Her room above Hiroshima. The clouds above the city like smoke from a fire.
“When I stood on your balcony and saw you putting on make up, I knew the paintings were yours.”
I told her I was sure I’d seen figures that weren’t there when I woke up.
Kozue laughed. “You weren’t imagining them. I brushed them out. I turned them into trees and rocks.”
Akira had fallen asleep in her arms, head flopped across her lap. Kozue lifted up her son and laid him on the sofa. She asked about Mazzy, my life. She sat forward, closer. The zoom lens of her gaze. The lustrous hair. I felt free, a naked being. I confessed that I loved my daughter, too much. And that given the chance I’d have loved her.
“Too much.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true.”
“We had something,” Kozue said. “Sudden and strange. The world was dead. I was painting dead people. Then you arrived. Like a man fallen out of the sky.”
“It was a curious thing.”
“Like a folk story.”
“That needed a happily ever after?”
Kozue turned to her napping son, his arm thrown out over the sofa, the toy truck in his tiny fist.
“Kozue.”
She reached across and clutched my hand, linked her fingers between mine. And kissed me.
A goodbye.
I left her at the door of her little shop, with her pots and cups, the lumps of clay ready to take on new forms.
四十一
THE BRIGHT SUN hurt his eyes. Koji returned to his apartment where construction workers in yellow hats milled around the foyer. An engineer with a clipboard asked why he hadn’t yet left the building. Koji looked at his name tag. The company badge. He kept his hands in his pockets and walked into the lift as the engineer threatened to call the police if he was still there tomorrow.
He unlocked his door and closed and bolted it behind him. His tiny apartment. A room that would be gone in two days time. Dust and memory. His memory. Because who else would look at this point of sky and know that a man once lived and breathed right here above the city.
Koji thought about this. Then he went into his bathroom and switched on the light. Smears of dried blood on his cheek, the backs of his hands. He leant against the sink and stared at himself for a long time, as if his reflection might do something of its own accord. He stared until he wasn’t sure which way he was facing. Whether he was looking in or out at himself.
He only moved when he noticed a thread of gold caught on his sleeve, a strand of blonde hair.
四十二
ON THE TRAIN back from Nikko, Yuki hooked her arm around my elbow, and put her head on my shoulder, and slept. She felt as light as a bird. I watched the landscape flicker by like filmstrip, mountains levelling out to fields and towns, bright green paddies and concrete shopping centres. I closed my eyes. There was a dream about Mazzy, the recurring one, how she smiles and waves, and then runs up the beach towards the sea.
I rang and sent her a text, but got her voice mail.
I woke up in Tokyo station, slumped against the train window, my folded jacket a makeshift pillow. Yuki had gone, and after looking over the headrest I realised the entire carriage had disembarked, leaving me the last person onboard. I couldn’t see Yuki on the platform, or anybody else for that matter. I presumed she was in the lavatory. Or, out of some protracted Japanese formality, had left me to sleep.
Still, it was very quiet.
I put on my jacket and looked along the aisle, and then through the doors into the next carriage. Not a soul. I looked again at the empty platform and wondered if I’d dozed while we’d pulled into a maintenance depot.
Then I stepped off the train. Volts of fear. No guards or passengers. Silence. I walked, and then jogged down the escalators to the ticket gates.
The waiting hall was empty. When I tried to exit, the automatic barriers snapped shut.
“Sumimasen,” I shouted. “Sumimasen.”
No answer.
I pushed through the barriers and stood before the news kiosk, scanning for signs of life. Today’s papers. Displays of fresh cream cakes filled the patisserie stalls. Had I missed an evacuation call? Was I about to be engulfed by a tsunami or melt in a radiation cloud?
I heard a high pitched voice from the basement aisle of shops and restaurants and stomped down the escalators.
The noise was a giant teddy bear, bleating a recorded sales mantra. It should have been a packed walkway.
