He sipped the first can as he rounded the corner by the dry-cleaner’s. A man leaned against the scabrous tiled wall, one geta sandal kicked back against the curb, cleaning his fingernails with a curved knife twenty centimeters long. He wore his glossy black hair in a folded-over knot at the back of his skull. A rough sash fastened his faded indigo kimono. The straps of his sandals were frayed. Tatsuya stopped in front of him. “Nice evening, isn’t it?”
The man lifted his gaze. “I walked all the way,” he said.
“I know,” Tatsuya said. “Want a coffee?”
The man appeared to think about that for a moment, then nodded. Tatsuya reached into his Seven-Eleven bag and took out the second can of café au lait. The man thrust his knife into the scabbard almost concealed by the folds of his sash before accepting the coffee the polite way, with both hands. The thumb that popped the tab was broad, callused, the nail gnarled but trimmed and clean.
“I got off work early,” Tatsuya said. “Thought you might not be here yet.”
“I have nowhere else to be. Yet.”
Tatsuya smiled, hunched one shoulder in a half-shrug. “Smoke?”
“Thank you, I would be grateful.”
They smoked their cigarettes in silence, watching homeward-bound salarymen and career women hurry past. A tailless tabby cat minced out of the privet hedge on the other side of the roadway and arched its back, hissing. Tatsuya sighed, threw down his cigarette, and trod on it. “Well, I’d better be getting back. I get to eat supper at home for once; what a treat. My wife might even be there, with her friend.”
“Have you told them yet?”
“Them?”
“Your superiors.”
Tatsuya winced.
In a moment of exhausted frustration last week, he had resolved to tell his boss point blank that the project was going to be a failure, they simply did not have enough bodies and were not efficiently using the ones they had, they were going to miss their deadline. But that would mean going behind the back of his team leader, who was stopping all complaints at the source and pretending that everything was fine. To make matters worse, Tatsuya was indebted to the team leader through long acquaintance. He was not yet prepared to take the momentous step of ratting him out for incompetence. “I was kind of pissed off with life that day,” he said. “I need more time to decide what I’m going to do.”
“Think about it, then.” The other man’s black eyes were hard. He knew Tatsuya was stalling.
“I will.” Tatsuya raised a hand and walked away without looking back.
Finding the front door of the apartment unlocked, he had time to prepare himself to meet Margrethe’s friend Devin. She was curled up on the sofa, reading a paperback.
“Hi,” she said, sitting up. She looked nervous. Maybe she was shy of him. They had only met once before, in Hawaii.
“Hi, Devin. Where’s Margrethe?”
“Oh, she – she had a private student. She didn’t think you’d get home so early – hee hee! – but she should be back soon. Yep.” Devin splayed her book on the arm of the sofa and followed him into the kitchen. “Is that your dinner?”
“Yes. Have you eaten?”
“Oh, I had sushi, too – some of those hand rolls from the little shop up there. Umm! Those were good.”
Tatsuya halted his chopsticks. “Do you like sushi?”
“I love it! I eat sushi for lunch almost every day at home. Uh, from the Korean deli. You’d probably think it wasn’t the real thing.”
“Well, if you’d like a drink or anything… coffee, tea… beer… anything you like. Feel free.” He waved a hand vaguely.
“Oooh, I’d love a beer.”
Not without a pang, Tatsuya handed her one of the cans of Asahi he had bought for himself. She sat across the kitchen table from him and sipped it, bright-eyed. To break the silence he asked her about her plans. She said she had bought a two-week rail pass and intended to travel all over the country, staying in youth hostels.
“I was thinking of leaving on Sunday. But actually now I think I might go sooner than that. Like maybe tomorrow, even.”
“What? Why? You can stay here as long as you like.”
Devin gazed abstractedly at the corner of the ceiling. “Well, I mean, even though you guys are being so fantastic about putting me up, and I can’t imagine, if I had to stay in a hotel it would be ridiculous – but I’m supposed to be on a budget, and I spent like a hundred dollars today, just on food and getting around, and a bit of shopping…”
“Yes, the prices are very high in Tokyo,” Tatsuya agreed. Suddenly he felt expansive, kindlier towards her. He put his used chopsticks into the empty sushi box and stuffed it into the trash. “Now I’m going to play my guitar. I hope I don’t disturb you. Tell me if it’s too noisy.”
