“There, pride, avarice and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of despair.”
- Dante Alighieri
- Dante Alighieri
Meet Prospero Mastroianni. Not a relative, though he could pass for one. He gets that a lot.
You can call him Ero - all the girls do and so do the guys at PSIA, 公安調査庁, the Kōanchōsa-chō. They’re all after the same lowlife dirt bags and he gets cut some slack.
Ero dresses in Armani when he has to, but most of the time you’ll find him in jeans and a black T-shirt. Things have changed and they haven’t and he’s back in Japan 20 years after he dropped out of Classic Italian Lit studies at an Ivy League when he read Machiavelli’s Art of War and decided to go East to study zen, practice karate and become spiritually enlightened.
Discovering men are just men and mountains are still mountains, he now packs dual citizenship and diplomatic immunity, likes to quote Dante and still packs a mean punch.
He’s got a score to settle and there are a bunch of wrongs left to right in the wake of a certain Nick Zappetti. And these days, there’s an expat community 2.9 million strong and someone needs to look after them in this land of the rising scum.
As they teach in Buddhism 101 - everything’s interconnected.
Like the government, the police, the press and the mob, for example.
And it all spells corruption.
You can call him Ero - all the girls do and so do the guys at PSIA, 公安調査庁, the Kōanchōsa-chō. They’re all after the same lowlife dirt bags and he gets cut some slack.
Ero dresses in Armani when he has to, but most of the time you’ll find him in jeans and a black T-shirt. Things have changed and they haven’t and he’s back in Japan 20 years after he dropped out of Classic Italian Lit studies at an Ivy League when he read Machiavelli’s Art of War and decided to go East to study zen, practice karate and become spiritually enlightened.
Discovering men are just men and mountains are still mountains, he now packs dual citizenship and diplomatic immunity, likes to quote Dante and still packs a mean punch.
He’s got a score to settle and there are a bunch of wrongs left to right in the wake of a certain Nick Zappetti. And these days, there’s an expat community 2.9 million strong and someone needs to look after them in this land of the rising scum.
As they teach in Buddhism 101 - everything’s interconnected.
Like the government, the police, the press and the mob, for example.
And it all spells corruption.
© 2021 JD Hixson
