Broken The Tokyo Lost Series-

This book was given to JOANNA Rączkowska on Instafreebie. www.instafreebie.com

BROKEN THE TOKYO LOST SERIES #1

CHRISTOPHER W ARD

CONTENTS Also by Christopher Ward About the Author Contact Broken Tokyo 1. Jack

Miyu 3. Jack 4. Jack 5. Miyu 6. Miyu 7. Jack 8. Jack 9. Miyu 10. Jack 11. Miyu 12. Jack 13. Miyu 14. Jack 15. Miyu 16. Jack 17. Miyu 18. Jack 19. Miyu 20. Jack 21. Jack 22. Miyu 2.

Nagano 23. Jack 24. Miyu 25. Miyu 26. Jack

27. Miyu 28. Jack 29. Miyu 30. Jack 31. Miyu 32. Miyu 33. Jack 34. Miyu 35. Jack 36. Miyu 37. Miyu 38. Jack 39. Miyu 40. Jack Stolen - sneak preview Contact

“Broken: The Tokyo Lost Series #1” Copyright © Chris Ward 2016 This book was previously published in 2014 under the title, “Finding My World” The right of Chris Ward to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Author. This story is a work of fiction and is a product of the Author’s imagination. All resemblances to actual locations or to persons living or dead are entirely coincidental. Cover by Elizabeth Mackey at www.elizabethmackeygraphics.com

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER WARD The Tokyo Lost Romantic Suspense Series Broken Stolen

WRITING AS CHRIS WARD Standalone Novels Head of Words The Man Who Built the World

The Tube Riders Series Underground Exile Revenge In the Shadow of London

The Tales of Crow Series They Came Out After Dark The Castle of All Nightmares The Puppeteer King The Circus of Machinations

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A proud and noble Cornishman (and to a lesser extent British), Christopher Ward ran off to live and work in Japan back in 2004. There he got married, got a decent job, and got a cat. He remains pure to his Cornish/British roots while enjoying the inspiration of living in a foreign country. True to his self publishing ideology, Chris writes in multiple genres and under multiple pen names. As well as romantic suspense under Christopher Ward, he writes speculative fiction as Chris Ward, sports fiction as Michael White, comedy as Michael S. Hunter, and one or two other things under names that, at this time, remain a secret…. www.amillionmilesfromanywhere.net

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BROKEN THE TOKYO LOST SERIES #1

Jack is a lost boy, a spoilt, rich delinquent sent to college in Japan to keep him out of trouble. Miyu is a lost girl, fighting to dig her way out of a life of hardship, struggle, and personal sacrifice.

When tragedy strikes, Miyu finds companionship in the unlikeliest of places. Jack wants only to go home to Britain, Miyu only to find the mother who abandoned her sixteen years before. Together they form an uneasy alliance that takes them from the seedy underbelly of Tokyo to the rice fields of Nagano, where they will discover that what they are searching for is something that already exists within them both.

Broken is the first book in the Tokyo Lost series, a series of unconnected stories that share the same settings and themes.

PART I

TOKYO

1

JACK

‘G et used to the taste of plastic, kid. You’ll be tasting it a lot from now on.’ Jack Williams jerked awake, gasping loud enough for the man in the seat beside him to look up and frown before turning back to his iPad. The hum of the aircraft filled the narrow space of the economy seating from all around, and from somewhere close by, he smelled the sour aroma of spilt beer. Glancing down, he found the remainder of his plastic cup of Carlsberg creating a stain across his blue sweatshirt, spreading out like a gunshot wound. ‘Are you all right, sir?’ came the bright, breezy voice of a cabin attendant. Jack looked up into the heavily made-up face of a young Japanese woman as she lingered over him, a forced smile on her thin lips. Sir. Had he ever been called that before? Jack couldn’t remember. He was nineteen, a school dropout and a career trouble-finder. “Sir” suggested an element of respect earned. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Just a bad dream, you know?’

She smiled. ‘Flying can be hard for some people,’ she said. ‘Is this your first time on a plane?’ He frowned. Come to think of it, it was. He hadn’t even thought about it before, because it was just the latest form of transport used to get away from his troubles. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve been on loads, but it never gets easier, does it?’ She gave him a smile and moved away down the aisle, and Jack found his cheeks burning. Why did I lie to her? Damn it, why didn’t I just tell her the truth? What’s wrong with me? It was always the same. Sometimes he felt like his tongue was a severed electrical wire, spitting out seeds of distrust and manipulation like a misfiring potato planter. What was he hoping to do, get her into bed? She was a cabin attendant. It was her job to be nice, to call him sir, to ask him if everything was all right. Why couldn’t he just take things at face value instead of always trying to turn them to his own gain? He sat back in the seat, thinking about the last boot he’d seen from underneath as it slammed his head back against the concrete of the play area in Filton Park. An MRI scan had showed no brain trauma, but it wasn’t an experience he was keen to repeat. ‘Cabin crew, please prepare the cabin for landing,’ came an announcement from overhead. Jack wished he could look out of the window, but he’d been stuck with an internal aisle seat on the left side of the middle row of four. Beside him, a middle-aged Japanese man began to pack up his iPad and put it away into a case. Baring a couple of hours of sleep, he had spent the entire journey from Heathrow watching manga cartoons.

A beep sounded and the seatbelt sign switched itself on. Jack adjusted his and flipped his seat back to the upright position. Tokyo. What might be in store for him here? He hadn’t wanted to go, but his parents had given him an ultimatum. Life in the Bristol suburbs wasn’t doing him any favours and he had more enemies than friends. Money had always been the leash that dragged him from one place to the next, but it was the one thing his family had plenty of. Daddy had waved his little plastic wand and Troubled Teen Jack had a year in an international college waiting for him, with a return ticket to Heathrow booked exactly three hundred and sixty-four days from now. It would be a breeze. He had his accommodation provided and an allowance that would be more than enough to live on. All he had to do to keep the direct debits coming was get the ticks on the attendance register that the college would send to his parents each month. He didn’t even have to learn Japanese. He closed his eyes as the plane came in towards the runway, dipping sharply as the hum of the descending wheels came from below. Jack wondered what it would be like to be in a plane crash, whether it would hurt, whether he would know anything before he was incinerated by a fireball. He knew what it felt like to know he was going to get his face stamped on, and how the concrete coming up to meet his skull from the other side would cause his vision to blur and his head to ache for days. It hadn’t hurt as much as he’d expected; a sudden sharp ache followed by another, and then a gradual tail of numbness that had faded over a few seconds. Numb. Wasn’t that the word to sum up his life?

The plane touched down with a light bump and then the roar of the brakes filled the cabin. Jack ducked his head to look out of the nearest side window and saw blue sky shining over an endless expanse of concrete dotted with stationary airplanes and little square trucks that moved among them like remote-control cars. It didn’t look a lot different than Heathrow, really. There was no sign of guards with guns, or geishas, or little wooden temples, or any of the other fanciful things Jack might have expected. He filed off the plane with the other passengers. As he reached the door, the kind cabin attendant gave him a sweet smile and a little bow. ‘If you’re in town I’d love for someone to show me around,’ he said as he passed her, but she just gave an awkward shake of the head and turned to greet the next passenger as if she hadn’t heard him. Again he silently admonished himself for his bullheaded forwardness. Hadn’t that been why he’d ended up with a boot in the face in the first place? There was a line between light flirting with another guy’s girlfriend and drunkenly, aggressively propositioning her. He followed the other passengers up a shiny walkway past a large billboard with a picture of a geisha and WELCOME TO JAPAN in English and several other languages. Around a corner he saw another one, this time featuring a quaint temple with a curved roof set in a tranquil garden. Still no signs of any guards with guns. In fact, the few official-looking people he could see wore expressions veering from excited to bored as they waved the passengers onwards. At immigration he copied the address he had received by email on to the landing card, then stood patiently while a little machine recorded his fingerprints and a

camera took a picture of his face. He began to sweat, wondering if there was any way they could know about all the scrapes he’d been in, that letting him loose in a foreign country—despite his best intentions—was really not a good idea. The glum woman sitting behind the immigration desk just gave him a resigned look as if she’d seen a thousand foreigners just like him before, muttered a robotic “thank you,” and waved him through. He was in Japan. Down a set of stairs he found his bag circulating around a big conveyor, and after another brief sweat as he walked past a customs official, he stepped through a set of wide doors into the arrivals hall. He’d gone no more than a few steps when he heard a voice shouting out ‘Ja-ku! Ja-ku!’ and he spotted a young Japanese man holding up a sign with his name written on it. ‘You are Ja-ku?’ the man said as he approached. ‘Yes. Jack Williams.’ The Japanese man gave a little bow. ‘I am Hirota. Masashi Hirota. Please call me Hirota.’ ‘Okay.’ The man beamed. He was a little shorter than Jack, slightly built, and had beautifully groomed hair falling over to one side, framing an angular, flawless face. He looked like a model from a shampoo advert. ‘You are from the college?’ ‘I am the driver. I take you to your apartment.’ Jack nodded. ‘Great, thanks.’ Hirota gave another wide grin. ‘One more thing.’ Jack forced himself to smile. After a twelve-hour flight from Heathrow the last thing he needed was to be

drowned in enthusiasm. He wanted a shower and a rest. ‘What?’ Hirota spread his arms. ‘To Japan … welcome.’ Jack gave a tired, wry smile. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

2

MIYU

‘O kay, see you later.’ Takahiro Kubota didn’t look up as Miyu lifted her college bag and heaved the laden thing over her shoulder. Her father was engrossed in yet another baseball game on TV: the Giants pummeling some hapless challenger for the fiftieth time this week. Sake in hand, Giants shirt on, he would be content until he fell asleep sometime later in the evening. Locking the door behind her, she stepped out on to the street. As always, as she glanced up at the pair of five-story apartment blocks that flanked her father’s old house. She felt that familiar sensation of being squeezed, of having the life and the youth crushed out of her by Tokyo’s relentless modernisation. Her grandparents had lived and died in this shabby wooden building, yet if Takahiro would just sign one of the papers that appeared through their door from time to time, something large and featureless would replace it within a matter of days. Often she wondered if giving up their family’s ghosts and moving on might not be the best thing. She opened all of the official-looking mail because it was important to

keep the bills paid, and her father’s rages tended to destroy anything lying nearby at random, so she knew just how much their little square of land was worth to a property developer. It was enough to buy them a nice house out in the country, somewhere like Yamanashi or Gifu, where, perhaps, Takahiro could forget the tensions that were causing him to drink himself towards an early death. At the end of her street she was nearly dissected by a couple of foreigners on bicycles as they cut in past her and headed for the youth hostel further down the road. She scowled for a moment then let her anger subside, and turned to watch them as they pulled up outside the mock-traditional building and climbed off their bikes. As always with foreign tourists, they had terrible dress sense and looked like they hadn’t washed for a week. The girl was wearing no makeup, had a roll of pale belly sticking out from a gap between her shorts and singlet like an uncooked sausage, while the boy had a baseball cap turned backwards as if he thought he was some kind of Yankee. She smiled, unable to contain the little fish of envy that jumped about in her stomach. Yeah, so they wouldn’t make any fashion parades, but they looked so carefree, as if life had lifted them up on a cloud and was now bouncing them through the sky far away from life’s troubles. Didn’t they have money to worry about? Parents with issues? Homework to do with a constant hangover, and a job that sucked? Was it so easy to rent a bike and just cycle away from your problems? She crossed the street, heading for the Asakusa subway station on the other side of the blue bridge. As cars whizzed past her she looked up at the massive Sky Tree towering six hundred metres over Sumida, another

sign of progress that made her feel like she was being left behind. It had risen from nothing to dominate the skyline in just three years. How could people do that? It wasn’t right. It had no soul. Her phone buzzed in her pocket as she reached the subway steps and started down. It was the man from last weekend, hassling her again. Come to the club, she replied. The attention annoyed her, but that was the best way. It was always a risk to meet them outside of work, even though with a few particular words you could open their wallets right up and avoid the cut the bar always took. She knew about the girl who had been murdered, everyone did, but she had been Russian, more of a trophy, more attractive to the kind of crazies Miyu liked to avoid. The risk, though, still hung over all of them like a cloud. She got on the train and took it all the way across town to Kitchijo-ji, right out on the red line past Shinjuku. She liked it out there. It was peaceful, the crowds were a little thinner, and by sitting in one of the little cafes or art galleries, she could pretend she was a heroine out of a Murakami novel. Perhaps if she concentrated hard enough, she too might just disappear, leaving all her troubles behind, and reappear in a mirror or a painting or a postcard, where life was an exact opposite to now—carefree and peaceful and people would offer her fleeting smiles as they passed by. The college was a few streets from the large park that attracted most people to the district. A handful of students were standing around outside or talking in groups beside the ice-cream vendor that had set up across the street.

She loved to look at their fashionable clothes, the things they did with their hair, or the makeup they wore. Some of them looked straight out of the pages of teen magazines, with their doll-painted cheeks, frizzy, dyed hair and a mixture of gaudy blouses, trendy dungarees, shorts, and mini-skirts. She didn’t stand out, did she? She wore sensible heels, a thigh-length skirt or jeans, with a non-brand sweater she’d bought in Shibuya. She wasn’t exactly dressed up nor dressed down, yet she felt their eyes on her as she walked up the steps to the college entrance, felt them casting their critical gazes like a spiky, electrified net. How could they possibly know what she did outside of college? They couldn’t, yet she was unable to shake the feelings of condescension. Did they know her father was an unemployed alcoholic or that her mother and sister had disappeared? Did they know what she had to do from Friday through Sunday to sneak money into her father’s wallet and keep the city taxes paid? Of course they didn’t. Yet, with every step she took she felt the scraping of critical nails down her back. It was almost four o’clock, and her first class was about to start. European History. She loved it. The teacher was an American and a dish to boot. His kind smile and warm laugh sent tickles of excitement through her. When he looked at her she felt as though he really looked at her; he wasn’t seeing past her or staring at her body or thinking about what price she might have or what he could do to her if he only asked. He talked to her like a human being, and actually seemed to care when she told him she’d got lost a little when he’d talked about the French Revolution, or the Tsars of Russia. He smiled and he answered her questions, and he never, ever hit on

her. She took her usual seat near the back and put her books out on the desk. Sanyo College of English Education cost a small fortune every month, but it was a total immersion course with every class from Math to Science taught in English by native speakers. After leaving high school she had done the entry level course to get her English up to scratch, and from last month she had started the full course, five evenings a week for the next year. The timing was perfect. Her classes were from four to eight p.m., giving her time to get back across town to fix dinner for her father before going out to work, while the late starts allowed her to catch up on sleep. She often wondered why she had signed up, why she hadn’t gone for a simpler office job or even just a couple of part-time gigs in local shops. Without the hit that the college gave to her wallet, she would be able to provide for her father and keep their house paid for, but basic survival wasn’t enough. She had spent her entire childhood simply surviving, working in a convenience store after school, putting up with the jibes of the other kids when they found out about her mother, and accepting the accusatory stares of the neighbours. She saw life as a long highway with high sound barriers hemming her in from all sides. The faster she ran the more chance she had of escaping them. They couldn’t last forever, could they? The teacher, Tim, entered from a door on the left of the classroom. He wore the same smart suit he always wore, with the blue tie today. He always wore the blue tie when it was sunny outside, and the green when it rained. Miyu wondered if anyone else had ever noticed. Today, though, he wasn’t alone. A young man followed him up onto the stage at the front of the

classroom and stood awkwardly beside him, shifting from foot to foot as though one quick shove would make him topple over. ‘Good afternoon, everyone,’ Tim said, in that smooth, class-CD quality American English that made several of the other girls seated in the rows in front of her fawn and bat their eyelashes. Miyu gave a quiet sigh. They were such tools. At times she felt embarrassed for them. ‘We have a new student today,’ Tim announced, glancing towards the young man beside him. ‘This is Jack Williams. He’s from Bristol in the United Kingdom. He’s an exchange student and he’s going to be studying with us for the next year. I hope you’ll welcome him into our class with open arms, and remember, he doesn’t speak any Japanese yet, so this is a great chance for you to practice your English while getting to know Jack at the same time.’ Jack smiled nervously as the class clapped. A couple of the girls in front of her had already turned their eyes away from Tim and were looking Jack up and down. Miyu sighed again. He’d have no trouble finding open arms to welcome him. It was sad, really, how shallow some of the others students were, how some Japanese girls in general were towards foreigners. They’re not rock stars, she thought, even though Tim looked like he might once have been one. They’re just people like us. ‘Okay, Jack,’ Tim said. ‘Take a seat and we’ll get started. There’s a spare desk at the back, next to Miyu.’ She suppressed a groan. In fact, there was a spare desk on either side of her. She was sure it wasn’t intentional, but she hadn’t made any real effort to make friends with the other students and so hadn’t been invited

up to one of the odd spare desks closer to the front. ‘Hey,’ Jack said, dropping his bag under the desk and sitting down. Miyu gave him a brief smile, but didn’t answer. Jack, for his part, didn’t look particularly concerned. If he noticed her coldness he didn’t show it. That’s good, Miyu thought. The last thing I need is to have him hitting on me for the rest of the year.

3

JACK

H e had felt okay during the drive into Tokyo, but by the time they pulled up outside a featureless, grey apartment block an hour later, it was all he could do to keep his eyes open. He glanced at his watch and worked out that the UK was eight hours behind, meaning it was roughly six a.m. He had been awake all night, and now the need for sleep was overwhelming everything else. Hirota had maintained a steady level of enthusiasm for the entire journey. It seemed at times to Jack as if every building or patch of farmland had a story to tell, but Hirota’s little anecdotes quickly began to merge into one long monologue of information that slid right over him. Was this patch of wasteground where the Hitachi munitions factory had been, or was it the site of the birthplace of a former sumo wrestler? Which type of religion was this temple again? ‘Your apartment number twenty-six,’ Hirota said, pointing up into the sky. ‘Seventh floor.’ ‘Thanks.’ Jack waited as Hirota unloaded his luggage. He was about to mutter thanks again when Hirota hefted up the

two huge suitcases and marched into the building’s lobby, leaving the car parked outside with its hazard lights on. He hadn’t removed the key, and Jack wondered whether he ought to point that out. Before he could say anything though, Hirota called for him from inside. At the top of a smooth elevator ride Jack found the two rooms and kitchen of his apartment to be collectively smaller than the bedroom in his parents’ home back in Bristol. With his arms outstretched he couldn’t quite touch the walls, but it was close. The kitchen, entered upon opening the front door, was even smaller, not wide enough for two people to pass. The bathroom appeared entirely made of plastic, while there was no sign of any furniture. Except for what he had brought with him, the apartment was entirely empty. ‘Look, nice view,’ Hirota said, going to the curtainless window and peering out. Despite the pessimism he felt, Jack found himself agreeing. The hill dipped away outside, arcing around to the right where it went into a tunnel under a railway line. Some kind of sports stadium bulged up on the other side like a giant silver beetle, while between two buildings to his right was the welcome sight of a park: dark green trees poking up out of rolling meadows, all of it set against a backdrop of distant highrises. It wasn’t unlike cityscapes he had seen of Hong Kong or New York. ‘Over there Shinjuku,’ Hirota snorted, clapping Jack on the shoulder. ‘You like drink, Shinjuku good place.’ The thought of a drink was rather appealing. ‘Thanks, I’ll remember that.’ Hirota snorted again, a straight pig-like grunt that made Jack wonder if he was trying to tell a joke. ‘But cost lots of money. Need before … what you foreigners say? Pocket rockets.’

‘Pocket rockets? You mean a few cans before you go out?’ Hirota seemed delighted. ‘Yes, yes.’ He pointed down on to the street at a squat building with an orange sign with the words 7-Eleven written on it. ‘Conbeni.’ ‘Convenience store?’ Jack smiled. ‘Right. Got it.’ It was almost a relief to discover that the drinking culture was the same as the UK even out here in the Orient. Get plastered before you went out, save a few quid. Getting drunk was something Jack considered himself an expert at. He had never worried for money, but a few cans at home saved time on waiting to get served. Hirota suddenly straightened as if he’d been invaded by some malevolent spirit. He gave another bow, then backed nervously out of the apartment, prattling something about coming back in the morning. Jack found himself alone. He went over to the window and discovered that it opened on to a tiny plastic balcony that looked barely strong enough to support the airconditioning unit Hirota had turned on, which was now feeding his apartment with cool gusts of air. A moment later he saw Hirota walking out to his car far below. Jack watched as he sped off. So. He had no idea where he was, where the college was, or even what he would sleep on, but he knew where he could get beer. It was a good start.

4

JACK

had been a really bad idea, but Charlotte had been I t making eyes at him, and he knew what that meant. It meant all he had to do was find a moment to make it clear that anything she wanted to happen could happen, and then there was a good chance that it would. Avoiding her boyfriend was the hard part. Phil wasn’t the kind of guy you messed around with. People in Jack’s circle whispered about where he got his money, after all his parents lived in some backstreet shithole while he drove around in a Beamer that was only a year from new. It wasn’t like he had a day job either; it was just a bit of work here and there. Charlotte was a prissy private school bitch, the kind of girl without any soul but with a rich family and an attitude that got her what she wanted. Phil was the bad guy and she wanted the bad guy, so out she went and picked him up. Even bad guys got boring though, and Jack had a rep himself. They’d been drinking on the fringes of the same group of friends, she had been making eyes, and Jack really wanted to see if she could make good on the

promises her lingering glances offered. So he knocked back a tequila, sat back, and waited until she got up to go to the bar. Then he made his move. He must have been so drunk, and so obvious. His best friend, Leon, had put a hand out to stop him, but he’d pushed it away. That had been the first warning. The second had been that Charlotte wasn’t alone. Rina, one of her bratty little friends, was going to the bar with her. He had thought he’d been whispering, but in a nightclub there was no such thing. ‘I’ve got champagne,’ he thought he had breathed into her ear. ‘And it’s outside.’ The press of her fingers on his stomach just above his navel and the second-longer-than-safe glance she gave him were enough confirmation that she understood, but the sour look on Rina’s face should have told him that she understood too. It might not have been so bad if he hadn’t been halfway through the act when Phil appeared. Perhaps aware that their little tryst might not have been as subtle as she had hoped, Charlotte hadn’t wasted a moment. Jack had been fully inside her on the bonnet of someone’s Ford when powerful hands had gripped him from behind, dragging him backwards. Phil and his mates marched Jack down to the end of the street and into a quiet park before they went to work on him, out of sight of the road and in too dark a place for any brave local people to intrude. By the time Phil’s boot had closed out the proceedings, Jack’s face, back, and chest were an electrical grid of aches and pains. He had woken up the next day with his pants around his ankles, a splattering of his own blood making an abstract work of art around his head, and a spaniel sniffing at his exposed genitals. ‘You have a rough night?’ the dog walker asked.

‘Hospital,’ Jack croaked, and finally something had gone his way.

COMPARED to avoiding gangs of thugs in Bristol nightclubs, survival in whatever suburb of Tokyo he now found himself in was relatively easy. A search through the cupboards had turned up a pile of mattresses that appeared to be traditional Japanese bedding, and when he had woken up, wide awake at some ungodly hour of the night, the convenience store downstairs had still been open. Plastic packets of food, bottles of water, and a couple of cans of local beer had worked as a great late night snack. He hadn’t even needed to speak any Japanese. He had simply put the goods down on the counter and then handed some of the notes his parents had put into a little bag for him to the middle-aged man behind the counter. If he now could figure out where the college was he’d have nothing to worry about. Feeling a little dazed, but wide awake nevertheless, he headed out on to the streets at around 4 a.m. Like a cat feeling out a new territory, he repeatedly doubled back to his apartment, afraid of losing it in the jumble of winding streets. He was unable to speak or read a word of Japanese, so one wrong turn could leave him homeless. On a couple of occasions, the angle at which he approached the streets made them appear unfamiliar, and he breathed many a sigh of relief when his apartment building came back into view. One end of his street was a commercial district, with no shops or restaurants anywhere among a sea of tall office buildings. At the other end he found more life, a

busy four-lane street with shops and cafés on either side, many of which were still open, and many that he even recognised: MacDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks. Even with the sky only just shrugging off the night, it seemed there were as many people walking to work as there were staggering home. Tokyo really did appear to be a city that never slept. He found his way down into a warren of backstreets and was confronted with stacks of seedy neon signs advertising bars and clubs. He caught a few glimpses inside as doors opened to discharge their drunken customers, and saw a range of women from high-heeled tottering stunners barely his own age, to gaudy, makeupclad grandmothers that would probably qualify for a bus pass. He even saw a couple of bars filled with bouffanthaired young men. It was almost too much to take in. He wondered where he could draw out his father’s allowance money and began to dream about the kind of fun he might have. Then he remembered he was supposed to be getting away from all the kinds of things that got him into so much trouble. And in any case, his life in Japan was yet to reach twelve hours old. It was almost six a.m. when he finally returned to his apartment. He lay back down on the pile of mattresses, feeling a sudden wave of exhaustion. While thinner than he was used to, the mattresses were comfortable, even if being so close to the ground made him feel like he was camping. He pulled a squat pillow that seemed filled with lumps of rock under his head and closed his eyes.

ALMOST AS SOON AS he had fallen asleep he heard a knock

on the door and opened his eyes to see Hirota peering in. The clock said a quarter to eight, but the time had just vanished. He must have forgotten to lock the door, unless the porter had his own key. Jack tried to smile, but the long journey had caught up with him, and he could only mutter a dribbling groan in greeting. ‘Good morning!’ Hirota chirped. ‘I trust you slept okay? It’s time for me to show you around.’ Jack groaned. ‘Thanks,’ he said, wishing he’d locked the door.

