The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl

by Tomihiko Morimi

  At that point, I suddenly had a thought and asked, “Mr. Todou, how did you get your cold?”

  He winced. “Well, it’s that habit of mine, again. Mr. Rihaku said he had an amazing…well, one of those shunga I like. So I went to go see it. He was coughing when I went. I’m sure that’s how I got sick.”

  Mr. Rihaku!

  The God of Colds raced down the threads connecting us all, and sitting right in the middle of that miraculous scene is Mr. Rihaku.

  Struck by that solemn thought, I sighed in front of Mr. Todou.

  But why, if everyone was catching the cold together in harmony, was I left out? I felt like a child, wide-awake in bed in the middle of the night when everyone else is sound asleep.

  “Then what of me, all alone?” I murmured in spite of myself.

  “Are you all right?” Mr. Todou asked, concerned.

  I spent the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, in bed going back and forth between sleeping and waking.

  A younger club member with a stuffy nose alerted me that the year-end party planned for that evening had been canceled. When I got mad at him—“Why haven’t you come to visit me?”—he maintained, “Things are way worse than that,” ignoring my situation, and described in detail how quiet the city was due to this cold. “Please watch the news.”

  I sat up in my futon, put the top layer over my shoulders, and watched Kyoto TV.

  The Christmas mood raging through town had been displaced, and the God of Colds was the star of the show now. The feature programming on colds continued in full force, and I was inundated with a ton of preventive strategies too late for me to deploy. The streets that should have been hopping in the run-up to Christmas Eve were instead being overrun by the God of Colds. I instinctively shouted with glee. I was stuck home alone being tormented by my cold anyhow, so I couldn’t make any preparations for Christmas Eve. All the impertinent rabble who thought they were going out that night could get a kick in the pants from the God of Colds and end up in bed, too.

  “Even so, this is pretty wild. It’s like the Spanish Flu or something.” Even I was stunned by how lonely the streets looked.

  A reporter on TV, wearing a surgical mask for extra drama, shouted, “Take a look at how few people are out!” standing at the Shijo Karasuma intersection. Almost no one passed by, and hardly any cars, either. The municipal bus going by was an empty box. The streets were decked out for Christmas, twinkling, which threw the dreary lack of people into high relief. It felt eerie, like a ghost town.

  The reporter wandered the streets as if she were searching for survivors after a world war and talked to anyone she found. Before long, a black-haired maiden striding briskly down Kawaramachi Street came into the frame. Before I knew it, I had crawled out of my futon and was literally clinging to the TV.

  “You seem awfully healthy, not even wearing a mask. What’s your secret to ward off colds?” asked the reporter.

  “I don’t really have one… If anything, the God of Colds doesn’t like me.”

  “Why do you sound so sad?”

  “Because I’m the only one who’s left out…”

  The maiden of my dreams spoke sadly into the camera.

  I got on the Keihan train back the way I came. There were almost no passengers.

  Rocking along in the train car, I got to thinking.

  I hadn’t seen that guy from my club lately. I started to wonder if something had happened to him. We met every few days by coincidence. It was rare to not see him for so long. I began to worry. Could it be that he caught a cold and is all alone in bed with a high fever? That would be quite serious. As Chief-in-Chief Underpants, the director of the school festival, Mr. Higuchi, and the owner of Chitoseya had told me, he’d been so active on campus when I wasn’t looking. To be imprisoned in his room with a cold must be torture. He’s such a kind person, so full of love. That’s why he battled for my picture book, acted opposite me in the play, and has always been there to help me. I’ve got to repay him! I was determined to help.

  I got off the train at the Keihan Shijo Station, thinking to visit Gabi Shobo. When I went up the stairs and exited to the east end of Shijo Bridge, the streets were oddly quiet. Usually, a crowd of people would be coming and going across the bridge, but today there was only a handful. The sparkling sunlight had weakened. When I looked over the bridge’s railing to the north, I could see the end of the Kamo River and dark, threatening clouds gathering in the northern sky. An eerie, stray breeze brushed my cheeks and left a muggy, lukewarm sensation in its place.

