The city remembers.
It is always night in Kabukichō. Here is who owns it, who wants it, and what sleeps under the bay.
Power map
Who answers to whom
| Group | What they are | Where | Standing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kumadori-kai 隈取会 | Old-money crime family | Kumadori Club, Nishi-Shinjuku | Taxes everyone. Owns the koban captains. |
| Oni-Gumi 鬼組 | Street gang | The blocks around the Rust Lotus | Pays tribute to the Kumadori-kai, and resents it. |
| Kaminari-gumi 雷組 | Motorcycle gang | The highways and their own bars | Answers to no one. Pays no tribute. |
| Police | The law | Everywhere | Bought at the top, dangerous at street level. |
| Kanemori 金森 | Corporation | The twin towers, Nishi-Shinjuku; the Sanctuary on the mountain | Rebuilt the city after the quake. Owns what the families rent. |
| NeonG | Bio-weapon | Wherever the power spikes | Feared by every faction. |
-gumi marks a street crew. -kai marks an established family.
The 2071 quake
Everything begins with the quake that flattened the old Okubo blocks. The corps rebuilt the towers and forgot the streets underneath. Officially it was tectonic. Nobody who was there believes that.
Oni-Gumi 鬼組 · Demon Crew
Street gang · the Rust Lotus
When the quake flattened Okubo, the Oni-Gumi grew in the gap: day laborers, dropouts and ex-riot police who painted demon faces on salvaged helmets so the camera grid couldn't match them.
They don't do business. They hold ground. Their turf is a few blocks of chop shops and noodle stalls around the Rust Lotus, and every stolen car in the district passes through it. Step inside the lines and they'll shoot first, because to the Oni-Gumi any stranger is a cop, a corp, or a Kumadori collector.
The Kumadori-kai taxes their chop trade. The Oni pay, and they remember every yen.
Kaminari-gumi 雷組 · Thunder Crew
Motorcycle gang · the highways
Ex-couriers, cut loose when the corps automated delivery. They kept the bikes, tore out the tracking firmware, and took back the old thunder-tribe name from their grandfathers' era. They don't pay tribute to Benikage, and they don't hold turf like the Oni-Gumi. The highways are theirs. You hear them before you see them.
Projected kabuki-face visors, LED light trails, hot pink, and saddle guns. Make a name for yourself and they'll ride past to get a look at you. Walk into one of their bars, or put a rider in the asphalt, and you're burned: every pack in the city hunts you on sight.
The bars
Exhaust Shrine: a garage bar under an overpass, bikes hung from the ceiling like trophies.
Paper Lantern 9 提灯9: a lantern-lit hall in north-east Okubo where the leadership drinks.
Kill-Switch: a junkyard bar in Shin-Okubo, its counter cut from a bus front, lit by oil-drum fires.
Benikage 紅影 · Crimson Shadow
Oyabun of the Kumadori-kai · Kumadori Club
Beni is the safflower red of Kabuki makeup. Kage is shadow. Kumadori is the red-and-black stage paint where red marks the hero. A man called Crimson Shadow who runs a club called Kumadori has cast himself as the hero of his own play.
He was born Kenji Sawamura, last son of a Kabuki family that played the Kabukiza stage for nine generations. When the theater was sold in '68 and turned into a holo-arena, his father kept performing for tourists in a mall atrium until the work ran out. Kenji never forgave the city for letting the art die.
He took his great-grandfather's stage name, a ghost-avenger, and built the Kumadori-kai the way a theater troupe is run: strict ranks, ritual, costume. Every lieutenant earns their makeup. On certain nights he holds court at Kumadori Club as if giving a performance.
He calls himself the keeper of what Tokyo was. In practice he's a landlord: he taxes the Oni-Gumi chop shops, owns the koban captains, and shakes down whoever rents Shinjuku's neon. He calls the Oni-Gumi "masks without a play."
"The curtain doesn't fall until I say."
Kanemori 金森 · Golden Forest
Corporation · Nishi-Shinjuku and the Sanctuary
After the quake, Kanemori rebuilt the towers and bought what was left underneath. The twin towers in Nishi-Shinjuku are its face. Its guards don't take bribes, its cameras don't blink, and it never sends a collector, because it already owns the building.
East of Okubo a road climbs a mountain to a temple estate Kanemori bought in '72. The lower courtyards are restored and guarded: a Sanctuary for executives who want to feel old money. Past the ridge gate the original monastery is left to the fog and the cedars, and something under it draws more power than a temple should.
The road doesn't climb straight. Past the checkpoint it drops into the valley and winds through sakura, forest and tea terraces before it turns up to the gate, and Kanemori keeps the valley empty on purpose: no traffic, no street crews, only deer, tanuki and a hot spring where its people soak after a shift. The police stop at the checkpoint. Kanemori's guards don't.
Shingan 心眼 · Mind's Eye
Abbot of the Sanctuary · Kanemori
He ran Kanemori's security division through the rebuilding years. Then he shaved his head, took vows, and had the company rebuild him around them: a cyborg body under a monk's koromo, a white mask with no face at all, and a naginata of Kanemori steel. The board calls him a retreat director. The monks who guard him call him abbot.
He doesn't chase and he doesn't call the police. He waits in the ruined hall and meditates, and he only moves when someone draws on him. Then he sweeps a naginata wide enough to clear a room, blinks through a crowd, and stands up two holograms of himself so you can't tell which mask to shoot. Kill the power and the doubles go out.
"The eye that sees nothing misses nothing."
Bosses
Boss Hunts · taken at a fixer kiosk
Goro the Gate
Tier 1 · Oni-Gumi
The Oni-Gumi's answer to the first Kumadori collector who came to the Rust Lotus. That collector went home in a car-crusher cube. Goro is 2.3 meters of chrome-plated bone graft with a demon mask welded to his skull, and he never walks the street without four of his own around him.
Tetsu-Kamen 鉄仮面 · Iron Mask
Tier 2 · Kumadori-kai
A riot-suppression walker the Metropolitan Police retired after the '79 protests. Benikage bought three at auction. Officially they're stage props. Each one has a Kumadori-kai pilot inside, a kumadori face painted across the cockpit glass. The Oni-Gumi riding escort aren't allies: covering it is part of the tribute they owe.
NeonG
Tier 3 · No one's
The quake wasn't tectonic. Under Tokyo Bay, a corp bio-lab was growing a living seawall, an organism bred to drink tsunami energy. Eight specimens died in the tanks. The ninth glowed, and the techs tagged it NEON-G. Then it ate the lab. Now it surfaces whenever the city's power draw spikes, drawn to neon like a moth. Nobody can buy it, scare it or tax it, so it's the one thing every family in Tokyo fears.