5

MIYU

‘C an I borrow a pen? I haven’t had time to buy any yet.’ Miyu held the pen out for Jack, pointing it at him like a dagger. As he smiled thanks she glared at her sheet of paper lying on his desk and the left hand side of her textbook that she had been forced to share. Who was this clown? He was good-looking, albeit in a more One Direction-ish way to Tim’s rugged maturity, but that didn’t mean she had to like him. In fact she wanted to push him off his chair. On weekends she got paid to have her personal space invaded by lecherous old men who smelled of whiskey, cigarettes and office sweat, but she was at college now and she didn’t have to take it. If he shifted over just one more inch… ‘That’s all for today,’ Tim said, clapping his hands together. ‘I’ll see you again on Wednesday. Take care, everyone.’ Some of the girls waved goodbye as they always did, while most of the boys just shook their heads as Tim went out, giving them one last smile before he closed the door behind him. As soon as it clicked shut, Miyu

snatched back her textbook and held out a hand for her pen. ‘Please,’ she snapped. Jack gave her an easy smile. ‘Thanks for lending it to me,’ he said. He held it out but as she reached for it he pulled it deftly away, turning it over in front of his eyes. ‘I love this red guy,’ he said, pointing at one of the characters drawn on the side. ‘He’s my favourite Pokemon.’ ‘Pocket Monster,’ Miyu said. ‘Pokemon is your silly Western word.’ Jack raised an eyebrow. ‘For someone doing an immersion English course you have a strange aversion to the West.’ ‘Just you,’ she said. ‘Quit staring at me.’ ‘I’m not.’ ‘You are.’ Jack smiled and shrugged. ‘Okay, I am, but only because I like your hair. It must take ages to get it to curl like that.’ Miyu lifted one hand and involuntarily tugged at a curl of perm. She didn’t like it but it was a requirement at the club. During the day she hid most of it under a beanie hat. ‘It’s natural,’ she lied. He smiled. ‘I thought so.’ For a moment he turned away to pack a bottle of Coca Cola back into his bag, and Miyu took the chance to study his face. He had a beautiful, smooth jawline with barely a hint of stubble. His hair was so blonde it could have come out of a bottle, and his eyes were as big as hundred yen coins and as blue as a winter sky. It was the kind of face that was easy to fall in love with, she thought, and therein likely lay the problem.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked. He grinned, and she sensed the storyteller behind those eyes. ‘The usual reasons. A thirst for adventure, that kind of thing.’ ‘Wonderful.’ ‘Listen, I don’t really know much about Japan or Tokyo yet. I’ve got this strange guy from the college who shows up at ungodly hours to show me around museums and stuff, but he’s really not my cup of tea. I’d much rather someone pretty and interesting—in a weird way—showed me around. Are you interested?’ ‘Not your cup of tea?’ Miyu rubbed her chin. ‘I like that.’ Then, narrowing her eyes as she stared into his, she said, ‘If you hit on me again, I’ll cut out your eyes and feed them to my dogs.’ He held her gaze. ‘What kind of dogs do you have?’ ‘All of them.’ He smiled. ‘It’s a date then.’ ‘No, it’s not.’ She hefted her bag. ‘I’m late for Math class. I hope you have something else.’ He made a dramatic show of crossing his hands over his chest. ‘I have earth science, whatever the hell that is.’ He held up her piece of paper. ‘But while I sit at the back and take it all in, I’ll draw little hearts on your piece of paper and write your name in them, Miyu.’ She raised an eyebrow. He had remembered her name. ‘You don’t have a pen.’ ‘I’ll borrow one.’ ‘I hope it doesn’t work.’ She turned her back before he could come up with

another retort, and followed the other students out of the room. As she reached the door she had an overwhelming urge to look back, just to see if he was looking at her. She stopped, put out one hand on the doorframe and took a deep breath. Don’t be such a tool, she admonished herself. Behind her, she heard a chuckle from across the room. ‘Bastard,’ she muttered under her breath, and stormed out.

THE REST of her classes that evening passed in a blur. She didn’t have any more with Jack and was able to maintain her regular position at the back of each class, avoiding any unwanted social contact. None of her other teachers were nearly as nice to look at as Tim, so she just tried to concentrate on the textbook in front of her. It wasn’t easy. Walking home just after eight p.m., she found herself doused by an icy bucket of reality. By now her father would be passed out drunk, the TV would still be on, and there would be nothing at home to eat. She didn’t work Monday nights, but she still didn’t want the hassle of cooking, so after she got off the subway at Asakusa she slipped into the minimart across the street from their house and picked up a couple of discounted bento, a salmon one for her father, and a hamburger for herself. She threw a bottle of juice into the basket and wondered whether she ought to get her father another small bottle of sake. While in an ideal world she would love for him to quit drinking, she couldn’t cope with him on her own and the mellow state that the alcohol left him in was far preferable to the violent, erratic beast that emerged when

he didn’t have enough to see him through until bedtime. She called out for her father as she opened the door and stepped inside. The TV was off, which was a surprise in itself, and the house was silent. She glanced into the living room, but it was empty. Alarm bells began to ring; Takahiro rarely went out now unless Miyu was with him. He wasn’t in the kitchen either, although there was a bottle of sake standing on the table. Surprisingly it was only half empty. She went to the bathroom door and peered inside, worried something might have happened to him. He sometimes fell asleep in the bath, but it was empty of water, unused. He had to be upstairs. Every creak of the old wooden steps seemed to echo through the house. Miyu wasn’t quite sure why she was trying to be quiet. After all, a stampede of elephants wouldn’t wake her sleeping father after an afternoon of drinking sake. Her only concern was that she usually found him asleep on the sofa or tucked under the kotatsu and just covered him with a blanket. Whole weeks would go by without him venturing upstairs. As she reached the upper landing she saw that her own bedroom door was open. Had someone broken into the house? Had her father been murdered? Was the person still here? She stood still and held her breath. From inside her room came the sound of shallow breathing. Miyu crept forward and peered in through the door. He was lying on the bed, his knees tucked up beneath him, sleeping softly with his hands under his face. He looked so peaceful, and Miyu sat down on the edge of the bed and put one hand on his knee. Tears sprang to her eyes as she remembered all the things she had lost, and the way life had been when they had been

a proper family. She was about to stand up and go to sleep in his room when his body shifted, and she saw a thin piece of paper poking out from between his fingers. She stifled a gasp. It was an envelope. She reached over and slid it out of his hands, careful not to wake him. There was a Nagano postmark, dated three days earlier. It was addressed, in neat handwriting, to her. She turned over the envelope and pushed her fingers inside. It was empty.

6

MIYU

She couldn’t think straight. Could it possibly have been for her? And if so, where was the letter? The postmark was Nagano City. Nagano was an hour and a half north-west by the Asama Shinkansen, up in the Northern Alps. She had never been there and by all accounts it was a quiet, unassuming place, but it was famous in Japan and across the world for hosting the 1998 Winter Olympics. Although she had been just a baby at the time, she remembered her parents shouting at the TV screen as some now long-retired skier raced to victory. Was that a clue? Because, of course, her mother had still been around then, as had her older sister, Saori. How long afterwards had they gone? Miyu took the letter downstairs and went out into the small yard behind their house where a pretty carp pond had once stood among a miniature glade of ornamental trees. Now, the fish were all dead and the pond was filled with gunge and partly dried out, while the trees were overgrown and wild.

She clenched her fists and let out a scream of frustration as she jumped up and down. Above her, the lights from the windows of the two tall apartment blocks on either side, plus the one that had grown up behind her house, watched silently, immovable. What had she done to be mocked like this? Why did she have to have every last bit of life squeezed out of her? Feeling calmer, she went back into the house and sat down at the table to study the envelope. It was just a normal rectangular one with the seal at the end that you could buy at any convenience store or hundred yen shop. There was no sender address on the back, just the circular stamp of Nagano City and the previous Friday’s date. The kanji that spelled out her name and address were written neatly without any flourishes or special characteristics that stood out. She didn’t know if she still owned anything with her mother’s handwriting on it, but even if she did she doubted she would be able to tell if they were the same. Her mother had left sixteen years ago, so even if it was her writing it might have changed over time. Where was the letter? What had her father done with it? She left the envelope on the table and went back upstairs. Takahiro was snoring quietly on her bed. He had rolled over and there was no sign of any pieces of paper lying around. Knowing he would sleep soundly until morning, she patted his pockets, but besides a set of keys for the back door they were empty. Next she checked the trash can by the door, the drawers of her little desk, and anywhere else she could think of that he might have put it. When she was certain there was nothing in her own room she went back into

his, but her father so rarely slept on the futon in the empty tatami room that it only took a couple of glances to be sure he hadn’t ever made it this far. The only thing she could think of was the bathroom, yet the toilet was dry, unused in a few hours. Downstairs, the little back toilet next to the kitchen looked like he might have used it, but even though flushing the letter was a possibility, it just made no sense. Why would he flush away a letter and then take the remaining envelope upstairs with him like a precious toy? But what kind of person sent an envelope with no contents and no return address? Perhaps it wasn’t for her after all. Frustrated, Miyu went across the street and bought a couple of beers from the mini-mart and took them to a bench on the promenade alongside the river where she sat down to think. Thoughts of her father the alcoholic filled her head as she took the first sip, but she didn’t care. He needed the escape, and sometimes she did, too. She tried to remember everything she could about her mother, but it was hard. Miyu had only been three when she left, and the shade of her mother was just a woman with a kind smile, wide oval eyes and shoulder-length hair. Medium height, medium build. Miyu saw her image on the street several times a day. Her father said he had burned all the photographs, although she had one of herself with her sister, Saori, whom her mother had taken with her. For years she had wondered if one day her mother would just show up at the door with a suitcase and a little girl standing by her side, but over time the dream had become wishful thinking, then later forgotten for months on end and her mother had faded into memory. Now as

she sat staring at the glittering river as it pressed on towards Tokyo Bay, she realised she knew almost nothing at all. Why had her mother left? When exactly? Her grandparents were all dead and it had been just her and her father for as long as she could remember. Everyone else had aunts and uncles. Why didn’t she? She downed the rest of the beer and opened the next. For a moment she considered tossing the empty can into the river, but her conscience stopped her. Her phone buzzed and she pulled it out of her pocket to find another message from the guy from last weekend, wanting to meet up. She rolled her eyes and put the phone back into her pocket. Across the river, the lights of the bars of Asakusa glowed bright against the night sky. Something flashed in front of her and she saw a duck land on the water below, execute a quick turn, and then vanish beneath the dark water. Further along the promenade a homeless man cried out and shifted under the blue tarpaulin that was his home. Miyu took a sip of the second beer and wondered why everything seemed so bleak.

7

JACK

a few days for the jetlag to pass, meaning Jack I t took would repeatedly fall asleep at the back of class or as soon as he got home then wake up at three a.m., starving hungry and wide awake. A trip out to the convenience store would sort him out, only for him to pass out a couple of hours later and then wake blearyeyed to find Hirota knocking on the door. Even when Jack let his frustration get the better of him, snapping at Hirota’s endless cheerfulness, the porter never seemed put out, and just let Jack’s antagonism bounce off him. Jetlag was a terrible thing, he said, and adjusting to life in Japan was always difficult for a foreigner at first. With the exception of a few boring classes, frequent trips to the convenience store and a couple of expeditions to the Burger King further down the street, Jack hadn’t really seen much of Japan, and the only thing he had established—that the people never seemed to rest— really pissed him off. Still, with no money other than what he had brought with him until he set up a bank account to have his

allowance paid into, he was effectively at Hirota’s mercy. And there were a thousand things to do. On Monday, Hirota took him to the local ward office to be registered. Hirota just gave a tolerant smile at Jack’s attempt at a joke when he found out he was signing up for an alien registration card. No doubt every foreigner ever to enter Japan had made a similar wisecrack. Then, it was off to the bank to set up an account, and then to the local Softbank to set up a mobile phone. Much to Jack’s disappointment, his father had apparently given strict instructions for Jack to be allowed only the simplest pre-paid phone that was available, some stone-age piece of junk that didn’t even have an Internet connection. He had always used the most recent iPhone, but there were ways around it. He’d already spotted a couple of net cafes, and as soon as Hirota gave him five waking minutes alone he would figure out how to get online. Not knowing what was going on in the world was killing him, and he had refused to call his parents on the principle that sending him out to Japan was akin to sending him to prison. He had one phone call a week, and he was damned if he was wasting it on his captors. Hirota, despite slowly ascending to the annoyance level of a fly caught in one’s bedroom at night, had his uses. He showed Jack how to buy a ticket for the subway and gave him a card he could show people if he ever got lost. While it was all in Japanese, Hirota claimed it told anyone reading it to flag Jack a taxi; then on the back there was a message for the taxi driver to take Jack back to his apartment and then call the college to arrange payment. Jack assumed the cost would be added to his father’s bill. The college, like everything else, Jack found, failed to

excite him while jetlag had him in its clutches. Hirota dropped him off at three p.m., then picked him up at nine and took him home. During that time, Jack had four or five classes, with an hour between six and seven for dinner and the occasional free period during which he was allowed to do what he wanted, which usually meant napping in a booth in the Denny’s across the street. Most of the classes were aimed at intelligent Japanese, low level material but taught entirely in English. With the exception of one beginner Japanese language class from seven to eight every day it was one long yawn.

BY FRIDAY, five days after he arrived, the jetlag was losing its hold. He slept normally for the first time since his arrival, sleeping in until just after ten a.m., and woke up actually feeling the desire to get out of bed. Hirota had offered to take him out during the day to visit some of Tokyo’s landmarks, but Jack had made an excuse that he was feeling a little sick and wanted a couple of days at home to sort out his apartment, the furnishes of which currently consisted of the mattress on the floor—what he now knew as a futon—and an open suitcase in the corner. By the door, plastic bags filled with trash were building up, because he hadn’t figured out where, when, and how to put them out for the garbage truck, and Hirota had expressly told him that dumping his trash into the recycle bins outside the convenience store was a capital offence. Jack had considered doing so in an attempt to get himself deported, but he was beginning to warm to Japan. And, in particular, to its girls. Fine creatures of elegant grace and beauty, well-

groomed and dressed, they were a world apart from the assortment of dogs, sows, and tramps that soiled the streets of his home country. Jack didn’t consider himself shallow in the slightest, but he had always found that the only girls attractive enough to be worth chasing carried around an attitude of self-importance the size of Basingstoke. When English men were so loose that any fat cow could afford to be picky, it created a culture of entitlement that Jack felt was a cancer on Western society. He knew he was good looking; his father and mother were both stunning for their age and had passed on their good genetics, and it was his right that he could take his pick, not find himself turned down by some fat slut who’d got lucky the last time the local military had the night off. It was a travesty, and a sign of social disorder that would eventually lead to population decline and the inevitable extinction of the British race. Suckers. Not so in Japan, it seemed. All he had to do was grin to bring forth a wave of laughter and delightful smiles. It was a situation he could quite easily get used to. At midday, a girl from his math class was coming around to take him out. Her name was Asami, which apparently meant “morning view”. He wondered whether he would get a morning view of her the next day. ‘Am I shallow?’ he wondered aloud as he jerked himself off in the shower. ‘Am I like … some stain on society? Screw it.’ He tended to be on the receiving end of fights, but there was a time when he was sixteen that he’d slammed some kid’s head through a glass window for spilling his beer at a friend’s party. He didn’t remember the kid’s name, but one of his old pairs of jeans still had a stain on

the thigh from the kid’s blood. Half the kid’s head had ripped open, the skin folding back like paper. Jack remembered standing there drunk while a couple of girls had tried to clean it up. One of them had actually tried to press the flap of skin back down as if it were a sticker that had come unstuck, and the image had made Jack burst out into laughter. It was absurd. He had stood there swaying drunkenly while people screamed and the kid with the flappy skin moaned in pain. People had gravitated away from him until he had been the king of his own little circle, and he had laughed and laughed and laughed. His father had kept him out of court and a possible stay in a young offenders’ home with a fat cheque to the kid’s family. Money solved everything in the end. Jack knew that he should feel guilty, but he didn’t. Relieved, maybe, but there was no other way he could see it other than that the kid had deserved it. At five minutes to twelve the doorbell buzzed, and he opened it to find Asami standing outside. She was shorter than he remembered, probably only five three, but she had a cute face and a nice slim body. She wasn’t showing much flesh and he couldn’t see much to get excited about under the Disney t-shirt she wore, but her eyes were a lovely hazelnut colour and he could tell she had made an effort. ‘Hi, Jack,’ she said, giving him a wide grin. ‘Are you ready?’ When he nodded, she actually bounced as she said, ‘Let’s go!’ The day was pleasant enough. She took him to a place called Harajuku, which was filled with lots of little fashion shops seemingly aimed at pre-teen kids with weird fashion sense, as well as endless strings of trendy cafés and cute foreign restaurants with plastic food in

windows outside and picture menus sitting on boards. He didn’t set out to be a bastard, but as her innocence of foreigners became apparent, he felt an alarming desire to take advantage of her. While he hated himself for it, he couldn’t resist telling her he didn’t have any money, meaning she forked out first for lunch and then an expensive coffee break in the afternoon. She took him to an amusement arcade where they wasted some more of her money failing to pick up generic soft toys with weak crane pincers, then to a little photo booth which she called piri-kura, where they took glossy pictures of themselves and then drew silly doodles on them using a computer machine standing alongside. Sensing that it was time to make a move, Jack made her blush by drawing a big red heart around their airbrushed faces. Evening had come quickly, and Jack was beginning to feel that it was time to close the deal with Asami before she got tired and went home. He pointed out a bar, but she made an extravagant cross with her arms and shook her head. ‘I’m nineteen,’ she said. ‘So?’ ‘Drinking in Japan is age twenty.’ Jack raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? If you can’t drink in a bar let’s get some and go back to my place, then.’ Asami gave a pained smile. ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘Why?’ ‘My parents are expecting me home at eight.’ ‘Eight? What are you, twelve?’ Asami blushed. ‘I’m sorry, Jack. I had fun. I want to see you again soon.’

He groaned and started to reach for her, managing to get a grip on himself before he ruined his chances forever. What the hell was her problem? ‘I thought you liked me.’ ‘I do.’ ‘Then why do you have to go home so early?’ ‘My parents are expecting me.’ Jack flapped a hand at her. ‘All right, go on then.’ For a moment her face seemed to crack; her smile fell away and it was replaced by a look of such utter despair that Jack felt like a complete bastard. She covered it with a forced smile, and reached out to shake his hand. Jack gave a slight shake of his head, then gave her hand a shake. With one last goodbye she turned and jogged off towards a line of taxis waiting at the curb nearby. As she climbed in, she gave him a final wave. ‘Fuck.’ Jack felt a sense of failure like he hadn’t in years. Everything had seemed to be moving towards its inevitable conclusion, only for the rug to be pulled from under his feet. He had a lot to learn about dating in this country, it seemed. However, the night was still young. It was only just past seven o’clock, it was Saturday night, and his father had paid his allowance into his Japanese bank two days before. There were women everywhere, and he could actually remember a couple of Japanese phrases he had learned in class. He went to the nearest convenience store and inserted his card. He followed the instructions for English, but when he tried to withdraw his money a message flashed up saying the bank was closed for the night.

Frustrated, he turned back towards the staff behind the counter and shouted, ‘What kind of stupid ass country has Cashpoints that close this early on a weekend? What the fuck?’ The staff stared back at him. One of them gave the other a nervous glance. ‘Fuck you,’ Jack shouted again, and marched out, in case they were planning to call the police. Back out on the street, he looked into his wallet and found he had approximately nine hundred and eight yen in coins. Most beers in bars ran to five hundred, while the subway back to his suburb would take a couple of hundred. He had just enough to get home and buy a quart of cheap whiskey out of the local convenience store, unless he wanted to rob somewhere or try to scrounge off someone. He had a bone the size of a small tree in his pants after Asami had bailed on him, and he wanted nothing other than to get his rocks off, but there was only so much he could do with the equivalent of seven quid. Scowling under his breath, he headed for the subway.

8

JACK

H e felt like shit the next morning when he woke up with his first sake hangover. He’d found sake even cheaper than local whiskey and his remaining seven hundred yen had got him surprisingly drunk. Around midnight he’d decided to go out and troll the streets looking for drunk girls he could cajole back to his apartment, but the jetlag had one last hit in it and he’d woken up in the middle of the night to vomit up a creamy white liquid that smelled like drain cleaner. When he woke again several hours later it was to find the sun streaming through his window, so hot on his face that he hurried to the bathroom mirror to make sure he wasn’t burned. He went back to the other room and found his phone, intending to apologise to Asami. Part of him still felt frustrated, but he knew he had overacted and now he felt like a complete asshole. He’d never handled not getting his own way particularly well, and the whole cultural thing had thrown him off. Did she like him or not? Had she ever intended to get closer to him or had she only been content to walk around Disney shops holding

hands? He got up and went out for lunch, the Burger King at the end of the street. He hadn’t made any effort to get into Japanese cuisine other than the little bits of food they put in the plastic lunchbox packs in the 7-Eleven. He’d walked around a supermarket once and been disgusted to find hardly any meat or cheese, just aisle upon aisle of fish and weirdly shaped vegetables. He wondered whether he ought to make more of an effort, but what did he care? Japan sucked. Everything was lame and the girls were stupid. He was walking back to his apartment when his phone buzzed. It was a message from Asami. Had fun yesterday. Hope to see you again soon ( ^ . ^ ). It took him a moment to realise the collection of strange punctuation at the end was supposed to be a cute face. What did that mean? Did she like him or was that some way of putting him off? He messaged her back: Me too! Sorry if I was weird, it’s the jetlag x. If she responded with an “x” he would know she still liked him. Then it was just a case of trying to get around her parents’ stupid curfew. A few moments later another message came back: No problem! You’re funny! See you soon! ^^ Just the eyes this time. What did that mean? Jack sighed. The sake hangover was still invading his concentration and he really wasn’t in the mood for messing around. There were loads of other girls at the college he could hit on. He’d had to work in a group with three of them in his science class and they’d spent the whole lesson grinning at him like he was some kind of gimp in a Mickey Mouse suit. Then there was that weird girl in the European History class, the Angry One, as he thought of her. He’d not expected to meet anyone openly

hostile so soon; she could almost be British, he thought with a smile. He sent a few messages to Asami, trying to get her to meet up with him later on, but she kept brushing him off with vague excuses about studying. He would have let it go, but her messages began to ask him questions, suggesting she was still interested. How do you like Japanese food? What’s your favorite movie? They began to get increasingly disconnected, until he finally twigged that she was practicing her English. What was it with people in this country? Were they all idiots and sponges? He began to seriously crave going back to England. How hard would it be to get deported? He grinned, wondering what Dear Daddy would say to that. Half the reason they had sent him away was to avoid having to clean up after him. It was a real shirking of their parental duties, but his parents had never been anything else but aloof and absent, always too busy with work. What’s your favorite colour? Asami messaged him, and Jack snapped. What’s your favorite dick size? he replied. Because I can give you all sorts. And just like that the communication stopped. Feeling a little better after the burger, he bought a couple of beers and went back to his apartment. After about half an hour he hadn’t received a reply. He figured he could write that one off, but then he had a brainwave. Sorry, he messaged her. That was the autocorrect! I meant “dress size..!”xx A few moments later a new reply came: Oh, thank you, Jack! You’re so cute! (-_-);. So, it was back on again. Jack rolled his eyes. He could waste whole lifetimes on such a pointless activity.

He wrote another message and pressed send, but this time a box flashed up on the screen with a yen symbol underneath followed by a zero. He had run out of credit. Unsure even which provider he was with, he had no idea how to replenish it until he spoke to Hirota at college the next day. He sat and drank in frustration as Asami sent another couple of messages, finally giving up after he failed to reply to Jack-san, are you there? (T_T), which he assumed meant sadness. Sitting by his window as the sun began to set behind the dome-shaped building to the west, he quietly got drunk again and mused over what might be in store for him the next day.

9

MIYU

tried to pluck up the courage to ask her father She about the envelope the following day, but as soon as she heard him shuffling around in the kitchen early that morning, her tongue felt huge in her mouth and she could only bring herself to exchange the usual muted pleasantries as he sat in the living room and watched the news over a bowl of rice. She had replaced the envelope in his hand before she gave in to her tiredness and went to bed herself, too scared to keep hold of it in case he remembered and wondered where it had gone. In the morning though, she watched her father closely, but he must have put it somewhere, because there was no sign. Neither did he mention it or give the impression that something was up. Miyu had slept in the small spare bedroom between her room and her father’s, but Takahiro hadn’t so much as acknowledged sleeping in her bed. Most days, he remained sober until just after lunchtime, lost in his own quiet world where an attempt at intrusion was likely to cause an outpouring of stress. Then, around two p.m., he would make his only foray out of the house, across the street to the mini-mart, or—in

the unlikely event that it was shut—to the Lawson convenience store a little further down the street, buy himself enough sake to get through the afternoon, and then settle down in front of the TV. Then he would repeat the same sorry cycle he had been repeating for more than three years, since he came home one day with a letter terminating his employment. The change in him from the photos she kept in her drawer was shocking, so much that she had slowly removed any around the house. She needed to be prepared when she looked at them. He had lost at least ten kilograms, and while he had never been muscular, he had always been healthily plump. His hair, once jet black, was now mostly grey, even though he was still shy of fifty, and he had the bags under his eyes of a man ten years older. His eyes were the worst; the old intelligence and stalwart gumption had long gone, replaced by a glassy emptiness. Miyu busied herself with cleaning the house until she heard the door closing, signalling her father’s trek to the mini-mart had begun. Then she hurried upstairs and went through all the trash cans as well as the drawers in her father’s room, but there was no sign of the envelope. She had taken the precaution to photograph both sides of it with her cell phone, but she still wanted to know what he had done with it. Had he hidden it somewhere? Could there possibly be more? Later, while her father set about getting drunk in front of the TV again, Miyu headed out for college, hoping it would take her mind off things. She found herself slightly disappointed that Jack wasn’t in her European History class today, but the other lessons passed in a blur of poor concentration. When she got home her father was asleep on the sofa, and to all intents and purposes it was

as if the envelope had never shown up. His routine had returned to normal. Another envelope had shown up, though. No mysterious address this time, it was a letter from the city hall. Miyu opened it with some trepidation and felt her heart sink as she read over the contents of the overdue city tax bill. They still owned seventy thousand yen, about the same she earned with a week of bar work. It wasn’t the end of the world, but she paid her college fees monthly and October’s fee was due at the end of September. Unlike a lot of the government bills, she couldn’t put this one off for a while. It had to be paid or she couldn’t go to the college. She made a quick phone call and asked if she could do a couple of extra nights at the bar. Her boss agreed, but because the days weren’t on her regular schedule, it would be commission only. That meant her regular customers had to show up and spend their money. As soon as she got off the phone, she sent a message to the guy who’d been hassling her, a man named Funayama, a management consultant in a computer company, asking him to come down. There was always one way for her to earn extra money. Sometimes she had to close her eyes and do what had to be done.

