Billy’s dad had passed last year. Weeks of sitting in the hospital in Patterson, watching the nurses stripping the brown clotted blood from the drainage tubes on his chest, smelling the fake pine forest smell of the air freshener, listening to the old man lapse into diatribes against the government’s failure to prevent Texan secession, hate-filled rants against his mother adultery, tasteless jokes about the Great Wall of Canada. Billy had felt so glad and so guilty that day Dad had tried to stand without warning and began the pouring out of the last of his tired and toxic blood. As the dangerous chemical splashed on the tiles, Billy thought of the red rays of the Rising Sun. His dreams had come true at last, as his family conveniently left the stage. It was a great and Shakespearean moment. Of course had lived anywhere else—any civilized place—even Texas, he could have sold Dad’s dying body to the zombie makers. He could have left that day for his spiritual homeland and lived like the Mikado. Seeing the kyonshi was a sign—his father’s ghost had joined him in Japan. All was well. All was good. Everything was tending toward its kami state.
The class bell broke this anti-Hamlet reverie, and he hurried to his class to teach English to students who were doing what their parents had done for six generations since Pearl Harbor, learning the language of power. Today’s lesson: an infinitive can be used just like a noun in all cases save for the possessive. To err is human. Mr. Parsons loves to read.
Three hours later Billy knelt on his tatami mats practicing sitting Zen. His computer screen simulated the meditation master. His randomly selected koan: “Hogen pointed to the bamboo blinds with his hand. At that moment, two monks who were there went over to the blinds and rolled them up. Hogen said, ‘One has gained, one has lost.’ ” Billy had no idea what that meant, but it was so damn Japanese! He focused his mind attentively on the koan, and attended to his breath. Fifteen minutes later he began to nod off, and as his head bent toward the floor, the computer made a booming noise awakening him. His neighbors pounded his wall and yelled in Japanese. Billy did not know if he were closer to enlightenment. He would have to buy better software to detect that, and such modern (or was it postmodern) touches seemed to Billy to be cheating. Enlightenment should come the old fashioned way.
Later he updated his status on the social networks. His old friends in the Patterson Ottaku Club were suitably impressed. Nothing said Japan more than a kyonshi.
Four bestselling manga were devoted to kyonshi: Kyonshi Love, Reverend Deadman, Kyonshi Girl, and Air Raid Siren. Kyonshi Love featured Katsumi, who intentionally exposed himself to the virus so that he could track his childhood sweetheart Kasumi—it was a retelling of the Robert Silverberg novella “Born with the Dead.” Reverend Deadman was a zombie Lutheran minister that had broken free from his controller and ran a church in Tokyo by day and fought alien sex fiends by night. His “undead” status gave him limitless energy and immunity from the aliens’ sex rays. Kyonshi Girl was a schoolgirl, who despite the fact her family had sold her as a kyonshi, sought the love of a demon prince and kept losing her underwear in interesting and creative ways. Air Raid Siren paid homage to a popular conspiracy theory that the virus was not man-made at all but had appeared at the Hiroshima blast. Billy loved them all. Of course they had nothing to do with the actual biology and economics of kyonshis.
When Billy was in high school, Dr. Kenta Sasaki developed the “zombie virus.” He had been working with artificial viruses that slow down and stabilize human metabolic functions. His initial work drew from the same reasoning as Western cryonics. If you give a terminal patient a few more years, a cure might be found. Dr. Sasaki’s own brother had died a few years before the AIDS cure. The virus stabilized tissue, but like other filoviruses—say, Ebola and Marburg—it showed a great affinity for the cells of the brain, eyes, and reproductive organs. Dr. Sasaki had been very careful in his design, the zombie virus did not share its sisters’ ability to infect rapidly. In fact the virus only infected one in ten people it was tried on in the best of circumstances. It was easy to cure, that is eliminate from the system—but the damage it did (especially to the brain) proved irreversible.
Some wealthy people underwent the infection as their only hope. Maybe their rare cancer, maybe their unidentifiable disease would be cured, and a cure found for the zombie virus. Their shambling state, their pale skin might be ended in some happy future. But given their looks and the years of zombie mythology in popular culture—they were seen as grade-A George Romero living dead. Although their tasteless food was made by baby food manufacturers, any number of brain-eating jokes came into being in the early years.