While he played Eric Clapton and the Beatles, she sat with her nose in her book, occasionally looking around at an infelicitous chord. But when he launched into “Paranoid,” her book went down, her head came up, and she began to sing along under her breath.
“You know Black Sabbath, Devin? No, go on, please! You have a nice voice.”
In truth it was reedy, but she could carry a tune. Loosening up, she got to her feet and swayed as she sang. Tatsuya turned up the volume and rocked out. Suddenly the doorbell chimed.
“Shit, it’s the neighbors!”
“Oh no,” Devin giggled.
An idea came to him. “Can you get it? Just say I’m not here, OK?”
She hurried to the door. Skulking in the kitchen, Tatsuya heard a woman apologizing profusely. He grinned to himself. The door closed; Devin skipped back into the room. “I think it’s OK. Of course, I couldn’t understand what she was saying—”
“She apologized to you!” Tatsuya laughed. “She came to ask us to turn it down – and she apologized to you! She must have been terrified when she saw you were a foreigner, and…” He gurgled, getting control of his mirth. “That was the first time they’ve ever come over here, and I think it’ll be the last time, too.”
Devin looked confused, then cautiously amused; then she grinned. “So, do you know any more Black Sabbath?”
They did “Crazy Train” and “Mr. Crowley,” and had just moved on to Deep Purple when the doorbell rang again.
“Damn,” Devin said. “Well, I know how to handle her now. Just look like a scary foreigner. I should’ve bought that other t-shirt.”
Crouched in the corner of the living-room with his amp buzzing quietly beside him, Tatsuya frowned. Instead of the woman’s voice, he heard the brief burr of a man’s voice, followed by Devin’s high-pitched English. The amp crackled. A faint whine of feedback emerged from its speaker and grew louder until Tatsuya wrenched the dial, turning it all the way down. His shoulders and the top of his scalp cramped with gooseflesh. He stood up.
Devin came back into the room. “It wasn’t the neighbor,” she said. “Not the same one, anyway.”
Pretending insouciance, Tatsuya sat down on the arm of the sofa and played a couple of chords that sounded tinny on the unplugged strings. “Was it a man?”
“Yeah. Oh, I guess you know him? He must have thought I was Margrethe, because he asked me, ‘Where is your husband?’ And I was like, uh, I’m not married – it didn’t occur to me at that point that he thought I was Margrethe – and he just said, ‘There is much further to go.’ I mean, what does that mean? It was weird… he looked so tired… and he was also dressed weird.” She blushed. “I mean, not weird, but… he was wearing a kimono.”
“I know him.” He urgently wanted to ask her: Did he have the knife? But if he had, surely she’d be alarmed. “It probably wasn’t important. You can forget it.”
“But it was weird,” Devin said. Hugging herself, she added in a whisper that sounded almost happy: “There’s so much I still don’t understand about this country.”
The doorbell rang for a third time. Tatsuya let out a choked-off yell.But it was only Margrethe, flushed and happy, who had given her keys t
o Devin earlier and now needed to be let in.
The Japanese rail system covers the archipelago like a spidery exoskeleton. Into this metal map of journeys past and present Devin set out, feeling like a mouse scurrying through the scaffolding of an alien architectural project. Every station had multiple levels and platforms; every youth hostel seemed to be a long walk away at the top of a hill. The railroads both made available and obscured the baroque marvels of the countryside. Craggy mountains and lush rice paddies, suburban sprawl, hamlets and highrise provincial capitals… she saw them all from train windows, and wondered about the lives of the people who lived there, people who did not travel. Her intense curiosity played out in comic encounters balked by the language barrier. There were also moments of tear-jerking kindness from strangers; there was the elderly man who followed her all through the town until, badly frightened, she screamed at him that she would call the police – that was enough to send him packing; and there were the conversations in youth-hostel kitchens and lounges with Japanese backpackers who more or less spoke English. Hippie-scarved, chain-smoking, they talked mostly about the other places they had been. Prague, Marrakesh, Ulan Bator, Rio de Janeiro… after a while these remote destinations all started to sound the same to Devin. But when she asked them about their own lives, they had nothing to say, or would not say it. They advised her to visit this mountain, that festival, the other onsen.