HER FATHER DIDN’T KNOW what she did to pay their bills and keep food on the table. She didn’t know if he would even care, but for many respectable families, having a daughter who worked as a hostess in one of the Ueno bars was seen as one step away from Yakuza association. Miyu had no doubt that the bar was owned

and sometimes frequented by gangsters, but that wasn’t her concern. Her job was to look pretty, act charming, and to get customers to stay and drink for as long as possible. If she chose to do anything outside of her time at the bar, it was her business, but she got a commission on any customers who came and expressly asked for her, so it was worthwhile to keep them friendly when she could. Takahiro Kubota had once been blandly respectable, a middle-manager at Sumitomo Banking Corporation, and even though her job kept their house from being repossessed, she still liked him to think she was working nights in a convenience store or at a call centre. She walked the couple of kilometres from Asakusa up to Ueno, saving a hundred and thirty yen on the short subway ride, but also preparing herself for whatever the night might bring. Bar work was easy, but there was always a latent threat behind what she did. The manager, Fumiyoshi Sato, was a hard, unflinching man who spoke his mind and, so she had heard, sometimes spoke with his fists. He wasn’t a man to cross, and something as simple as refusing a customer’s advances could send him into a wild rage. The other girls too, were bitter and moneyobsessed, spiteful and backstabbing. Miyu wasn’t the only girl forced by poverty into the job, but she preferred busier nights, because it meant she had less time to talk to the other hostesses. In Ueno Station she went down the stairs into the Metro underpass. At a line of lockers near the back she stopped and opened one, revealing a number of clothing bags. She selected a dress for the night and headed for the bar. The cost of the locker ate into her salary a little, but it was better than trying to hide her dresses at home

and risk her father finding out. Club Wildest Dreams was up a small staircase not far from the Keisei Skyliner Station, where trains took passengers to Narita Airport. Only a small neon sign out on the street announced it, but most customers came at the invitation of a regular. She got changed and put on her makeup in a small room at the back. She felt like an idiot every time she stuck the ridiculous fake eyelashes to her eyelids and rouged her cheeks until she looked like a clown. She was lucky that the bar didn’t force her to perm her hair regularly like some bars did. She had a perm done once a month and then hid most of it during the day under a beanie hat instead of prancing around like a show pony, the way many off-duty hostesses did. A little hairspray and a brush-through and it would stay buoyant for an evening. She hoped Funayama would show up. The club shut at two a.m., and if she could persuade him to take her out afterwards she could probably fleece him for the costs of a new dress or another hair job. It was a common ploy among the girls, and many doubled their salaries without having to do any more than give the crotch of the customer’s trousers a little late night rub. Dresses or new hairstyles for the hostesses ran into the tens of thousands of yen and it was a vicious circle; you had to look good to get the attention, and you needed the attention to afford to look good. The hours ticked by, and a handful of customers showed up, sat down with their favorite hostesses, and filled their stomachs with beer and their minds with fantasy. Miyu looked after a couple of newcomers, but they were nervous first-timers and didn’t spend much money. Each time the door went, she looked up, hoping

to see Funayama and his fat wallet, but he never came. At two a.m. she headed back to her locker at the station, a paltry five thousand yen better off, stinking of cigarette smoke and slightly drunk. She had wanted to be out of the club as soon as possible so she changed in the station toilets, then stumbled back to Asakusa with her head hung low. Back at home, her father was asleep on the sofa as usual. There were a couple of inches of sake left in the bottle on the table, so Miyu finished it off and fell asleep on the soft cushions on the floor at her father’s feet. Her last thought before she closed her eyes was if she would know what true failure felt like when it came, or whether it would just sneak up on her like old age.

10

JACK

night?’ Jack asked, pulling out a chair and ‘R ough sitting down across from the aggressive girl from European History class. They were both on a break between classes. He had found her sitting alone in a corner of the little college restaurant. The girl just glowered at him over her paper cup of coffee. ‘How can you tell? Is it the knife wounds or the needle marks?’ Jack grinned. ‘You look how I feel. Like someone slapped your face with a subway train.’ The girl raised an eyebrow. ‘Jetlag, huh? I thought it was supposed to go after, what, two weeks?’ ‘Call it life-lag and you’d be about right.’ The girl cocked her head. There was still no hint of a smile. ‘Wow, it must really be hard to have parents send you overseas to study. Perhaps you could lend me a few yen so I can, you know, eat.’ ‘I’m on an allowance,’ he said. ‘Daddy keeps my royal riches locked away in a chest at the end of his bed.’ ‘So you’re actually rich?’ Jack shrugged. His first instinct was to give her a line,

like his dad was an astronaut or something, but the reality was already crazy enough. ‘My dad is a pretty well known actor,’ he said. ‘His name is Jed Williams. You might have heard of him. He’s not a leading star but he gets around, does about ten movies a year. He’s usually the fourth or fifth name in the credits, and while people don’t generally recognise him in the street you get people remembering his characters because they’re always the ones that go turncoat or die just near the end.’ A hint of a smile crossed the girl’s lips for the first time. ‘Wow, I’m almost impressed. So, you’re a rich son of an actor who gets to go overseas all expenses paid whenever he wants. That’s great.’ Jack shrugged. ‘You’re right about the rich son of an actor thing. I got sent here, though. It was this or end up in prison.’ The girl smiled. ‘So you’re a … how do you say in English? A crim.’ Jack laughed. ‘You’re quite observant considering your hair covers your eyes half the time.’ ‘It’s intentional. It’s easier than carrying around a wall to keep people away.’ Jack took a sip of his coke. ‘I can’t remember your name,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty sure I wrote it down but I forgot it anyway.’ ‘I didn’t tell you.’ ‘You wrote it on the top right corner of your textbook, in English. It began with an M.’ ‘Left.’ ‘What?’ ‘Top left corner.’ ‘I told you I’m still jetlagged.’

The girl actually laughed. She still maintained a wall of hostility, but Jack could sense her outright hatred starting to ease. ‘It’s Miyu.’ ‘It’s lovely.’ ‘If you dare for one second to try to hit on me I’ll cut off your dick with a rusty knife and feed it to my neighbour’s dog. I’m sure it won’t make much of a meal, but the poor bastard looks half-starved anyway.’ ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ ‘I’m not some gaijin-loving slut.’ Jack smiled and stuck out a hand. ‘I’m Jack,’ he said. ‘As in, beanstalk.’ ‘Beanstalk?’ He made a shape with his hands. ‘It’s like this thing that grows into the sky and has a world of giants at the top.’ ‘Oh, Jack the Giant Slayer.’ He shrugged. ‘Close enough.’ ‘I know.’ ‘What?’ ‘I know your name’s Jack. You got introduced in front of the class. I wrote your name down.’ He smiled. ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘So I’d know which locker to pour acid on.’ ‘Thanks for thinking of me.’ He leaned forward on his elbows. ‘So what’s your story, Miyu? I’ve told you mine.’ ‘Do you really want to know?’ ‘Of course.’ The funny thing was, that he really did. The more he managed to keep the girl talking in English that was almost as good as that of his friends back home and far better than any of the other students he had talked to, the more he wanted to know about her. There was something about her that made him think she was a fuck-

up like him. She leaned forward on her elbows until their faces were only a few inches apart. She was physically perfect, with lovely almond shaped eyes, and rounded cheeks which dimpled on the rare occasions that she smiled. Her hair was a dyed auburn, with curls bouncing out from beneath the beanie hat she was always wearing. ‘My father is an unemployed, forty-eight-year-old alcoholic,’ she said. ‘We live near Ueno, just the two of us. I’m here because I don’t want to end up like him. I have a mother and an older sister, but I don’t know where they are. They left us.’ Jack sighed. ‘Ah, that sucks. Loads of my friends’ parents are divorced too–’ ‘They’re not divorced,’ she snapped. ‘My mother disappeared when I was three years old. She took my sister, who was five at the time, with her. My father doesn’t know where they went, and he doesn’t know why. The police were never able to find them. She must have changed her identity and started a new life, or perhaps thrown herself off a bridge. I don’t know. I’ll probably never know.’ Jack looked into her eyes and found he couldn’t look away. ‘That … really sucks.’ A bell rang from somewhere behind them. Before Jack could say anything else, Miyu grabbed her bag and jumped up. ‘I’ve got class,’ she said, giving him a small smile. ‘Let’s talk again sometime. I didn’t completely hate talking to you, and I don’t despise you nearly as much as I would like to.’ ‘Thanks, I guess,’ he said, but she had already turned away and was hurrying towards the exit.

He sat back down again, feeling stunned. He hadn’t expected anything other than a frosty hostility. Now he had come away with her life’s darkest secrets, and he got the feeling that she had been waiting for such an opportunity to unburden herself. What a terrible thing, he thought, and for once he actually meant it.

AFTER CLASSES that night he waited for Miyu out on the steps, but by half past nine there was no sign of her, so he gave up and headed back towards the subway. Hirota had only driven him for the first week, although the cheerful porter still showed up every couple of mornings to check on Jack’s understanding of things. Under Hirota’s guidance Jack had learned how to use the gas stove without burning the apartment down, which buttons to press on the rice cooker to make the rice cook, and, most importantly, not to open the lid every five minutes to check on progress. He now knew where his nearest supermarket was, could differentiate between cartons of milk and yoghurt, understood that most ATMs shut at eight p.m. even on weekdays—except for a couple of convenience stores that stayed open until ten—and that if he wanted to find his shoe size, he had to ask for the “gianto” section in the local Shoe Mart. All in all, he was making decent progress, and the prospect of survival for the next year became less and less bleak with each passing day. He still hadn’t phoned his parents, but he had managed to get a member card for the local Internet café and had found out, via his dad’s website, that he was now shooting an African war adventure in southern France, of all appropriate places.

His mother was likely with him, so communication would have to be by email anyway. There was a one-liner from her asking if he was okay, so he sent her a one-liner back. I’m fine. Thanks for worrying. Jack. He wondered how well the sarcasm would translate. He had found out he was living in a place called Yoyogi. It didn’t seem to be famous for anything other than having a stupid name, having a smaller park than Ueno, less bars than Shinjuku, and fewer shops than Shibuya. So his fellow students said, although those names meant very little to him other than as places on the Yamanote loop line. He still hadn’t bothered to explore much of the city after his failed date with Asami, but now that he could find his local station on an English language subway map there was nothing stopping him except his own latent reluctance. So far he had managed to avoid trouble. As the culture-shock wore off, there was less to occupy his mind and the bad thoughts that always seemed to be waiting started to creep back in. Not far from the subway station he found an Irish pub called Foraker’s, and he took a seat at the bar and got steadily drunk as he watched the highlights of some motor racing event on a pull-down screen. There were several other foreigners there, all sitting in booths in twos or threes. There were some couples, one or two muscular Western guys with tight t-shirts who looked more like military than English teachers or exchange students. Jack finished his beer, ordered another, and tried not to stare. It just didn’t make sense. Some of the girls sitting with foreign guys were stunning, slim and beautiful, lovely faces, and they were with these spotty, podgy chumps with horse laughs and receding hairlines. They just didn’t

seem to understand that just because a guy was foreign didn’t make him special or good looking. He had another beer. A couple of girls came to the bar and bought some drinks. One of them gave Jack a pretty smile before they went back to a table in the corner, sliding in opposite two guys, one whom Jack caught speaking in a British accent. He was ginger, for God’s sake. Didn’t these girls know anything? He got up and took a piss. When he came back his glass had been taken away, but the barman, a young Japanese guy, apologised and filled him a new one. Jack told him no problem, then stared at the ginger guy’s girlfriend until he caught the ginger guy staring back. The guy frowned. Jack stuck out his tongue and the guy turned away. ‘What is it with this country?’ Jack said to the barman, who just smiled politely to show he was listening. ‘Don’t your women know what they’re doing? I mean, come on. Look at some of these guys. What the fuck is wrong with people? They’re all losers.’ The barman just cocked his head and gave another smile. ‘Do you even understand what I’m saying?’ Jack said. ‘Don’t you speak English? How can you work in a bar for foreigners and not speak any English?’ A hand fell on his shoulder. Jack glanced down at a powerful, callused hand with a signet ring on the middle finger beside a slight band of lighter skin on the ring finger. The nails were scrubbed clean. Hovering over it, just inches from Jack’s own, was the chiseled face of a guy who had to be military, his hair cut short, his eyes watery blue. ‘Hey, um, mate,’ the guy said, ‘could you keep it down a bit? You’re getting a bit loud over here and you’re

disturbing some of us.’ The strength of the hand over his shoulder was clearly meant as a threat. Jack looked back at the guy, knew he’d get flattened in a fight and gave a slow nod. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just a bit irascible after my flight today. I didn’t mean anything by it.’ The guy gave a cold smile. ‘That’s cool. We don’t have a problem. Just keep it down a bit, that’s all.’ ‘Sure. You have a nice evening.’ ‘And you.’ The guy gave Jack a last strong pat on the shoulder and then went back to his table. Jack gave them a sly glance. The guy was with another muscular guy who also looked military. Sitting opposite them were two girls who looked much younger, both wearing skirts that were barely visible, their faces caked with makeup so thick you could have peeled it off. You fucking cunt. The thought came so strong, Jack felt like he’d been slapped. The lighter band on the guy’s ring finger had to be from a wedding band that had been left at home. That in itself didn’t bother Jack—he was hardly the most faithful of people, after all—but it was the front of the guy that had wound Jack up, that this meathead prick had taken the moral high ground. Jack finished his beer and stood up, putting on his jacket and zipping it up. He thanked the barman, then took a deep breath, composing himself, trying to calm his hammering heart. With both hands he took hold of the wooden barstool, shaping to push it back under the bar, but instead lifting it up in front of him. He took two steps to the left and flung it at the military guy’s table. He didn’t stop to see what happened. He bolted for the door as a cacophony of smashing glasses,

screaming, and shouting came from behind him. A guy sitting near the door started to move to block his way, but Jack shoved a circular standing table towards him and then barged through the doors and out on to the street. He took an immediate turn down a thin alley between two lines of neon signs, twisting off the street as soon as he could and ducking down behind a fire escape. A few seconds later a heavy shape ran past his hiding place without stopping. Jack didn’t hang around. He crept up the fire escape, climbing three floors before it opened out on to a roof space. The buildings were so packed together that he was able to climb over a thin drop onto an adjacent roof, then climb up a second fire escape onto another building that faced out on to the main street. He peered out from behind the struts of a flashing neon billboard down onto the street below. Forakers was about fifty yards down the street. One of the military guys was standing out the front with the two girls beside him. One of them was squatting down, dabbing at her face. It was impossible to tell, but it looked like she’d been injured. Jack felt a sudden gut punch of shame, and for one brief second considered going back out on to the street and owning up. As the shouts of one of the guys came loud enough for him to hear, he knew that his guilt was just the beer talking. Getting a pummeling wasn’t on his personal menu for the night. One of the guys disappeared back into the warren of little streets behind the main thoroughfare, and Jack stayed where he was, too scared to move, until the guy reappeared a few minutes later. The first guy flagged a taxi down and helped the girls into it, but when he tried to join them one of the girls pushed him away, slamming the door.

For a moment the two guys stood outside the bar, turning around in circles as if wondering what to do, then one of them stuck out a hand for another taxi. One pulled in to the curb, they climbed in, and it moved off down the street. Jack still didn’t move. He waited there for another half an hour, wondering if they would come back, if perhaps they’d seen him and were just lying in wait further down the street. In any case, there had been a lot of other people in the bar, many of them foreigners. They couldn’t all have been drunk, and they would probably remember his face. As he took a roundabout route back to his apartment, he realised he’d made his first enemies in Japan.

11

MIYU

night at the club was shaping up to being Tuesday worse than Monday. Miyu sat at the bar drinking water out of a wine glass as she waited for someone—anyone —to show up. There were six girls on duty tonight. Two girls employed just to serve drinks and clean up worked behind the bar, polishing glasses with one eye on the TV playing in the corner, while the other three hostesses sat with regular customers in the quieter booths at the far end of the room. Occasionally Miyu would take over a drink just to give herself something to do, but the girls, tangled closely with their customers, glared at her as if she was encroaching on their territory. If a customer came with a friend then she was welcome to join in the entertainment, but a solo customer got one on one treatment unless he was paying extra. She looked up as the door went, hoping it was Funayama. Her heart sank as she saw a pit-faced middle-aged guy with slicked-back hair framing cold eyes and a hard mouth. He wore a leather jacket and he clicked his fingers at the nearest barmaid, asking for a bottle of scotch.

Miyu slipped immediately into hostess mode, leading him to a seat, pouring his drink and lighting up a cigarette. He gave her a slow grin, revealing glimmers of gold in the back of his mouth, and one hand slipped out, cold, damp fingers closing over her exposed thigh and squeezing tight. She forced herself not to gulp. Customers came in all shapes and sizes. Some were lonely guys or guys with great salaries stuck in bad marriages, others were career singles who lived at home with their parents and had money to burn. Many rolled in drunk off the street and left the same way with their wallets a lot lighter, while there were always the affluent few who wanted something after hours. The girls weren’t prostitutes, weren’t for sale, but many of them had a price that varied depending on who was asking. If a man wanted a straight fuck there were dozens of middle-aged Koreans and Chinese who worked in the massage parlours around the station who would lie down and shut up for a few thousand yen, but most of the guys with the money to proposition the hostesses wanted a lot more. They didn’t just want to screw, they wanted the emotion, the passion, the intimacy. With practice everything could be faked, but that didn’t make it enjoyable. And then there were guys like this. Miyu started making small talk about the typhoon that was due in a few days, avoiding talking about his job if possible. He was the kind of guy you didn’t ask. His hand pushed further up her skirt like she was a piece of meat to be tenderised for carving. Miyu poured him another drink and patted his knee. Her father’s tax bill wouldn’t pay itself. ‘You have wonderful strong hands,’ she whispered into his ear, and slid her own hand upwards.

He nodded, and whispered a number. It was more than a week’s salary. She smiled and slid her hand up another inch, closing her fingers over the bulge she found there.

HE SPOKE ONLY with his hands in the short taxi ride to the nearest love hotel. In the lobby, she stood patiently beside him, pretending to check her makeup in a small vanity mirror as he paid for a short stay “rest” and then led her to the elevator without a word. He stood beside her like a chaperone until they entered the room, but as soon as the door was closed his hands began to explore her with rough, clumsy movements. She did what she could to fake enjoyment, closing her eyes to take his short, hard dick in her mouth, moaning with pleasure like women did in the movies. She wanted to get him off quickly because it was easier to wash her mouth than her vagina, and there was always the risk of pregnancy if she couldn’t make the man wear a condom, but he wouldn’t be denied. She managed to get a condom on him before he rammed himself into her, his dick barely able to fill it. All she had to do then was moan in the right places until he was done. It didn’t take long. After all, foreplay for him had begun a couple of hours before, back in the club. The hotel visit was just to finish things off, although he surprised her by wanting a second round just a short doze later. As she hung on to his shoulders while he thudded into her, she realised how much she must have impressed him. That had to count for something. As he finished a second time, she lay back, breathing heavily. She had almost climaxed herself, something that

almost made such experiences bearable, but always made her feel worse the next day. She stared up at the ceiling, at a mirror that showed her spread-eagled and naked, her skin glistening with sweat, the muscular back of the man looming over her. She realised she didn’t even know his name. ‘Slut.’ She looked up towards him just as a palm cuffed her across the face. She gasped and started to struggle, but he was on top of her, holding her down. ‘Damn slut.’ Another slap. She reached for his hand but he batted it away. Then the hard inside of his wrist slammed into her eye. She groaned and rolled over, feeling a sudden release of pressure as he stood up. Something soft and light and tickly landed on her back. She lay on her side with her hands covering her face as she listened to him put on his clothes and lace up his shoes. He didn’t say another word but a moment later the door slammed and she looked up to find she was now alone in the room. She didn’t try to stop the tears. She went to the door and locked it from the inside in case he decided to come back, pulling a safety bolt across, then sat down at the little desk to remove her makeup. Around her left eye was a dark blemish, and the skin underneath looked a little puffy. She sat back down on the bed and switched on the TV. It was a late-night missing persons show, the last thing she wanted to watch right now, so she switched it over to some low budget quiz show and lay on the bed for a while, watching but not really watching. The hotel rests were for three hours, but she didn’t want to stay with the scent of the man’s sweat and cigarettes in the

room. She scrubbed herself clean in the shower, washing the last of the makeup off her face. He had used a condom both times so his taint was just superficial, easily washed off. It wasn’t that hard, not really. The first time she had gone with a customer she had cried for hours after he had left, but it got easier. It was just a thing, was sex. No dirtier than sitting on a bus or cleaning out the house, once you got used to it. As long as the man played safe, there was nothing to worry about unless he got punchy or obsessive. A couple of the other girls had been followed home; one had even moved across town and quit her job to escape some perv who would wait outside for her. The police didn’t really care if the guy didn’t do anything. She knew one girl who’d been laughed at up at the local police box and told not to wear such provocative clothes. The punchy ones could be trouble. Several girls had been smashed up bad, but she’d got off okay this time. Her temple stung to the touch, but she could probably cover up the bruise with a bit of concealer. Four ten thousand yen notes were scattered on the bed. She checked on the floor and smiled when she found another that had fallen down. Fifty thousand yen. It was less than half what they had agreed, but for what had amounted to twenty minutes of lying on her back, it was an addictively high amount. Some of the Koreans who walked the street that backed on to the park would get on their knees for single figures if they hadn’t found anyone for a little “massagi” by midnight. She might have to explain away her bruise to the boss but she couldn’t complain. She looked at herself in the mirror as she walked to the door. The bruise was already starting to darken

around her lower eyelid, and she wiped away a tear. What if the next one doesn’t stop? What if next time I end up in the hospital? Why can’t I walk away? She knew why. She was as much a slave to the darker side of the night as any of the trafficked women who called for drunken punters in their high-pitched voices. Only she wasn’t a slave to some gang ring but to herself; men would pay a lot more for young, pretty Japanese girls, and as long as the bills kept mounting up she would keep meeting customers after the bar shut, keep going to backstreet hotels and doing whatever she had to do to open the client’s wallet. Back at the station she changed into her day clothes. The man had torn the front of her dress so she tossed it into the nearest trash can and headed for home. It was almost four a.m. and the day was beginning to lighten. The trains hadn’t started to run yet, so she walked home to Asakusa. Tokyo seemed eerily quiet, with the handful of cars and taxis not loud enough to hide the soft chirp of the first sparrows to wake up and the cooing of roosting pigeons. A few other people were walking home, some hostesses like her, other young men in jeans and t-shirts who probably worked in convenience stories or slot parlours. Everything had an air of transition about it, decay blending into rebirth, the old melting into the young. She thought again of the envelope with its mysterious writing, her name written on it with the soft strokes of a fountain pen, and wondered what there was about it that lingered on her mind. No letter, no photograph, nothing, yet there was something else that stayed in her memory, something that was just out of reach of her comprehension, but there nonetheless. Did it matter? Did any of it matter? If it was her

mother, why would she have suddenly decided to get in touch by letter? Why not just call, or even look her up online? Miyu had the usual social media accounts like everyone else did. She wouldn’t be that difficult to find if someone looked hard enough. If her mother wanted to hide their contact from her father, why not just figure out how to send an email? Why the need for a physical letter at all? A sudden thought stopped Miyu in her tracks. What if it wasn’t her mother who had sent the envelope? What if it was her sister? Saori would be in high school now, if … if… Even entertaining the thought was like a shovel cutting out her heart. If she was still alive. Miyu pushed the whole episode out of her mind. The envelope was already gone; there was nothing she could do about it now except forget it. She had other things to worry about. The TV was still on downstairs when she got home, but her father was not on the sofa as she had expected. She switched it off and quietly called his name as she climbed up the stairs. He was lying on her bed again, in the same foetal position as before, facing the wall with his hands pushed up under his chin. He looked so childlike, so weak, that she couldn’t help climbing up onto the bed behind him. Life with her father had never been easy, but at heart he was a good man. Takahiro had worked hard at his job until it was pulled out from under him, and even though she had barely seen him between work and the dark, secret places where he took his growing drinking problem, he had always looked after her. Even when she was in junior high school he had taken her on walks up

to Ueno Park on Sundays, trips to the zoo, and to the Ghibli museum in Mitaka, even once to the spring sumo tournament to watch Hakaho overthrow his great rival Asashoryu for one of the final times before the great Yokuzuna’s retirement. He had usually been reserved, letting her bring a friend to keep her company as if knowing that his own conversation would be noticeable by its absence, acting more as a chaperone, but he had still been there. He had been her father. ‘Dad,’ she whispered, putting one arm around his shoulders and leaning her forehead against the back of his neck. He made a soft croaking sound, the sound a person made when he was speaking from inside a dream. His body stiffened and shifted, then the sound came again. ‘Mayumi … doko e … kanashii…’ Miyu gave a short gasp. ‘Mayumi … where … sad…’ Mayumi was her mother’s name. Her father suddenly jerked, his breath expelling in one long gasp. Miyu held on to him, worried that he’d have a seizure and hit himself on the wall, but his muscles relaxed against her and his breathing began to ease. She lowered her head to his again and listened to the beat of her father’s heart mixed with hers. And then she realised there was only one. She didn’t cry. She felt his last breath leave him, sliding out of him in a single lethargic flow. She squeezed her eyes shut and held on to him as the processes of his body quietened down towards a sleep that would be eternal. He was gone, but she couldn’t let go. She held on to him until she fell asleep, and when she woke hours later her father was cold and still and dead beside her. She

got up, wiped the tears from her eyes, and went downstairs to call for help.

