NEW RELEASES
The Midnight Mayor by Jūza Unno
The Second Turncoat by Benito Pérez Galdós
THE TWO FACES OF THE CITY
Every city has two faces. By day, T—— City is a modern capital of noise, traffic, and ten million hurrying strangers. After midnight, it becomes something else entirely — a vast, silent, deserted metropolis known only to the handful of souls who walk its streets while the rest of the world sleeps. The narrator, a writer of detective fiction who has trained himself to stay awake through the small hours, is one of those souls. The Midnight Mayor, a figure of extraordinary intelligence and uncertain sanity who claims authority over the sleeping city, is another.
One freezing March night, the narrator stumbles onto a murder in the canal district. He is knocked unconscious, wakes to find himself covered in blood, and learns he is the only suspect in a killing he did not commit. Trapped between the police hunting him by day and the shadow world that operates by night, he is drawn into the orbit of the Midnight Mayor and the secret machinery of a city that exists on an entirely different set of coordinates from the one its daytime citizens know.
Written in 1937 by Unno Jūza, the founding father of Japanese science fiction, The Midnight Mayor is a novel that defies genre: part noir mystery, part philosophical meditation on urban life, part speculative fiction about the reality that hides inside the ordinary. Translated by Vox Day, it has never before appeared in English. Those familiar with Philip K. Dick and especially China Mieville’s The City and the City will recognize this strange territory of a fascinating city that is not what it seems, narrated by a man who is not sure which version of himself is real. Now available on Amazon.
Excerpt
There was a twenty-two-meter road crossing the tramline (the one with no trams in sight) and stretching off to the right. Take that road and you could reach Kameido without having to go down to another canal. This wide road, too, was like the corridor of a crystal palace. Not a soul in sight. I turned onto it and had ambled maybe a hundred meters when someone let out a bloodcurdling scream. From the volume and the quality of the voice, it couldn’t have been anything but human. I’d prowled the midnight streets dozens of times, maybe hundreds, but I’d never heard a scream like that. I froze where I stood.
Just one scream. So I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed to come from an alley off to the left, a little farther ahead. That’s when I thought about my position. You might laugh at that, but what I was actually weighing was whether a person in my situation had any business getting mixed up in something suspicious, at this hour, in a place like this. Back when I was just a literary young man with nothing to lose, it wouldn’t have mattered either way. But now, in addition to being “Kōgaya Seiji” the pen name, I held a real position under my real name. A respectable one, too. Far more promising, career-wise, than grinding out manuscripts for magazine money. I’d only just landed this position, and by all rights I should’ve been refraining from midnight strolls altogether. If I got dragged to the local police station and made to give my real name, and then clumsily invoked the rather embarrassing title I’d earned barely a week ago, I’d be a laughingstock to every detective in the precinct.
Worse, I’d bring trouble down on Mr. T, the benefactor who’d gone to great pains to secure me the position, and on all my new superiors. I’d have no leg to stand on. You’ll learn what my real profession is soon enough, but the reason I’m not telling you now stems from exactly this kind of concern. So bear with me a while longer.
That’s about where I should’ve quietly backed away from the whole scream business. But I think there are people in this world who’ll understand: even when you know beyond doubt what the right thing to do is, sometimes, depending on how you feel in the moment, you just can’t bring yourself to do it. That was me. I ordered my arms and legs to retreat, to turn around and walk the other direction. I practically shouted at them. But my arms and legs (they belonged to Kōgaya Seiji, apparently) didn’t feel a thing. They dragged my body, which might as well have been a living corpse, straight toward where the scream had come from.
I turned the corner. And sure enough, there they were: shadowy figures tangled together on the ground.
“Hey, what’s going on? What happened here…”
To my everlasting shame, Mr. Kōgaya Seiji, who’d been lodging in my body for years now, ignored every cease-and-desist order from Asama Shinjūrō (that’s my real name) and made me cry out like any common rubbernecker. Damn it. “Wha—” The two men on the other side, both dressed alike in Inverness capes and felt hats, let out startled yelps and nearly dropped the third person they’d been carrying between them.
