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The first name Ranpo ever chose for himself was Hirai Taro. He couldn’t explain this decision, no matter how hard he was pressed, it just fit neatly on his tongue and felt like a name that was his own.
Kouyou frowned told him she would not have a Kamuro named so plainly, and to pick something better.
He could tell my looking at her that in that moment she mistook the name Ranpo gave for his birth one, which, well it suited Ranpo just fine at the moment, for his preceding name had been the name of the Clairvoyant’s son, and that name had died with the two who chose it.
Ranpo rocked back and forth on the okobo he was still getting used to, fished through his memory and eventually found a name he detested. Gold Mask, Ōgon-kamen. It was mentioned to him by his father in a bedtime story as the title ascribed to a thief he once dealt with, who came to be known by the staple accessory that obscured their face.
“Kogane,” Ranpo said eventually.
“Gold?” Kouyou tilted her head. She tested the name, “Kogane. Kogane-chan. Yes, that’ll work. Kogane-chan, then. Then you may call me ane-san.”
He smiled beneath her approval, and she ruffled his messy hair.
And then she taught him how to look up at men with innocent wide eyes, demure his posture and lure them to his new sister’s bed.
—
Kouyou told him to keep his mouth shut until he understood how much other people didn’t. If he scared away any more of her clients, she’d throw him back onto the streets.
“Give me a week,” he told her, not confidently, but nonetheless assuredly. “One week of running around, doing your chores, and watching the other Kamuro work. On the eighth day, I’ll bring you the richest client in the precinct.”
—
Kamuro widen their eyes to give the illusion of innocence, and blink up at the tall, male clients to appease their ego. With women, they become childlike, docile daughters to appeal to maternal instincts. There’s a way of speaking that people find ‘sweet’.
Old money people are casual, do not check receipts, do not glance at price tags, and pay with a casual recklessness when they can be so moved to. They are comfortable in their existences. New money flaunts and indulges. Both have manicured nails, perfect teeth, and no set work schedule.
—
On the eighth day, he brought in a man who paid for Kouyou the highest price for one night ever paid in the brothel’s fifty-year history. On the tenth, he brought a man that beat that record too.
Kouyou plucked an ornament straight from her hair and gave it to him as a show of her approval. He could not wear it in his hair, so he tucked it into the folds of his bright red kimono instead.
—
“And this is my dear Akiko-kun,” Kouyou smiled as she introduced her lover. Yosano was a slim woman in her early thirties with perfect skin, slim hands, a deep voice, and the air of strength. She was also, as Ranpo’s deduction supplied, a woman who defected from the military during the Great War, and a woman who resented senseless bloodshed suffered by the working class on the behalfs of the cushioned rich.
She asked Ranpo to tell her about herself, and Ranpo did.
Then she asked Ranpo to sell himself to her.
His face scrunched in disgust and he stumbled back on his stupid wooden platform shoes and protested he was only a kamuro, so no thank you!
“No, no,” Yosano laughed. “Not like that. Your mind, kid. Your head. Your body comes with, of course, but not for that purpose.”
“You want to be your info broker?” Ranpo asked, quizzical. He looked at Kouyou, who clearly approved of this deal, given she’d invited Yosano to make the deal in the first place. He was looking for the purpose of expressing that he didn’t want to leave. That he liked being Kouyou’s kamuro. “Do I have to?”
“Not at all,” Kouyou shook her head. “It’s your choice. You may pursue the path of a courtesan, if you so wish, or join Akiko-kun’s cause.”
“But,” Ranpo almost bit his lip. He refrained on account of all the scoldings he used to get for eating his lipstick. “I, you, ane-san…”
Kouyou looked at him, blinking owlishly in confusion, and then she laughed. “Oh, Kogane-chan, I’ll still be there. Akiko-kun and I are an item, and I am always with her cause.”
Yosano positively simpered as she laid herself against Kouyou.
“What would you like to be,” Yosano asked, “Kogane-chan, or Taro-kun?”
Courtesan, or informant?
How would you like to sell your body, Ranpo?
—
Ranpo had never looked forward to the inevitable future of entertaining a client in bed, so he chose the informant. He sold his mind, and was invited into Yosano’s faction-neutral clinic.