12

JACK

J ack opened his eyes. For a moment he thought it was a normal Sunday morning, that he was back at home in Bristol, and he’d just spent the evening getting drunk in one of the posh bars around Clifton Triangle with his circle of rich kid friends. There was no one beside him so he hadn’t got laid, and there was no blood on his knuckles from a possible punch up. It was time to face the day. He sat up, and the memory of the previous night came rushing back. He remembered the military goons, the barstool, the chase, the bleeding girl. He lay back on the bed and pulled the duvet back over his face. What had he done? He’d been here less than two weeks and he now had to look over his shoulder wherever he went. He was a foreigner in Japan; it wasn’t as easy to blend into a crowd. What if those two guys spotted him? He gritted his teeth and screamed into his pillow. He felt like getting on the next plane home, but his father was a wily bastard. The allowance would never be enough to quite cover it unless Jack saved up for a few

weeks. His father knew his son well; Jack couldn’t keep money until there was only enough left to scrape by until the next installment was due. He just didn’t have the willpower to save it. As he took a shower, he found himself dwelling on the girl he had seen kneeling in the street. How badly had he hurt her? Had some of the smashed glass cut her face? Had he blinded her? The bar had to have security cameras. There couldn’t be that many foreigners in the area who fitted his description, and the police could come knocking at any minute. The doorbell rang. Jack jumped, cracking his head on the shower fitting. As he switched off the shower and wrapped a towel around himself, he remembered there was nowhere to run except straight out of the window. It was best to just take his punishment, hope his dad would find out and be able to bail him out, and pray that Japanese prisons weren’t the hellholes he saw on documentaries about Thailand. ‘Hey, Jack! Are you in there?’ It was Hirota. Jack could have thrown the chirpy little porter off the balcony. ‘Are you ready, Jack? Today we’re going to Tokyo Tower. Do you remember?’ What Jack had passed off with a wave of his hand as a whatever had obviously been taken as gospel by his ever ready chaperone. Asami had been ignoring his emails, but to be honest he didn’t feel like talking to her right now. He just wanted to hide under his blanket. Hirota was the usual bundle of energy, bustling into the kitchen with a camera strung around his neck and a light jacket hung over his arm. His hair looked

immaculately brushed and he gave Jack a wide grin. ‘You could never see all Tokyo in one lifetime,’ he beamed, although Jack wasn’t convinced. He felt like Hirota was trying to cram the entire city into a couple of weeks.

TOKYO TOWER, Tokyo’s fire engine-red carbon copy of the Eiffel Tower—albeit a fraction taller at 333 metres—was a mere runt compared to the colossal Sky Tree that poked 634 metres into the sky on the other side of Tokyo, but as Jack had to agree, the problem with the Sky Tree was that the most impressive building in the city—the Sky Tree itself—wasn’t visible from it. Therefore, they had to endure the tourist trap that was Tokyo Tower with its endless gift shops and multiple entrance fees for each observation level. Hirota insisted the waxwork museum was great, but for Jack, who had once gone to Madame Tussauds on a school trip, it was yet another waste of money. Luckily Hirota, possibly via the school and therefore via Jack’s father’s account, was paying. Afterwards, Hirota took Jack for a walk through Roppongi, the nearby area of bars and clubs he claimed was a “paradise for foreigners”. Jack could see why in a sense; everywhere he looked he saw buff military guys with trampy Japanese girls on their arms, going into and coming out of dirty bars with foreign-sounding names like Jazz Explosion, Skyfall Bar, Roundhouse. Everything seemed a whole class level down from anything he’d seen so far. Patches of gunk that could have been vomit stained the pavement and discarded beer cans poked out of flower beds. Even with Hirota giving him a guided tour, Jack found

it difficult to concentrate on anything while the memories of the previous night were still fresh in his head. Guilt still gnawed at him like a starving dog, and even though he was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses to hide his face, he still double-checked every time someone who might be military approached. The truth was that he could barely remember the night before, and even if he saw the guy who had told him to be quiet close up, he still might not recognise him. As for his companion, Jack could have already walked past him a dozen times. Judging by the number of empties on their table they had probably been just as drunk, so hopefully he had faded in their own memories to a similar level of obscurity. However, whether he was recognizable or not, he still didn’t feel any better. In fact, if he had to name it, what he felt was total and utter loneliness. He needed someone to talk to, someone who was real and wasn’t either paid to like him or was talking to him because he was a foreigner, or was the son of a famous actor, or was rich, or a thousand other things that might make someone attracted to him. Hirota wasn’t a friend; he was a paid employee of the college charged with giving Jack a cultural education whether he liked it or not. The only person who came to mind was the angry, weird girl from European History. What was her name? Miyu. That was it. She was pretty enough under the strange clothes she wore even if she had the personality of an angry dog. She had made it quite clear she didn’t like him, and after briefly entertaining the idea of trying to pick her up he had realised he didn’t really care much for her either. Yet, of all the people he had encountered, she came across as the only one who might understand. ‘Hirota,’ he said, as they sat drinking canned coffee

outside a forlorn little temple sandwiched between two office buildings, ‘If I need to get a contact from the college, can I ask you?’ ‘What contact you need?’ he asked. ‘Teacher?’ ‘No, not a teacher. One of the other students.’ Hirota grinned. ‘Ah, you want date. Not sure I allowed to do that.’ Jack shook his head. ‘No, no, not like that. I was supposed to do a project with one of the other students in my European History class, but I wrote down the wrong number.’ ‘She gave to you already?’ ‘Yes,’ he lied. ‘But I must have put a digit wrong somewhere. It doesn’t work.’ Hirota grinned. ‘If she gave you already, then no problem. What’s the girl’s name?’ ‘Miyu.’ ‘Family name?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What she look like?’ Jack frowned. ‘Well, she’s got this perm but she always wears a hat so it sticks out. She’s pretty I guess, but kind of weird at the same time.’ Hirota nodded. ‘Kubota Miyu. I know. Don’t worry, I find you the number and I message it to you.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘No worries?’ Hirota gave him a double-handed thumbs up. Jack smiled. The porter might be annoying, but his cheerfulness could be infectious.

IT WAS around eight p.m. that night when Jack’s phone pinged with an incoming message. Under the name

HIROTA (PICK UP GUY) was just a phone number followed by another emoticon smiley face. Jack groaned. He hadn’t realised men used them too. The phone number was a clickable link. Jack shrugged. He had nothing to lose so he dialled the number and put the phone to his ear. It rang for a few seconds, then a tired-sounding girl’s voice said, ‘Moshi moshi?’ ‘Um, hello, this is Jack. Is that Miyu?’ There was a pause. ‘Hello?’ he said again. ‘Yes, hello, Jack. How did you get my number? What do you want?’ For the first time since the night before he felt a sudden flush of happiness. ‘I’m sorry, the school gave it to me. I really wanted to talk to you.’ ‘Why? Look, I really don’t have time right now.’ Jack waved a hand in the air as if that might actually stop her from hanging up. ‘Please don’t go. I really need to talk to someone.’ ‘Why me?’ He sighed. ‘Because I think you might understand.’ There was another pause. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Really?’ ‘Yes. Do you know Ueno? Go up the stairs outside the station and wait for me by the park. But if you try one single time to hit on me I’ll cut off your balls and throw them to the stray cats.’ He smiled. ‘Thanks. I won’t, I promise. See you soon.’ ‘Sure.’ The phone went dead. Momentarily forgetting everything that had happened, Jack grinned. He hadn’t expected it to be that easy, but he couldn’t shake a nagging feeling that she had almost been hoping he would call.

Perhaps she wanted to talk too.

13

MIYU

as she walked up to Ueno Park she wondered E ven what had made her say yes to Jack. His phone call had come out of nowhere. He didn’t have her number—of course he didn’t, he was a spoiled little rich kid and she’d rather gut him than date him—so to have found a way to get it when he could still barely find his way home from the college showed serious intent. Whether it was an intent that she liked was another matter. She was still reeling from the shock of her father’s sudden death. The ambulance had taken his body away for an autopsy and she had been quizzed by the police for a couple of hours, but they had assured her it was just for formalities. Takahiro would undergo a postmortem, after which she would have to arrange a funeral. The house seemed so cold and empty without him. Sitting in the living room with the TV off, Miyu could still feel his presence, as if he were sitting quietly in a corner, watching her. Several times she found herself calling for him, only to realise what she was doing and feel stupid all over again.

She had done her crying before the police came. There were surprisingly few tears, because she still felt in a state of shock, as if he had gone outside for a while and would be back soon. She wasn’t even sure how many he deserved. After all, she had been more of a father to him over the last few years than vice versa. She sold her body to keep a roof over his head and a glass of sake in his hand. Shouldn’t that count for something? Shouldn’t she be allowed to hate him for that? Hate was too strong a word. She only felt a sense of pity, and a deeper sense of regret that she hadn’t been able to change him. She had tried several times over the years to slow his drinking, all to no avail, but she didn’t feel that was really the cause at all, it was only the accompaniment to his gradual downward spiral, the oil for the chisel slowly chipping away at his soul. He had been slowly dying for years. Ever since her mother left. Sooner or later she would have to start going through his things. She had looked, of course, at times, hoping to find some clue to her past, but there had to be more stuff secreted away, perhaps with more answers. Or perhaps none. Perhaps that single envelope with its Nagano postmark, and the neat address with her name at the top, was everything she would ever know. It was the catalyst, maybe, to her father’s death, but what had it been really? Just an envelope, just a few strokes of ink on paper. She had wanted to get out of the house, and Jack’s phone call had come at the perfect moment. She had phoned in sick from her job, and while she couldn’t really afford to take much time off, she found she no longer cared about the house at all. So what if the banks took it? She could keep herself in one of the little single-room apartments that were all over Tokyo. Perhaps she could

even get out of the city altogether, go somewhere quieter, more peaceful. Somewhere like Nagano. She had resisted the urge to drink her father’s sake earlier in the day, but as she walked up the street she stopped in a convenience store and bought a can of Asahi beer. She drank it while she climbed the steps towards the station overpass that led across to the large, forested Ueno Park, an area which mixed cultural attractions—the oldest zoo in Japan, the national history museum—with the social—the blue tarps of Tokyo’s largest homeless population. Night had fallen, and the neon lights around Ueno Station made a ring on three sides. Jack was sitting on a bench about halfway across the overpass. He was drinking the same brand of beer, and stood up as she approached. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m so glad you came.’ ‘It’s Sunday night,’ she said. ‘I like to get drunk in parks on Sunday nights.’ He held up a bag containing several more cans. ‘I hoped so,’ he said. ‘I figured you might be a beer kind of girl.’ She smiled. ‘They’d never have served you if you were Japanese. They only serve me because I look threatening. I’ll be twenty in three months. It’ll almost be an anticlimax.’ ‘I had to press a button on the cash register,’ he said. ‘It’s kind of strange. We don’t do that in England–’ She lifted a hand, tired of his silly culture-shock. Every foreigner was the same, but they got used to it if they stuck around a while. ‘Let’s walk,’ she said. ‘Pass me another can, please. This one’s done.’ They headed into Ueno Park, past a couple of street

sellers and a fortune teller. The homeless were up among the trees, their blue tarpaulins hung across the small patches of land they’d designated as their own. She saw a couple of pairs of feet sticking out from under some cardboard sheets on a bench. ‘They’re the first ones I’ve seen,’ Jack said. ‘They’re all over in England.’ ‘Community, I guess,’ Miyu said. ‘They don’t have to be here. The government has a housing program. Homeless in Japan are homeless by choice.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Why not? The usual reasons, I guess.’ ‘Which are?’ Miyu put a hand on her forehead and frowned. ‘Just … take it for what it is.’ ‘I got in a fight with a homeless guy once.’ Jack shrugged. ‘He was some scrounger and I just, you know, kicked him.’ ‘You kicked him?’ Jack grimaced. ‘I was drunk. He was hassling me and I just lost it.’ She stopped walking. Jack carried on a couple of paces before realising and turning around. ‘Do you do that often?’ she asked. ‘Just “lose it”? That means you couldn’t help yourself, right?’ He smiled. ‘Your English is great.’ ‘I have a reason to study it. Well?’ He shrugged. ‘Things don’t go like they’re supposed to sometimes. If I’ve had a couple of drinks I can’t control what happens.’ Miyu started walking again. They carried on in silence for a while until they passed the entrance to the zoo and came out on a wide walking path leading down towards the Tokyo Museum. Miyu stopped to pet a friendly stray

cat which had wandered out of the bushes and meowed at them for food. As she reached out a hand towards it, Jack nudged it away with his foot. ‘Hey!’ ‘Dirty thing. You might catch something.’ Miyu stood up and shoved him away as the cat scampered back into the bushes. ‘Baka!’ she shouted at him. ‘Yamenasai!’ Jack took a few steps back and spread his arms. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ ‘It means you’re … you’re an asshole. I don’t know why I bothered coming down here to meet you.’ ‘Why did you then?’ ‘Because … because…’ The angrier she got the harder it was to find the correct English words to use. The language she had managed to master in general conversation suddenly because thick and turgid like a soup, the words difficult to locate and order in any sense. ‘Because what?’ ‘My father died,’ she blurted. ‘And my house … my house is empty now and I don’t want to be in the empty house.’ Jack stared at her. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know.’ ‘This morning. He died in my arms. He was forty-eight years old.’ Jack took a step forward and reached out for her, but she stepped back out of reach. She felt the temptation to hug him, but maybe that was all part of his plan. She knew what he wanted because he was a foreigner, and they were notorious for trying to lay as many Japanese girls as possible, especially in Tokyo where there were so many starry-eyed gaijin-idolisers. She wasn’t one and she wouldn’t stoop to that level just because her father had

died. She could still remember the press of the rough customer’s hands on her shoulders as he held her down on the hotel bed; her thighs were sore from his jolting hips. The last thing she wanted was to hug a man. ‘That sucks real bad,’ he said. ‘How’s your mum coping?’ ‘I told you, I don’t have a mum,’ Miyu said. An image of the envelope appeared in her mind. ‘She left.’ ‘Ah, I remember. I’m sorry. It’s a shame you can’t find her to let her know. She must have loved him once.’ Miyu gave a slow nod. ‘She must have, mustn’t she? She must have loved him once.’ Jack gave her a weak smile. ‘Do you want to open up another beer? It’s getting a little chilly and I think a bit of alcohol will warm us up.’ Miyu smiled. ‘Okay. Thanks.’

14

JACK

found a sheltered place to sit, a bench on a They pathway that overlooked the eastern part of the zoo. Trees had been carefully planted to avoid anyone without a ticket from seeing in, but they could hear the calls of the animals, the chatter of the monkeys, and the shrill chirping of the birds. By the time they had finished the rest of the beers it was fully dark, and a light chill was starting to creep into the October air. Overhead, the clear sky had become a haze of reflected city lights, the glow completely obscuring any view of stars. Jack was quite drunk, and even though Miyu continued to be spiky and evasive as they made stunted conversation, mostly anecdotes about their pasts with neither going into much detail, he found her company to be comforting. She seemed to feel the same, because despite repeatedly threatening to leave, she now sat near enough that he would only have to lean a short distance with his arms outstretched in order to touch the bag she had conveniently placed between them. She wasn’t just playing hard to get; she had fortified herself, and was warning him that a long siege of attrition lay ahead.

He had plenty of time to study her as she sat and drank beer while she talked. A streetlight poking out of the trees nearby hung every contour of her face with lines of shadow, and it was easy to see the makeup she had been wearing but had not removed properly, and the bags under her eyes from a lack of decent sleep. She looked how he felt: a bit sick, a bit beaten up. ‘It’s getting cold,’ she said. ‘I should be getting back. I have a million things to do.’ ‘Do you want some help?’ She shook her head quickly, too quickly, he thought. ‘No. I’ll be fine. It wouldn’t be right to have someone come over. The neighbours might talk.’ She said it as though there was no chance at all that the neighbours would even care, but he decided not to push her. It was clear that she was still coming to terms with everything, and he felt dangerously close to preying on her vulnerability, little of it though there seemed to be. He’d seduced girls in difficult circumstances before, girls on the rebound, even one teary classmate when he was sixteen who had been gutted over the loss of a pet. He wasn’t even sure if he liked Miyu yet. She was attractive but she hid it well, and she didn’t have the outward cuteness of a lot of Japanese girls he had seen. She was more like a multi-leveled experience, and he had barely seen beyond the first layer. He walked her back to the station and they said goodbye outside the main entrance. In the brighter lights there he noticed a bit of a bruise around one side of her eye, but he didn’t want to ask her about it, not after her father’s death. Instead he reached out and gave her a little handshake, holding on just a few seconds too long until she had to pull her hand away. ‘I might not be in college for a few days,’ she said. ‘I

have a lot to organise.’ He shrugged. ‘Sure. I’ll … take notes for you?’ She smiled. ‘I know you won’t because you’re a lazy bastard, but thanks anyway.’ ‘Sure.’ He headed for the train. As soon as he climbed on to the near-empty carriage and took a seat by the doors, he felt utterly alone again. Miyu had become his only friend in this great, bustling wilderness of people. He hadn’t told her anything he had wanted to say, but even in their silences he had felt a connection, that he was no longer alone, that there was someone else here who knew that he existed. As the train pulled in at his stop, he realised he didn’t want to get off. He didn’t want to face his empty apartment, the street where Forakers stood, the latent threat of a beating at the hands of two military guys. He stayed seated until the train started moving again, past names that were becoming familiar: Yebisu, Harajuku, Ikebukuro, Shibuya. As the train pulled in at Shinjuku, Jack stood up and got off. He found himself in a much bigger twilight zone to the one around his local station. The station itself took him twenty minutes to find a way out of, and he wondered how he would ever find the correct line again. When he did find his way out of the east exit he was surrounded by towers of neon, crackling music, and swarms of people. Starbucks and MacDonalds stood alongside Japanese restaurants with orange lanterns outside and huge multileveled karaoke buildings with windows looking in on groups of people drinking and singing. He walked past a group of pretty girls dressed as maids and handing out leaflets, groups of snappily dressed punks with hair

straight out of the 1950s, crowds of gawking foreigners, laughing couples, elderly couples hobbling along. It was a crazy, riotous explosion of humanity, yet in the centre of it all Jack felt acutely alone. He found a foreigner bar and started to drink. He had plenty of money in his wallet, so he stared at the glass as it slowly emptied, then at the next as it did the same. He was just wondering whether he ought to head for the last train when a couple of girls approached him and asked him if he was a member of One Direction. Of course he was, he said. Take a seat. At least a warm body beneath him for a couple of hours would stave off loneliness for a while, but they weren’t having it. They wanted him to stand up. Stand here, give the peace sign, iPhones out. Click! The secret sixth member of One Direction, photographed with Nameless Japanese Girls A and B, soon to be circulating on Twitter. He ordered another drink and sat back down as they giggled and left. A few minutes later the bartender called time. It was Sunday night, of course, so this bar stuck to British rules and kicked out at twelve. With the last train long departed, Jack stumbled down the street, heading for the nearest orange lantern. The cramped little hole he found himself in stank of grilling chicken. He sat down, then pointed at the closest available beer sign. A couple of older Japanese businessmen grinned and began to practice stunted sentences in English: Where you from? Why you come to Japan? You like Japanese girl? You like Japanese sake? Without a girl in sight, sake and the businessmen became his best friends for a couple of hours, until he stumbled out into the street, unsure if and how he had paid, where he was, and where he had to go to find his

way home. The lights all seemed so much brighter, the smiling laughing faces of the citizens of the city that never slept seemed everywhere, and he bounced and stumbled his way through the tight, brightly lit streets, wondering if he had enough in him to find a late nightclub. Then his feet were slipping out from under him and something lumpy, badly smelling and crinkly was his mattress as the world turned upside down. He rolled over in the trash, trying to swim his way through it, but the best he could do was crawl a few feet further onwards into a dark little space between two buildings that towered dirty and dark on either side. The metal rungs of a fire escape rose above him like a cage roof, and the whirring of an air conditioning unit came from right in front of him. It was spitting out warm air. He was tired. He let his arms lower him to the ground, and his eyes to slide closed.

15

MIYU

didn’t want to sleep when she got back. Hanging She out with Jack for a couple of hours had done nothing to release the tension she was feeling, nothing to stave off the loneliness. If anything she thought he was more of an asshole than before, although if she ever saw him again she wouldn’t outright ignore him in the street. He hadn’t really tried to hit on her, there was that. There were a couple of answerphone messages on her father’s phone, one from the police and another from the coroner. She rang them both back, but the police had merely been checking up on her and had nothing much to say, while the coroner’s office was shut until the morning. Still, she had a million things to think about now her father was gone. She made herself some tea and for a while just idly wandered about the house, looking at pictures of herself with Takahiro on the shelves, picking up and turning over cups and plates as if answers to her questions would be written on the undersides, adjusting curtains, plumping up cushions, everything she could think of to avoid doing anything that might prove

traumatic. As the buzz from the beer she had drunk with Jack began to fade, so her resolve to uncover the mysteries of her past began to return. She had always known her mother was called Mayumi, but now she also had a possible location—Nagano. It wasn’t much to go on. There were a million women in Japan called Mayumi, and Nagano was a city of four hundred thousand people. It might even be a false lead, and what chance was there her mother would still be using the same name? There was a reason the police had never found her, after all. She started in her father’s room, carefully picking through his drawers, looking for anything that might help. He didn’t have a lot of things, but most of what he did have were trinkets and knickknacks that were meaningless to her: old watches and penknives, a couple of signature stamps, and what she assumed were ornamental chopsticks. In other drawers were piles of reports from his banking days, stuff he had probably planned to throw away but never got around to it. There were old clothes and kitchen stuff in other drawers and cupboards, but it was all jumble now he was gone. Where were the photos, the keepsakes, the memories of his past and childhood? What she knew of her extended family was piecemeal at best. Her grandparents on her father’s side had died before she was born; the family shrine was in Sumida and they visited during the Obon festival in August each year. If there were grandparents on her mother’s side she guessed they had been ostracised at the same time her mother had left. Miyu had certainly never heard anything from them. Did she even have aunts and uncles? Takahiro had always said he was an only child, and there were no

names on the family shrine for anyone who had died in the last thirty years other than her grandparents. Unless of course they were still alive. She had a sudden thought. What if it was her father who had left? Her mother had supposedly vanished sometime in early 1998. Takahiro had told the story a hundred times: one chilly Tuesday evening he had dressed a three-yearold Miyu up in her winter coat and taken her down to the river to watch the motorboats speeding past and throw bread to the first ducks of spring. It was something they did often whenever her father was home from work early enough. Miyu was at that age where she was a bundle of energy, but too young for kindergarten, so her father often took her out to give her mother a little time to relax. On their return, they had found her mother and Saori gone. Their car was missing too, as was a suitcase and some clothes for them both. Takahiro had suspected the suitcase had already been packed, because he later noticed a large number of Mayumi’s clothes missing, while Saori’s toys had been scattered across the bedroom floor, some taken, some not, as if Mayumi had hurried to pack and just grabbed what she could. Miyu and her father had been out of the house less than an hour. In that time her mother had taken all of the photographs of Saori from the shelves and a couple of the girls together. She had also taken the photos of themselves as a family. There had been an extensive search. Their car had been found abandoned outside Oshiage subway station, less than a twenty-minute drive away. It was empty. Her mother’s disappearance had come as such a surprise that the police had investigated a possible kidnapping. The investigation had gone on for the rest of

the year, but eventually the police had filed it away. There had been no sightings, no leads, and with no evidence of foul play, there was little they could do. There were legal ramifications to taking a child away from one parent, but the courts tended to side with the mother. The police had often wondered why Miyu had been left behind. As the years passed, Takahiro got into the routine of going to work, then picking up his daughter from daycare or a neighbour’s on the way home, and together the two of them struggled along through life until her mother was barely even a memory. It happened, her father said. That didn’t make it better or easier to deal with, but it was something that people sometimes just did. That was the story as he told it, but as she continued to pick through his things, she wondered just how much of it was true. Surely there was some way she could check the facts that her father had told her, to find out if there was anything that he had hidden. A mother didn’t just run away from her family, taking one daughter but leaving the other behind. Or did she? Miyu went downstairs and sat down at the kitchen table to make a list of people whom she could ask, who would have been around at the time of her mother’s disappearance. Up until she was ten, there had been another house beside theirs where a reclusive old man called Kobayashi had lived, but it had been bulldozed for an apartment block and he had moved away. She remembered him out in his back garden, weeding a scrawny vegetable patch, but he rarely did more than grunt a brief greeting if he ever saw her. Maybe if she visited the local ward office she could find out where he went. Adding to the list, she jotted down all the local businesses that had been around as long as she could

remember. No one working in the nearby supermarkets or convenience stores would remember her, but if there was a local ramen shop where her parents had eaten on regular occasions the owners might recall her mother. It was a long shot, but it was the best lead she had. The first place that came to mind was the mini-mart across the street. It had been there as long as she could remember, and unlike other convenience stores, it was a family business owned by a man called Iida. He usually employed university students to do the night shifts, but he was always there in the mornings. She tapped the pen against the table. It was a slim chance, but it was still a chance. One way or another, she was determined to find out what had really happened. If for nothing else, she needed closure.

