An uyoku van blocked the steps to Pirate Mary’s parking lot. Revere the throne. Expel the barbarian, announced lettering down both sides. Unlike most such vans, which were black with a gold chrysanthemum, this one was gold with the imperial chrysanthemum picked out in black. It still had a revolving fog-horn though, bolted to the cabin roof, ready to harangue people on all sides.

The van was empty, all its doors locked.

Kit shrugged. He was drunk, tired, and stank of someone else’s wife; which was probably just as well, at least being drunk was, because had Kit been sober he’d be terrified. Not about the fascist van, but about the dead man behind him and the cos-play’s blade hanging heavy in his pocket.

Three Suzuki cruisers, all chopped beyond recognition, blocked the truck’s access to the alley. So its driver would need to climb two flights of stairs to Pirate Mary’s, track down three drunk bozozoku bikers, and persuade them to let him out. The faithful-sword-to-the-throne was going to require all the luck he could get.

Kit knew he should go in. And yet…

From habit, he reached into his back pocket for a multitool, flipped out the flat-blade screwdriver, and began to re-fix Pirate Mary’s history to the alley wall. Someone was forever trying to steal it. Towards the end of the 1500s a single figure controlled the seas around Ireland—Gráinne Ni Mhaille, known to Elizabeth Tudor, the Queen of England, as Grace O’Malley and to Elizabeth’s government as a wicked director of thieves and murderers.

She held hostage Elizabeth’s ships, raided villages on the English mainland, stole cattle, and forced Elizabeth to the negotiating table. Máirín Ni Mhaille was Grace O’Malley’s eldest daughter, better known as Pirate Mary. Some reports said she ended on the gallows in Dublin, others that she took James Stuart’s offer of a small castle on the Connemara coast. A revisionist version, recorded by the Bishop of Santiago, had her repenting of her sins and living out her final years as a nun in Spain.

About half of that was true. The rest Kit had invented after he bought the narrow wooden building in Roppongi and begun fitting out its second floor as an Irish pub. Such is the nature of history that Máirín ending her days at a Spanish convent now featured as fact in a TV documentary examining the links between Ireland and Spain.

Buying the house had been Yoshi’s idea. Cold and brilliant Yoshi, who blew into Kit’s life and left him standing, because unlike her other lovers he let her blow right through him. He’d asked Yoshi once, near the beginning, if something terrible had happened in her childhood and she’d given a smile both slight and mocking.

“So simplistic,” she said.

A day later she asked him if that was his excuse. Kit intended to tell her about his mother, but talked about being a sniper instead.

“A rurouni,” said Yoshi, at the end of it. “A hitokiri and a rurouni…A killer and a traveller with no destination.”

It took her three days to make the Kawakami Gensai sequence, a series of twelve pots in shades of desert yellow, slashed across the sides with quick flicks of a knife. The sequence sold within hours of going on display in Mitsukoshi, the majority going to private collectors, although one ended up in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It had taken two years to repair the wreck of a building, but they’d done it eventually. Another six months were lost in creating a bar, installing the bathrooms and white-washing wooden walls. The sign came last, painted by a small Vietnamese woman who owned a tattoo parlour behind the Almond coffee shop. She did it from a tatty snapshot of Mary O’Mally and a postcard showing the Disney version of Captain Hook.

Pirate Mary’s—Tokyo’s Best Irish Bar. No one but Kit knew where Máirín Ni Mhaille got her face.

“Dozo…”

The bozozoku glanced round, ready to take offence, recognised his host, and decided to move aside, albeit reluctantly and without bothering to take his hand from the panties of a girl in a tartan skirt.

Oh well, thought Kit, it gives the place colour. Dope thickened the stairs around him and a snatch of jig, ripped from an old Riverdance DVD, ran on a wall screen outside the bar.

Without thinking about it, Kit tucked the cos-play’s knife above the lintel, where he usually left a spare key. Then he took a deep breath and pushed open the pub door. The room stank of warm beer and too much skunk. Someone had ripped a chrome grill off the juke box in the hope of making it louder, and two bozozoku in leathers and replica WW2 helmets had crashed a table of art students and were coming on to the girls. No Neck was meant to be having a word with his friends about that.

“Kit, mate. Over here…”

People began calling before Kit even shut the door. Yoshi was still here, working the Guinness pumps, a job she hated. No Neck was definitely missing and the food cabinet was entirely empty.

“Listen…” It was Gaz, an Englishman who ran a studio by day, with a sideline in “portfolios” by night. Every would-be hostess who staggered off a plane at Narita already knew she was selling her breast size, hair colour, and smile. When Gaz suggested life could be better as a model most were happy to believe it.

He charged them camera use, studio time, the use of cheap clothes, and the services of a bad makeup artist. Model cards came extra. Cards being the best shot printed up with the model’s name, age, and vital statistics.

These lied as often as Gaz did.

Kit didn’t really dislike him. He was just one of those people…one of a thousand expats who’d dragged their unhappiness to the other side of the world, expecting everything to be different, and never quite got over the fact it felt the same. At least Kit had arrived with no such expectations.

“Sweet fuck,” said Gaz, cancelling what he was about to say. “You look wrecked.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Tough night, catch you later…”

Until Micki appeared, Kit really thought he might make it across the smoky room without being stopped. She looked about twelve but then she also looked like a boy. Her twenty-first birthday had been at Pirate Mary’s, courtesy of her friends in the bozozoku.

“I’m so sorry,” said Micki, bowing. “My fault…”

“What is?”

“Everything,” she said, and promptly burst into tears.

Kit took a deep breath. “What happened?”

“Yoshi-san fired No Neck.”

“She what…?”

“When he wouldn’t leave, she called the police.” Tears were streaming down the Japanese girl’s face. “They hit No Neck with sticks,” she said, “very hard…”

“The police?”

Micki nodded, her mouth a tight butterfly of misery. Tommy No Neck had been chapter leader with the Rebels, Australia’s most notorious gang of bikers. And he was the only foreigner Kit knew who rode with the bozozoku, Japan’s very own speed tribe.

“Yoshi…”

Looking up from her pump, Yoshi glanced back long enough to check a glass was full and slapped the lever, delivering a pint of Caffrey’s to the counter with a slight bang. For Yoshi, this counted as full-on rage.

“Kit,” she said, just his name.

“About No Neck…”

“Leave it,” said Yoshi. “I’m not having this discussion.”

“He’s my best friend.”

“That’s why he sells drugs, drinks beer without paying for it, and steals money from the till…”

“Small change,” Kit said.

“Also packets of cigarettes, whole boxes of condoms, whisky from the cabinet. He treats this pub like he owns it.”

“Okay,” said Kit, “we’ll discuss this later.”

Shaking her head, Yoshi said, “No, we won’t. There’s nothing to discuss.” She glanced at her watch. Almost an hour after midnight. Officially the bar shut at 11 pm. In practise, because his clientele were mostly foreign and the bozozoku fought only among themselves, the police overlooked the fact he stayed open late. Whether that arrangement would last beyond their arrest of No Neck was another matter.