So she went to the hot springs and boiled herself lobster-pink. She hiked up a mountain and ate black “onsen tamago.” She hugged an eight-hundred-year-old tree, almost got bitten by a monkey, took pictures of schoolchildren in their adorable little yellow beanies, and got mixed up quite by accident in a local festival, among a crowd of half-naked men jigging through the streets with a gold-encrusted shrine on their shoulders. That night she drank at an izakaya with the bon vivant seniors who had adopted her into their midst, and woke flat on her back on a grassy roadside. Terror gripped her. She had no idea where she was in the universe. But her head was resting on her backpack, and in the mesh pocket her hand encountered a packet of manju dumplings, sweet bean paste snugged into soft pastry shells, wrapped in a cotton handkerchief. She unwrapped them and ate one, sitting there on the verge, somewhere so remote that not a single car was passing. Above her the stars cavorted with the clouds. The message had grown clearer now, she could almost decipher it – but then the clouds thickened, and the intricate pattern of lights was lost.
At last she turned back towards Tokyo. She did not want to go. She felt like Pandora, if that demigoddess, hand already on the latch, had been called away to catch a train, leaving her box unopened. All she’d done was admire the patterns on the outside. But her rail pass was about to expire; as the Japanese said, sho ga nai – there was no help for it.
A shinkansen roared past, pushing a storm front of wind. Rain rattled on the skylights of the station. There was a cloying smell of broth from the soba and udon stand. She bought a can of sweet coffee from a vending machine and sipped it. Really, this stuff was weirdly delicious; or maybe it was just that the taste always teased her with some elusive memory of something else she had eaten or drunk, perhaps in a dream… Mentally, now, she was half back in Tokyo already.
Checking her email at last night’s youth hostel, she had found a message from Margrethe. Tatsuya had accepted an invitation to fill in at the next gig of a band led by some guy he knew; the show was on the day of Devin’s scheduled return. If she were not too tired, would she like to go?
Too tired? She was tingling with energy, on edge with anticipation. The best part of her trip now lay behind her, but her neurochemistry did not seem to have gotten the message – or maybe her body knew something she did not. All the way back to Tokyo she struggled to figure out what it was telling her.
Five floors up from an alleyway in Sangenjaya, above a yakiniku restaurant and a vintage clothes retailer and a graphic design company and a recording studio, the rock café Heaven’s Gate consisted of a room with a stage at one end and another room with sofas, separated by a wall that was mostly arches. In front of the stage milled a handful of people who knew the performers personally.
Beer in hand, Devin stood with Margrethe and Phil, jiggling from foot to foot to the beat of Aerosmith as interpreted by Kubikirizoku featuring Tatsuya on guitar. Margrethe had explained to her that Tatsuya knew Phil as her yoga instructor and one of her friends. All the same, Devin felt terribly tense, as if the truth about Margrethe and Phil were out but everyone was being too polite to notice it.
What made it all the more difficult was that she had more or less come down on Tatsuya’s side, and meeting Phil had not changed her mind. He was an inch shorter than Margrethe, with a gentle smile and a trick of looking you in the eye for too long without blinking. His cargo shorts exposed hairy shins. Mildly he bopped to “Mama Kin,” his smile unchanging, and laughter welled up in Devin’s throat like hiccups.
“It is still much further.”
She turned. A few feet away stood Margrethe and Tatsuya’s neighbor, the man in the scruffy blue kimono. She started to go towards him, but he gave a curt shake of his head. “What do you mean? What do you mean?” she said fretfully, only then realizing, in the back of her mind, how odd it was that she could understand him at all – that a man so traditionally Japanese-looking should speak flawless English. But then again, why should he not?
“Not that way. This way.” He turned and moved off towards the back of the room.