  Even when I turned onto Kawaramachi Street, all I found was the wind blowing through the empty town. The whole row of shops was decorated for Christmas, gleaming brilliantly, but there were almost no customers. Everyone tottering past me was wearing a big mask.

  At the Shijo Kawaramachi intersection, there was a reporter doing street interviews, and she talked to me, too. She seemed to be catching a cold herself, and when I told her to take care as we were parting, she emphasized, “You be sure to take care, too.” Then, with nothing left to say, we surveyed the cityscape. It was as if we were standing on the corner of Shijo and Kawaramachi after the end of the world.

  The Christmas melodies playing from the shops were sometimes drowned out by the gusting wind. It whipped through the valleys between buildings with a noise almost like the roar of some gigantic beast lurking deep within the town. Where in the world does this wind come from? Walking through the gusts battering both Christmas and me, I finally arrived at Gabi Shobo.

  When I pushed on the glass door and went inside, the shop was silent, as if the stacks of used books sucked up all sound. The heater was making the place toasty, so I was relieved. Right when you walked in, there was a stack of beautiful box sets of collected works stretching up high like towers.

  Occupying the register in the back was a beautiful little boy. He was resting his chin on the register with his cheeks puffed crankily out, scowling at an old book lying open on the table.

  “Hello,” I said to him.

  He sniffed and looked up, and his face brightened when he saw me. “Oh, it’s the Ra Ta Ta Tam lady. Long time no see!”

  “Since the bookfair, huh? I never thought I’d run into you here.”

  “I’ve become the disciple of this bookseller. Once winter break starts, I’ll be here every day.”

  “He said you have a lot of promise.”

  “Of course I do. I’m a genius.”

  “What are you reading, there?”

  “This? It’s this Chinese medical book called Treatise on Cold Damage Disorders.”

  He put the Treatise on Cold Damage Disorders away and poured me some tea. I thanked him with an Asada Ame drop. As he enjoyed it, he observed in a low voice, “But I’m not sick. Cold medicine is poison for your body when you don’t have a cold, you know. If you eat too much, you get a nosebleed. There’s a crazy cold going around right now. Are you doing okay?”

  “The God of Colds hates me.”

  “No one can leave their bed. Until the God of Colds settles down, the city will be at a standstill. Isn’t it sort of fun? You and me are the only ones who haven’t been defeated by this cold.” He stroked the Treatise on Cold Damage Disorders and hinted with a smug look on his face, “If it comes down to it, I’ll just have some of the medicine for colds that cold medicine doesn’t cure.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A medicine that’ll immediately cure a cold that cold medicine doesn’t.”

  He took a little bottle out from beneath the register. It was a puffy shape like a Daruma doll and contained a clear brown liquid. The label on the side in an old-timey font said JUNPAIRO.

  “This is a cold medicine they used to sell back in the Taisho period. You can’t get it anymore. My dad knew a lot about Chinese medicine and figured out how to make his own. I can make it, too.”

  “Does it really work that well?”

  “Like magic. If you want, I could give you a bottle.”
<
br />   Then it hit me: If my clubmate is suffering from a cold, I have to take this medicine to him and pay him back for all he’s done for me.

  I carefully put away the bottle the little boy gave me.

  He was nice enough to see me off as I pushed open the glass door again and went out onto Kawaramachi. The wind blew down the lonely streets again, and some scraps of paper slid by. Something like a glittering streamer caught the little rays of sun peeking from among the clouds, as it whirled up into the air and went flying between two buildings. The boy and I stood under the eaves of the shop for a while, gazing up at it.

  “I don’t think you’re going to catch the cold. It’s up to the God,” he ruminated. “You should use that medicine for someone important to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We hope you’ll come again.”

  I caught the municipal bus to stop at home. Besides the driver, who was wearing a mask, there were no other passengers. I rode through the quiet streets.

  Usually, the area in front of Demachiyanagi Station was crawling with young people, but today it was quiet. As I walked from there to my apartment complex, the neighborhood was so quiet, everyone seemed to have gone extinct, and the only sound was the wind whipping past the tops of the telephone poles. It was so quiet it was scary.

