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off with a chuckle like part of the syllabary— ka, ki, ku, ke, ko! —and fashion-conscious Kato gazed at Sugioka with eyes so wide they were nearly round and cried, “Now, that’s what I call STYLIN’!” And for the next thirty minutes or so they had exchanged no more words but lots of stunned looks and sporadic bursts of uncontrollable laughter. Now, as he walked down this tree-lined street, Sugioka was remembering that laughter, and sniggering to himself. He recalled with special fondness the question someone had posed when the laughter had subsided somewhat—“So, like, what sort of Oba-san was it?”—and how everyone had focused on him as he told his tale.
    “Well, you know, after we did the Pinky & the Killers show, I’m kind of embarrassed to say it but I was so excited I couldn’t sleep, so I took a bunch of sleeping tablets I’d bought from some street kid in Shibuya, but even then I couldn’t sleep, and in the morning, you know how it is on mornings like that, you get a hard-on so bad it hurts, and I went out on the street with mine, carrying this knife with me too, which now makes me think that right from the start I was planning to take somebody down—yeah, not kill ’em but take ’em down, that was the feeling—and I saw this Oba-san in a white dress come out of the rear entrance to Ito Yokado, a white dress that looked like it was made out of jizz, and she smelled like shellfish too.”
    III
     
    “I instinctively understood that this Oba-san was the one I needed to take down, and I’ll tell you why I knew. It’s because I’m a hunter . Not that I’ve ever done any actual hunting per se, but I read this book by a guy who calls himself Japan’s Number One Hunter, and this guy, normally he works in a little advertising agency as a whaddayacallit, a copywriter, and his wife left him and he doesn’t have much money and lives in Tama New Town, and he drinks a lot and gets into fights, and even though he always loses he still thinks of himself as the Number One Hunter in Japan, whether or not he’s ever actually bagged any game, which he hasn’t, by the way, but anyway I read this book he wrote, and when you read it you’re like, Now, this is a true hunter , because this guy, in his mind he’s always got a shotgun with him, even though he doesn’t really have one because he failed the written exam for the license, which is multiple choice and, like, ridiculously easy, like the written exam for a driver’s license. I mean, the questions are like, ‘After hunting or target practice, you find you have some live, unused shells left over. What should you do with them? A: Use proper care in taking them home and storing them in a safe place. B: Divide them up amongst any children who happen to be nearby. C: Heave them into the nearest body of water, shouting SCREW YOU! at the top of your lungs.’ Well, this guy would always choose B or C because, see, he’s honest, that’s his downfall, he can’t tell a lie. So, anyway, he doesn’t actually have a gun, so what does he do? He goes jogging, and as he’s jogging he visualizes himself shooting down all the living things he sees on the road. He started with ants and caterpillars and things, then graduated to praying mantises and cabbage butterflies, turning all the jogging courses around Tama New Town into killing fields, and then after a while he conquered his fear and started targeting dogs and cats. The way he puts it in the book, I don’t remember the exact words, but it was like, ‘It’s not only deserts and savannas and mountain forests that can serve as hunting grounds, but the city itself. Right in the middle of the city, that’s my hunting ground, and it’s mine alone.’ That’s what he says, and then he says that survival of the fittest is just another namby-pamby philosophy that can’t really help you when you’re living in the city. He goes: ‘What’s important is humanism. We need to realize our hunting in the