Gripped by urgent curiosity, exulting in it, Devin started to follow, but within a couple of paces she lost sight of him and stopped, disconsolate.
All the lights went off. Simultaneously the guitar and bass fell silent, leaving only the drummer and the vocalist, unamplified, to accompany each other for an instant before they were drowned out by cries of humorous alarm. A tinge of streetlight seeped through from the other room, which had windows.
The black shape that was Tatsuya lifted its guitar over its head, set it on the floor, and plunged down off the stage. Someone let out a raw shout.
In front of Devin a scuffle broke out. She was thrown staggering back as if from a moshpit. Margrethe shrieked. Devin fought to reach her side, but an angular square-winged shape loomed up in front of her; a hand seized her by the shoulder and spun her around.
She reached up. Inspired with a sudden certainty, she delicately unpicked the hard, warm fingers from her shoulder and laced her own fingers through them.
Now light from the hall illuminated the exit, and there were people clustered around it. Devin was not leading, but neither was she being led. She knew the way.
Someone located the breaker switch. The lights came back on and revealed Phil sitting on the floor in front of the stage. Gingerly, he touched his left eye. Blood trickled from his nose and down to his lips.
“I can’t fucking believe you!” Margrethe wanted to scream at Tatsuya, but she restrained herself to a whisper.
No one else, except for maybe Phil himself, seemed to be aware that it was Tatsuya who had hit him. She had dragged Tatsuya into the other room and backed him up against one of the sofas by the windows.
A dopey grin of self-satisfaction spread across his face. “What, you think I’m going to let him fuck my wife and not do anything about it?”
“You knew?”
“I know you. I’m not stupid.”
“But you are a coward,” she hissed. “Or why’d you wait until the lights conveniently happened to go off?”
“It seemed like a good opportunity.” Tatsuya nursed his knuckles. There was a small cut on one of them. He sucked it. “Why did you do it, anyway?” he said indistinctly.
“Why?” She raised her shoulders, let them fall. Her protean emotions hurled her in the other direction now. “Why not, when I never see you? Why not, when we never get to spend time together or even fucking talk? I thought I was marrying you, but little did I know you were already married to that goddamn company!”
Tatsuya’s eyes went soft with t
he look of defensive incomprehension she knew so well. “I’m on a deadline. Our project—”
“You’re always on a deadline! There’s always some project!” Tears oozed down the sides of her nose. “There’s not always going to be me.”
Tatsuya’s adam’s apple hitched visibly. He said in a weak voice, “Sorry. Margrethe – I’m sorry.”
“Dumbass. It’s me who should be – I’m sorry.”
Crying, she went into his arms.
Tatsuya sat on the sofa with Margrethe across his lap. When she seemed to have stopped crying, he shifted her head to his shoulder so he could light a cigarette.
She sat up. Then she rose on her knees. “Tatsuya! Oh my God. Look.”
He followed her pointing finger down through the window to the street. “Shit, that’s—”
“Yes, it’s Devin! Where’s she going?”
“Oh, shit,” Tatsuya mumbled. “Better go after her.”
But he did not move. His consternation gave way to a feeling of guilty relief so powerful it made him lightheaded. Everything was clear now. It was not him, after all. He was safe.
Side by side at the window, they watched Devin walk away from the building and vanish amidst the fun-seekers: a calm, stolid little figure, apparently alone.
THE END
About the Author
Felicity Savage is an American fantasy author. Born in South Carolina, Savage lived until the age of two in rural France, and then in the west of Ireland. At six, she moved with her family to the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, where she joined the Girl Guides and appeared in productions of Robin Hood and Peter Pan at the RAF base on Benbecula. Her first novel, Humility Garden, and its sequel Delta City were published by Penguin ROC in 1994 and 1995, while she was still at Columbia University. Her Ever trilogy was published by HarperCollins in 1995, 1996, and 1997. Savage was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1995 and 1996. She currently lives in Tokyo, Japan, with her husband and two cats. When not writing, she works as a Japanese translator, sings Gregorian chant, and moonlights as a serial houseplant killer.
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