  Just as I got to my building, I ran into Ms. Hanuki coming out bundled up in a large scarf. She was carrying a big shopping bag.

  “Oh! There you are!” Her face was bright and cheery. “I dropped by while I was out shopping.”

  Her voice was hoarse, but she seemed good, so I was relieved. The wind was messing up her hair. She stood next to me with a disgruntled expression and surveyed the streets. “Hey, so why’s it so quiet?”

  “Apparently, an incredibly bad cold is going around.”

  “I though the world got destroyed while I was out sick.”

  “So, Ms. Hanuki, what brings you here anyway?”

  When I asked that, she whispered, “Don’t be alarmed,” and furrowed her beautiful brow. “Higuchi caught a cold.”

  Enduring my sickness all by my lonesome, I tossed and turned in bed. Whenever worries and anxieties attacked me, I whispered, “Do what you can, step-by-step.” I said it so much, the words echoed in my brain and got stuck in my head.

  Do what you can, step-by-step.

  Step-by-step.

  Step, step. Step, step.

  Before I knew it, I was walking down the stone pavement of Ponto-cho at night. Sandwiching the pavement were the lights of restaurants and bars, like phantoms floating in the darkness. I didn’t know where I was headed. I was just walking step-by-step, weaving through the drunk people coming and going along the busy street. Just then, an apple dropped down right in front of me. What’s an apple doing here? I thought, but it was a Daruma doll.

  Eventually, I wandered into a bar. My usual self could never do something like that. But this was a dream, so there was no resistance. As I sat there alone drinking a faux electric brandy, a cheer went up from the very back of the long hallway-like bar.

  After some time, a shady-looking guy in a yukata came floating along up near the ceiling, stopping above the bar. He was puffing up a storm on a fat cigar. Even in a dream, I knew only one person who would do something so strange. “Hey, Higuchi,” I called, looking up at him.

  Higuchi spun around in the corner of the ceiling and then got into a cross-legged posture. “Oh, it’s you. That’s funny,” he said. “Haven’t seen you since the school festival, right? I bet you caught that cold.” He made a gentle landing on the seat next to me. “Embarrassingly enough, I finally caught it, too,” he griped with disappointment.

  “Either way, you seem pretty energetic.”

  “That’s that; this is this.”

  “I don’t get it,” I responded, and then I asked him, “How did you fly? I sure can’t.”

  “It’s impossible unless you know the trick. Will you be my disciple?”

  “Mm, I’d hate to be your disciple. Yeah, no, sounds awful.”

  He insisted, “Oh, don’t say that. Until Hanuki comes to visit, I’m just here in bed alone, so I don’t have anything in particular to do. And if I teach you Higuchi-Style Flight now, it’ll come in handy when you need it.”

  “When will I need it?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. Let’s just do it.” Higuchi cackled like a tengu and took me out of the bar.

  Mr. Higuchi lived in a wooden apartment building in Shimogamo Izumigawa-cho.

  Shimogamo Yusuiso, it was called, and it looked terribly old. The outdoor AC unit installed on the sagging roof seemed as if it was going to fall out at any second. Clothes fluttered like flags on a laundry pole jutting out of one window, and the glass in the row of windows rattled in the wind. If a sumo wrestler charged the building, the whole thing would probably come toppling down.

  Ms. Hanuki and I visited around three in the afternoon, but because the entire sky was suddenly overcast, it was as dark as evening. Strong gusts of wind set Tadasu no Mori to the west rustling. It almost seemed like the wind was blowing from deep in the dark forest.

  When we went up to the second floor, a heavy wind shook Yusuiso like an earthquake, and Ms. Hanuki and I instinctively grabbed each other’s hands. We walked down the dusty, dimly lit hallway and found so much junk piled up outside Mr. Higuchi’s door at the very end that there was nowhere to stand. “This place is filthy!” she nagged as she shoved stuff out of the way.

  When Ms. Hanuki and I entered the room, Mr. Higuchi was wrapped up in his futon with his face twisted into a frown. “I had a weird dream,” he mumbled at the ceiling. Then he shouted in frustration, “I can’t believe I caught a cold!”

