Jiro watched the bus and the girl with the white-tipped ponytail disappear behind the worn pillars of an old bank building. Until the last moment, she had continued to bob up and down with her nipples pressed to the glass. No, thought Jiro, he was not going crazy. Her ponytail had clearly been waving hello! And now that he thought of it, the shape of her lips had also been strange: turned slightly upward at the ends, almost like a puppy …

But why …? Squinting in the summer light, Jiro recalled what Kaori had said. About the kaiju. About how you could find them all over Japan. But you needed to learn to suppress your inhibitions, to see what was in plain sight. Then he thought of Sheena and how she had disguised herself. How her blue scales had melted away to reveal those perky, upturned breasts that were almost human.

Jiro looked around. A blonde hottie was jogging toward him, hair swishing, sneakers beating on the asphalt. Jiro squinted at her sports bra. Were her breasts bouncing correctly? Was her cup size natural to her proportions? Was the sweat pooling in her cleavage the right color? The right smell? As she ran past, Jiro leaned forward slightly and took a deep whiff of her armpits. His nose brushed her arm, and he sneezed all over the woman’s backside. Sweat and spice, he thought. But she seems human enough.

The woman stopped and gave Jiro a disgusted look. She flashed an obscene hand expression, turned away, and ran on, her butt cheeks jiggling underneath her shorts.

Suddenly, Jiro felt both terrified and excited. What if … what if all over Koko Town, there were more kaiju—more monster girls hungry for human bodily fluids—hiding in plain sight? What if they could disguise themselves and live as humans? Maybe the bus girl’s ponytail hadn’t been a ponytail at all, but some sort of tail or horn or head appendage. She hadn’t been bending over the man’s lap to pick up her purse. She had been feeding on him! Or, as Sheena would put it, sucking him dry.

Jiro set off down the road, in the direction of the port. A few cars rushed past, blasting him with wafts of hot asphalt wind. For the first time that day, he felt like he was on an adventure. The first matter of business was to find the Captain of the Hinomaru. But now he had found another mission, a mission of his own.

It was time to do some kaiju hunting.

#

Three hours later, Jiro sat down at the curb, popped the top off a bottle of lemonade, and downed the thing in one go. It was bad manners to drink outdoors in Japan, but at this point, he didn’t care. He was hot, tired, frustrated. But, if he was to be honest with himself, he was also quivering with excitement.

The search for the Hinomaru had been a failure. Jiro had walked the whole length of the port, asking the ship owners, dog walkers, joggers, and anybody else he could find about the whereabouts of the Hinomaru. He scanned the names painted onto the barnacled vessels at port. He went to the nearby marina and checked the registry. Checked it three times. He even tried going to his knees and praying for the ship to appear.

But it was like chasing a ghost. Wherever he went, there was no sign of the boat named Hinomaru.

Jiro spat onto the sidewalk, earning a glare from a passing Japanese man. And there was something else. Something very, very strange about the way the locals had answered Jiro’s questions. At first, when Jiro said hello, most were friendly. But the moment they heard the name Hinomaru, the light went out of their eyes. They became evasive, muttered excuses, refused to meet his eyes. They were hiding something. But what? Who was this mysterious Captain?

As for kaiju hunting, he had had more success. Up and down the port area, he had walked along the streets and side alleys, checking every hottie that passed for irregularities, slowly running his eyes over every curve, nook, cleft, and cranny of their bodies. He leaned forward to inspect their asses, looking for tails or strange nubs. He peeked at their necks for gills, their ears for feathers posing as jewelry. He sniffed their armpits for strange smells. He squinted at their breasts and counted the nipples poking through the fabric. And then, just to be safe, he counted the breasts too.

This had earned Jiro many dirty looks, some even called him a “foul pervert.” One old hag had even chased him with a bottle of pepper spray. But the perverted efforts had paid off. Around the port area, Jiro found several kaiju posing as ordinary humans. A tan woman sunbathing topless on a boat had suddenly reached for her martini with a rubbery tentacle. There was no wind, but Jiro saw her skirt billow open and close like a jellyfish. Beneath her skirt, her long, shapely legs were half-transparent: he could see the deck of the boat through her thighs.

At a supermarket, he saw a flower seller in an apron watering her plants without a watering pot: the water came spraying out of her arms: it was like someone had switched her hands for showerheads. And by the water, Jiro saw a red-haired woman with fins on her forearms wade up out of the sea naked. And there, after shaking the seawater off her naked body, the redhead had materialize an entire wardrobe on her bare body: white lace panties, a sun dress, sandals, even a straw hat. Materialized everything but a bra. On another occasion, Jiro had looked up to see someone jump between the roofs of two tall buildings. There was a flap of brown wings and a spreading of legs, rewarding Jiro with a flash of the kaiju’s feather-lace panties.

But the most shocking discovery came in an alleyway between two brick buildings. There, behind a dumpster, he saw a couple getting it on. A woman with ultra-short hair had pushed a man back against the wall and was deep-kissing him like the world was about to end. The man was wearing a suit and tie, and the woman was running her hands all over his body: his face, his neck, his ass. And then, to Jiro’s surprise, another pair of hands appeared from the girl’s torso and slipped down into the man’s pants. Jiro had nearly moaned just from the sight of it! A kaiju with four arms!

How could he have missed all this before? Kaiju were everywhere! So this was the power of blood—and of inhibitions. To people without the right blood, spiritual blood, the kaiju looked just like ordinary humans with extraordinary sex drives. And even if people had the right blood, like Jiro did, they often still only saw what they wanted to see.

And those other monsters? The yokai, ghosts, ghouls, and spirits? Where were they? He would have to learn how to see those as well.

Jiro licked the last bit of lemonade from the bottle and tossed it into a bin by the vending machine. As for the Hinomaru, there had been only one clue from his search. An old man peeing by a graffiti-ridden wall had told him: “If you want to find a captain, don’t go to the port. Go to the market instead. That’s where all the people who know the fishermen are.”

Jiro stood up and shrugged. It was as good of a clue as any.