I sprinted along a corridor to the Maronuchi Exit. Emerging into another empty ticket hall, I again shouted, “Sumimasen.” Nothing. I dashed over to the information counter and checked the office. More unmanned booths. Open tills showing thousands of yen.
I was sure I’d missed news of an emergency, and was furious that no one had nudged me awake.
And where the hell was Yuki?
I ran up two flights of stairs, past the deserted police box, and out into the middle of the square. Just the looming towers of glass. No cars or buses.
“Hello?”
No one.
“Hello?”
The road should be clogged with traffic. Taxi ranks lined with cars. Perhaps a bomb was about to blow up Tokyo Station. A North Korean warhead was homing in to obliterate a city that had been cleared while I napped on the bullet train.
If the buildings were about to come tumbling down, I needed to be away from steel and glass, and ran towards the open space of the Imperial Palace. When I saw my running figure reflected in the curved windows of the Shin-Marunochi building, it was the first dreadful confirmation that I wasn’t dreaming. That and the cartilage clicking in my knee. I ran along the central reservation between rows of flowerbeds, across the junction and over the moat into the palace grounds.
Out of breath, I slowed and turned back to the station. A silent construction site. Stalled cranes and empty sky, the cold wind. The only movement the scurrying, dry leaves, rasping along the pavement.
I pulled out my phone and rang Mazzy. Again, her answer phone.
I jogged, and then I ran, between small pines that dotted the lawn, heading into the setting sun. With the wind at my back, and the dead leaves streaming ahead, it seemed we were being sucked into a dying star. Passing the litter of a homeless camp, beer cans and a flu mask, empty cigarette packets and a water bottle, rubbish had never been so comforting. This was the most human thing I’d seen.
Beyond the trees I could see the palace, the gracefully curved roof, the moat and the stone wall, vacant sentry boxes. I could walk up to the house of the most precious and protected family in Japan. Stroll through the front door and nose around in the Emperor’s bedroom.
I didn’t care. I needed to know where Mazzy was. I ran along the empty highway, my knee shooting pain. After failing to break the lock on a bike I fell into a panicked walk, occasionally jogging, always looking to see if anyone else was around.
I ran down the middle of the road. My wooden soles slapped loudly, echoing between shop windows and company lobbies. The only other sound was my laboured breathing, until I reached Shiba Park at the foot of Tokyo Tower. Then crows, cawing from a ginkgo tree as I hurried to my apartment.
I didn’t trust the lift and skipped up ten flights of stairs, rattling every letterbox in case other residents had missed the evacuation. How I preferred that reasoning to a void. That would mean people gathered in shelters, a hubbub of voices.
Not the silence when I opened my door.
Crushed. I ran from room to room. I went onto my balcony and surveyed the rooftops, the redundant buildings. I bellowed and screamed myself hoarse. I had conversations with the vacuum, begging the hidden to show themselves. Tokyo was an empty set, the actors backstage and the audience gone home.
I called for my daughter, shouting her name across the streets.
&
nbsp; No answer.
Nothing.
I’d left Nikko on a busy train and arrived in a hollow city.
I splashed my face with water, checked my reflection in the mirror. That it was still me. I slapped my cheeks until they burned and the blood was pounding through my inner ear. I clenched my fist and punched myself, knuckles against skull, rapping on the brain.
No world returned with a throbbing temple.
I scrawled a note and stuck it to Mazzy’s bedroom door, promising I’d be back by dark.
Then I went downstairs, kicked my bike from the stand, and pedalled onto the main road. I had one look in the police box, and then rode up the shopping parade, past the tea shop and the French bakery, towards the bright steel of Mori Tower.
At the plaza an automated voice warned me to take care. A voice. A woman. Telling me to be careful on the escalators.
I felt stupid. Scared and baffled.
