he night was so steaming hot that just thinking about breaking a sweat was enough to break a sweat.

Pedestrians were dropping like flies from dehydration. The street vendors sold everything they had in stock to quench the thirst. Before they knew it, they’d bartered away their own supplies and were hitting the canvas as well.

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

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

The weather hadn’t been like this during the day. It’d suddenly turned at midnight. As if choreographed.

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

Her boyfriend reacted with a fierce glare. He flicked his gaze at the owner of the glass and then gaped as he tried to glower.

Setsura Aki silently set the empty glass on the countertop.

“You sure can put ’em down,” the bartender said kiddingly. 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 all in black. It’s not natural, even assuming you were one for putting on airs. Not a thread out of place.”

Ha, ha, Setsura grinned 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 who aren’t a part of this world. 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 for the bartender to see. “Look, I’m down to my last good suit.”

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

As a statement like “Yeah, it is” or “That’s for sure” followed logically after such a statement, Setsura looked up at the bartender. A gesture of agreement.

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

“At all?” echoed Setsura.

The bartender caught his breath, suddenly aware of being 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 girl several chairs over. 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 by the shoulders.

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

“You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” the bartender instructed the boyfriend with a knowing smile. “But that’s not the fault of this here customer. 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 enough in his own way. He over-articulated and rushed his words at the same time.

“Sure thing,” said the bartender, the smile not disappearing from his face.

He reached for the cordless phone sitting nearby. The memorized number of the cab company was the single push of a button away. As he brought the phone to his mouth, Setsura mumbled something to himself.

Setsura always had the feeling about him of just having 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.

There wasn’t 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 Shinjuku would succumb to the horrible tragedy that awaited it.

The once glass-smooth roads preserved the scars of terrible cracks and fractures. On starlit nights, the wind whistling through the roadside trees sang 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 lie beneath the brilliant moonlight like broken sepulchers. 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 itself 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.

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 across the streets were cast by photographers fixated on its beauty.

With guides and bodyguards at the ready, the relatively safer grounds of the Park Hyatt and the 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 organic shadows were cast by the trees lining the roadways. 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 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 comely young man had his eyes closed.

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

“Huh?” The bartender drew his brows together. 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 heart of the old timers who knew the place before the “Devil Quake.”

There was no river, no swift-flowing river. But there was 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?” He 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 burst 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. She was 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 bewitching blues it swept away the regulars to a different place.

As if a girl like that could sing!

But in this business, a mere slip of a teenager often moved professional singers to tears while tough-skinned veterans grieved in private, knowing they’d never be her equal. That was the power of the blues.

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

The applause swelled as the reverberations of the final stanza drifted through 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 this city into her music. I gotta say, this is one helluva town.”

He looked for a sign of agreement from his guest, who was sitting across the table from him. He received none.

“Yeah, yeah, if the good Doctor wanted something better, he could manufacture a perfect pair of vocal cords himself.” His intention was to enliven the mood, but he paled as soon as he spoke, hearing the mocking tone in his words.

“Perhaps we shall listen to something else for the time being.”

The voice of his guest was like deep water spilling over polished gems. It was a voice that made the two scantily-clad hostesses flanking him catch their breaths.

Had the voice belonged to a statue, then its sculptor must have given up his soul to carve something so beautiful. A corner of his white cape was draped over his right hand, which contained all the powers of the demon world. It was said that he could cure any disease with nothing more than a rusty knife.

Making such rumors all the more believable was a physical beauty that at a single glance seized the chest with a paralyzing sense of emptiness akin to death. That was why he was called “Doctor Mephisto.” The Demon Physician.

“What do you mean by that, Doctor? You don’t want to listen to the blues any more?”

“I’m not really sure myself,” the Doctor answered this time.

“Huh,” the man responded in confusion. His attention turned to the brandy sniffer sitting in front of Mephisto. “Hey, what’s going on?” he shouted. “His glass isn’t topped off!”

The hostesses should have attended to the task. Neither of them moved. They couldn’t move a muscle. As soon as they had sat down next to the electrifyingly attractive doctor, the two had fallen under the spell of his indescribably unearthly presence.

“That’s fine,” Mephisto said softly. “I don’t consider myself a serious drinker.”

“Oh, be serious,” the man said, waving his hand dismissively.

Three empty bottles of cognac were lined up on the table. The best spirits from the outside world. They were rare as hen’s teeth in Demon City, costing a good five hundred thousand yen each. Mephisto’s handiwork, downing what he’d been offered.

Marveling to himself, the man produced a new bottle. “Bottoms up, Doctor.”

Mephisto didn’t refuse. He raised the empty glass to receive the smoky golden liquid. And then downed it in a single gulp. Without taking a breath or wiping his mouth. And not leaving a single drop behind. Almost as if the alcohol sprang into his mouth of its own accord.

“That’s one hollow leg you have,” the man said with honest admiration. “Your cheeks aren’t even flushed. Incredible! Doctor, I’m telling you, when the time for hospital expansion comes, just give me a holler. I may not look it, but I can get my hands on unlisted properties that never show up on the market.”

He wasn’t lying. A real estate broker who’d made Shinjuku his home turf, his Kabukicho offices had a hand stirring every pot in the ward, from the grubbiest shotgun shack to the coveted ruins of the old Self-Defense Forces buildings.