“Is he hurt? Was it a robbery? A murder?”
I said this leaning in without the slightest restraint to get a look. The third man, unlike the other two, was dressed Western-style in an overcoat like mine. Thirty-four, thirty-five maybe. A bit bony, but the kind of thoroughly unremarkable face you’d find a dozen of on any street.
The two Inverness men glanced at each other, and one of them spoke up:
“See, this here’s a mate of ours, right. He’s had himself quite a lot to drink, legs gone all wobbly, and just now he goes and steps right into that ditch back there, takes a proper tumble. He’s hurt himself, but we’ve not the first idea where to find a doctor hereabouts. Terrible sorry to bother you, mister, but could you maybe go find us a doctor’s place nearby…”
He rattled all this off in a thick Kansai accent.
“Oh, fell in a ditch and got hurt, did he?”
I laughed out loud inside my head. Who did they think they were fooling? It took about two seconds of thought to tell the difference between a scream from falling in a ditch and that blood-freezing shriek I’d just heard. And there were two of them, yet they wanted to send me, a total stranger, running off alone to find a doctor. That didn’t sit right. Detective fiction isn’t written for nothing, you bastards. The irritation flared up in me hot and sudden. Not a good sign, that. Kōgaya Seiji had apparently conquered Asama Shinjūrō completely and was about to get us both into serious trouble.
Sure enough. Before I knew it, I’d pulled the pocket flashlight from my coat and swept the beam across the third man’s body.
“Ah—”
“Ah—”
Both sides cried out at once. Their shock was undoubtedly at the flashlight. Mine was at the fact that the third man, the one they’d said was merely injured, was stone dead. His face had gone completely gray, lips discolored, mouth hanging slack, eyes rolled back to the whites. He wasn’t breathing. Anyone could’ve diagnosed it at a glance. And what’s more (unfortunate for them), when they let the body hit the ground with a thud, it shifted slightly to one side. Something glinted on the left side of his back. A blade, sunk deep into the flesh. A short sword, most likely.
I gasped and leapt backward. But it was already too late. A crushing blow caught me square on the jaw. I didn’t even have time to cry out before I collapsed.
THE EDUCATION OF A SCOUNDREL
Madrid, 1819. The absolutist order is rotting from within, secret societies plot in cellars and salons, and the exhausted kingdom leans toward the revolt that will explode when Colonel Riego raises the cry of liberty. In such a season, only a fool commits to a cause, and Juan Bragas de Pipaón, a supreme survivor, is no fool. As he sees the winds begin to shift, he prepares to turn his coat again.
But The Second Turncoat is more than the further education of a scoundrel. Here the two worlds of the Second Series collide: Bragas’s oily, self-justifying memoir gives way to the tragic drama of Salvador Monsalud, the liberal idealist, and his half-brother Carlos Navarro, two men of one blood on opposite sides of Spain’s widening wound, bound by a woman neither can possess and a hatred neither can put down. Around them move a fanatic beauty who embodies the old Spain, a dying patriarch, and a nation about to tear itself in two.
By turns wickedly comic and darkly moving, this third novel of Galdós’s acclaimed Second Series interweaves private passion and public catastrophe with the mastery that made its author the Spanish Balzac. It stands on its own as a drama of divided loyalty and thwarted love, and draws together the threads of King Joseph’s Baggage and Memoirs of a Courtier of 1815 as the Monsalud cycle deepens. The translation, by Vox Day, marks its first appearance in the English language since its original publication 140 years ago. Now available on Amazon.
Excerpt
Judge, friends, of my astonishment, my utter devastation. For a long while I stood with the paper in my hands, not knowing what course to take, unable to fix my ideas or resolve upon a single step, incapable of forming any clear judgment upon the matter. In my brain, chaos seethed. A horrible fear filled my spirit, a fear such as I have never known.
I passed some time in painful uncertainty. As if I were conscious that my body was a mass of packed yet loose sand that would crumble at the slightest movement, I dared not take a step or stir a finger. Little by little I recovered myself. I began to reason; I struggled to diminish the gravity of the affair, and curiosity forced its way into my spirit. Who had brought that threatening sheet? The man who wrote to me, my comrade of old, why had he devised so singular a means of communicating with me? Was it really he, or some idle jester? And whoever it might be, by what means had he contrived to deliver so monstrous a warning?
