He stopped smiling for once and gazed out. ‘The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, it turns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits the ground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only absolutely perfect when it’s falling through the air, this way and that, for the briefest time... I think that only we Japanese can really understand that, don’t you?’
A van roaring the message Vote for Shimizu, the only candidate who really has the guts to fight corruption screeched past like a drunken batmobile. Shimizu never betrays, Shimizu never betrays, Shimizu never betrays.
Mr Fujimoto trailed his fingers through the air. ‘Why do things happen the way they do? Since the gas attack on the subway, watching those pictures on TV, watching the police investigate like a crack squad of blind tortoises, I’ve been trying to understand... Why do things happen at all? What is it that stops the world simply... seizing up?’
I’m never sure whether Mr Fujimoto’s questions are questions. ‘Do you know?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know the answer, no. Sometimes I think it’s the only question, and that all other questions are tributaries that flow into it.’ He ran his hand through his thinning hair. ‘Might the answer be “love”?’
I tried to think, but I kept seeing pictures. I imagined my father — that man who I had imagined was my father — looking out through the rear window of a car. I thought of butterfly knives, and a time once three or four years ago when I was walking out of McDonald’s and a businessman slammed down onto the pavement from a ninth floor window of the same building. He lay three metres away from where I stood. His mouth was gaping open in astonishment. A dark stain was trickling from it, over the pavement, between the bits of broken teeth and glasses.
I thought about Tomoyo’s eyebrows, her nose, her jokes, her accent. Tomoyo on an aeroplane to Hong Kong. ‘I’d rather be too young to have that kind of wisdom.’
Mr Fujimoto’s face turned into a smile that hid his eyes. ‘How wise of you.’ He ended up buying an old Johnny Hartman disc with a beautiful version of ‘I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart’.
A mosquito blundered its way into my ear, suddenly there, loud as an electric blender. I pulled my head away and swatted the little bugger. Mosquito season. I was scraping its fuselage onto a bit of paper when Takeshi’s estranged wife marched in, pushing her sunglasses up into her bountiful hair. She was accompanied by a sharp-dressed man who I immediately sensed was a lawyer. They have a look about them. When Takeshi offered me this job I’d spent a whole evening over at their apartment in Chiyoda, but now apart from the curtest of nods Takeshi’s wife ignored me. The lawyer did not acknowledge my existence.
‘He,’ Takeshi’s wife pronounced the pronoun with the unique bitterness of the ex-wife, ‘only leases the property, but the stock is worth quite a lot. At least, he was always boasting that it is. The real money’s in the hair salons, though. This is just a hobby, really. One of his many hobbies.’
The lawyer demurred.
They turned to go. Takeshi’s wife looked at me as she was stepping through the door. ‘You can learn something from this, Satoru. Never make a big decision which will alter the shape of your life on the basis of a relationship! You may as well take out a mortgage on a house made of sponge cake. Remember that.’ And she was gone.
I thought about what she had said as I put on a Chet Baker disc. A trumpet with nowhere urgent to be and all day to get there. And his voice, zennish murmurings in the soft void. My funny valentine, You don’t know what love is, I get along without you very well.
The phone rang. A hysterical Takeshi. Drunk again.
‘Don’t let them in! Don’t let that mad cow in!’
‘Who?’
‘Her! Her and her backstabbing-scumbag-bloodsucking lawyer, who should be representing me! They’re going after my testicles with a meat cleaver! Don’t let them look at the stock — don’t let them look at the accounts — it’s illegal — and hide the limited edition original Louis Armstrong. And the gold disc of ‘Maiden Voyage’. Stick it down your boxer shorts or something — and—’
‘Takeshi!’
‘What?’
‘It’s a bit late, I’m afraid.’
‘What?’
‘They’ve already been. Just to look around for a few seconds, so the lawyer could see the place. They didn’t look at the accounts, they didn’t evaluate anything.’
‘Oh. Great. Just great. Great. What an utter, pigging, mess. That woman is Mad Cow Disease on two legs... And what legs they are...’ He hung up.
The sunlight hummed and was soft. Shadows of twigs and branches swayed ever so slightly against the back wall. I thought of a time many years ago when two or three of Mama-san’s girls had taken me boating on a lake. One of my earliest memories.
Your place does keep you sane, but can also keep you lonely.
What was I going to do? I rolled up my shirt and looked on my forearm. There was a snake which Tomoyo had drawn on with a blue pen yesterday afternoon. I asked her, why a snake? She’d laughed at me like she was in on a joke that I wasn’t in on.
Two thoughts walked into my place.
The first thought said that we hadn’t slept together because sex would have closed an entrance behind us and opened an exit ahead of us.
The second thought told me quite clearly what to do.
Maybe Takeshi’s wife was right — maybe it is unsafe to base an important decision on your feelings for a person. Takeshi says the same thing often enough. Every bonk, he says, quadruples in price by the morning after. But who are Takeshi or his wife to lecture anybody? If not love, then what?
I looked at the time. Three o’clock. She was how many thousand kilometres and one time zone away. I could leave some money to cover the cost of the call.
‘Good timing,’ Tomoyo answered, like I was calling from the cigarette machine around the corner. ‘I’m unpacking.’
‘Missing me?’
‘A tiny little bit, maybe.’
‘Liar! You don’t sound surprised to hear me.’
I could hear the smile in her voice. ‘I’m not. When are you coming?’
And so we talked about what flight I could catch, where we would go, how she would level things with her father, what I could do to avoid eating into my meagre savings too much. I felt as near to Paradise as I have ever been.
Hong Kong
The moon, the moon, in the after...
There’s a mechanism in my alarm clock connected to a switch in my head that sends a message to my arm which extends itself and commands my thumb to punch the OFF button a moment before the thing beeps me awake. Every morning, without fail, no matter how much whisky I drank the night before or what time I finally got to bed. I’ve forgotten.
Fuck. That was a horrible, horrible dream. I can’t remember all the details, and I don’t think I want to. The office was being raided. Huw Llewellyn had stormed in, with the Chinese police and my old scoutmaster whose Volvo I once shat on, they were all on rollerblades, and in my haste to erase the suddenly numerous files relating to Account 1390931 I keep mis-typing my password. K-A-T-Y-F-R-B, no, K-T-Y, no, K-A-T-Y-F-O-R-B-W — no, and I’d have to start over. They work their way up the building, floor by floor, coffee cups were spilling in their wake, the electric fan swings its eye this way again, and unpaid telephone bills flutter through the air, bats at dusk... There’s a window open, and forty days and nights up the wind is vicious. The mouse on my computer sits there frozen, refusing to double-click. Was it any of this? Was what any of this? I’ve forgotten.