He pulled information out of patients to give her a better picture of the underground. He thwarted fights before they happened. He took his charisma lessons from his Kamuro days and put them into conflict resolution when prevention wasn’t an option.
They called him Hirai Taro at this time, still believing that this was his birth name, and having lost the need for the prettier brothel name.
“Taro-kun,” Yosano asked one day, as she leaned against the door of her private room, blocking his escape. “How would you kill the boss of the Port Mafia and make his death believable, in spite of your infallible healing ability, while retaining the ability to forge his last words.”
Oh.
Ranpo answered easily, “Have him die in the company of someone you trust while you’re en route, and make sure you’re just a liiittle too late. Someone like ane-san.”
The boss of the port mafia was already sort of dying, in all ways other than physical. Yosano’s ability could treat the physical deterioration, but not the mental, and he was issuing deranged orders like he wanted to flood Yokohama with blood.
“Ozaki-chan is a noteworthy candidate, yes, but what about you?” Yosano’s eyes glimmered, and Ranpo felt dread.
To be clear, he’d seen this coming from the moment the deal was offered to him, it just hadn’t been real to him until this point. Until he was staring Yosano in the face and could predict her next order before she spoke it:
“Kill the boss of the Port Mafia for me, Taro-kun. I’m sure you can find a way to make it believable.”
—
Here is all you need to know:
The deranged port mafia boss stood up from his bed and broke its contents in a rage. He cracked windows, tore the bed sheets, and before Ranpo could stop him he’d tangled his feet in the linen, tripped, and cracked his head open on the desk.
Tragically, Yosano did not arrive in time to save him, but before he died he told Ranpo (or, Hirai Taro, rather) that Yosano was to be his successor.
—
Do you know what makes securing one’s new rule over the mafia easier?
Knowing the in’s and out’s of all the dissenters, down to their genetic code. Knowing how to manipulate them, how to convince them, and how to get other people to kill those which can’t be convinced.
—
“I want to change the mafia,” Yosano confessed to him as she ran a hand through his hair. “You can never scrub a city free of organized violence, but, by sitting at the top of it, you can at least regulate it.” She gazed out at the streets from the high window of her office, and stared at the buildings the mafia had bombed under her predecessor’s reign. “He put Yokohama at war with itself, constantly. I had to stop it. I had to.”
A necessary evil, Ranpo thought mildly. Politics were his shortcoming, as they posed a much messier debate than deduction, which held only one finite answer. In his limited mind, he could not see anything wrong in Yosano’s statement.
Then again, he had not gone to school, and only learned from his parents’ how to dissect crime. He wasn’t sure whether the ‘mature’ thing would be to understand Yosano, or to oppose her.
In the end, he decided it didn’t matter. This was where his loyalties lied: with Kouyou, and now Yosano as well. They were his older sisters, who took him in when the world rejected him.
“The world is full of monsters,” Ranpo said eventually, picking at the hem of his black button-up absentmindedly. “You need a big, extra scary one to keep ‘em all in line.”
When he said this, he meant Yosano, or more broadly the mafia. But when Yosano took in a sharp gasp, making an expression as though she’d just been struck upside the face with an idea, then turned towards Ranpo, he thought, uh oh.
“You’re right,” Yosano whispered. She sprung from her seat with a leap and ran to him, put her hands on his shoulders and gasped, “you’re right. You’re what we need! With your mind, and more resources, we can keep them all in line.”
“Me?” Ranpo’s face contorted. “Me, the monster?”
“Of course,” she smiled, “you and the mafia.”
“Oh.” Ranpo felt very cold. His blood felt cold. “Wait, no, I can’t—I’m not a monster. What are you talking about?”
Yosano blinked, genuinely confused. “Well, not literally, of course. It’s only a metaphor.”
“If anyone’s a monster, it’s not me,” Ranpo frowned, now feeling oddly petulant. He tried to click his heel against the ground but forgot he was wearing dress shoes now, not the wooden okobo. “I’m a kid!”
And he was very proud of this fact. Mafiosi and courtesans alike doted on him for it.
Yosano’s eyes softened, as if suddenly understanding something. “You are. You’re a child and a monster.”
“Huh?”
“Taro-kun, your intelligence is monstrous.”
Oh.