  After placing the kabocha squash I got from the owner of Chitoseya by Mr. Higuchi’s pillow, I decided to make egg sake with the electric burner on the counter. Ms. Hanuki was sticking a gel sheet on his forehead and getting her revenge. “So you got the cold after all.”

  Mr. Higuchi had sat up in his futon, and before long, I handed him some egg sake.

  “How did you of all people get the cold, Mr. Higuchi?”

  “I tried to go visit Rihaku,” he started, blowing on it to cool it off. “But the closer I got to his place, the more mercilessly the God of Colds attacked. Tragically, before I could reach my destination, I was defeated. This cold is not fooling around. The sickness on the loose is the Rihaku Cold.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Tadasu no Mori. That’s where the cold is coming from.”

  “So we need to cut it off at the source.”

  “But there’s no medicine that’ll work on Rihaku, and even if there were, it’s then a question of who would be able to take it to him.”

  I took out the little bottle I got from the boy at Gabi Shobo. Mr. Higuchi’s face suddenly sparkled, and he held the amber bottle up to the light with a sigh. “Ahhh!” he marveled. “This is Junpairo, the first and last miracle drug. That’s one of the two ultimate articles I wanted to acquire, along with the ultra-efficient Kamenoko scrub brush. Rihaku drank it a long time ago to survive the Spanish Flu… Where did you get this?”

  “A boy at a used bookstore gave it to me.”

  “Excellent, excellent.” Mr. Higuchi took the lid off, twirled a chopstick in its syrup, closed the bottle again, and returned it to me. Then he happily slurpled the Junpairo. “It’s so tasty, just delicious.”

  “Will this cure Mr. Rihaku?”

  Just then, a black gust like a great, big beast crashed into Yusuiso. The windows rattled so loud it seemed as if they would break at any second. We ducked instinctively.

  Ms. Hanuki stood up, opened the curtains, and gasped.

  When I peeked out the window and looked beyond the roofs of the neighboring houses, a huge dark column was standing tall enough to reach the heavens. It was moving at a leisurely pace right down Mikage Street, heading toward the Kamo River. Its outline was hazy, so it was hard to tell what was going on, but sandwich boards, l
eaves, flyers, and cans were getting blown into the air. Something echoed loudly as it ripped.

  “Is that a tornado?” Ms. Hanuki murmured. “I’ve never seen one before! Sweet!”

  “That’s one of Rihaku’s coughs. It’s full of germs. This looks like the end.” Mr. Higuchi looked at me as he licked the Junpairo. “Rihaku is practically dying of this cold. The God of Colds has taken up roost in his body, creating more and more lackeys to spread the Rihaku Cold. Anyone who tries to save him will fall sick. If we don’t do something, Kyoto will be destroyed by a cold. Take this Junpairo to Rihaku.”

  I clenched the bottle and stood. “Yes, sir.”

  In order to confront the excessively powerful Rihaku Cold, I had to make careful preparations.

  I went to the public bathhouse nearby. Next to the entrance curtain fluttering in the wind was a notice that said YUZU BATH TODAY. There was no one at the bathhouse. In the large bath, round yuzu bobbed inside a net. Soaking in the big citrus-smelling bath, my body warmed up. Then I thought over the mission god had given me and whispered “All right!” at the ceiling.

  When I returned to his apartment, Ms. Hanuki put all sorts of things in a backpack for me. She was so concerned. She said to take everything that could fight a cold, just in case: eggs and sake, Coca-Cola and ginger, pickled plums from the owner of Chitoseya, simmered kabocha, a big yuzu, an apple, and herbal medicine. The all-important bottle of Junpairo we wrapped against my stomach with a cloth. I was like a walking cold remedy.

  Mr. Higuchi and Ms. Hanuki saw me off, and I headed for the approach to Shimogamo Shrine.

  Dark clouds hung overhead, and the sky was gloomy like the day of an impending typhoon with that lukewarm wind. Mikage Street was a terrible mess of garbage, bicycles, and other detritus after the tornado earlier.