The silver steps revolved and I carried on my bike. At the top of the escalator was the faux German market. Snapped-together shacks in mock pine selling mulled wine and schnitzel. It should be teeming with shoppers. I wheeled my bike into the tower lobby, kicked out the stand, and walked through gates usually guarded by men in white gloves and peaked caps. I flicked glances over my shoulder, trying to catch out the phantom stalker, a following presence I felt despite the utter desolation.
All the lifts were waiting. I hit the button for the top floor, hoping the doors would open to a smiling receptionist, a polite bow and a lipstick smile.
No one.
The empty lighthouse at the top of the world, surrounded by stellar blue. I looked through the windows at the map of a city, the lifeless metropolis. I walked the observation deck and searched a dead panorama. For one vertiginous second I thought about throwing myself through the glass, falling with the shards and smacking the concrete.
But what would happen to Mazzy?
Then a lone crow glided from a street light and perched on an advertising hoarding, scraping its talons on the metal frame. When the crow upped and flew towards Shibuya, I took a lift back down to the lobby, got on my bike and followed.
I could hear my breathing, ticking wheels and the chain along the cogs. I knew that subjects in isolation experienced auditory hallucinations, that voices could be generated by loneliness. As sure as I could hear my own, plaintive call from the highway. Singing out to the empty streets like a forlorn rag and bone man.
Riding into Shibuya, a minuscule figure beneath the looming towers, I wondered if I was dead. A netherworld powered by the last sparks of my consciousness. No Pearly Gates. No reincarnation. Just a cold, glittering city. The sole occupant.
I rode through the main concourse of the train station, under a roof that should be vibrating with carriages. I pedalled past a flower stand selling bunches of roses, freshly picked and immortal with colour. I cycled under the bridge towards the bronze Hachiko statue, the sculpture of a dog that waited for the owner who never returned.
Mounted on every building around the intersection were the giant LED screens. Switched off. The white dots shrunk into black space.
In the middle of the crossing I put my bike on the stand and sat down. I should be trampled by the crowds, a rush of motorbikes and taxis. Instead I waited. Like a bronze dog. I looked into the cafe where I’d taken Mazzy on her first day here. If I focused hard enough could I jump back into that moment?
Any moment.
I got on my bike and pedalled past shops and restaurants, along the avenue of crimson maple trees. How appropriate that the roof of the National Stadium looked like a capsized ship.
Then again the crow. Flying towards Meiji Shrine. I followed, pedalling along a path speckled with ginkgo leaves and pine needles. Yoyogi Park should be filled with kids rehearsing plays. Girls in maid outfits wailing with an out of tune guitar. The Elvis dancers, twisting and turning in their ripped leather jackets and gelled back hair.
I rode under the torii that marks the shrine entrance. The bike rattled across the gravel, tinkling the bell as I bounced a track through the small copse surrounding the sacred grounds.
More crows flew towards Shinjuku, like smoke might draw from an open window. Beyond the forest I could see a flock gathering above the Hotel Centurion.
Where I’d spent my last night with Kozue.
Through the empty streets I followed their flapping wings. At the foyer I carried my bike up the steps and dropped it clattering to the lobby floor. Then I jumped into the lift. I had to see the room, the bed. To know that she wasn’t there. That we both weren’t. The feeling that I’d find another version of myself was growing by the second, and I ran along the corridor.
The door was ajar, and slowly, I walked in. My trousers and shirt on the carpet. Clothes I no longer possessed. The bathroom was shut, and I knocked.
“Who is it?”
The muffled voice was mine. I tried the handle but it was locked, so I stood back and kicked off the bolt.
Water sloshing back and forth. Wet footprints. Her make up on the sink. Black eye-liner and lipstick. A space on the steamed mirror wiped clear.
I stumbled out of the bathroom. Crows swirled around the hotel like sheaves of burnt paper, and I reached up and opened the window. I was standing on the ledge when I saw the plane. A jet liner, high and bright. I shouted and waved, calling down the search team. When the plane looped in a slow, silent curve, I saw it was made of paper.