His wife had been stricken by a malignant tumor. After his personal doctor and shamans declared her condition hopeless and threw in the towel, he’d taken her to Mephisto’s hospital. Mephisto cured her in ten seconds. The little party he was throwing tonight was his way of expressing his gratitude.

“Say, Doctor, girls aren’t your thing?”

The man cast a quick glance at the cordon of women surrounding them. At the best nightclub in Kabukicho, stocked with the prettiest women money could buy, none of them was getting the job done. Tell one to pour a drink, and it’d go all over the table. Crack a joke, and they’d just sit there and stare off into space.

The man had kept his temper in check only because they were acting that way because of Mephisto.

Maybe they were intimidated by his looks, or some obstacle prevented them getting up close and friendly. As much as he needled, pushed and shoved, they wouldn’t press any closer. But they didn’t stand up and walk away either. They sat there and stared at him like beings possessed. It made the man shiver.

“You like women?” Mephisto asked.

“Of course!” From his wife down to a college coed, the man had four lovers.

“To me, everyone is the same. I feel that way especially after an operation.”

“You do have a point there.”

“If the insides are the same, all that’s left to choose from is what’s on the outside. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“When there is no need to willingly choose that which is ugly, then this is all that remains.”

Mephisto lightly stroked his cheek with his left forefingers. When he did it, it didn’t seem off-putting at all. No one would disagree with the assessment.

“That means that—guy or girl—you’re fine with them as long as they’re pretty? Not to be crude, but you’re saying you play for both teams?”

The man flashed a frozen smile. The eyes of the women flanking Mephisto rolled back as the taut, unearthly aura flowing surrounding him suddenly snapped.

“D-Doctor—”

A pall of silence descended. Mephisto’s face shone with a brilliant white light in the dark gloom. “Pretty?” he probed. “Has the human race devised a more miserable standard of description? Are you incapable of imagining a species of beauty that can stand before you while you remain unaware of it? Haven’t you ever felt that way? Such stale adjectives are suited only for those who know nothing of vistas that the stunted human brain cannot fathom.”

The view before the man’s eyes gave way to reality. Applause beat against his eardrums. The singer from before was again mounting the stage.

“Nevertheless, the female sex is undeniably an object of enormous fascination. You could even call it an imperative. From a doctor’s perspective.”

Mephisto gracefully opened his arms and wrapped them around the hostesses to his left and right. At the same time, as if escaping a ghostly spell, the dazed expression on the man’s face returned to normal. Only his eyes remained peeled.

Mephisto’s fingers slowly crawled across a white shoulder. ”Ahh—” the woman gasped.

“Fair skin, a proper distribution of fat, internal organs in good health—nevertheless, quite unaware, with no action required on their part, they will rot away beneath spotted, aging skin—the epitome of transience.”

Mephisto’s fingers reached the breast of the woman pushing out of the top of her dress, a dress slit far up the thigh. The man gaped as Mephisto’s fingers sank into the soft, white flesh without denting or creasing the skin, like a craftsman driving a nail through soft pine.

“What a waste,” said Mephisto with complete sincerity. “An utter waste. Mothers who have reared their children and women who will never give birth—to them, what good are these but to tempt men? They need simply say the word and—gone. And given in exchange, a meaningful life worth living.”

The man burst out, “Isn’t that a bit over the top, Doc? They’re just boobs.”

The mood in the nightclub abruptly changed. A noisy rustle raced from one end of the room to the other.

“What’s that voice saying?”

“No, what’s that sound?”

The commotion in the audience pulled the man’s attention toward the stage. Mephisto stared intently at his glass. A small, strange tragedy was about to be born.

The singer pressed her hands against her throat. Gasping, unable to breathe, the air squeaked out of her lungs in an asthmatic scream. She writhed, her mouth open. A hoarse was cry drawn out of her body like a thin thread. Finally the sound underneath welled up and spilled out.

Zaa— Zaa— Zaa— Zaa—

The sound wrapped her audience more in confusion than terror. A sound nobody had ever heard before.

Zaa— Zaa— Zaa— Zaa—

The sound of onrushing water.

From the lips of this blues singer, said to be second in talent only to the great Shinobu Kaze, poured a sparkling sweet sound, like a melody played on a koto. Such a gorgeous timber. Such a sad song. And such an expression of unmitigated joy.

The audience forgot the extraordinary sight of the bewitched performer and sank into a collective trance.

“They’re coming,” a man’s voice intoned.

At that instant the singer cried out. A silver shaft the width of her mouth sprang from her throat and smashed into the chairs in the audience, scattering screaming patrons and sending a shower of splinters flying in all directions.

A column of bone-chilling cold water.

The white shadow made its way like a phantom through the fleeing customers. Everybody knew the gorgeous young man cloaked in a pure white cape, but the purpose of the brandy sniffer, peeking out from the seams of the cloak, was a mystery.

The singer bent backwards and then pitched forwards. The water arced forth from the depths of the sea and channeled through her throat. It didn’t touch the floor.

Doctor Mephisto stood directly in front of the onrushing waters.

The night’s incident was destined to become one more curious case in the medical files of the Demon Physician. Even before that, the story would take on a life of its own, another chapter in “the legend of Doctor Mephisto.”

Every drop of water gushing from the singer’s lips was sucked into the glass Mephisto held in his hand.