That insult hit his skin like a droplet of rain; soft, cold. Not painful. Not yet.
—
The downpour hit him on his way home, which was a little nook of an apartment in a well to do neighborhood. It occurred to him that because they could not look into his home and deduce all the intimate details of how he lived the way he could about theirs, he was being invasive. He could not look at things without invading their privacy. He could not look without causing damage.
A monster, with its claw-imbedded paws, cannot walk without scratching the pavement. Cannot hold another, without drawing blood.
—
Kunikida was a steel-spined, unbendable ideal-obsessed orphan boy who produced cash and weapons with his ability to get him and the Sheep by.
In other words, Ranpo did not like him.
“You’re lame,” he said, crunching down on a lollipop. “Too unadaptable.“
“I can adapt. I simply prefer not to,” Kunikida scowled at him. He had narrow eyes but a childish roundness to his cheeks that made his angry frown look more like a pout. He couldn’t afford to iron his grey shirt or his green and black varsity jacket, but he’d clearly kept them as clean as he could, and probably hung them as they dried to reduce the extent of the wrinkling.
“Okay, well adapt to this.”
Ranpo kicked him in the face just to feel something.
Taller, stronger, and more experienced as Kunikida was, the scuffle ended with Kunikida pinning his wrists beside his head against the Suribachi dirt, both of them wearing all new bruises.
“What the hell was that for?!” Kunikida demanded.
“I dunno. I just wanted to lose at something.”
—
“My ideal is to never let an ally die a preventable death,” Kunikida spat at Katsura, who’d criticized Kunikida’s ideals for different reasons than Ranpo did.
Ranpo saw them as pointless, Katsura saw them as downright detrimental. As a member of the sheep, Katsura had stirred up trouble with the mafia in order to get them to attack the sheep. His aim? To see Kunikida’s ideals crumble.
That was dumb, because Kunikida’s ideals could not crumble. It wasn’t possible. Ranpo knew that because he wasn’t stupid.
When the scuffle with Katsura was over, he proposed, “Hey, join the mafia with me.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Join the mafia, and I’ll tell them all to leave your friends alone,” Ranpo asserted brightly. He puffed out his chest too. “Solves all your problems, in your ideal way! No bloodshed, no dead comrades. Completely practical too! In the mafia, you’ll have all the more resources to defend anyone you deem a friend. And! You’ll have me.”
Kunikida’s eye twitched. “What worth are you?”
“I’m the scariest monster around!” Ranpo boasted, feeling his chest burn as he did. “I can scare away anyone who threatens your friends!”
“And why would you want to do that for me?”
Ranpo smiled. “Your ability’s convenient. I mean, creation? Only limited by size? With my brain, can you imagine what kind of havoc we can wreak with that?”
Kunikida winced.
“And! I like you, Kunikida-kun,” he beamed. “I like your ideals.”
I like your devotion to them. I like that you have beliefs to be devoted to. I don’t. I wish I did. That would make me feel human.
“You… do?” Kunikida uttered in disbelief. He pushed his glasses up as if to see clearer the signs of lies on Ranpo’s face.
“I do. You’re super cool for sticking to them.”
“Oh.” Kunikida flushed slightly, and rubbed the back of his neck. “Thanks.”
“So, my deal?”
Kunikida’s face flickered with hesitance, again. No doubt he was beginning to wonder whether Ranpo’s praise was mere flattery.
“I’ll make you a second promise, Kunikida-kun. Not only will I help you as a partner—no, I’ll help your ideals as a whole. I’ll make sure you never have to comprise your ideals for the world.” He smiled, and decided he liked the sound of his own words. They were like a vow, an oath, a devotion. Resolve that was inherently human. “I’m a monster, so I’m really, really could at killing the stuff that would be a threat to you.”
Kunikida looked down at him with wide, nearly hopeful eyes. Ranpo extended his hand, and Kunikida ruminated.
“I…”
“You?”
Kunikida seized his hand with newfound conviction, startling a squawk out of Ranpo. “I’ll help you too!”
“Eh?”
“I’ll make you into the ideal partner,” Kunikida swore. “Your intelligence is a good place to start, of course. Yes, that is ideal. But other facets—you must eat well, exercise well, build social connections. You must know my own ideals down to the letter. I’ll have to put you on my schedule, yes, this will work.”