16

JACK

H is head hurt and he smelled bad. He opened his eyes to the feeling of someone prodding him in the shoulder, but bizarrely it was a cat which skipped away as he rolled over, scampering up onto the first steps of the fire escape and watching him with suspicion through the metal bars. He was still lying where he vaguely remembered falling, in the crawlspace beneath the bottom flight of a fire escape, at the end of a thin, dead-end alleyway. A rank smell of sour pasta sauce seemed to permeate his whole body, and when he sat up he found the front of his sweater stained with the stuff, as if he’d vomited lumpy blood spotted with bits of onion during the night. He sat up, his head spinning and pounding at the same time. He’d heard that sake gave you killer hangovers, but this was his first real experience. He felt like someone was hollowing out his skull with a rusty scalpel while listening to death metal at the same time. He’d never really suffered from hangovers all that much, but with the little glass of clear liquid endlessly topped up by one or other of the two businessmen he’d been

drinking with, he figured he’d drunk a lot more than he thought. It was Monday morning, sometime around rush hour, judging by the number of people he could see passing the end of the alleyway. He felt in no mood to be among crowds of people, so for a while he just sat and watched, hidden in the shadows behind the fire escape. Eventually his stomach and his bladder got the better of him. A convenience store dealt with both complaints, but as he shuffled up and down the aisles with his hair all sticking up and his clothes all dirty, he couldn’t help feeling the hot gaze of the other customers turning on him as he passed, even though he was hardly the only unkempt person about. That he was a foreigner set him apart, and his cheeks began to burn from the attention. His anger began to rise too, but he managed to keep that in check as he headed for the nearest train station. He was in enough trouble already. For all he knew the police might be looking for him, and there was no reason to draw attention to himself, despite how strong the urge was to shove the staring people away, to shout in their faces. Even on a crowded Monday morning train people gave him a wide berth. He didn’t have to push to get off at his stop, and soon he was stepping down on to the platform at Yoyogi, where just thirty-six hours before he had let his temper get the better of him. With a head still muggy from the previous night’s sake, he was feeling brave, but he still crossed the street as he passed Forakers, eyeing it warily from the shadows beneath the overhangs of the shops opposite. It was shut up and closed, nothing unusual for a bar on a Monday morning, and there were no police cars or officers about. Let go of the paranoia, Jack. Japan has bar fights too,

and just like in England, it’s all forgotten about the following day. He went back to his apartment, but he didn’t feel like going in to college today, so he folded down his bed and switched on the TV Hirota had rented for him a couple of days before. Hirota, in all his resourcefulness, had picked up a DVD player too, and a handful of thrift store DVDs. Jack found some action movie from the mid-90s and switched it on, pleased to see that it was an English language version, even though illegible subtitles flashed up on the bottom of the screen. It wasn’t enough to make him shake off his guilt and the nervousness he still felt, but it helped. It definitely helped.

HE DECIDED to take a couple of days off from college, and he spent his time loafing around his apartment or occasionally slipping out to the park across the street to sit on one of the benches and watch the joggers and the couples and the ducks that swam across the pond. It wasn’t so dissimilar to a park in England, although it was a lot tidier, but as he stared aimlessly into space he wondered if he wouldn’t be better off going into college, telling them he was quitting, and demanding that they charge his father for a flight home. But even as the thought slid across his mind, he wondered if he really wanted to leave. He thought about his weird date with Asami and wondered if he could have done things differently, and Miyu was never far from his thoughts. As he watched groups of pretty girls talking together as they walked through the park he found himself torn

between the desire to do what his natural instinct instructed and to actually make an effort to care about something. He hadn’t messaged Miyu since Sunday, partly because he felt ashamed of himself and partly because he didn’t want the responsibility of being her shoulder to cry on. He didn’t need that shit. Girls with baggage were always a problem, but didn’t he have more baggage than any of them? On Tuesday night he had a couple of beers and messaged Asami. Hi, Jack, how r u? ;-^- she replied. Not feeling great, he messaged back. Finding life here a little difficult. It’s so different to England. Don’t worry! You’ll soon be Japanese! was her reply. He pushed Miyu out of his mind as he responded, Can you meet me? I really need to talk to someone. There was an uneasy pause of five minutes before she responded again. He knew what that meant; she wasn’t interested but didn’t know what to say. When it did come, her response was pretty transparent: Let’s meet at the cafeteria at college tomoro! We can talk then b-^-d. He gathered the emoticon was a thumbs up. Meet at the college, in the open, with likely her friends around to make sure no serious conversation could take place? It was a put-down disguised as a safe date. Not sure I’ll make it tomorrow, he responded after a few minutes of his own. I’m not feeling great. Oh, poor Jack! Get well soon! was her response, and he left it at that. As he lay back on the pillow, folded to prop him up a little in the absence of any actual furniture, he couldn’t shake a feeling of guilt. There wasn’t anything between him and Miyu, so why should he? She didn’t even like

him, and he didn’t … like her. Damn it. There was nothing attractive about her. She was a weird, funnily dressed oddball with a bad attitude and more baggage than a dozen porters could carry. There was nothing attractive about her … except everything. ‘Fuck you,’ he muttered, rolling over and throwing the pillow against the wall.

HE WENT OUT, bought a quart of whiskey from the convenience store, and got drunk while he took a train over to Shinjuku. It was getting late, around ten p.m. when he stumbled out of the station into the warren of backstreets. He wandered around for a while, eventually finding his way into a foreigner bar where this time no one bothered him. A few girls smiled at him but he must have looked unfriendly enough to put them off from approaching him, and he made no effort to beckon them over. He already knew what he had in mind, but it was a case of working himself up to it. Finally, around midnight, he left the bar and wandered back towards the station, but instead of turning into the entrance, he turned down the streets that stood directly in the shadow of an overhead train line, where there were only a few older, less desirable bars, and a few neon signs that flashed numbers louder than words. And women, lots of women. He resisted the first few, until he found one closer to his own age. She was probably around thirty, but still attractive, and he didn’t resist as she took his hand and led him towards a set of steps leading up to a door with a small neon sign outside.

Inside the dimly lit space, he let her lead him to a booth containing little more than a bench with cushions on it. She smiled as she pulled a curtain across behind them. ‘You pretty boy,’ she told him, unzipping his fly. ‘You got money I give you good service.’ He had drawn out plenty of money earlier, but still unsure of what it was worth he held out his wallet and let her choose her fee. She plucked out three notes, tucked them into a purse, then looked up at him and smiled. ‘Come on,’ she said. He let her lead him, first using her hands and her mouth as he stood in front of her, then pulled him towards her as she lay back on the bench and pulled her dress up over her stomach. He paused only long enough to roll a condom on, then he closed his mind to all the thoughts wanting to upset him and did what he did best, gripping her soft thighs with his hands and gritting his teeth as he let his hips take his frustration out on her hips, taking a base sense of pleasure at the way she feigned enjoyment so well, he could almost believe it, not feeling the hatred for himself that had simmered beneath the surface for most of his adult life until he came, filling the head of the condom in three hard thrusts, feeling at once a sense of satisfaction at the smile on her face and a disgust at himself for the pleasure he felt. ‘Come back anytime,’ she said, running one hand down his bare chest as she pulled down her dress. ‘I’ll be waiting.’ He gave her a half smile and stumbled out, hands still working to put on his belt. As he reached the bottom of the stairs the other whores, sensing there was no more money to be made from him tonight, turned away almost with disdain. His wallet and his balls emptied, he was

invisible. The trains had stopped running again, but he couldn’t face another night sleeping out in the street, and the whiskey was beginning to wear off. He remembered the card Hirota had given him in case he got lost, and he handed it to the nearest taxi driver, gratefully climbing into the warmth of the back seat. Jack leaned his head against the window as the taxi swung through the streets. The lights of the city blurred into one rain-ruined canvas, a slurred world of excitement and chance and possibility and failing and decay, a place of madness and chaos which could swallow a person whole as if they had never existed. Was that what had happened to Miyu’s mother, he wondered. Had she just dissolved into the insanity of Tokyo one day, never to be seen again? Miyu. Why was he still thinking of her? He had proved he didn’t need her, proved she was just another face in the crowd, one he needed no more than any of the others. The taxi came to a stop. The driver pointed at a shockingly high number on a meter stuck to the dashboard in front, and Jack was relieved to see the prostitute had left him enough money to pay for it. He handed the notes over, took his change, and climbed out. ‘Where the hell…?’ His apartment was nowhere to be seen. He glanced down at Hirota’s card, but it was a meaningless mess of squiggled writing. He looked up at the building in front of him, and realised the taxi had brought him back to the college. It was dark and closed. He wandered over to the steps, bought a coffee out of a vending machine near the entrance and sat down, holding the comforting warmth

cupped between his hands. He remembered the dark pleasure of the prostitute’s body, her skin on his skin. He was Jack Williams, decadent playboy. Women were just toys, and whatever feelings he had for Miyu were just his mind responding to his struggles to overcome the culture-shock of life in Tokyo. It was easy to tell himself that, but underneath the surface, feelings and emotions were beginning to swirl unchecked. He had suppressed them as long as he could, but sooner or later they would bubble back up to the surface. He wouldn’t cry, because he wasn’t the kind of pussy that did that, but as he looked up at the sky cast with the glow of a hundred thousand city lights, he didn’t think he’d ever felt so miserable.

17

MIYU

I wondered if you had a minute to spare?’ ‘I ida-san, Miyu asked. ‘I wanted to ask you a couple of questions if that’s not too much to ask.’ The crinkled face of the old man leaning over the till looked up at her. ‘Ask away,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to hear about your father. You have my deepest sympathies.’ ‘Thank you. But what I wanted to ask you is not about him. It’s about his wife. My mother.’ Iida’s face sank. ‘Oh, well. I’m afraid there’s not a lot I can help you with. I heard about her disappearance, of course, but only what the newspapers reported. Kubotasan and I were never really friends.’ Miyu sighed. ‘Did she ever come into your shop? Do you remember ever speaking to her?’ There was no one else in the mini-mart, so Iida pulled out a fold-out chair from under the till and sat down. He rubbed his veiny temples as if the idea of talking about her mother gave him a headache. ‘This was a long time ago,’ he said. ‘And I never really had much to do with your family. I’m just a shop owner, you know? We might have mentioned the weather from

time to time but that’s about it.’ ‘So you did talk to her.’ ‘I remember a woman coming in with your father, but it would have only been a handful of times. Back in those days there was a larger supermarket further down the street, where that accursed convenience store now is. They would have shopped there most of the time.’ ‘What did she look like? Can you remember?’ Iida rubbed his eyes. ‘Look, Kubota-san, even if you showed me a picture of her I probably wouldn’t recognise her. We were hardly friends, your father and me. I remember him with a woman, but that’s all. It could have just as easily been his sister.’ Miyu nodded. She had thought it might prove fruitless, but she had to try. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Outside, she wandered up and down the street, past the silvery, soulless office blocks that had sprung up over the years, replacing the old Asakusa piece by piece. There were a couple of old ramen shops nearby and she tried those too, but the old owners from her childhood had either died or sold their businesses. No one had even heard of her father. As she sat down on a bench by the river to eat a couple of rice balls, she wondered what Jack was doing. She had taken the week off work to sort through her father’s stuff and deal with the funeral arrangements, and she had also told the college she had no plans to go in this week. They understood, but business was business and fees had to be paid. She felt ashamed to even think it, but her father’s body was barely cold and she was already considering what to do with the house. It wasn’t big, but the land would be worth a lot to a company wanting to set up in touching distance of Ueno, and she could easily make enough to buy a decent

property in a quieter prefecture or put some money in the bank. There was nothing holding her here now. Everything she held dear had moved on. Jack didn’t message her. She thought about messaging him, but changed her mind. The previous night had been a strange one. Still unsure whether she even liked him, let alone felt anything for him, she had felt almost uncomfortable in his presence, as if they were two strangers thrown together in the same prison cell. It worried her that she kept thinking about him. While she wasn’t as promiscuous as some of the other girls at the club, she had still slept with more than her fair share of customers when money was tight, yet without hours, she had invariably forgotten them, their faces all merging together into one single amorphous shape that she found she could easily shut out of her mind. Jack, however, whom she hadn’t so much as touched, kept appearing in her thoughts like a stray cat showing up for food. It was infuriating, but it was nice at the same time, in a strange kind of way.

FEELING DISILLUSIONED at her abject failure to find anyone who knew her mother, Miyu called off that part of her sleuthing for the afternoon and instead returned to sorting through her father’s stuff. The more drawers she emptied, the more she began to think that there had to be a stash of private items somewhere. There seemed to be a complete absence of anything important, no accounting documents, no personal effects. There had to be pictures of her mother somewhere, with baby pictures of herself and Saori. No father would have thrown them away, surely?

She finished sorting through everything in his bedroom without finding anything of real interest. It was just clothes, some old books, and a few boxes of assorted junk. The most interesting thing was a box of old ornaments and framed paintings that had probably been bought at a market in Asakusa and hung on the walls for a while until they outstayed their welcome, but that was it. Nothing that gave her any insight into her past. Giving up on the bedroom, she went downstairs and looked through the kitchen. The coroner called while she was cleaning out the fridge and throwing away the halfeaten food, to tell her that Takahiro’s cause of death had been determined as heart failure brought on by alcohol abuse. Feeling the bottom drop out of her when she had already thought it was long gone, she sat in morose silence on the sofa for a while afterwards, staring through the drapes at the quiet street outside, wondering just what had happened to cause her world to collapse in upon itself. She found herself glancing at her phone more and more, wishing Jack would message her, but he didn’t. She wasn’t about to message him, but she needed someone to talk to now even more than she had last night. Instead, she was stuck home alone with her sadness and her memories. A while later, she managed to summon the energy to call her father’s lawyer and let him know about her father’s cause of death. The lawyer asked her to arrange a date to attend the opening of her father’s will. Suddenly everything seemed so final, and it was hard to answer without bursting into tears. Tuesday morning would be fine, she told him. The house was starting to get to her, so she got a

drink and went out into their little garden. Her father had often tended it when she was younger, but except for the odd brave occasion once or twice a year when she donned some gloves and went after the weeds with a trowel and a pair of clippers, it had slipped into gradual abandonment. In one corner was a shed slowly being choked and dragged back into the earth by a nest of ivy, while in the other it was difficult to make out what had once been a pond. She hadn’t been into the shed in years, and when she first tugged on the door it didn’t budge. A second tug and it suddenly jerked forward in her hands as one rusty hinge gave way, and she found herself peering into a dim cavern a couple of metres square. A two-tiered wooden table stood against one wall, the lower level laden with boxes of collectors’ edition sake from distant prefectures like Kagoshima and Hokkaido. Takahiro, before he became a hardened drinker, had been a bit of a connoisseur, and this was where he must have kept his collection. Likely it was undrinkable now, but it made her feel teary all over again for the old days. On the upper shelf were more garden-orientated items. Some old plant pots, trowels and hand rakes, a few cracked and broken seed trays, and some empty compost sacks. She ducked inside, not realising she was so tall until she saw how the ceiling was leaning down. She picked up a couple of the pots and turned them over in her hands, wondering if her mother had been a gardener before she left. ‘I guess I’ll never know,’ she whispered, and started to put the pot back down. Something caught her eye on the edge of the shelf below her. She stared at it for long seconds, her brain seemingly unable to compute what it was and its

significance. It was a circular impression in the dirt, one of several, making a shallow bowl in the years of dust that had accumulated there. A fingerprint. Someone had put their hand on the top shelf to take their weight while they leaned down towards the boxes containing the collectors’ sake bottles at the bottom. It had been her father, it had to have been. Miyu sighed. Perhaps he had wanted something special to drown out his sorrows, something that the minimart couldn’t supply. Then why had he left the box? Her face flushed hot with a sudden rush of adrenaline as she reached out for the nearest box. It was heavy, but it wasn’t heavy with something made of glass. It was a better distributed weight. It was full of paper. She should have known her father wouldn’t have left empty sake boxes in the shed. He would have drunk the sake like he did all the rest, and then he would have thrown both the bottles and the boxes into the recycling. Yet, left in the shed, they were a perfect disguise. Miyu could barely control her emotions as she carried them one after the other into the living room and set them on the table. She got herself a beer from the fridge and just sat and looked at them for a few moments, almost too afraid to touch them. Then, with shaking hands, she opened up the first box and began to reveal the secrets of her father’s life.

18

JACK

anything else left to do but call his There wasn’t really father and beg for the money to get a flight back to England, where no doubt he would continue to dodgem his way through life, with his father’s credit card constantly bailing him out. He had promised to give Japan a try, but he had failed. He had caused too many problems, screwed too many people, and generally torn too large a rift in the fabric of society for it to be wise for him to stay any longer. He couldn’t face going in to the college. By the time he’d walked home in the early hours of Wednesday morning, all he wanted to do was sleep until a taxi came to pick him up for the airport. Whether that was a matter of hours, days, or weeks, he didn’t care. His mind was a mixture of despair, anxiety, and regret, and the only way he could see to get over it was to reset his life, to pretend this whole sorry adventure had never happened, and get back to the relative safety of getting his head kicked in by disgruntled boyfriends in dirty play parks in the middle of the night. Hirota came knocking around six p.m. but Jack didn’t

answer. He didn’t want to face the spritely porter, even though he could perhaps ask about charging his father’s account for a plane fare. It would be a waste of time though, because he had come to the conclusion that while Hirota appeared to be a helpful employee of the college, he was actually a kind of minder, maybe even employed directly by Jack’s father to keep him in line. He didn’t go to college on Thursday either, although he did venture down to the end of the street for a Burger King meal. He sat in the window to eat, keeping one eye on the street opposite, where Forakers stood closed. He couldn’t believe he had gotten away with it. He hadn’t seen many other foreigners in the area, so it surely couldn’t be that hard for the police to track him down. He was still terrified of running into the two military guys again, but even a beating at their well-trained hands might be preferable to a spell in Japanese prison. After dinner he went back to his apartment and holed up again. Later that afternoon he got a message from Hirota: Are you sick? He didn’t reply, so half an hour later the phone rang. He let Hirota go through to voicemail, then every half an hour after that until Hirota finally got bored. When he got an unexpected and sweet Hi Jack, I didn’t see you today, will u come tomoro?, from Asami, he ignored that also, worried that Hirota had gotten her on the case. The only person he would even consider replying to was Miyu, but she seemed to have lost interest. He wanted to punch stuff, he wanted to cry, he wanted to cough up his money on another prostitute to see if it made him feel better. All he did though, was sit in his apartment and watch the same five ‘90s action movies over and over again.

HE WAS DOZING when the knock came on the door. At first he wasn’t sure what day it was, but then he figured it must be Friday because he distinctly remembered it being dark when he had slipped out to the convenience store for some more beers, and that had been at the tail end of Thursday. ‘Jack-san! Jack Williams-san?’ came a voice through the door. He climbed out of bed. He was still wearing his clothes from the day before, but they were creased and smelling bad. His phone was still in one pocket, but his wallet was over on the table, lying open amidst some empty beer cans, some coins spilling out of its pocket. The knock came again. He didn’t say anything. He just stood still, trying to figure out who it was, not wanting to answer. It didn’t sound like Hirota. Then a second voice piped in: ‘Mr. Jack-san! Open please! Police!’ His gut seemed to drop out. He gulped, wondering whether he could get out through the window, but it was too high. They’d found him. It had taken almost a week, but they had tracked him down. The door handle rattled, and someone shoved the door. He had locked it, but it wasn’t thick. They could break it down if they chose. What were the rules in this country? Were they allowed to just break in? Didn’t they have to have a search warrant? Perhaps if he just waited they would go away. Then he could call Hirota and ask for help. The handle rattled again, and Jack heard the sound of a foot kicking at the bottom of the door. He squeezed his eyes shut. He had no choice. It

looked like they were coming in anyway. ‘Wait!’ he called. ‘Just hang on a minute, I’m coming!’ The rattling stopped. ‘Jack-san?’ came the first voice again. His hand was shaking as he opened the door. Three policemen stood there in dark blue uniforms. The first one was old and stern, while the other two looked barely older than himself, their faces smooth and boyish, their eyes almost nervous as they flicked across his face. ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’ The first one stepped forward and Jack had no choice but to move out of the way as the man walked into the apartment. The second followed, and the two of them went into the tiny living room and stood in the middle, looking down at Jack’s untidy heap of bedding as if searching for a body. The first picked up a beer can, gave it a little shake, and then shook his head and sighed as if appalled by Jack’s existence. Jack watched them with a growing feeling of despair. He didn’t know what they were looking for, but he felt it would be only seconds before they marched him off to the station. The third officer was standing by his apartment door looking embarrassed. Jack noticed the gun holstered at his hip. The first policeman gave a snorted laugh. He nudged an overflowing trashcan full of empty plastic cartons that Jack had accumulated from the convenience store across the street. The third policeman, the one Jack had assumed was the guard, stepped past him into the apartment and went to look. The first policeman looked up and said something to Jack in rapid Japanese. Then he went over to Jack’s suitcase and peered inside. Jack was standing next to the open door. Less than

fifteen feet away was the elevator, but beside it was a set of double doors through to a stairwell that came out in the lobby below. He had barely registered what he was about to do before his feet were moving, propelling him out of the door and forward across the elevator lobby, barging him through the doors to the stairs and hurtling him downwards, three stairs at a time. He swung around the turns, running so fast he could barely keep his footing, and was at the bottom floor before he heard a shout from the landing above. Too late to stop and turn back, he raced out of the entrance lobby, turned left down the hill, past a police car parked up outside his building and down the first little alley he came to. Over the days of his descent into melancholic despair, he had spent a lot of time wandering around the warren of residential and commercial streets surrounding his apartment. Within a couple of minutes, he had put several streets between him and the policemen, and finally stopped to rest in a small garage space underneath a three-story office building, squatting down behind a perfectly waxed Toyota sedan to get his breath back. Only then did he realise what he had done. He had pulled a runner from the Japanese police, and he had done it barefoot. His feet were aching and sore from the hard asphalt, so he rubbed them with his hands, picking a couple of pieces of grit out of his soles. A moment of clarity came over him and he wanted to slap himself. What the hell was he doing? This wasn’t Bristol, where doing a runner from the police might get you off a vandalism charge or a ticket violation, this was Japan. They had come looking for him, and they had found him, and now he was homeless and shoeless. The

only things he had in his possession were a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and his cheap pay-as-you-go phone. He had to go back, it was the only sensible option. Sure, they might fine him for running away, but giving himself up had to count for something, right? They wouldn’t lock him away just for that, would they? They had to take pity on him, and even if they didn’t, his father might have some influence at the embassy to get him put on a plane back to England. There were no sensible options but to give himself up and take whatever punishment was coming for him. Stand up, take it on the chin, accept that he’d fucked up once again and head back to a life of delinquency in England with his head hung in shame. You failed, his father would say, or perhaps would get his secretary to type up a memo for him. You’re a disgrace. You’re a nothing, you’re a failure. Jack remembered the homeless guys in their blue tarp houses up in Ueno Park. Homeless by choice, Miyu said. Escaping the rat race, perhaps, or running away from a failed life. Wasn’t that what he had just done? Run away from yet another failure? Where was he? What was he? He stood up and walked to the garage entrance. The small street outside was empty of people or cars. It twisted down a hill like a river cutting between two banks of apartment buildings, and he realised he had never seen this road before. It represented so much. It was a start of something, the beginning of an adventure or perhaps just the beginning of the end, the road leading to his own blue tarp in Ueno Park, the first foreigner to debut among the bearded, dirty tramps who made a community there. He started to walk down the hill, his bare feet silent on

the ground below him. He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, and did the only thing he could think of. He called Miyu.

