Girl Recruits Her God: Chapters 1-7

By Ami Sakurai

When she was young, Yuri lost consciousness after being locked in a sun-heated car by her mother, having an illicit love affair at the time. The experience traumatized her, and she grew up to be a high school girl who could not love or open her heart to others. She was afraid of hurting her own feelings by dealing with others, and wanted to become a mindless ‘object’.
Yuri met Kenji, whose leg had been crippled by bullies. To extort money from middle-aged males, they used a telephone dating club named Lover Line, a prostitution match-maker offering high school girls. She had a one-night stand with a ‘prey’, who had a shocking secret.
The author Ami Sakurai, whose previous work “Innocent World” was translated into many languages and received massive attention, describes in her second work real lives of Japanese high school girls who live on the impulsive edge in order to overcome suppression.
This is the first half of the work, which was originally published in 1997 from Gentosha Inc.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781329819047

Book preview

Girl Recruits Her God: Chapters 1-7

Girl Recruits Her God: Chapters 1-7

Originally written in Japanese / Ami Sakurai

Translated / Nobu Nakagawa

Cover Photograph and Cover design / Ami Sakurai

This work was first published in Japan in 1997.

Japanese edition copyright © 1997 Ami Sakurai / Gentosha

English edition copyright © 2016 Ami Sakurai / The BBB: Breakthrough Bandwagon Books

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-329-81904-7

-1-

The frosty metallic flesh fumed the chilling stench of death, and stimulated my naris.

I approached the 1982 Volkswagen Golf, and gently blew on the door. It revealed the crimson-red I often had nightmares of.

Discolored dust whirled, revealing little of the flashy scarlet. Just the way it was in my dim recollection.

Since my mother left home, it had been abandoned, never receiving maintenance. Without doubt, the batteries had to have run out ages ago, with the accelerator and the brake rusty and stuck.

I was afraid of going inside.

My ghost, a petite but large-eyed girl, might be in the rear seat, whispering to me quietly. Vague murmuring and overflowing grief might be lurking within the air as a white and misty empty shell.

Still, I opened the door.

This would be an altar that would hold special significance for me. In this crimson-red Golf, ‘it’ dwelt.

Always appearing in a dream, with a shining metallic body.

Gentle yet tough white wings, soaring through the wind.

An expressionless, slightly disconsolate, and hollow gaze.

If I died, ‘it’ would hold my body, away from this world. I always had waited for that day.

Hence I must pray within ‘it’.

I inserted the key, and awakened the driver’s cabin from two years of sleep.

I chased off the dust that had been piled up, and sat on the driver’s seat.

I thrust in the engine key. Expectedly, there was no response. Poor thing, I muttered in thought. The engine had to have inhaled moisture beyond help, and had been falling into a deep coma.

What would be worse, to be instantly crushed at a scrap factory, or to let rust and corrosion eat away at the electrical system for the gradual death.

I slumped into the seat, and muttered to ‘it’.

I want to be a part of you.

Just like an object, like a discarded silicon chip, I want to become the existence of a quiet, fulfilled being.

For a couple of minutes, voice of my heart echoed in the pious silence of the garage.

The ritual was finished, with my body swelling with dark, inorganic energy. As quaking of ashen metal, a lightning bolt penetrating a lightning rod in the night.

I unfolded on my lap a bulky folder booklet recording the data of list for a telephone dating club. I had been keeping the record since the first call to the telephone dating club back in the first year of middle school. It was somewhat of a diary for me. This was the ninth booklet.

The final page was recorded as such.

* * *

<> Q.P.

June 23. Maple Club. 32 year-old brokerage firm sales representative, seven at Café Rion in Shibuya. Thirty minutes later, Hotel Canal in Maruyamacho with Izumi. Sweptback hair with silver-framed glasses, reptile-like cold eyes. Second base at hotel, finisher with hands. 30,000 yen. Persistently asked for my number, so gave him number for Shibuya police booth. On the way home bought at Tower Records three CDs and a German Solingen box cutter.

* * *

‘Q’ stood for QUARRY, meaning ‘prey’.

‘P’ for PLUNDER, to ‘loot’.