He rambled on for so long Ranpo almost regretted himself.
—
“You won’t kill them?” Yosano frowned.
“Don’t wanna,” Ranpo said. They were talking about the Sheep. “Made a deal.”
“You’ll hurt the mafia’s reputation, making them think we go easy on kids.”
“Don’t care. I’ll make up for it later.” He shrugged. He didn’t care much. Yosano usually listened to him anyway, since she knew how reliable he was.
“You’re sure of this decision?”
“Mhm.”
“Well, then.” Yosano’s frown quirked upwards into a smile. Her eyes held a sadistic glint and Ranpo titled his head. “I can think of another way to remind people of the mafia’s ruthlessness. Show them we don’t go easy on kids.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
Yosano gestured to the strap-laden infirmary bed, which she kept in her office in case she ever felt like torturing a man or two.
“Lie down,” she commanded. “Now.”
Oh.
Ranpo flinched. “You can’t be—“
“I thought you were smart. You should be perfectly capable of seeing how serious I am.”
Ranpo was smart, it was just that the concepts of Yosano and his hurt seemed antithetical. Fear pooled in his eyes as near tears and he protested, “Hey, wait, ane-san won’t—“
“Your ane-san will understand the necessity,” Yosano crooned. Her thin smirk split her face in half as she lifted her cleaver from her desk. “You’re injured, aren’t you? A little banged up, got a sprained ankle. I know you do. But you need to be half dead for your ability to work, and I can always use some more cash.”
“What are you saying?” Ranpo asked, eyes wide and mouth smiling. He didn’t know what other expression to make. He laughed. “What are you saying?”
“People will always need organs.” Yosano stalked towards him like a shadow and latched her hand painfully onto his shoulder. The strength of her grip was just one twitch away from rearranging his bones. “We can save lives this way,” she mocked, “now lay down willingly, before I break your bones to fit you in there.”
—
Product: Five kidneys, two hearts, a liver, four lungs, a pancreas, five ounces of bone marrow, three liters of blood.
“Go on,” Yosano smiled as he sat up in the infirmary bed. It was so soaked in blood that the shift of his weight caused more to drip out the side, like water squeezed from a sponge. “I’ve already called in the buyers. Now it’s your job to drive up the price. You worked a brothel once—you should know how to haggle.”
His head was foggy. Phantom pains itched at his skin. He had this urge to scratch. He scratched it, scratched his skin like he meant to tear it off again. Like it didn’t belong. Wasn’t supposed to be reattached.
His organs sat preserved on artificial circulatory systems in an ice chest.
“Take a shower and go,” Yosano said, unforgivingly. “If you’re not out of here within thirty minutes, we’ll do this all over again.”
Ranpo scrambled so quickly to his feet, he tripped over himself, hit the ground again, and began to sob.
—
Ranpo sold his body.
One man, whose brother’s lungs were riddled with life-threatening cystic fibrosis, had the bright idea to ask where the organs came from.
“Someone died for these, right?” He asked, laughing to himself in grim guilt. “Murdered?”
Ranpo frowned. “Isn’t ignorance supposed to be bliss?”
The man shook his head. “No, I… the uncertainty would be worse. I want to know with certainty what price was paid for my brother’s life today.”
Ranpo sighed. “Twenty-two million yen.”
“Sorry?”
“That’s how much your brother’s life cost.” He gestured vaguely at the organ chest. Twenty-two million was the cost the man paid to the mafia for the organ. “No one died for it.”
“But… how?”
Ranpo glanced at Kunikida. “Hey, make a pencil.”
Kunikida did so, and the man marveled.
“That’s not how we made the organ,” Ranpo cut in before misunderstandings could form, “but I’m showing you magic exists. Gifts. Abilities. Whatever you want to label them. My boss’s gift allows for organs to be removed without a person dying. So, no one died for those lungs.”
The monster was alive, wasn’t he? Alive and well, opening his mouth wide and selling himself.
“Go home, and sleep soundly,” Ranpo said, though he himself did not know why. “The only thing you’ll be holding a funeral for is your wallet. Better eat the cheap cereal from now on, and cut back on the dates.”
