United States of Japan Read Online Free PDF

descended straight into his throat and belly. Blood spurted out. Several officers and their dates gasped in shock, thinking the swordsman had accidentally impaled himself. But the performer continued dancing in good cheer, not disturbed by the blood, which turned out to be strawberry jam. He pulled the sword out and asked the crowd if anyone could, “Help me cut my head off?”
    Tiffany raised her hand and, just as Ben was about to object, a Japanese waitress whose face was doused in white paint approached and said, “Ishimura-san. Forgive the interruption, but you have a call.”
    “I’m not taking any calls during the show,” Ben said, dismissing the woman.
    “Sir. Respectfully, the speaker was very insistent.”
    Ben looked to Tiffany. “You going to cut his head off?” he asked her.
    “Only if you watch.”
    “I’m squeamish about this kind of thing.”
    “It’s a trick.”
    “I’ll be back soon,” Ben said.
    “It’ll be over by then.”
    “You can tell me all about it.”
    “You leave, you miss out.”
    He kissed her cheek and followed the waitress down the steps. He bowed to several ranking officers and ignored the ones who were with their mistresses. After he’d exited the performance hall, he took out his portical in its square form and flipped open the flaps to turn it into its familiar triangular shape. Porticals had originally been devised as “portable calculators.” In the decades since the War, they had grown to encompass a phone with visual display, an electronic interface to search information on the kikkai (the digital space where all information was stored), and more. The triangular glass monitor interfaced with the processor, which he navigated via tactile contact. The silver borders accented the sleek design. “Patch the call through,” he told the woman.
    No signal came.
    “What’s going on?” he asked.
    It was hard to interpret her expression with her white face and her crimson painted lips. She looked like a mask, an inscrutable assembly of paints staring with pupils of incoherence. “Can you follow me, sir?”
    “Where to?”
    “A private room.”
    “I thought I had a call,” Ben snapped.
    “I wanted to talk with you.”
    “About?”
    “Could we speak in private?”
    “You can speak here.”
    “It would be better in private as will be made abundantly clear.”
    The performance center had newly painted walls that were richly saturated in red and dark blues, bleeding decadent opulence. There were statues of heroic officers from the United States of Japan in almost every corner, bravery allegorized in sculpted form. Ben noticed the plaque on one, describing how Colonel Ando died of typhoid in the San Diego uprisings while fighting the rebels and drowned himself in their water supply to make the Americans sick; Sergeant Okada was a notoriously clumsy chef who poisoned a thousand chestnuts and killed a thousand Americans in the process; and Lieutenant Takahashi was a pilot who sacrificed her life to take down one of the enemy aircrafts by crashing into their otherwise impregnable aircraft carrier bridge. They all died with honor. Living soldiers rarely got statues, Ben thought to himself.
    He was led into a large room filled with hundreds of cages. Birds were inside each, chirping chaotically, virulent squawks in an aviary cacophony. Most of the birds criticized the cramped space, the dry air, and the stale food. A nervous few fretted about their upcoming act, wanting to dazzle the humans who reciprocated their songs with thunderous claps.
    “Why are we here?” Ben asked.
    The waitress slipped out of her kimono, her peachy flesh juxtaposing eerily against the white of her kami-like face.
    “What are you doing?” Ben demanded to know.
    She had taped her breasts together and it became apparent from her lean chest and the bulge in her breeches that she was actually a he.
    “I’m flattered, but I’m here with someone,” Ben said. “So unless this is more than a