They were marks for a little game that I played with my gangmates.

A Self-Defense Force member, an airline flight engineer, a taxi driver, a sales representative of a drug manufacturer ...

There were men of all sorts of occupations. Still, for me, they all fell under the category of ‘Q’, no more than a faceless mass.

I took out from the pocket a Lover Line tissue pack that I got in front of Ikebukuro station today. To cruise for the victim.

Lover Line had a membership system for male customers, with reputation for its strict checking of identity and annual income. Hence it was popular among the assisted dating girls, for there were less chances of being misses.

Among tens of numbers on the list, I chose the Shibuya shop, and slowly made the call.

There was always the tension that I felt at the moment the phone connected.

A young male responded to the call with a low voice, and asked, Hello, where might you be at?

Inside the garage of a dead car.

I answered with the pretense of a little nervousness.

That’s one to think about. You in high school?

If you wish so, think of me as such.

The man gave a bitter laugh, introduced himself as a 29-year-old businessman. He seemed to be accustomed to picking up girls through telephone dating clubs.

Let me guess. You probably have a nice body, a short hairdo, and hmm, look like Maki Sakai. Am I correct?

All wrong.

The man seemed to be thrown off by my dry, uninflected voice, but immediately pulled himself together.

Glad it is a normal girl like you. The last girl I met through a telephone dating club was into S&M. Well, it was good in itself, but bindings and whips every time is a little ...

Pity. You belong to the trash box.

I brusquely cut off the phone. Once more, I called the same shop number.

Hello. Wait. Let’s chat for a moment.

A penetrating voice of a male about my age.

Sounds better than the last one. I let out a silky voice.

Hey, do you know what codeine phosphate is?

What is that? Some sort of scientific experimental drug?

The source of an acid trip contained in cough medicines sold in pharmacy. If consumed in large quantities, you feel the downer and can have lots of fun.

Are you stoned from taking that?

His voice lowered in quiet anxiety. I laughed faintly.

You’re wrong. Just my way of saying hello. All my friends have experienced it, so I tested you.

A complete lie. Nowadays, no one would even try such happy meals of drugs.

Tonight, there will be a party at a hotel in Shibuya. Max tension with drugs and caffeine preparations, dancing and swimming. Membership at 10,000 yen. Wanna come and try? There will be girls from some elite high schools as well.

I’ll pass since I’m low on money, said the man as he had gotten cold feet. Besides, I gotta go to a cram school today. Too bad. Maybe next time.

I said Ta-ta, and hooked up

Then I talked with five different people, and made an appointment to meet with the most promising businessman in his 30’s at the stair hallway of Shibuya 109.

The time I spent on thinking about a plot of an ill-fated girl depluming money always was the moment of pleasure.

Too much or less of pitifulness would deprive it of reality.

Then, how about this?

Raised by a single mother, raped by mother’s boyfriend and got pregnant.

Being threatened to kill if rattled, while in a bind for the lack of abortion expense.

Of course, the clothing would be the high school uniform bought at the flea market. It was an iron rule to make the facial foundation thin with a thick eye makeup.

When the man got hooked in the talk, with goofy sympathy and erotic delusion entangled in his thoughts, I got ecstatic in the evil sensation of the victory. For such inferior, flimsy men, they should consider this an honor even to be deceived by me.

I moved my body, so that I could project the image of my face in the back mirror.

I erased all expressions to make myself look like ‘it’.

The ashy mineral-like eyes were the micro cameras, and the clear skin was made of a bioplastic material. The skull was filled with gallium arsenide, and the heart was a replica of vanadium crystal.

The facial expression was fixated, like a lizard revived from the bottom of the night darkness that was emitting the cold light.

‘It’ would neither engage in conversation, nor exchange ideas with anyone. For it had no purpose in life.

It was an extraterrestrial being dwelling in the desert of a distant planet, adapted to the inorganic environment over a period of millennia, to define the final phase of the morphological transformation. In a few more millennia, the crystal would decompose, returning to the flowing sand. Only that memory of the future charmed me.

It was the irrelevance of excessive human nature; love, sorrow, despair. I simply identified and analyzed events. I memorized the events if needed.