Tokyo. The love of my life breathes like blazing. I came here to hide from compassion.

My ex's family was yakuza. A Tokyo girl, all the way. I only found out about her mob connections when we were breaking up, or I might not have nailed her best friend. Within a month, the same best friend had me nailed to a cross, unwilling to renounce my love, the cold metal spikes of her infidelities bleeding me dry, starved of sexual salvation. She was stubbornly evil like that.

I packed my bags and came to find the technicolor Emerald City the ex's antecdotes had promised. It's clubs and drugs from there on in.

She was called Marzipan-chan. Half Deutsche, half Nihonjin. We met in a whiskey bar, four months and half a savings account into Japan. She said she was from Berlin.

"Ah." I sipped my drink. "Und willst du mein Berliner bischen?"

She smiled through a cotton candy haze of curls. "Have you had a Berliner before?"

"No. But I dated a Frankfurter in college." Tip your waitress.

"We're much sweeter."

"Will you make me fat?"

She shrugged. "Only if you love me too much, Americanjin." Laying her cash on the bar, she stood, and strutted to the the door.

I could only follow.

..

I followed the sticky prints of her bubblegum boots. I followed the strawberry exhaust trail of her scooter. She would have shown me the city, had I ever looked up. Two years got lost in a rosy opium war.

When I woke up in the blank steel cargo hold of a ship, I felt like a morning after sans used prophylactics and sans recollection. My back was hidiously cramped, my hands and feet chained. And I was fat as a pregnant hippopotamus. Then a shockwave and a smoking molten hole in the door, and my mind was on other things. The smell of azaleas hit me full force, the olfactory lullabye rocking me back to unconsciousness. I fought it, she appeared.

She took long strides, ignoring the rocking of the boat and the sirens going off somewhere above us. Grabbing me by the elbow, she pulled me to my feet, holding me, essentially, just above the floor, as I was unable to support myself. Her eyes terrifed me.

Whatever internal storm had propelled her here quieted, and she whispered, "Baka." First she slapped me upside the head, then she kissed me.

How did I forget that? It was drowning in carnival lights, wild young saccherine joy, falling through the hole in a fresh iced doughnut. I was trapped against her sensuous sticky lips, held tight by my taffy attraction to her. Her tongue made deft peppermint swirls through my dried-out mouth, forcing me to act. I was tumbling through sunset pillow clouds, I gave, yet I was newly driven. I wished like hell my hands weren't bound.

The kiss was over. She let me drop like unnecessary underclothes.

The rocket launcher, as she setlled it on her shoulder and aimed, seemed awfully excessive. But as always, her style floored me. It was painted as pink as her go-go boots, metallic sheen diminished by a flawlessly applied matte topcoat.

She shrugged, tossing her spun sugar hair. "Tut mir leid, Americanjin. You're too much trouble. You can't take care of yourself and I can't leave you. You're weak. You'll tell them everything."

What everything?, I wondered. I don't know why I'm here, I wanted to say. I don't know who you are, but you're beautiful and I want to take you somewhere private and fall in love for five more minutes.

Her finger was already on the trigger. I just nodded.

"Sayonara," she said..