My house was no house of ghosts, though very old and large, fit enough, therefore, for the invisible denizens of shadow to walk its halls, if fear permitted them the entrance. Happily, I believed in neither sorcery nor the fanciful pranks of souls in torment. Not for an instant did I entertain such childishness. But I had at the same time the certainty, thanks to a thorough inspection I had carried out shortly after taking up residence, that my house, though it possessed two doors, harbored no novelistic passageways, no cellars, no hidden gates, no marvellous wardrobes, no trapdoors, nor any of those theatrical contrivances which in the playhouse and in books furnish the stuff of a surprising intrigue. My house, then, having no secrets, it was plain that one of the servants had been the bearer of the strange message.
They were three. The first, who went by the name of Farrancho, served me as errand-boy, valet, and on occasions of great urgency as amanuensis; a man of the most honest antecedents, by his understanding almost incapable of the sacraments, for he reasoned like a mule, yet by his moral character most estimable, to all appearances. Never did I catch him in a lie, a theft, or any fault whatever.
The second person of my household was a woman, a venerable matron sufficiently old and plain to be proof against amorous lapses, sufficiently young and cleanly to serve well and cook better; Martha for her diligence and mastery of domestic affairs, Magdalene for her piety. She had served nuns for twenty years, which is to say that she was prudence itself, sanctity personified, probity in effigy. She never busied herself with household gossip and appeared to lack the faculty of speech altogether, unless it were to employ certain pious formulas: never did she enter my room without intoning lugubriously the Carthusian refrain of we must die. Her obedience was blind, her solicitude boundless, her devotion as steadfast and mute as that of the good slave; her culinary art was silver, her silence gold. Even her name was admirable in its concision and sanctity. She was called doña Fe.
There was besides in the house another female; but she did not serve me (though I should have liked it well enough), but Jenara, whose maid she was. Paquita, a handsome girl, had been but a short while in the house, and I was not yet acquainted with the qualities of her character. She seemed an excellent young woman. My suspicions fell chiefly upon her, and after her upon Farrancho. Doña Fe remained free from any unfavorable supposition, for besides possessing a character of the utmost gravity, incapable of any deceit or intrigue, she was at that moment confined to her bed, afflicted by horrible pains in her face and ears.
Having reviewed in my mind the qualities of that domestic triumvirate, my attention returned to the principal matter, to the strange sheet that had come at so untimely an hour to disturb the tranquillity of an upright man, a diligent servant of his king and his country. The most singular feature of that most singular document was that its author, whether he were in truth Monsalud or some other ragamuffin of the same stripe, while soliciting my aid also offered me his protection, as the words you will not regret it seemed to indicate. But in the very next line he threatened me insolently. The words you will remember me gave me great unease. Could it all be a ridiculous farce? He who offers protection or punishment does so because he possesses power; and if Monsalud possessed power, why did he solicit my aid? Ought I to disregard the letter, or fix upon it my whole attention?
Thinking on this, there came to my memory recollections of the ardent character of my old friend; his figure rose before the eyes of my imagination, wild-haired, horrible, stained with the sinister pallor of Jacobinism. Turning once more to the letter, whose characters betrayed Salvador’s hand, I found fear once again master of my spirit, plunging me anew into vacillations without end.
The words of the letter indicated a firm resolution. What may appear obscure and enigmatic to my readers was not so to me at that time, it being common practice, indeed popular sport, to blacken with vile nicknames the persons of illustrious and most respectable men who consecrated their lives to the service of the realm. Thus the Fox was don Juan Esteban Lozano de Torres, Minister of Grace and Justice; the Tiger, my friend and protector don Buenaventura, recently elevated to the marquisate of M***; and the Elephant, don Ignacio Martínez Villela, Councillor of Castile and a man deeply entrenched at Court, though rumor had it at the time that he was a Freemason.
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