Furyo knows he is asleep and struggling to stay so, but every few minutes he thinks he is awake watching Machi stuff her face with seaweed wrapped rice balls. Something about his mouth disturbs him. He thinks he sees a mouth like a spider, mandibles of an inhuman nature protruding from a mouth he had spend hours making out with. Her hands and eyes seem to be black like the parlor of a cockroach or cricket and as his sleeping eyes clear from the haze of sleep they go back to the smooth and soft women pale skin. He knows he is asleep, conscious of the stiff armrest poking his back, the cramps of injuries further excited by being stiffly cramped in a small sedan. Machiko smiles and he falls back into dreams of infants with spider faces crawling across ceilings lit by the drifting lights of passing cars.
All night he dreams of being stopped in an American gas chamber, cold steel rivers and chairs full of holes where sodium cyanide falls into a bath of sulfuric acid and filling the turquoise painted octagonal airlock with pungent smoke that smells like almonds dipped in bleach, ripping the fibers of his lungs and drowning in blood. He has dreams of an elderly police inspector who tends a garden in his retirement, too pained by being forced into corruption to remember his glory days as an honest detective, so he loses him self in the wealth from turning a blind eye to school girls sold to brothels and doctors forced at gunpoint to put the stolen organs of missing Korean day laborers into the chest cavities of foreign corporate tv executives. Awful dreams of torture and medical abuse.
Furyo dreams of his mothers face, but she is not friendly. A cold hostility is in her glaring eyes. He sees his grandmother smashing the armrests of her wheel chair, sneering about his father, (黒狼) The Black Wolf, Kuroi ōkami. He thinks about his father, trying to reconcile the pictures of his childhood home with the legendary assassin spoken of in fearful whispers by Yakuza who dread a visit by a personage known for leaving bodies in broken peices. Furyo thinks of (ミスター·ゴースト·ランタン) Mr Ghost Lantern and his stories about legendary Monsters, Yokai, Evil Spirits and Cannibal Giants who live in the mysterious islands of the west, where all the dead of Japan are sent instead of burial to satiate the Cannibal Warlords of antiquity, now being hunted by the Ghost Clan and Possessed Men in a coup he has choses the losing side of. Tribes of Monstrosities and great evil spirits orchestrate organized crime, oppressing the public as ghoulish the Vampire Clan impersonates law enforcement.
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Furyo wants to wake up but his injuries seep any energy he has into a tortured, restless sleep where only cruel out of focus pictures guide a story by unreliable narrators as the gods have no mercy for him. He thinks of all the time lucky kids found money or new toys. All Furyo found was violence, beaten by rival gangs, framed by cops, accused by store owners out of the blue just for being there. A hundred times he remembers being picked out of a crowd as if slanderous liars sensed something about him they wanted to destroy by the way he dressed or the look in his eyes. He must represent every old woman’s memory of some Romeo who left her abandoned and pregnant or never showed up to pick them up from the airport. He has the mark of cain on him. A black curse devoted to misery and ever increasing pressure.
He dreams of the car being loaded on a Ferry to the Island of Giants, (人食い巨人の島) “Hito kui Kyojin no shima.” Furyo thinks he can hear Albatross, Petrils, Skuas & Jaegers. Japanese sea birds songs as he listens for the horn to signify landfall. He imagines walking the deck of the ferry and seeing the mist shrouded land of the Giant Clan where fire breathing blue roosters stalk the beach, bird women and glowing eyed psychic apes stalk the forrest. Where single horned Kirin horse-dragon frolic among the sea foam, snake and spider shape shifters take the forms of beautiful women like the (狐) Kitsune fox spirit who sings songs to tempt travelers into being eaten alive beside roads. A terrible land of magic and compromised physics lays before him as evil spirits of the sea try to drag the ferry down to the depths of blackness bellow. Somewhere like a mountain rising from the stormy waves, the mythical (海坊主) Umibozu watches unfeeling as hundreds of clawing (船幽霊) Funayurei spirits rip lines and tangle the propeller.