19

MIYU

like her head hadn’t stopped reeling for days. She felt Her father’s old sake boxes had turned up secrets, all right. Her whole existence was a lie. First things first, before she could get down to the job of trying to understand everything that had happened to her, she had to get her father’s estate in order. Only then could she leave it all behind. The first box had turned up a bunch of photos and documents from her father’s childhood, pictures of her grandparents, him as a child, old school photos, a few random certificates and other memorabilia. Takahiro could officially swim ten metres. He had attended a first aid course as a fourteen-year-old junior high school boy, and, rather surprisingly, had passed level two of the national English test. He also wasn’t her father. His will was in the second box, and she had taken it to her father’s lawyer on Tuesday to have him witness its opening. All his material possessions had been left to Miyu, as well as whatever money was in his bank account. Her

father’s lawyer, who had already begun to investigate her father’s worth on Miyu’s instruction, had found a few hundred thousand yen in a savings account, but it was only enough to keep the bills paid for a year or so. The house, though, wasn’t his. It belonged to someone called Naoshi Kubota, her father’s brother, an uncle she had never known existed. For years, Miyu had been sleeping with strange men to pay the taxes on a house that now didn’t even belong to her. Not directly, at any rate. In his will, she was described as Kubota Takahiro’s “ward”. Later on, when the text became less garbled with legal jargon, it became much clearer: niece. Takahiro Kubota, the man she had always known as her father, was her uncle. She had been searching for her mother for years, but now she was searching for her father as well. And thanks to the will of the man she had always known as her father, she knew where to find him. Naoshi Kubota had an address in Nagano Prefecture. It was hard to take in. She asked her father’s lawyer for a little time to get some air, and went out to a café across the street where she sat and stared at the tabletop while a latte went cold in front of her. The boxes of mementoes, they had told a thousand things, yet there was so much she still didn’t understand. So, her father wasn’t her father, but her uncle. Her real father lived in Nagano Prefecture. Miyu had been put into her uncle’s care officially; there was a court document signed and stamped that said so. The official seal was KUBOTA, and since all official seals had to be registered by the city office, it meant her real father or someone acting on his behalf— her mother?—had given official permission for her uncle

to become her guardian. And then he had raised her as his own, bringing her up from the age of two to believe he was her real father. She had no memories of any earlier time, but then at that age she wouldn’t have expected to. The woman with her sister, that had to have been her real mother. But where were they now? She had a million questions that even the boxes didn’t answer, and there were many items that seemed to have no real meaning. One box contained nothing but old newspapers, mostly from early February 1998. All of them had a pullout of the Nagano Winter Olympics, so it seemed Takahiro had collected them in the hope they might one day be worth some money, as he had kept all of the papers intact. Miyu flicked through a few pages, but there were more than a dozen. She planned to read them all just in case, but it would have to wait until she had more time. There were no other details on her real father other than an address, and there were no written details on her mother. There were dozens of other photographs, though. Pictures of Mayumi and Takahiro together, with Miyu sitting on her mother’s knee and Saori holding her father’s hand. There were pictures of them in front of Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyland, at the beach, at a table in a Saizeriya restaurant. There were pictures of her mother and father and her and Saori, and then suddenly Mayumi and Saori were gone, and the pictures became just herself and her father. Where did they go? And if Takahiro wasn’t her father, why had he been given custody of her? It was nearly too much to take in. She found herself feeling the pull of the alcohol menu in the café, and before she knew it she was drinking a beer at three in the

afternoon. He might not be my real father, but I certainly take after him.

NOW SHE HAD her real father’s address, and hopefully with it her mother’s, finding them would be easy. How strange it seemed, though, having dreamed of finding her mother for so many years, now she felt nothing but distrust and reluctance. The thought that she wasn’t her father’s daughter had never occurred to her, and she didn’t know how to handle that knowledge. She got drunk that night when she got home, and again the next night after a day spent dealing with the coroner and the funeral arrangements, followed by a couple of visits by wellwishers. It was tradition in Japan to bring the body home, and the following day, Wednesday, the coroner’s car arrived with her father already embalmed and laid to rest in a coffin. The coroner’s assistants set him up in the downstairs back room, covering his face with a sheet. Miyu, as was required, prepared tea, sake and Japanese sweets for anyone who might wish to pay their respects, then spent the afternoon making idle conversation with a handful of neighbours, most of them barely familiar enough to know her name, let alone her father’s. Thursday was more of the same, with Miyu trying to find time to sort through the last of the boxes while dealing with occasional well-wishers, as well as phone calls from the crematorium, the undertaker, her father’s lawyer, and even the police, who rang once again to check if everything was going okay. She appreciated the sentiment, but by the time she sank back into the oblivion

of one of Takahiro’s favorite brands of sake, bought over at the mini-mart, she just wanted everyone to leave her alone.

FRIDAY MORNING she had set aside to deal with the last of her father’s boxes, before calling the crematorium to finalise the funeral arrangements, then the company who would inscribe Takahiro’s name on the family tombstone. It was all just hoops she had to jump through before getting down to the real task of laying Takahiro to rest and then tracking down her real father, Naoshi. How much of a paradox her life now seemed. She found she was weepy all the time, unable to keep her eyes dry, unable to concentrate on anything other than the desire to drown her sorrows. At times she felt like she couldn’t even see straight, like her entire life was beginning to unravel in front of her eyes. She eyed the alcohol more closely each time she went to the mini-mart. She might not be, as she had found, Takahiro’s daughter, but his influence had rubbed off. Now, of course, as each new revelation came to light, she could barely imagine what he had been using the sake to drown out. While he was at work he had been able to keep his mind off things by dealing with banking tasks, but as soon as he was laid off the thoughts must have begun to creep in. And what must he have seen every time he looked at her? She wasn’t his daughter. She was yet to find out why, but who now was Mayumi and what connection did they share? Miyu felt the weight of collective conscience bearing down on her like a falling sky. It was almost too much to

bear. She’d just begun to take out the items from the final box when a wave of misery swept over her. She fell backwards on the sofa and just cried, her hands pressed over her face as though to hold the flood of tears inside. She rocked backwards, kicking out at the armrest of the sofa until her feet hurt, wishing it was the physical manifestation of everything that had hurt her come to life so she could relieve herself of her pain. Everything seemed to be crumbling. It wouldn’t have surprised her if the earth began to shake and her house came crashing down. As she finally managed to get her sobbing under control, her phone buzzed again. She sighed, knowing it was probably another lawyer or policeman with some tiny overlooked detail or an unnecessary offer of condolences. She almost didn’t pick it up, but when she finally did she saw JACK flashing up on the screen. She jabbed the answer button and thrust the phone against her ear. ‘Hello?’ ‘It’s Jack. I’m sorry to call, but … I need you.’ After a few days without practicing, her English had got a little rusty, but when the words registered their meaning her eyebrows rose. Someone needed her? ‘Where are you?’ ‘Listen, I’m in a bit of trouble. I lost my shoes—’ She couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Is that all? Jack, I can take you to a shoe shop. Can you get to Ueno? I’ll meet you at the same place as last Sunday, on the overpass before you get to the entrance of the park. I’m kind of in the middle of something, so is four o’clock okay?’ ‘Um, yeah, I guess so. But I’ve got a bit of a problem —’

The phone went dead. Miyu stared at it for a moment, checked her volume, then realised Jack had rung off. She pressed re-dial, but all she got was his automated answerphone. His battery must have died. He said he had a problem … what could have happened to him now? She was intrigued but a little frustrated at the same time. After all, he didn’t seem to understand the concept of problems like she did. She wished she had his problems. Still, he had sounded genuinely upset, and she hoped that he’d be able to stick to the plan or otherwise find somewhere to charge his phone. It was just after lunch, so she had a couple of hours before four o’clock, but she really didn’t want to be in the house anymore. Instead she got up and headed for Ueno Station. For a while she sat in the Starbucks outside the station and brooded, but all she could think about was how happy everyone looked. All the other customers seemed to be chatting in pairs or small groups, and even the few on their own were smiling into mobile phones or lost in books. She felt so lost, so purposeless. Her whole life was like a house of cards that had caught a gust of wind, and now she couldn’t even find the cards. She finished her coffee off quickly and went back outside. She still had a couple of hours until she hoped Jack would show up. There was a convenience store nearby, and she went inside under the pretence of browsing through the fashion magazines, but she couldn’t even concentrate on that. The cans of beer were calling her, and she couldn’t resist. Five minutes later, she was back out on the street, a plastic bag full of jostling cans in her hand as she headed up the steps to the overpass. As she sat down on a bench to wait, wrapping her

arms around herself for warmth, she tried to will him closer. ‘Please hurry, Jack,’ she whispered under her breath, as she opened up the first of the cans and took a deep swallow of chilled, delicious beer.

20

JACK

to smash the stupid thing on the ground. H e The wanted battery had failed him at exactly the wrong moment and it wasn’t as if he could go back and get his charger from the apartment. He couldn’t even buy a new one because he had left his wallet behind. He was stuck, shoeless and penniless, with a phone that didn’t work and only half an arrangement made with Miyu. He had been hoping she might be able to pick him up, because there was no way he could get to Ueno on foot in a couple of hours. He wasn’t even sure where it was. It was all he had to go on, though. He didn’t know where Miyu lived and he could hardly go to the college and ask. He had two choices; locate and use a phone charger, or get to Ueno by four o’clock. Both seemed equally difficult, but with the second option at least he knew what he had to do. He couldn’t go far without shoes, or at least without attracting the attention that having no shoes would bring. He’d been into enough office buildings with Hirota to know that they often had foot lockers on the inside with slippers for guests, but many would also have security

guards or cameras. He carried on walking until he saw a small office with no obvious reception desk, just an entrance lobby with a slipper rack beside the door. He stepped inside, fully intending to just grab a pair of the soft indoor slippers that were difficult to keep on your feet, but there was a pair of tatty trainers in one of the compartments that looked about his size, so he grabbed them and hurried back out. He slipped around a corner and put them back on, then noticed a large cross on the wall of the building as he was walking away. Stopping in his tracks, he frowned, torn by indecision. It was a doctor’s surgery. Goddamn it, did he need to be such a bastard to steal some patient’s shoes? He pulled the shoes off, threw them towards the door and then ran off into the back streets. Before he’d gone more than a couple of hundred yards he began to feel like an idiot. His feet were hurting, and he’d only managed to create attention for himself. Would the police be searching for him? They knew he had no shoes on. Would they think to ask a surprised guy standing outside a doctor’s, picking his shoes up off the ground? Perhaps it was paranoia slipping in, perhaps not. Too late, there was nothing he could do about it now. He walked another half a mile before sitting down to rub his feet. If he could only get some socks, it would make a difference. He had seen laundry hanging on the back balconies of several apartments, but most of them had been too high for him to reach. He turned down a side street into some tight lanes barely wide enough to cycle down, and finally spotted a ground floor apartment with a rack of clothes hanging from a balcony which was low enough to reach over.

Taking his time would only increase his chances of being seen. He paused a short way down the street, identified what looked like a pair of black men’s socks both secured on the same peg, then took a deep breath and made a run for it. He tried to jump up, squeeze open the peg with one hand, grab the socks with the other, and run off, but his fingers slipped off the hard plastic rack, and when he jerked the socks free the whole rack shook and bounced on the washing line it was hanging from. Clothes spun through the air. A dog started barking. Scowling, Jack tucked the socks under his arm and sprinted for the nearest alleyway. After another hasty sprint, he squatted down inside the gate of a little park to inspect his loot. What he’d thought were men’s socks were actually a pair of women’s black gloves, but they were elastic enough to go over his aching, bleeding feet, even though the fingers flapped around in front of his toes. It wasn’t great, and he felt like a fool, but it was an improvement on bare feet. Not for the first time he found himself wishing he’d just taken the shoes from the doctor’s after all. He still had no idea where he really was, but he had gone a couple of miles at best. He had little idea where Ueno might be from here, but it was a clean twenty minutes on a subway train, so it wasn’t a distance he could walk in a couple of hours. A train would be the best way, but unless he could get money somehow there was no way he could jump a train without getting caught. Maybe outlying stations would be unmanned, but the central lines all had big ticket gates and guards. As he was passing a bicycle park at the front of a building, he found his answer. Of course. He knew from conversations with Hirota

that the Japanese were lax on bicycle security, and it only took him ten minutes of searching to find one with the key still in the wheel lock. This time he swallowed down any feelings of guilt as he climbed on and cycled off. He felt like this country already hated him; one more minor crime wouldn’t make any difference. It took him a few minutes to orient himself, but he soon came to a larger street with street signs and maps every few hundred metres. Although he was making progress, his feet were still aching from the long walk barefoot, and now the pedals of the bike were digging in to them. Even worse was when he spotted a sign reading UENO 22km, far further than he could realistically ride in what was now less than an hour and a half. Even if he went straight there, the endless streetlights and pedestrian crossings would kill his progress. He had no chance of making it, and if he didn’t find Miyu in time he’d be screwed. There was literally no one else who might be able to help him. Up ahead, the big road he was following seemed to wind around to the west, so he turned down a small back street to try to cut off the corner. About halfway along he passed a little shrine, and pulled up, something glittery catching his eye. The wooden shrine was set back in a small yard just off the road, but there were several stone statues of various deities standing on pedestals dotted around the small grounds. The thing that had glittered was in a bowl at the nearest statue’s feet. The little depiction of a man was only about a foot high, and it seemed to stare at Jack with dismay as he picked out the only two silver coins among a handful of the dull aluminum one-yen coins in the offering plate. He now had a hundred and fifty yen, and after a few minutes

of cycling around the back streets he had found another three hundred, enough to get him across town to Ueno. With every coin he pocketed he could feel the skies waiting to part and chastise him, but he had no other choice. He wanted to pledge to return them, but knew he never would. Perhaps if he did some charity work or saved a kitten he might absolve himself of blame, but it was the least of his problems right now. He turned the bike around and headed for the nearest major street, searching for a subway. It took him a while to find one because he had somehow managed to get himself off a main line on to one of the smaller lines, but pretty soon he was passing through the gates with a precious 290yen ticket, the price that was circled next to the word UENO. People seemed to be staring at him as he climbed on and sat down near the door, so he tucked his feet under the seat as best he could, but after a few stops he had to change lines so had no choice but to reveal them. He ignored some sniggering schoolboys, but whenever he passed a guard or another man in uniform his cheeks burned and he prayed an arm wouldn’t snake out to grab him. By the time he got to Ueno it was ten past four, and he practically ran up the steps to the ticket gates, pushing past grumbling elderly people to get through as fast as he could. Would she still be there? Would she have given up and gone home? What would he do if she wasn’t there? The questions burned in his mind and it was all he could do to hold down an increasing sense of desperation. She would be gone, he knew it. He would have no choice but to hand himself in to the nearest police box and hope the worst that happened was that he

got deported back to England and his uncaring parents, and the soles of the boots waiting to stamp his head into the concrete. He was gasping for breath by the time he reached the top of the stairs to the overpass. A hazy sky was drawing the light away, with the trees of the park across from him bathed in shadow. He scanned the faces of the people walking across the overpass, but she wasn’t there, he was too late. It was just him, a couple of other foreign tourists, and a few bums loitering on the benches. One lying on the bench nearest to him shifted his arm and knocked over an empty beer can. The clinking sound made Jack look up, and he saw that the man was not a man but a young woman, lying under her coat, one arm draped over the side of the bench towards a cluster of empty beer cans scattered on the ground around her. ‘Miyu!’ He stumbled over and squatted down beside her, lifting the coat off her face. She groaned, and bleary eyes looked out of a tear-stained face. Her mouth opened with a smacking sound and a crusty groan came from her throat. ‘Jack? Jack, is that you?’ she croaked. ‘It’s me. Are you—’ Her eyes squeezed shut and she pulled her lips tight in a grimace as she let out a low moan. ‘Help me, Jack. Help me, please.’

21

JACK

was barely more than a dead weight. She had M iyu drunk six cans of what he had at first thought was beer but then realised was what the Japanese called chu-hi, a fruit flavoured alcoholic drink similar to the kind of alcopops people drank back home. Jack had tried a couple of flavours, but thought it tasted like piss and so had stuck to beer. In general it was cheaper than beer and also came in a couple of high alcohol varieties. She had drunk six cans of eight-percent alcoholic fruit juice, so just getting her standing took a serious effort. The first thing she did was vomit all over his only shirt, but there was nothing he could do except wipe it off as best he could and carry on. He got a few looks as he supported her down the stairs, but as many seemed aimed at her state rather than at his. Miyu was a mess, disheveled and dirty, her clothes stinking of spilt chu-hi and crusted with vomit. She mumbled as she walked, muttering barely comprehensible directions to him that he presumed would take them back to her house. At the bottom of the overpass steps they crossed a busy intersection and Jack found himself in a warren of

shops and market stalls selling everything from still-living seafood to gangster jackets and plastic mobile phone covers. He soon became aware that Miyu had no idea where she was going. He had taken her wallet and phone and put them both into his pockets for safekeeping, and as they turned a corner and a flashing neon sign announced HOTEL just a few metres in front of them, he took an executive decision. It didn’t look like a regular hotel, and in fact had prices for short stay as well as overnight. The entrance was just a single staircase heading up to a door in the second floor of a garish building adorned with flashing lights and with a noisy game centre in its basement, and he dragged Miyu through into a cramped reception where a man’s hands were visible through a small gap in the wall at about waist height. The rest of the receptionist was hidden behind a screen. The man had to be able to see Jack on a video monitor somewhere, because he said, ‘Rest or stay?’ in English. ‘Stay,’ Jack answered, pulling out Miyu’s wallet. The man stabbed a finger at a number under a piece of laminate. Jack pulled six thousand yen out of Miyu’s wallet and handed it over. A key was pushed across in response. ‘Third floor,’ the man grunted. Jack pulled Miyu into a little elevator and held her up as it rose and stopped. He stepped out into a gloomy corridor and dragged Miyu a few doors down to their room, letting her sit on the floor while he opened the door with the key the man had given him. Inside, the room was immaculately made up in a deep, seductive purple, everything from the walls and

window blinds to the bedsheets and lampshades. A widescreen TV was built into the wall opposite the end of the bed and the ceiling was one big mirror. Jack had heard about love hotels but had never been inside one. This was clearly a basic example, just a little kinky, but without all the bizarre extras Hirota had laughed and joked about. There were no baby’s cots for adults or robot suits or water beds, just a bit of alluring lighting and a packet of condoms on the dresser next to the toothbrush and paste. Miyu staggered to the bathroom and threw up. A small bath-shower unit was in an adjoining room, so while she was retching over the sink Jack ran the shower and then helped her take off her clothes. She didn’t seem to mind him watching as she stripped down to her underwear and climbed into the tub and sat down, her head on her knees as the water cascaded down over her, but Jack closed the door to give her a little privacy. While she was cleaning herself, Jack found a neatly folded dressing gown and changed into it, then tried cleaning their clothes in the sink. After a few minutes he heard the shower switch off, so he went back out into the bedroom to let Miyu dry herself. She seemed to have sobered up a little, and although he asked if she needed help, she told him no. She came out of the bathroom without a word, wrapped up in an identical gown to his. She walked around to the far side of the bed with her head bowed and her hair hanging over her face. Jack pulled back the covers and she climbed under wordlessly, pulling the sheets back up over her face. Jack watched her for a few minutes until her breathing evened out, then he went and cleaned himself up.

MIYU SLEPT for about three hours before she woke up. During that time, Jack found a cable channel on the big TV and watched several episodes of an American drama with the sound turned down low. He couldn’t understand the dubbing, but he’d seen it before. He was just starting to feel tired when he glanced across at Miyu and realised she was looking at him. ‘Thanks,’ she croaked. ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘What time is it?’ ‘Seven p.m.’ ‘Oh.’ She closed her eyes again. A few minutes later she began to snore again. Jack had heard women snore before, usually after a similar kind of drink-induced collapse, but for some reason it didn’t annoy him like it always had in the past. He found Miyu’s low growling to be rather amusing. In the dim purple light and with the blanket pulled up over most of her face, it wasn’t easy for him to study her. He tried anyway, staring at the curves of her eyes, the way her forehead furrowed as she slept, the mounds of her cheeks that looked like tiny hills. He’d never really looked at her before because it was hard to get behind the cutting remarks always coming from her mouth, but when he looked closely she was as pretty—if not more so —than any of the girls he had seen at the college. She was more understated, but she had a perfect bone structure, and huge eyes—now closed—that you could lose yourself in. ‘Are you watching me?’ she asked suddenly, making him start. ‘If you are, I’ll cut out your eyes.’

‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘Good.’ She gave a little half smile and started snoring again. He had already broken the back of his guilt by stealing from Miyu to pay for the room, so he figured it wouldn’t hurt to dip into her wallet again, and went and bought himself a couple of cans of beer from a vending machine out in the corridor. Then he sat drinking them and watching the TV, letting the alcohol take away the dull ache in his feet. He had bathed them and picked out all the grit, but finding a pair of shoes in the morning was high on his list of priorities. His eyes began to get heavy. He sank back into the pillows and switched the TV off, letting weariness overcome him.

IT WAS SOMETIME in the early hours of the morning when he woke. The room was silent and dark and for a moment he wondered where he was. It took him a moment to remember the trail of disasters that had finally led him to Miyu, and how he had found her drunk and hysterical on the overpass bridge. He rolled over in the bed and found her looking at him. Her eyes flickered in the darkness but he could tell from the way her head shifted that she was awake and studying him. He wasn’t sure if she knew if he was awake, then he heard her whisper, ‘Thank you.’ ‘What for?’ She didn’t answer. Instead he felt her reach out a hand and take his own under the covers. For a moment he wondered if she wanted something more, but then her

body shifted on the pillow as she relaxed again, her eyes closing. He concentrated on the smooth, soft skin, feeling the warmth of her body in her fingers. He didn’t know what tomorrow would bring for either of them. For all he knew, he could be on a plane back to the UK or behind bars in a prison cell. The day had started badly, but it had ended as well as he could have hoped. Tomorrow could take care of itself.

22

MIYU

was lying beside her in the bed, but when Miyu J ack first woke all she could think about was the drumming inside her skull. She’d vomited up a lot of the chu-hi she had drunk, but it had still taken its toll. She climbed out of the bed and staggered to the bathroom, washed her face in the basin and then took several gulps of cold water from the tap. Feeling a little self-conscious, she then brushed her teeth again before going back to the bed. It was just after eight a.m. Jack was snoozing quietly, turned away from her. She climbed back under the covers, feeling awkward, trying to remember if anything had actually happened between them. The previous afternoon was a blur of lights and half memories. She wasn’t even sure where they were, but doubted they could have gone far. She remembered being unable to walk. Jack’s thick blond hair had mounded up on the pillow, and Miyu couldn’t resist reaching out to touch it. It felt soft and smooth, the way she imagined the hair of shampoo advert models might feel. She ran her fingers

through it, jerking back when she got caught on a knot, causing him to wake. He rolled over to face her, his eyes bleary from sleep, but otherwise he looked the same as he always did. She didn’t want to think about how bad she must look, but she kept reminding herself that there was nothing going on between them. They were barely even friends. She didn’t need to make a good impression. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Hey,’ he answered. ‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ she said. ‘Things just drove me crazy.’ He reached out and took her hands in his. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Do you?’ ‘Look. Just because I’m a spoilt little rich kid, it doesn’t mean I don’t understand problems. I have plenty of my own, believe me.’ ‘I have to get back to my house,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to be sorting through my father’s things. Then there’s the funeral to arrange … it’s one thing after another.’ He nodded slowly, as if it wasn’t an answer he had wanted to hear. She remembered that it had been him who had called her, not the other way around. ‘Why did you call me yesterday?’ she asked. He looked away. ‘I’m in trouble,’ he said. She stared at him a moment, feeling that familiar need to hate him. What had he done this time? Couldn’t she be the one in need just once? Why did he always have some problem that went above and beyond anyone else’s problems? Perhaps he thought she didn’t understand, because before she could speak he said, ‘With the police. I, um,

ran away from them.’ ‘What?’ ‘They came to my apartment, looking for me. I ran away from them.’ Her hangover left her in no mood for his childishness. She pulled her hands out of his and swung a hard slap at the top of his head. ‘Ow!’ ‘What do you mean, Jack?’ He rubbed his head. ‘I panicked. ‘I know it was stupid but they were just standing around and no one was guarding me and … I just panicked.’ ‘What did they want?’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t exactly ask, did I?’ ‘You have to call them. You’ll get in even more trouble if you don’t hand yourself in.’ ‘They’ll just kick me out of the country or put me in prison!’ ‘Good! You deserve it!’ The look he gave her was one of greater shock than when she had hit him. He looked like someone had just stabbed him in the heart. ‘Do you really want me to go?’ ‘Yes! Get out!’ With a huff he climbed out of the bed. He took a few tentative steps towards the bathroom and reached out for the t-shirt hanging over the back of a chair, rubbing the cloth between two fingers. ‘It’s still wet,’ he said. ‘And I don’t have any shoes.’ She glared at him. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I forgot them.’ She leaned out of the bed and looked down at his bare feet. Lying on the floor a few feet away, as if they’d been tossed there, were a dirty, torn pair of women’s

gloves. She made the connection immediately, and suddenly the absurdity of the situation made her burst out laughing. ‘Are you serious? You ran from the police in bare feet? Are you crazy?’ ‘I panicked,’ he said again. ‘I’ll go if you want, but I’d be really grateful if you could lend me a bit of money for some new shoes.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I left my wallet too. My phone was in my pocket, but that’s all. I left everything else.’ ‘So who paid for this room?’ He shrugged and gave a sheepish grin. ‘You did.’ ‘Oh. Well, I guess I deserved it. How did you even get across town if you had no money?’ ‘Yeah … I, um, stole some coins from some of those little statue things that are scattered about.’ ‘From the shrines? Jesus, Jack. What else did you do?’ He shrugged again. ‘This and that. Don’t worry, I can pay them back. My dad’s rich. Once I get home I can get some money and—’ She pulled the covers over her head and rolled over, cutting him off. In the dark under the blankets she wished she could spirit herself away from here, away from everything. Why couldn’t she be the heroine in some Miyazaki Hayao movie and pull back the covers to find herself in some fantasy world where all her troubles no longer mattered. She took a deep breath, clenched her fingers over the duvet’s edge, and jerked it back. Jack was still standing where he had been, in the middle of the floor, looking like a sad puppy that had wandered out of its owner’s house and into the road, and was waiting for a truck to come and mow it down.

‘Sit back down, Jack.’ ‘You don’t want me to leave?’ ‘Do you want to leave?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then no. I don’t want you to leave either.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not quite sure why I want you to stay, but you can.’ As he came back to the bed and perched himself on the end, she remembered that despite everything he had helped her. Now it was her turn to help him. ‘You can stay at my house for a couple of days,’ she said, wondering quite where the words were coming from. After all, he was technically a fugitive and she was in the middle of preparing Takahiro’s funeral. There would be police and other official types buzzing in and out all of the time. Then she remembered that Takahiro wasn’t actually her father. How could this buffoon of an Englishman have made her forget? She forced a smile. ‘We can help each other,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’ ‘What are you going to do? They’ll find you eventually.’ ‘I know.’ Miyu reached out and took his hand. His arm felt tight and for a moment she felt like she was trying to persuade a petulant child. Again that wave of dislike washed over her. How could Jack be so stupid? Then she thought about her own life and how circumstances had forced her to grow up early. She’d taken her first job in a bar at sixteen, and had sex with her first customer at seventeen, although she had told the guy she was nineteen and he had believed her.

