible to imagine life being any different. So he didn’t try, he just put one foot in front of the other and wished himself home.
    Neku sighed. If she’d been hunting she would have struck by now, so much time wasted on tracking was merely silly; unless the man with the Colt was having doubts? This seemed possible—the gap between hunter and prey remained the same ten paces as it had been a minute earlier, only now the hunter was glancing back, as if aware he too might be followed.
    And he was, for reasons that probably made sense only if you were Neku, the original…The foreigner gave her coffee. He’d never actually asked if she liked coffee, but every morning, when he returned from his walk, he presented her with a cup, giving Neku a slight bow. Once she changed doorways just to see what would happen and he arrived at her new doorway, carrying her cup, as if that was where she always slept.
    And before this, he’d given her 5,000 yen. At a kiosk on the way to the Meiji Shrine. One day when he was feeling sad and Neku was feeling scared. In the early days when she was still getting used to being herself. It was unacceptable that someone should hunt him.
    The Rolex was a fake but it was a good fake, triple-wrapped white gold, with a pearl face and appliqué numbers, Korean made. Kit stared drunkenly at the man’s Colt automatic, then at his own watch. “Okay,” said Kit, deciding to do what he was told. “It’s yours.”
    This was not the response his mugger had been expecting.
    “Drop it.”
    When Kit bent, the man shook his head. “Drop it,” he said.
    The fake Rolex hit the dirt with a thud, then bounced against the railings of the graveyard to become lost in darkness.
    “Now your wallet.”
    Extracting a small leather billfold, Kit flipped it open, peered inside, and shrugged. Fifty thousand yen. About the price of a good meal in Akasaka, a week’s heroin, or a proper service for his bike. Hardly worth getting killed over.
    “No,” said the man, when Kit got ready to drop it. “Hand the thing to me.”
    Kit did as he was told.
    His mugger was openly sneering now.
    “And the rest.”
    Kit began to search his own pockets. Nothing but keys to the bar and a handful of coins, mostly 500-yen coins or lower. It was only when he dipped his hand into the inside pocket of his wax jacket that Kit hesitated, although he imagined the expression on his face was surprise.
    “Come on…”
    “It’s just a postcard.”
    “I don’t care,” said the man.
    I always thought this is where we’d both end up. How wrong can one girl be? Signed with a heart, which was really just an M for Mary with the first and last downstroke squeezed together. If her card had sentimental value, how come he hadn’t answered the