Tae had made one mistake: Apartment 108 was not two doors down, but three. Jiro took a nervous breath, straightened the giant pink Hawaiian shirt, and knocked.

No answer. The door was even rustier than Tae’s. By the door was a bicycle, battered, with the seat and one wheel missing. Next to that was a broken flowerpot and the remains of a cactus. The cactus was a pile of pulp, like someone had smashed it with a sledgehammer.

Jiro knocked again. Please let this guy just be an ordinary man, he thought. I’ve had way more than enough excitement for one day.

Suddenly, the door flung open and smacked Jiro in the forehead. He stood clutching his head in pain. A man in his late fifties stood looking down at him, chewing on a plastic straw. Despite the heat, the man was dressed in a black sweatshirt and sweatpants decorated with patterns of dragons breathing fire. He had on sunglasses, and a scar (what was it with all the scars?) ran from his ear to the edge of his mouth.

“What do you want?” said the man. “If you’re selling newspapers, I don’t want one.”

“A-are you Ken?” Jiro asked, still clutching his head. He was pretty sure it was bruised—or fractured.

The man eyed Jiro suspiciously. “Why?”

“I want to ask about the Hinomaru.”

The man tensed up. He looked at Jiro. “You’re not from the city office are you? Not the police?” He stuck his neck out from the doorway and looked around. There was a bit of tattoo peeking out from under the man’s collar.

Jiro shook his head quickly. “No I just want to know a bit about your fishing experiences …”

The man brightened. “Ah, a journalist!” Then he cocked his head at Jiro’s pink shirt. “But I wonder … Aren’t you dressed a bit too casual for a journalist?”

“I’m freelance,” Jiro lied.

“Oh,” Ken said, waving Jiro inside. “Well that explains it. There’s not much here but …”

Jiro followed Ken inside. He noticed Ken had a limp when he walked: his right leg dragged on the floor behind him with each step, and he had to lean on the wall for support.

The apartment was just like Tae’s, except it was even more run down. The door to the bedroom was torn off from its hinges and was lying on a sofa in the living room. In the place of the door, the bedroom was curtained off with a blanket.

Ken slid the door off the sofa and sat down slowly, favoring his bad leg. He indicated that Jiro should do the same.

“Ken, I have a que—"

“Shh,” Ken said with a finger to his lips. “My daughter is sleeping in the bedroom.”

Jiro nodded.

“So,” Ken pulled a knife somewhere and was flipping it in the air and catching it. “You’re here about the fishing problems. And the disappearances. I’ve been waiting for someone to come. To tell our story! I thought nobody carried.” He quivered when he spoke, like a junkie hungry for a fix.

Jiro shook his head, watching the knife warily. This was news to him. “I want to know about Soko Island. Why you’re fishing there.”

“It’s not even that good. The catch in that area. It’s just that the catch is so much worse everywhere else.”

“What do you mean?”

“Every fisherman has his own secret spots,” Ken said, twirling the knife. Jiro notice he was missing the pinkie finger on his left hand. Tattoos and a missing pinkie: so this man was a yakuza—or a former yakuza. “I had my own secret spots too,” Ken was saying. “But all of those dried up, except for Soko Island. And by now Soko Island has probably dried up as well. I haven’t been there since …” He motioned at his leg. “Anyway, now ships go out and come back without a single fish. Sometimes all we get is an old shoe or a piece of rag. Sometimes …” Ken lowered his voice even further. He had a strange expression on his face. “Sometimes the boats even disappear.”

Jiro nodded sympathetically. That would explain the strange reactions at the port. But what about the reactions to the name Hinomaru?

“Could it be …” Jiro said, thinking out loud. “Was the Hinomaru one of those ships? To disappear?

“Yes!” Ken suddenly shouted. He plunged his knife into the sofa, sending up a spray of fake features and nearly piercing Jiro’s leg. “Can you believe that? I worked for twenty years to buy that ship! And now it’s gone … And with this injury I can’t even work … How am I supposed to provide for my family?!”

The guy, thought Jiro, seemed nice enough for a yakuza. But he also had anger problems. Either way, there was no way Jiro could kill him, both on moral and physical grounds. Any attack would probably earn Jiro a knife to the belly. Still, he didn’t want to disappoint Kaori. For some reason, he wanted to show her—and that stupid fish woman Sheena—that he was capable of solving this problem. And that he could do it his own way, not theirs.

“Do you know why?” he asked. “Why the fish disappeared? Why the Hinomaru disappeared?”

Ken narrowed his eyes, leaned forward across the table, put his mouth to Jiro’s ear. Then he shouted: “IT’S A CURSE!!”

“A … curse?”

“Yes, didn’t you hear me?!” Ken threw his hands up. He was shouting now, waving his arms. “It has to be a curse! Some evil spirit is eating the fish! And kidnapping sailors!” Ken sunk bank into the sofa and started to cry. Jiro was getting an idea of why this man had been forced to cut off his pinkie: he was just way too emotional.

“Dad, SHUT UP! I’m trying to SLEEP!” Shouted a sudden voice from the bedroom. A slipper flew out from the curtain and hit a cup on the coffee table with such force that the cup flew against the opposite wall and shattered. A second slipper hit Ken in the head, snapping his neck sideways.

Silence.

“Sorry,” Ken finally whispered, pulling his neck back into alignment. “My daughter has a bit of a temper.”

A girl swished aside the curtain and stepped through, rubbing sleepy eyes. She had hair with blonde highlights, tied up in a bun. She was muscular, curvy, and tan. The girl scratched her groin absently and stifled a yawn.

“Dad I told you to be quiet when I’m trying to slee—"

The girl’s eyes met Jiro’s … and both of their mouths dropped open. Standing in the doorway, in a pair of loose-fitting bunny-print pajamas, was Aya.

“Dad …” Aya said slowly, not taking her eyes of Jiro. “That’s him. The guy who tried to violate me.”