All the while she was showing up to school with bags under her eyes and struggling her way through classes while the girls behind her argued incessantly over Disney characters and who had the cutest iPhone cover. Perhaps Jack wasn’t strange after all, but it was her who was unusual. ‘I’m sure it can’t have been that bad,’ she said. ‘Perhaps they were just checking up on you. Your parents might be worried if you haven’t called in a few days.’ Jack shook his head. ‘They won’t be worried. They make sure I can’t get my hands on enough money to fly home.’ Miyu wasn’t in the mood to argue with him. She just nodded. ‘We’ll go back to my house,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to keep out of the way if anyone comes around, though. It might not look good if there’s a gaijin showing up right after my dad died.’ Jack looked about to protest, but then he closed his mouth and nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said.

THEIR CLOTHES WERE STILL DAMP but they put them on anyway, then they went outside to get a taxi. Jack stole a pair of disposable cotton slippers from the room, which were a big improvement on the pair of women’s gloves. Out on the street, Miyu stopped at the first market stall they came to and bought Jack a pair of cheap sneakers. ‘You can pay me back when you get out of prison,’ she smirked as he put them on. Miyu was a little worried that having not returned home the night before she might have attracted suspicion, being that her father’s body was still at home.

It was custom in Japan for her to open her house to any visitors wishing to pay their respects, and she would be expected to be home all day long. However, when she got out of the taxi there were no notes on the door nor any sign that anyone had been here at all. Her phone battery had also died, but after she let Jack and herself into the house and switched it on, she found only a couple of messages, one from the coroner asking if she was ready to proceed with the funeral, and another from her boss, wanting to know if she intended to return to work. She called back the coroner and told her that the arranged date would be fine. Then she called back her boss and told him she needed more time. He didn’t take her decision well, but there were plenty of other girls vying for the customers’ attention. He told her to call again if she wanted to come back. As she hung up, she wasn’t sure if she ever would, but such was her inability to move on with her life, that after a brief moment considering whether to delete his number, she just switched off the phonebook and put her phone back in her bag. Jack needed clothes. She told him to wait in the spare room while she hunted out some of Takahiro’s that might fit him, although Jack was so slightly built he would almost have fit into hers. She picked through a couple of boxes that she had already sorted for the recycling, and managed to find a couple of decent pairs of jeans, some t-shirts and a couple of sweaters. She wasn’t sure how she would feel to see him wearing her father’s clothes, but the only clothes he had still stank of her vomit, so she gathered them up into a bundle and hurried through to the spare room where he was waiting. ‘Jack, I got you some…’ She trailed off, dropping the

clothes to the floor. Jack had stripped down to his underwear and was in the process of putting on the gown he had also stolen from the hotel. He looked like a boy band member under his clothes as well as in them. His parents had obviously passed on good genetics, because Jack was lean and toned, his stomach fatless and well defined. His chest was thin and hairless, almost Japanese in its androgyny, like a guy from a manga cartoon. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and she realised she had been staring. ‘I got kind of sick of the damp,’ he said. ‘And, you know, the smell.’ She shrugged, feeling her cheeks redden. ‘Um, that’s okay,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you can change now.’ Before he could answer, she turned and marched out, down the stairs to the living room. She sat down on the sofa and stared at the last box of Takahiro’s secrets, feeling lost and stupid all at the same time. What was she doing with Jack in her house? And what was she doing staring at his body like some schoolgirl at an Arashi concert? It was pathetic. She picked up the nearest photograph, of the man she had always known as her father with his arm around another man who looked strikingly similar. This had to be Naoshi Kubota, Takahiro’s brother and her real father. They were standing outside Tokyo Dome, with a Giants flag just visible in the background. They looked to be in their early twenties, probably a little older than she was now. What had happened to change everything? ‘Hey.’ She screamed as the voice startled her and knocked the box over. She looked up to see Jack standing in the

doorway, wearing her father’s clothes. ‘What are you doing?’ she said, immediately feeling foolish. ‘Um, just coming to see you,’ he answered. ‘Oh. Okay. You can have a sleep upstairs if you like.’ He gave her a smile as if to say, calm down. ‘I spent all night sleeping,’ he said. ‘I’m fine.’ He sat down on the sofa beside her and leaned over the scattering of personal items. Miyu inched away from him, cringing as she did, feeling like an idiot. ‘These are my father’s things,’ she said. ‘Is this you?’ he said, reaching out and picking up a picture of a girl in school uniform. ‘Ha, it doesn’t look much like you, but I guess you’ve changed your hair a little since then.’ He handed it to her and while Miyu had never seen it before, for a moment she thought he was right, that it was a picture of her in junior high, but then she noticed the uniform. It was different. The picture wasn’t her. ‘Saori,’ she gasped around a lump in her throat. ‘Who’s Saori?’ ‘My sister.’ Jack nodded. ‘Oh. She looks like you. She’s cute. Where is she?’ Miyu shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’ Jack smiled. ‘You must know what school she went to.’ He pointed to the picture. ‘There’s a school logo on the uniform.’ Miyu felt like someone had punched her in the head. He was right, of course. She had another lead. All she had to do was find out which school her sister had attended and she might be able to find someone who

recognised her. But what about the pictures themselves? She reached over and picked through the pile of envelopes Jack had disturbed. The picture had fallen out of one, and as she lifted them up she recognised the same handwriting as on the envelope that had arrived a few days before her father’s death. There was more than a dozen, each postmarked almost exactly a year apart. Each one had a picture of her sister, from her first year in high school right back to her first year in kindergarten. Only the picture Jack had picked out was of the girl in a uniform, almost as if her mother had included it by mistake. All the others were of her sister in casual clothes in bland, featureless locations such as parks and gardens that offered no clue as to her whereabouts. ‘What’s going on?’ Jack asked. Miyu looked up at him and shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I really don’t. My whole past seems to have been a mystery.’ He smiled. ‘Well, let’s solve it together,’ he said. For a moment Miyu’s heart seemed to jump, and she almost gasped. The way he looked at her, the intensity in those eyes, it was enough to make her forget all her anger and sadness, even what had been directed at him. She wanted to touch him, but at the same time she knew that any kind of relationship was a really bad idea right now, that her life was far too confusing to get involved with a foreigner who also happened to be on the run from the police. And then it all seemed to make sense. Both of them were trapped. Both of them were caught up by their pasts and slowly being devoured, piece by little piece. Both of them needed to get away for a while.

THE UNDERTAKER CAME LATER that afternoon to pick up the body. The following Monday the funeral was held, and a handful of vague acquaintances and former colleagues of her father showed up to the crematorium to wish him on his way. It was a somber affair, but more than anything it finally felt like closure, and Miyu left the crematorium feeling like a huge weight had lifted off her chest. She caught the train home to where Jack was waiting for her, holed up in her spare room, slowly watching his way through her collection of English-language DVDs. ‘Are you ready?’ he said, as she came through the door and smiled at him. She nodded. ‘I’m ready,’ she said. ‘Then let’s go.’ By the door were two small cases. One was packed with clothes for both of them, while the other contained items from her father’s sake boxes that Miyu felt would be useful. And in her pocket were two Shinkansen tickets for Nagano.

PART II

NAGANO

23

JACK

N agano was a lot different than Tokyo, Jack thought, as the bullet train rushed through fields and hills and long tunnels as it took them northwest away from the Japanese capital. After an initial hour of seemingly endless Tokyo suburbs they had found themselves surrounded by mountains, and while villages and rice fields still filled every available stretch of lowland, Jack felt the suffocating press of city-induced claustrophobia beginning to lift as tall, snow-capped mountains appeared in the distance. Nagano City, when they began to slow into the station, looked like a smaller, thinner version of Tokyo with lower buildings and less people, but the highlands that surrounded it on all sides gave more sense of perspective to an endless urban jungle. He almost felt happy when he stepped down out of the train with Miyu standing beside him. He reached out for her hand and was a little surprised when she took it. It had been an automatic action, and suddenly he found her warm palm enclosed in his. She didn’t look up at him to suggest she was surprised, and

to any observers they might have appeared like any other young cross-cultural couple visiting the city for a couple of days. Jack was wearing sunglasses, but other than dressing down in Miyu’s father’s clothes, he hadn’t changed his appearance. He’d briefly considered shaving his head, but at his request Miyu had looked on the national police website to see if his mugshot was on the Most Wanted list, but there had been nothing. She hadn’t been surprised and seemed bemused that he was. She had also wanted to ring the college but he hadn’t let her. He hadn’t told her about the incident in the bar—or, for that matter, about the prostitute—so she found it difficult to believe that he was in any real trouble, despite his fears. In any case, she said, if there was some big manhunt operation going on she might have heard something about it by now. As they left the station, Miyu seemed to turn quiet and morose, while Jack felt better than he had in some days. He still didn’t have any money and felt bad about living off hers, but he had thrown his useless pay-as-you-go phone into the trash and felt about as free as he ever had. Sooner or later his life would come crashing back to reality, but for now he was content to take things one day at a time. He wasn’t quite sure what Miyu had going on. She’d tried to explain everything about her father, but the more complicated the situation got the more garbled her English became. At most times her English was exceptional. He hadn’t realised just how good it was until he’d spent time with some of the other people on his college course. Even Hirota’s English was bitty and jarring at times with frequent mistakes, but Miyu’s English had the quality of long hours of dedicated practice.

During the days he’d been holed up in her house while she dealt with her father’s funeral, he’d seen how immersed she’d been; DVDs, CDs, books, magazines … all in English. Except for a couple of college guides, everything she had was in English. It was borderline obsessive, but when he had asked her about it, her answer had been that she wanted to give herself a chance of getting somewhere in life. Jack loitered outside while Miyu went into the tourist information centre to ask about hotels. She came out a few minutes later with a list, and together they took a couple of left turns outside the station and ended up at a youth hostel that faced the train tracks. Miyu wasn’t sure how long they were going to stay, but there was a limit of a week, so she booked a twin room for that long and told Jack they’d see what happened after that. Jack was pleasantly surprised by the room. It was far removed from the youth hostels he’d stayed in back in England, which were dirty, tatty places with showers that didn’t work and no toilet roll. The only thing that seemed the same were the groups of dreadlocked fashion victims hanging about in the common room downstairs, but otherwise it was closer to a smart hotel. Miyu seemed unconcerned by anything, and set about arranging all her father’s letters and photographs on the little desk between the two beds while Jack sat in a chair by the window and watched the trains zoom in and out of the station. ‘What’s the plan?’ he asked, after she seemed to have finished and had sat back to survey her organisation. ‘I wish I could help you more in this, but you know, the Japanese is difficult.’ She smiled. It was a lovely smile, he thought. A shame it was so rare.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you plenty of tasks,’ she said. ‘Thanks. I need to keep my mind off my impending prison sentence.’ ‘I’ll visit you.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘I’ll bring grapes.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘To prison?’ ‘Isn’t that where you bring them?’ He smiled. ‘No, to hospital.’ ‘Oh.’ She frowned and looked around her, as if searching for a piece of paper to write down this new information. ‘Going back to the plan, what are we going to do tomorrow?’ Outside, the sky was already beginning to darken as the sun slipped behind the mountains to the east. ‘Never mind tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We have things to do today.’ ‘Like what?’ ‘Around seven p.m. is when club activities finish at all the schools. We’re going back to the station to find out where my sister went to school.’ ‘How are we going to do that?’ She smiled. ‘I’ll show you.’

AN HOUR later they were sitting on a bench across from the steps that led up into Nagano station. Both of them were holding cans of coffee in one hand and colour photocopies of the picture of Miyu’s sister in her school uniform in the other, the copies reduced to palm-size, so it was easy to slip them out of sight if anyone took too much interest in what Jack and Miyu were doing. A few

school kids had wandered past, bags slung over their shoulders, but none in a uniform that had the same design. To Jack, most of them looked the same, but every time he nudged Miyu to point a student out, she would shake her head. ‘Wrong skirt hem,’ she would say, or ‘Wrong shoes.’ Finally, at about eight p.m., Miyu shook her head and stood up. ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘We’ll try again tomorrow.’ They got some noodles out of a little restaurant a couple of streets from the station and then headed back to the hostel. While Miyu sat at the desk and looked at maps of Nagano, Jack lay down on his bed to drink a can of beer. Miyu had told him she was keeping a tab of everything she had paid for and fully expected payback once he got out of prison, if he ever did. ‘What are you hoping to find?’ he asked, after getting tired of listening to her um and ahh over the maps and the assortment of pictures. ‘I mean, there was an address for this guy in the will, wasn’t there?’ Miyu nodded. ‘My real father? Yes, there was. But I checked it out on Google. It doesn’t exist anymore. The address I was given was for a vacant plot of land on which a house stood until about ten years ago.’ ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘Tomorrow we’re going to City Hall. I’m going to ask for the current address of Kubota Naoshi, my real father, and the brother of the man I grew up thinking was my father.’ ‘Your uncle, yeah?’ She sighed. ‘You know, it’s really difficult to think of him like that. He wasn’t perfect, but he brought me up as his daughter and that’s all I ever knew. The mother who left me was never more than a memory.’ ‘And you’re still hoping to find her?’ Miyu held up one of the envelopes that had been

addressed to her. ‘I’m absolutely sure she’s alive. This is her handwriting, I know it. And it’s addressed to me.’ ‘Can I see that?’ ‘Sure.’ She passed it to him and he peered closely at it, but what Miyu said was an address was just a series of lines and curves to him. Japanese writing was as incomprehensible as cipher. ‘It smells funny,’ he said. ‘Kind of like … formaldehyde.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Disinfectant.’ ‘You mean for cleaning things?’ ‘Or sterilising them. Like in a hospital.’ Miyu raised an eyebrow. ‘What if she’s a nurse, and she’s been writing those letters on her lunch break?’ Jack smiled. ‘That would be an amazing discovery, wouldn’t it? Come on, there could be a million reasons why it smells like that. It might have nothing to do with her. It could have had something split on it in the post office. ‘Still, it’s worth a try. I’ll call all the local hospitals tomorrow. They might have heard of a Mayumi Kubota.’ ‘If that’s still her name. Honestly, it might be easier just to knock on every door in the whole town.’ ‘Are you being sarcastic?’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just … this is kind of like searching for gold on the beach. It’s kind of a waste of time.’ She snatched for a pillow and smashed him over the head with it. When Jack saw the anger in her eyes he was glad there hadn’t been a table lamp or something else heavy that was closer. ‘Finding my mother is not a waste of time!’

He held up his hands. ‘Look, I’m sorry. But are you even sure she is your mother?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘After all, this guy you’ve always thought of as your dad actually isn’t, is he?’ Miyu glowered. ‘Please do not talk about my father like that. He is not just some guy. I don’t care whether he was my real father or not. He brought me up. As far as I’m concerned, that’s good enough.’ ‘Then why are we even here?’ She tossed the pillow aside and sat down on the bed. ‘I want answers.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess that’s the most important thing, isn’t it?’ He reached out a hand towards her. ‘Look, I’m sorry. Sensitivity isn’t exactly my strong point. I didn’t mean to be a dick.’ ‘Don’t touch me.’ ‘Will you cut my hands off?’ ‘Probably.’ He smiled. ‘Probably is worth a chance.’ Before she could react, he had jumped across onto her bed and sat down beside her. He wasn’t quite sure what she would do when he tried to take her hand … but elbowing him in the face wasn’t something he had considered. He rolled away, rubbing at his cheek. ‘That wasn’t necessary.’ A foot slammed into his back and he slid to the floor, landing with a bump. ‘Ow!’ Miyu’s face peered down at him from the bed. ‘I’ve forgiven you,’ she said. A hand reached out to help him up and he grabbed it. She was stronger than she looked, but just as he got halfway to a sitting position she suddenly let go and he thumped back down.

‘Ow!’ he said again. Miyu raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t be too trusting, Jack,’ she said. ‘Look where it’s got me.’ As Jack climbed up from the floor and sat down on his own bed this time, he was beginning to think that Miyu had a screw loose. Perhaps he would be safer in police custody. ‘We ought to just go to bed,’ he said. ‘Alone.’ ‘That’s what I meant.’ ‘Good.’ Miyu stood up. ‘I’m going to have a shower. I think it would be a good idea for you to be asleep when I come out, or at least facing the other way. The only reason we have a twin room instead of two singles is because I trust you more where I can see you. But if you dare try to touch me in the night…’ ‘You’ll kill me?’ She gave a slight smile, but the humour in it was difficult to spot. ‘Probably.’ ‘In that case, I’ll be asleep then.’ ‘Good.’

24

MIYU

was a little disappointed when she woke up to M iyu see the sun shining in through the open curtains. She had wanted to be out on the road by first light, but a glance at the clock on her phone told her it was just before nine. She got up and looked around for Jack, but his bed was empty, the covers pulled back as if he’d left in a hurry. ‘Jack?’ She got up and pulled a t-shirt on over her nightdress. It was unlikely that he’d run off, because her purse was still on the table and he had no money of his own. He’d also thrown his phone away. She didn’t know how he could stand being effectively cut off from the world, but he seemed far happier. Perhaps it was the weight of expectation that was dragging him down. She had no idea how it must feel being the son of famous people, but it had to be difficult. When you met people it was never on an even footing if they knew who you were. Perhaps that was what he was coming to like about being in Japan, that no one here knew him. Then there was the police thing. Was he really in

trouble? He came across as being a bit rash and short tempered, but the Japanese police were pretty easygoing when it came to general disorder, and he would have had to have done something really bad for three of them to show up at his house like he claimed. She had called the college yesterday and told them that in light of her father’s death she wanted to take a month sabbatical, and they had agreed to suspend her fees. She had desperately wanted to ask about Jack, but that would have given away that she knew about him. She figured that if she wasn’t asked then they hadn’t noticed the two of them hanging out. She looked up as the door burst open. Jack came in, carrying two MacDonald’s bags. He dropped one down on the bed in front of her. ‘Breakfast,’ he said. She smiled. ‘Thanks, I guess. How much did these cost me?’ He put a hand into his pocket and pulled out some coins. ‘Here’s your change,’ he said, handing them to her. ‘You can work it out. I took a one thousand note.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, I appreciate the thought, I guess. If not the … method.’ ‘I told you, I’ll pay back everything,’ he said. For a moment she felt bad about the way she had spoken to him. Sure, he had stolen from her yet again, but from the put-upon look in his eyes she could see that he really was just a kid. She’d often heard foreigners say that Japanese young people were immature, but Jack made her look like a grandmother. He genuinely seemed to think that once he’d broken something, he might as well keep breaking it, because it wouldn’t make any difference. He was wrong. She knew what it felt like to get hurt

over and over again, and it never got easier to take. ‘I tell you what,’ she said. ‘So that you don’t have to keep … borrowing money from you, I’ll give you a stipend. Kind of like pocket money.’ She grinned. ‘That’s what Japanese wives do to their husbands. They keep charge of all the family money and then give their husbands a few thousand yen every month so that they can … do man stuff.’ ‘So we’d be like an old married couple?’ As soon as he said it, Miyu felt her cheeks redden. As she looked at him with his easy smile and his messy, shampoo-advert hair, and thought about the subtle muscles hidden under her dad’s old clothing, a wonderful vision of the future appeared in her mind. She scowled, stamping it out like an old campfire, not wanting it to take hold. Good things didn’t happen to people like her. Only a succession of bad things, until you eventually chose the least bad and ran with it. ‘Look, I’ll just lend you some money, okay? So that you don’t have to keep dipping into my purse.’ He shrugged again. ‘I guess so. Are we going to eat this food or what?’

THE STAFF at Nagano City Hall, as she had half expected, pulled the confidentiality card when she asked for details of a Naoshi Kubota. An officer typed into a computer for a few minutes, then gave her a long hard stare and told her there was no forwarding address on record for the person formerly residing at what was now a vacant lot. Of course she knew, just from the way he looked at her, that there was something on the computer that he couldn’t divulge. It angered her to be so near yet so far, but when she

started shouting he had threatened to call security. Jack had understood from the gestures if not the words and pulled her out of there. Now, standing next to a vending machine on the ground floor, Miyu didn’t know what to do. ‘Drink some coffee,’ Jack said. ‘It’ll make you feel better.’ Miyu rolled her eyes. ‘What will make me feel better is going back to Tokyo and forgetting about all these country idiots.’ Jack grinned. ‘We’ve only just arrived. Plus, I don’t want to go to prison just yet.’ Miyu reached out and gave his arm a little push, then looked down at her hand as if it had suddenly taken on a life of its own. ‘Yeah, well, things would be easier if we could get a break.’ ‘Well, let’s make our own breaks,’ Jack said. ‘You’ve got that old address, right? Let’s go up there and see if there are any neighbours who might remember him.’ After her experiences in Tokyo trying to find someone who knew anything about her family she didn’t share his optimism, but it was worth a try. She nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said.

MIYU LOOKED up the address on her phone and found it to be a few kilometres out of the city centre. They took a local train four stops to a small suburb called Shinonoi. At the station, Miyu peered up at a large tourist map attached to the wall. ‘There,’ she said, pointing. ‘It’s about there. Just before you get to the zoo.’ Jack frowned. ‘Why’s there a green T-Rex in the picture?’

Miyu read over the place names. ‘Huh. Apparently that’s Nagano Dinosaur Park.’ Jack laughed. ‘I loved the heated toilet seats and the automatic escalators, but you Japanese have cloned dinosaurs? Seriously, that’s some technology.’ ‘I imagine they’re plastic.’ ‘I hope so.’ Outside the station they found they’d missed the bus to the zoo by five minutes and the next one wasn’t for more than an hour. Jack was reluctant to walk because his feet were still sore, but aside from a 7-Eleven, Shinonoi seemed devoid of shops or other entertainments and Miyu was keen to get moving. ‘That way,’ she said, pointing towards the hills rising up a kilometre west of the station. Soon they were walking through countryside loaded with autumn colours of reds and oranges, as the city receded behind them. The road wound up through rice fields and apple orchards where heavily laden trees overhung the road. Looking uphill, Miyu could see the curving undulations of a mallet golf course overlooked by a series of large, fibreglass dinosaurs. A couple of groups of old people were moving slowly from hole to hole and she wondered if Tokyo wasn’t just a little too hectic sometimes. She’d always seen herself as a city girl, but even though the suburbs of Nagano were barely five hundred metres behind her, she felt like they’d got off a train in a different world. Could I live here, she wondered. Could I handle it? From behind her came the rustle of vegetation, and then she heard Jack say, ‘Hey!’ She looked back and saw him holding out an apple with a big grin on his face.