The man chuckled at first, for a lack of better ways to respond. Then he laughed. He laughed into his hands until he was crying with his hands over his sobbing eyes and chanting like a prayer,
“I’m so glad. I’m so glad.”
That made one of them.
—
Tortured for disobedience. Tortured for failure. Ranpo’s body was cut open and stitched together until Yosano finally deemed her Frankenstein’d monster good enough.
His brain worked faster now, pushed to its limits and beyond by the threat of pain no human body was ever supposed to live through. He was smarter, sharper, better. He was so smart that walking in public filled his brain with enough automatic deductions to induce a headache within minutes.
He had to stop thinking when it didn’t matter. Had to start closing his eyes whenever possible.
Kunikida picked up his slack with only some complaint. He dictated Ranpo’s schedule and diet based on what he knew of his preferences so Ranpo wouldn’t have to hurt his brain with decision fatigue. He rented entire arcades and cafes for hours so Ranpo could have fun without having to deal with people. He handled all the transportation.
“You can’t get tired of me,” Ranpo once told him. His fingers were fisted in the fabric of Kunikida’s black vest and he was close to sobbing into his shoulder. “You can’t.”
I can’t live if living gets any harder. It already hurts so much. We can’t trim my claws or I won’t be as scary, but they’re overgrown and digging into my skin every time I walk.
“I won’t,” Kunikida promised him. “You’re my friend. By my ideals, I cannot let you die a preventable death. If you,” he paused, “if you do not trust relationships, trust my devotion to my ideal code.”
And Ranpo did know by his deduction that Kunikida would never compromise on his ideals.
—
The only time Ranpo’s mind shut up was when he was under the knife or asleep. When he was in so much pain his brain couldn’t physically process a single thought, or his brain wasn’t awake at all.
That was how Ranpo learned to find peace in vivisection, and develop a reliance on melatonin pills. It didn’t matter if he developed a dependency, since whenever Yosano healed him, it would reset anyway.
Ranpo became known as the Fiend of Twenty Faces while Kunikida was the Conjurer. Together they were Kyōfu-Ō, the Kings of Terror, for their specialty in chemical warfare and neurotoxin. Ranpo was the mind and Kunikida the creator; a dangerous, god-like combination. Together, they made their victims bleed out from the sweat pores in their bodies, or rot from the inside out.
No one could identify them, much less catch them. They scared off most gangs like that, even the ones from Tokyo, and those that encroached on Yokohama anyway were left strung up by their own entrails at their mothers’ doors.
—
When Ranpo read Edgar Allan Poe’s works, he finally felt understood.
The raw, gothic, unapologetically violent nature of his horror stories sympathized with him, while the detective novels reminded him of everything his parents meant for their son to be.
When he learned that the author himself was a member of the mafia too, his elation was like no other.
He had forgotten how their first meeting went, beyond that he burst into Poe’s presence on the man’s way out of a meeting with Yosano, but according to Poe he blurted his in-depth praise and analysis out to him so quickly he couldn’t catch half of the words. At one point, he went on such a long tangent it deprived him of breath, and he fainted right onto the floor two feet in front of Poe.
There was never a more effective way to shatter Ranpo’s fearsome reputation in front of his idol’s eyes, so that the man wouldn’t blanch from him, than that. So, if anyone asks, Ranpo definitely meant for that to happen.
(“No,” Poe frowned when Ranpo tried to tell Mushitarou as much, “no you didn’t.”)
—
Poe took him into other worlds; literally. Worlds where Ranpo belonged. Worlds where there was nothing more to deduce than the story, which was by nature lacking in all the millions-per-square-footage of details that reality held.
The only trouble was that if Ranpo didn’t shut his eyes here too, he’d solve every case near instantly. Poe swore to him he’d try to write a mystery which he could stay in for longer, and Ranpo wished he could say he believed that would work, but he couldn’t—not without lying—so instead he laughed and said, “thanks, Poe! But there’s no mystery I can’t see through. Maybe just give me a blindfold in the next one? That’ll buy me like, thirty minutes, if I try really hard not to notice things.”
“I can do that,” Poe agreed. “I’ll do my best for you?”
“Why?” Ranpo chirped before he could stop himself. His smile was wide and his eyes were open and empty.