Yamada’s design. The pretty white glider banked through wide turns, never losing height. When we’d followed its flight on the park, we were the protectors. Now the plane was my guardian.
I descended to the lobby and ran outside. The crows had gone, but the plane was still sailing the breeze, looping back and forth over Kinokuniya. The bookshop. If I could hold a copy of my book, read my name on the jacket, then I’d know that I once existed. With others. Groups, Gangs and Belonging could hardly be written in a peopleless city.
I sprinted across the footbridge and banged open the doors. Aisles of best-selling novels and international newspapers. Gaudy magazines filled with celebrities and film stars.
In the popular science section I scanned the spines. My trembling finger noted that the authors beginning with M didn’t include Monroe.
Then I saw the cover. What at first looks like a strutting gang is on closer inspection a group of disparate individuals: a policeman next to a football hooligan, a schoolgirl, a businessman, a punk, an old woman with a cane, a soldier and an anti-war protester.
But the name wasn’t mine.
In block capitals, where Ben Monroe should have been printed, it read Per Lindstrand. Lydia’s new partner.
Mazzy’s new father.
I dropped the book and fled down the escalators, crashing through a fire exit onto the walkway above Shinjuku station. I collapsed. I pulled at my hair and pressed my palms against my eye sockets, as if I could force the correct vision onto my brain.
Then I heard the slow hiss of water, pebbles jumbling in a broken wave. I was sitting on a beach in California. Sunlight danced on the sea. Lifeguards chatted, patrolled the shoreline. I stood up and trudged across the sand, ducking under umbrellas, stepping around towels and glistening bodies. I could smell coconut sunscreen. I bent down and scooped up a handful of hot sand.
I caught sight of the red and white golf umbrella we always used as shade, and I walked across the beach until I was right behind the parasol.
“Look, daddy.”
Mazzy.
Gone.
With the sea and its breaking waves.
My baby daughter.
Back in Tokyo, the empty city. A burst of sun between the buildings. Light on the train tracks. A train on the light tracks.
A train.
Without passengers. The carriages rattled across sleepers, and the lone service shuttled into Shin
juku station. I ran down the staircase, jumped the ticket barrier and sprinted along the concourse, terrified the train would leave without me. The jingle played to warn that the doors were closing and I dived inside.
As the train pulled away, I realised that I wasn’t the only passenger. In the next carriage, looking over her shoulder and walking away, was Mazzy. I yanked open the door and leapt across the couplings, hurrying along the aisle to keep her in sight.
The train was gathering speed, shooting through stations, accelerating until the lights were neon smears. We span through revolutions of Tokyo, faster and faster, beyond the screeching metal and rattling tracks until I was weightless, adrift in the calm of zero gravity.
Swimming with Mazzy in a Greek cove, floating in sunlight.
Bang.
Crumpled on the carriage floor. The train stopped. Shadows on the platform. Figures. Tall, and imposing.
Crows.
Huge, imperious crows. They cocked their heads and studied me. A specimen. One of the crows let out a low cackle, and the other birds cawed in reply. My body was meat, prone before the gleaming beak that jutted into the carriage. I pushed myself away from the snapping jaw. The flock rustled their wings and passed a length of steel from beak to beak. When the head crow bent the rod into a hook, I knew it was the tool to pull my body from the train. I jumped up to run, but the crow snagged my coat and dragged me to the door. Kicking and screaming, I was hauled onto the platform and plucked into the air.
Dangled above the city, like a mouse in the grip of a falcon. Helpless. Yet secure in the talons that I was something not to be dropped.
There was peace to be held like prey. To be carried.
We rose above chequered rice fields, the concrete towns and metallic cities. The crow rode higher on heated thermals, and the landscape faded, vanished into sky.
**
I looked down onto broken, sunlit clouds. They flecked the ocean like a great blue blanket pocked with feathers.
Tokyo Page 17