“I think you deserve to feel okay, Taro-kun,” Poe explained in painful earnestness. “I want to write a world so sophisticated you feel just like everyone else.”
“Ehh? You’re gonna put me in a world full of monsters?” Ranpo pouted. “Mean.”
“Monsters?” Poe stared. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, I’m a monster! So a world full of things like me means a world full of monsters.”
“That’s not…” Poe squinted. He looked concerned. “You’re not a monster.”
Okay, sure, and the sky is green. Ranpo rolled his eyes.
“I mean it,” Poe doubled down. “You’re brilliant. That’s awe-inspiring, not monstrous.”
Ranpo frowned, and tilted his head. This was odd, because Poe was wrong, but he also wasn’t lying. For those things to be true, that had to mean he was stupid. But Poe wasn’t stupid. So then, he had to be lying? But Poe wasn’t lying. “I don’t get it.”
“You inspire me,” Poe said seriously. “If you were allowed to be a detective, I’m sure you’d have inspired many more.”
Poe had to be either lying or stupid, but if he wasn’t either than he had to be correct, but that couldn’t be possible either because anyone could see that Ranpo’s flesh was rotting off his bones like Frankenstein’s monster’s and he was just this cobbled-together freak of nature with a high selling price.
Poe couldn’t be correct, but Ranpo cried anyway. He sobbed into his hands so loudly the bartender gave him another drink on the house, said he’d never seen a man cry like Ranpo did. Poe called it proof of Ranpo’s humanity. Ranpo liked to call it pathetic. Poe said monsters couldn’t be pathetic, so therefore, he agreed he was human. Ranpo cried so hard he fell asleep in his idol’s arms.
—
Ranpo sold his heart more often than a courtesan. Fifty-two other people lived with his hearts beating in their chests while a hundred and twelve had their blood filtered by his kidneys. His parts were sheathed inside hundreds of bodies and a woman had seen every inch of his insides apart from his skull. His body wasn’t his own and it was thoroughly used.
On his deathbed, Poe held his exploited body in his arms and told him, “Ranpo-kun, it isn’t your fault.”
This confused Ranpo, because he knew it wasn’t his fault, and yet as this was said he became aware that his lips were moving against his will and his voice was repeating ‘I’m sorry’.
“A monster you have never been,” Poe said, “but, if you must loathe yourself, then loathe yourself enough to ensure there isn’t another you.”
Ranpo paused. His mouth was dry from speaking. Finally, consciously, he uttered, “What?”
He took Ranpo’s face into the cradle of his hands, and Ranpo felt the blood trickle onto his face, down his jaw and to the chin, mixing with the tears which he didn’t realize until now were also streaming from his eyes.
“You have borne the burden of monstrosity for a while, haven’t you?”
“It’s what I am.”
Poe smiled, and simply shook his head. “When you find someone like you, take care of them the way you wish someone did for you. Protect the vulnerable. Be the safeguard you never had.”
When Poe died in his arms, Ranpo realized it, and yet did not. A part of his mind deduced it from the chill of the skin and the ceasing of the breath, but when it came to Ranpo’s body, he merely sat there until the moon rose into the sky, and Mushitaro had to physically untangle him apart from the corpse.
—
Ranpo patched up the missing, sold-off gaps in his existence with Poe’s parts. He swapped the coat he got from Yosano for Poe’s, kept Karl at his side for companionship, switched his phone out and took all the books.
Poe had asked him to care for someone similar to him the way he wished he had been, but the way Ranpo wished to be cared for was by Poe. So, he picked out a new name. Hirai Taro was a tainted one, anyway. He picked Edogawa Ranpo; Poe’s name in his native tongue.
He left the mafia and spent two years ducking his head and grieving. What humiliated him the most was that his heart still belonged to all the people he sold it to—the fifty-two patients who received his transplants, his ane-san, his mentor, his partner, his protege and the their sibling. Two years of grief and he could never turn his claws against them.
All the same, Ranpo showed up on the armed detective agency’s doorstep with Taneda’s recommendation, intent on throwing himself into protecting the vulnerable civilians, and safeguarding the agency.
He looked up at Oda with big, green, kamuro-innocent eyes and asked, “May I apply to be a detective?”
May I sell myself here instead?