‘Present!’ The apple was a Fuji, one of Nagano’s famous local brands, and about the size of a softball, almost overbalancing in Jack’s hand. She saw the eagerness in his face, the childish desire to delight her, but all she could feel was anger. ‘What are you doing?’ she shouted. ‘That’s not yours! You can’t just pick them off the trees like that!’ He spread his hands. ‘Come on, it’s only an apple.’ ‘It’s someone else’s apple! This is Japan, you don’t just pick stuff from trees. I don’t know what you do in England, but here in Japan that’s stealing!’ He shrugged. ‘Well, if you don’t want it, I’ll just put it back.’ Without hesitation he tossed it back over his shoulder. It bounced off the grass verge and rolled to a stop at the foot of the nearest tree. He spread his hands again. ‘Problem solved.’ Miyu was shaking with rage. ‘You disrespectful … bastard.’ She turned and started walking away, marching up the hill towards the plastic dinosaurs. ‘Hey, wait!’ ‘Go away.’ She was too angry to slow her pace and give him a chance to explain. She wondered if he would run after her, but she heard a little yelp of pain and guessed he had probably tried. They settled into a routine where she set the pace, with Jack trailing along a hundred metres behind her like a sulking child. She didn’t turn back, but occasionally she caught his reflection in the glass of a vending machine and the shiny surface of a couple of road signs. After a time, she almost forgot he was there as she returned her focus to why they had come to Nagano. She

looked down at her phone and saw that the plot of land where Naoshi had lived was out of the road beyond the dinosaur park’s upper entrance. With Jack trailing along behind her, she walked up through the mallet golf course and past a small shop and a variety of picnic and play areas, then into a section of shrubs signposted as a botanical garden. The path opened out on to a little car park at the top. A road led out through an open gate. Miyu finally paused to glance back, and saw Jack still lagging along behind, his hands shoved into his pockets, taking an unhealthy interest in a big red brontosaurus that had been hollowed out into a set of play tunnels for little kids. He was peering into the tunnels, clearly pretending not to be upset. She knew they were close to the vacant plot, so she stopped to wait for him. Sighing as he approached, she wondered if her anger had really been for him, or whether it was pent up rage against the mess her family was revealing itself to be. After all, he’d only stolen an apple. It wasn’t exactly murder, and she was hardly a model of honesty. There was a principle involved, but it was a principle she had amplified because she was angry about other stuff. Wasn’t it? ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered as he walked up to her, his head bowed. ‘I overreacted a little back there.’ He shrugged, and when he looked up at her she almost gaped. He looked so ashamed that she could imagine his face had been ripped open and his soul drawn out. He didn’t just look upset, he looked devastated. ‘No, you didn’t,’ he said. ‘I fucked up. I fucked up again. I’m sorry, Miyu. Perhaps I should just go and turn

myself in. I’m a criminal at heart.’ She waited for him to smile, thinking it had to be a joke, but he just stared at her with the same forlorn, lostchild expression. The more she looked at him, the more ridiculous he seemed, until she couldn’t help but break into a smile. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘You can stay on the run for a couple more days if you like.’ He shrugged, and for a moment she thought he would start to cry. Do I really need this right now? Wouldn’t it be easier if I told him to get lost and just did this on my own? The thoughts invaded her head like burning matches, stinging her. She wondered if she was losing her mind. I don’t know myself. I don’t know who I am anymore. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s just over there, according to my map. Let’s go take a look.’ The hill rose steeply to their right, with the road winding past rice terraces, fallow fields and occasional houses as it angled upwards. Off to their left, a panoramic view of the city built up around the Shinano River valley as it stretched away towards the Japan Sea another eighty kilometres to the north. Miyu had read through a couple of tourist guides on the train on the way up yesterday, and knew that the highland area rising out of the valley opposite them was Shiga Kogen, Japan’s premier skiing area, while the dark green mounds to the north were some of the famous Five Mountains of Shinshu, the old name for Nagano and its neighbouring prefectures. She couldn’t remember which was which, but the name of one, Kurohime, had stood out. Black Princess. If it was referring to mindset, then it could definitely be

her. She wasn’t sure she deserved the title “princess”, but there had been more than one customer at the bar who’d used it as her pet name. ‘Well, there certainly isn’t a house here anymore,’ Jack said, and she looked up to see he’d picked the right plot of land, an overgrown patch of brambles and weeds between two rice fields. It was about ten metres square, big enough for a house that was no longer here. She nodded. ‘That’s it,’ she said. Unsure quite what she’d been expecting, she followed Jack as he made his way across the tangle of weeds towards the edge of the flat terrace, where a buttress marked the edge of the plot. It was the uppermost terrace of more than a dozen, but while these nearest the road were large, as the hill steepened they became thinner and thinner. Some of the rice paddies were only a couple of metres wide. Then, lower down, they widened again as the hill leveled out into squares big enough for building, and houses began to break up the patchwork of rice fields and vegetable plots. ‘Look, there’s a bench,’ Jack said, turning back towards her. She followed after him and saw he was right; a wooden bench big enough to seat three people sat on the edge of the plot, looking out over the panorama. A path she’d not noticed before went back along the front of the plot and then down the side to a small slope angling down off the road. They had come in from the opposite side, so the tall weeds had hidden it from their view. While the rest of the plot was wild and untamed, the metre-wide path looked often used and well-tended. ‘Careful,’ she said as Jack went to sit down. ‘It might be rotten if it’s been here a while. I wonder who put it

here?’ Jack patted the seat beside him. ‘It looks pretty well looked after to me,’ he said. ‘I’d say it’s been varnished in the last year.’ ‘Wow,’ she said, sitting down beside him. ‘That’s quite a view, isn’t it? What on earth would have made them tear this house down?’ Jack shrugged. ‘Probably the same reason everything good gets sold off. They needed the money.’ Miyu frowned. ‘We Japanese are notorious for saving our money,’ she said. ‘In general, Japanese families tend to keep their family’s land rather than sell it off.’ ‘Perhaps they had no choice.’ ‘Maybe. I guess I’ll probably never know. I wonder who looks after the path?’ Jack stood up and walked along to the corner, then turned and came back again. ‘Maybe they do,’ he said. ‘Look at these.’ He squatted down and ran a hand through the grass. At first Miyu didn’t see what he was indicating, but then he brushed away some grass and she saw grooves in the ground that had been worn smooth. ‘What are…?’ He looked up. ‘I’d guess they’re wheel marks,’ he said. ‘What, like a bicycle?’ ‘No, there are two parallel lines,’ he said. He looked up at her and smiled, and the old remorse had melted away. He looked confident, assured, like he had suddenly looked in the mirror and decided he wasn’t worthless after all. He picked a crushed stalk of some anonymous weed out of the closest track and ran a finger along the smooth soil. ‘These are deep, and repeatedly used,’ he said. ‘See

how there’s more crushed plants underneath this one? Someone is coming here regularly and using the same tracks each time.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I’d guess because the thing with the wheels is heavy, or either the person pushing it isn’t very strong.’ ‘Pushing?’ He nodded. Standing up, he walked back along the path to the corner and squatted down again. ‘There’s a patch here where the lines are scuffed as if this is a turning point.’ Miyu stood up. She turned to look out at the view for a moment as if the answer would materialise in the air, then she looked back at him. Her heart was thumping in her chest and she felt like the answer to everything kept slipping off the tip of her tongue. ‘Jack? Jack, what is it?’ He frowned. ‘Now, I’m just making an educated guess here—’ ‘Educated guess? What does that mean?’ He smiled. ‘Calm down. It means something that’s a guess, but based on evidence.’ ‘Oh.’ She hated it when she got flustered. English, which she understood so well most of the time, seemed to turn to a meaningless mixture of words and phrases, like letters shaken around in a bag. ‘I think your guess about the smell on that letter might not be so far from the truth,’ he said. ‘I’d say those marks were made by a wheelchair.’

25

MIYU

sat beside each other on the bench. At some They point, Jack had taken her hands in his and was gently rubbing her fingers. Miyu had tears in her eyes, and every time she tried to speak her voice broke up with emotion. After a few minutes she had stopped trying to speak in English, and now ordered the words in her mind before letting them out. Jack, seemingly understanding her feelings, was mostly quiet, only answering her questions. ‘So, my real father is disabled, and my mother brings him here to look at the view.’ Jack nodded. ‘It’s possible. It’s a nice view. I’d come here to look at it.’ ‘And it has to be my father, because my mother was writing those letters.’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘They sold the house to pay for his medical care, and they live in a hospital—hospice—somewhere that smells of disinfectant, which is why the letter smelt of for … for … for—’ ‘Formaldehyde.’

‘And they send pictures of my sister to me.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Because they don’t want me to forget what she looks like. But … but … my father—my uncle—hides them because … because…’ Jack squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t try to understand everything. Don’t speculate. We haven’t found anything yet. It could be someone completely unconnected to your parents who is coming here. We have no proof.’ ‘But it would make sense, wouldn’t it? The smell and the wheelchair?’ He nodded. ‘It would.’ ‘Why?’ ‘What?’ ‘Why? Why did they give me away? Why didn’t they keep in touch with me?’ Jack shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Why send me pictures of my sister but nothing else?’ ‘I think … maybe your father was supposed to tell you something about her. Something that he didn’t tell you because … he didn’t know how.’ Miyu felt a surge of emotion, and, as she tried to speak, her throat tightened and all that came out was a watery croak. Jack put an arm around her and pulled her close to his chest. Neither spoke as she sobbed against him. ‘I can’t do this,’ she said. ‘I can’t do this alone.’ He didn’t answer straight away, and she wondered if he would answer at all. Then, slowly, as if it was hard to force out the words, he said, ‘You’re not … alone.’ ‘Thank you.’ She felt him nod, and one hand rubbed her shoulder.

THE NEAREST HOUSE was a couple of hundred metres further down the road, but Miyu didn’t feel capable of knocking on any doors. Instead, they went back to the dinosaur park, bought a couple of cans of coffee from a vending machine by the entrance and sat down on a rock to gather their thoughts. Jack had gone quiet, as if the occasion had overawed him, while Miyu was unable to think straight, with a million different scenarios flashing through her mind. She had felt so close to her parents she could almost reach out and touch them. Her mother had sat on that same bench, and Jack claimed that, from the state of the plants crushed in the wheel ruts, it had only been a day or two since the wheelchair had last come that way. What if we just camped out and waited for them? They would have to come back eventually, right? ‘Are you ready?’ Jack said at last, getting up and putting his can into a recycling bin beside the vending machine. ‘We’re here now, so we need to go and ask the neighbours.’ Miyu shrugged. ‘I’m not sure I can. I feel like a mess right now. What if they don’t know anything?’ ‘Then we haven’t lost anything. But what if they do? What if they’ve seen your parents coming here and know when they’ll be back?’ ‘I’m scared, Jack.’ ‘I know you are, but don’t be.’ ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘What for?’ ‘For dragging you into this. For using you like a … a stick.’ ‘A crutch?’ He laughed. ‘It’s an adventure. I feel like Sherlock Holmes.’ ‘How did you figure out all that back there about the

wheelchair? I would never have noticed it.’ He shrugged. ‘While I was hiding out in my apartment instead of going to college, all I did was watch Hirota’s pile of ‘90s spy movies over and over again. All that wasted time had to come in useful somewhere, right?’ ‘It was a good thing to notice.’ ‘I hope so. We don’t know if it’ll go anywhere yet.’ They headed down the road towards the nearest house. It looked modern and new, and when Miyu knocked on the door the owner was a young woman in her mid-twenties. She looked surprised to see Miyu and Jack, and when Miyu asked about the owner of the overgrown lot, because, she claimed, she was hoping to buy it, the woman told them her family had only moved there five years before, and that she knew nothing about a Kubota family. The next two houses were a similar story. Miyu’s frustrations were beginning to rise, and as the third person closed the door, having told Miyu and Jack that they’d only moved to Nagano a year before from Okayama in the south, Miyu stamped her foot in anger. ‘Hey, calm down,’ Jack said. ‘We’re wasting our time. None of these houses are old enough to have been here when my parents lived here. They’re all just rich city folk who’ve moved up here for the view.’ ‘Then we need to change our approach,’ Jack said. He started walking back up the road towards her father’s old plot. Miyu stared after him a moment, then when she realised he wasn’t coming back she started to follow. Jack walked down the path to the bench and appeared to sit down. Miyu lost sight of him behind all the weeds, but when she walked down the path to the

corner she found the bench empty and Jack gone. ‘Jack? Jack? Where are you?’ She jogged over to the bench, but he had disappeared. She felt a rising panic, then heard his voice coming from below her. She looked down. Jack had climbed down the retaining wall and was now standing about five terraces down the hill, trying to talk to an old farmer who was pushing rice bushels into a machine which was filling sacks with freshly cut grains. Over the noise of the engine she couldn’t hear what Jack was saying, so she climbed down the thick stones of the wall and hurried down a little path to meet him. ‘I’m trying to buy that ground,’ Jack was saying to the bemused Japanese farmer wearing a white boiler suit and a hand towel tied around his brow to protect him against sunstroke. ‘I want buy that ground.’ ‘I no speak English,’ the man said as Miyu came up behind Jack. ‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ she told him in Japanese. This is my English boyfriend. He doesn’t speak much Japanese.’ The man shrugged and switched off the machine. ‘He’s cute,’ he answered as Jack looked confusingly from one to the other. ‘He’s handsome but he needs to calm down a bit.’ She smiled. ‘He gets excited sometimes,’ she answered. ‘What’s he saying?’ Jack asked. Miyu grinned. ‘He says you look like Justin Bieber,’ she told him. ‘Is that good or bad?’ ‘It depends.’ Turning back to the farmer, she said, ‘I’m sorry to bother you. We were just trying to find out what happened to the owner of that plot up there.’ ‘Kubota-san?’

‘You know him?’ The man shrugged. ‘Did. A little. Kept himself to himself mostly, but we talked from time to time. Terrible what happened to him.’ Miyu felt that familiar tug of an answer. She took a deep breath before she said, ‘What happened to him?’ ‘You’re not a reporter, are you?’ Miyu shook her head. ‘No. I’m … I’m … his daughter.’ ‘Saori? You’ve grown up, I can say.’ At the hope in the man’s voice, Miyu felt that familiar urge to cry. ‘No, not Saori. I’m Miyu.’ ‘Miyu?’ The man looked confused. ‘I didn’t know he had two daughters.’ ‘I can’t explain. It’s … complicated.’ The man nodded. ‘It sounds it.’ ‘Can you tell me what happened to him?’ The farmer looked pained to tell her, as if this was some big wind-up that would come back to haunt him. He pulled the towel from his head and used it to wipe sweat off his brow. ‘Look, I don’t want to get in trouble here,’ the farmer said. ‘I don’t know who you are or why you’re here, but Kubota only had one kid that I ever knew of. If you want to talk to him, she brings him back every Thursday around sunset and they sit up there for a while. I don’t know where they live now and it’s none of my business. Don’t tell him I told you.’ ‘I won’t.’ ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.’ ‘Just one last thing.’ ‘What?’ ‘You said something happened to him. What happened?’ The farmer glanced around as if expecting someone to be listening in, but Jack, unable to follow the

conversation, had wandered off and sat down by the end of the terrace with his back to them. The other fields were empty. ‘The car accident,’ he said. ‘You didn’t know about that? You don’t know much about your supposed father, do you?’ Miyu wiped away a tear. ‘I didn’t even know he was my father until a little over a week ago.’ The suspicion in the farmer’s eyes faded, replaced by pity. ‘I didn’t know that, I’m sorry. Look, it’s none of my business what happened to the Kubotas, but they definitely have my sympathy. They lost everything.’ ‘Who owns that plot now?’ ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I bought it off the family because I know how much Kubota-san liked that view. They sold the rest of his land off to property developers, but they gave me a good price for that one, just so they had somewhere they could come back to from time to time. For the first few years I farmed it, but it didn’t seem right seeing them sitting up there while the damn frogs were going crazy behind them. Five years ago I just let it go fallow and it’s been the same ever since.’ ‘And they come every Thursday?’ ‘Religiously. I don’t know that they’ve missed a day in years.’ Miyu nodded. ‘Thank you so much, Mr…’ ‘Matsumoto. I considered Kubota-san a friend, once,’ he said. ‘We weren’t that close, but he was a nice guy. If I were you I’d let it go, though. You don’t need to see him like he is now, and her … well. The years have been hard for her, let’s put it that way.’ ‘Mayumi?’ Matsumoto frowned. ‘Who’s Mayumi?’ Miyu started. ‘My … my mother?’

‘Kubota’s wife is Yoshiko. I never heard of a Mayumi.’ ‘Oh.’ Miyu took an involuntary step backwards, and the conversation ended. Matsumoto bid her goodbye and started up his machine again. Miyu stumbled back across the dry rice field to where Jack had stood up to wait for her. He frowned as she reached him. ‘Are you all right?’ She shook her head. ‘I think I need to go back to the hotel,’ she said.

26

JACK

told him what she knew over dinner in a M iyu Japanese-style restaurant near Nagano station. It took her a while to get the story clear because she seemed confused and was stumbling over her English, but at last Jack felt like he understood. Her father had always said her mother’s name was Mayumi, but now it seemed that her mother’s name was Yoshiko. So who was Mayumi? The whole situation was confusing, but Jack felt rather pleased he’d cracked the deal with the wheelchair even before the old farmer had confirmed it. But he wasn’t pleased in a smug way, but in a satisfied way that made him feel like he wasn’t completely useless to Miyu after all. A year ago he’d have gloated to his mates in the pub about such a success, but now all he felt was a quiet pleasure that he had helped her. Perhaps I’m growing up after all. At the same time, the strange things he felt when he looked at Miyu made him feel uncomfortable. As the son of a famous actor, he’d often been able to take his pick of girls with no more than a little name dropping, followed, if

necessary, by a little charm that slid easily off his good looks. Picking up girls had never been a case of if but of when, and part of the reason he had gotten into trouble was that it was almost too easy at times. Single girls, girls out looking for a good time, nice girls who wanted a boyfriend, they were too easy. The challenges were the girlfriends of bad-boys, married women, women with families and kids, women old enough to think twice about taking him to bed, because it was the thinking twice that made it into the kind of challenge that he thrived on. Miyu was a whole different proposition altogether. She should have been his meat and drink, a girl with issues and a drinking problem who was sleeping in the same room as him at night. The challenge was that while she no longer outright hated him, she harboured a deep distrust and a sense of disrespect, helped by the playful immaturity that so many other women found attractive. She was serious, and he had picked up from numerous subtleties in the way she dressed, moved, and acted, that sex to her wasn’t something to get excited about. Whether that was due to an abusive ex-boyfriend, something in her childhood, or something else, he didn’t know, but it was there, simmering under the surface.

BACK IN THE room after dinner, they sat on their respective beds, drinking cans of beer and talking quietly about their childhoods. Miyu sat with her legs tucked up to her chest, while Jack lay on his side, looking out of the window, which showed Miyu’s reflection against a backdrop of city lights and the occasional rushing train. ‘Did you spend a lot of time on movie sets?’ Miyu

asked. ‘With your parents, I mean?’ He shook his head. ‘Not as much as you’d think. When I was very young they would take me, but while I was in primary school I had a live-in nanny, and then I was sent to boarding school from the age of twelve.’ ‘A nanny?’ Miyu smiled. ‘What, like Mary Poppins?’ ‘Her name was Mildred Cole. I used to call her Cold Mildew.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Mildew is like mould. Like on something that’s gone bad.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘Not to her face, of course. She was a real dragon, but she didn’t really care what I did too much, unless I damaged something. I wasn’t a bad kid, I just used to watch a lot of TV.’ ‘Was it just you and her?’ ‘No. We always had other house servants. Some lived with us and others just came in to clean or cook. My dad used to employ young foreign girls as maids, because they were easy on the eye. Mum used to complain, but he was hardly ever there. I thought they were great.’ ‘Why?’ He smiled. ‘Why do you think? Son of a famous actor, some twenty-year-old Polish girl trying to support her family … like shooting fish in a barrel.’ ‘Like…?’ ‘Yeah, well. Let’s just say that I didn’t have to try very hard if I liked one of them.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘What about you? Did you ever have a lot of boyfriends?’ He thought he saw her reflection tense. He wondered if he was running his mouth a bit, but he felt almost like

he was trying to repel her. She deserved better than him. He’d drunk a couple of beers and it seemed like a really good idea to make sure she didn’t like him. ‘I had a couple,’ she said. ‘At school. You know, I was busy taking care of my father, and it wasn’t something I had much time for between school work and looking after the house.’ ‘Did you rub them up the wrong way too?’ ‘The what?’ He smiled. ‘Were you aggressive and confrontational with them? Is that why you ended up single?’ ‘I buried them in the garden,’ she growled. ‘Except for one. I chopped him up and fed him to my father’s fish, except he poisoned them and they all died.’ ‘I guess I’d better sleep with the light on,’ Jack said. ‘In a separate room would be better,’ she said. ‘A shame they’re fully booked. We’re stuck with each other.’ ‘A nightmare,’ he agreed. They were both quiet for a couple of minutes. Jack stared out of the window as a train rushed past, beginning to slow as it came into the station. ‘What’s the plan for tomorrow?’ he asked. She sighed. ‘We keep looking for information. That farmer, Matsumoto-san, said they came every Thursday, but today is Tuesday. I can’t relax until I’ve been up there to see them, so we have to stay busy.’ ‘Doing what?’ ‘We can ring around the hospitals and hospices in the area, see if my father’s a patient at one. Then we can spend some more time trying to find out which school my sister went to. We have to keep looking for leads just in case they don’t show up.’ ‘Can I ask you a question?’ Jack asked. ‘A serious one? And can you promise not to cut my throat or cut my

hands off or something?’ He rolled over to look at her. She met his gaze for long seconds. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Why are you doing this?’ ‘What do you mean?’ Miyu glared at him. ‘I have to find them,’ she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘My real father owns my house and I need information from him to deal with the will.’ ‘That’s lawyer stuff,’ Jack said. ‘You don’t need to do any of that. You can put it all in the hands of your lawyer and have him deal with it. If he can’t get in contact with your real father in a certain length of time, then the rights will probably revert to you and you can keep everything. No, what I meant was, why do you want to find them? After all, they gave you away.’ Miyu watched him for a few seconds as if letting his long speech sink in. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. ‘I mean, what if they don’t want you? What if they sent you away because they didn’t want a daughter? Wouldn’t it be better to just remember the man who cared for you as your father and forget about the others?’ Miyu shook her head. ‘No, no. Takahiro will always be my father. The one I call my father. My real father, Naoshi, is just a name on a piece of paper. But my mother … I remember her. I remember her smiling face. I remember her being with us in the house. She left for a reason … and I want to know what it was.’ ‘So who are Mayumi and Yoshiko?’ ‘That’s what I need to find out.’ He nodded. He could see from the determination in her eyes how important this was for her, and suddenly he realised he had found the reason he had been sent to Japan. The college was just a façade. If there was some divine force controlling his actions, it had brought him

here. ‘I’m not going to be much use to you,’ he said slowly, holding her gaze, ‘but if I can help you I will. Even if it’s as just a shoulder to cry on.’ ‘A shoulder to…’ ‘And I don’t want anything in return. Well, except a small loan.’ He grinned. ‘But, when this is over, I’ll go back to Tokyo and I’ll take what punishment is waiting for me and I’d do whatever I have to do. If they send me back to England, then so be it. Whatever happens though, I’ll pay you back every yen. But until then, I’ll help you every way I can.’ She smiled. ‘Thanks, Jack. I appreciate it. I wish you’d speak a little slower, though.’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘I understand. It’s okay.’ ‘We’ll figure it out,’ he said. ‘We’ll find out what happened to you. I only hope it doesn’t upset you too much.’ The smile dropped from her face. ‘Yeah, I hope so too.’

27

MIYU

was able to pick up a phonebook at the local She bookstore, but after ringing the first ten hospices listed in the long-term medical care section and having no luck, she was starting to fear for her sanity as well as her phone bill. Aware that it might take her a while, she told Jack to just go out and entertain himself for the morning, but after half an hour she wanted to give up anyway. Jack had gone out to look around, but he had no phone so there was no way to contact him. Sick of the hostel room, Miyu decided to get some air and walk around the Nagano station area while she cleared her head. There was a Starbucks not far from the station so she sat down with a notebook and tried to plan their next move, but her pen just hovered uselessly over the paper and she couldn’t think of anything that might help. She was completely preoccupied with trying to find her parents tomorrow night at the old plot on the hill near the dinosaur park. If something was going to happen, it would happen then. She didn’t like to admit it, but without Jack around she found it much easier to concentrate, even if she was

unable to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. There had to be an answer just waiting for her to find it. So far they’d got nowhere, but she could sense something was about to happen. Naoshi Kubota, her real father, had been in a car accident and been left disabled. Her mother, Yoshiko or Mayumi or whatever she was calling herself, brought him back to the site of their old house once a week to reminisce. They had sold the house to pay for his medical bills and now lived somewhere else, somewhere smaller, she assumed. They had given her away because it was too difficult to look after them both… Yet they had kept Saori. It made no sense. Why pass one daughter off on an uncle but not the other? And if that’s all it was, why the great secret? Why not a phone call once a week, a visit during school holidays? She had always assumed her mother had left because of something that had happened with her father. Now it seemed increasingly likely that her mother had not wanted her. So why the laughing, smiling face in her memories? Miyu wanted to scream.

SHE WENT BACK to the hostel to look for Jack, but there was no sign of him so she wandered the streets for a while, eventually finding her way up the hill to Zenkoji temple, Nagano’s showpiece attraction. Large and imposing, as she entered under the huge rafters and was confronted by a wooden deity that people were queuing up to rub in places where they had ills, Miyu stopped long enough to rub it once on the forehead and once over the heart.

Had her parents ever come here and done the same? Had her mother rubbed a hand over her womb, wishing Miyu had never filled it? She felt like crying. As she walked down the hill towards the station, she resisted the urge to buy a beer from a vending machine on a street corner, and instead went into a little café and bought a cream and banana crepe. It made her feel like a pig, but the sweetness did the trick. By the time she left the café and headed on down towards the station she felt a lot better. Wandering through a department store to kill time, she picked through racks of clothes she couldn’t afford, aware that her finances were closing in around her like pincers, cutting off her ability to breathe. She looked at watches that cost the same as a small house, rings that she would likely never see on her fingers. She found an unexpected interest in the crockery section, only too aware of how old and out of date her father’s crockery was, but let the temptation to buy random bowls and plates pass. Eventually she found herself in an electronics section, but as she was walking past a wall of flatscreen TVs, she turned to look and stopped dead. Jack’s face beamed out at her from all of them, part of a current NHK news report. The segment was short and over in a few seconds, but the message across the bottom of the screen was fixed in her mind. The son of a famous British actor had disappeared and was wanted by the police. He was being urged to turn himself in to the nearest police station. Like a hammer blow to the heart, Miyu found herself gasping for breath as she backed away, until the TVs— now showing the highlights of a baseball game—were

out of sight. She hadn’t realised until now that she liked him being around, but if his disappearance was deemed important enough to make the national news then it would only be a matter of time before he was spotted and taken into custody. She couldn’t imagine he had done anything serious, but even so he would likely find himself on a plane out of Japan, and then she would never see him again. Would that be so bad? He wasn’t good for her; probably wasn’t good for anyone. Getting hooked up with Jack could only cause her heartache further down the line. He was immature, he had no sense of moral obligation … he was fun to be around. He cheered her up. She didn’t want him to leave. But where was he? Perhaps he’d already been taken in by the police, or maybe he’d just got bored of being with her and handed himself in? She felt her heart begin to race. She hurried to the escalator and took it two steps at a time, almost knocking the shopping bags out of an old lady’s hand. As she reached the bottom and spun around the pillar on to the next one going down, she flashed the now-irate woman a smile of apology.

THE HOSTEL ROOM was still empty with no sign that Jack had returned. Miyu sat on her bed for a while, then moved to the desk looking out of the window at the train tracks, before finally sitting down on Jack’s bed. He had left a can of beer in the little fridge in the corner of the room, so she plucked it open and slowly sipped it as she waited.

It was no good, he had gone. It was close to three in the afternoon when she decided she had better go and see the police. If they had him in custody, he could be trying to communicate with them. If she could translate maybe she could sort the problem out and get him released before they put him on a Shinkansen back to Ueno, a Skyliner to Narita, and then the first JAL Airlines flight to London Heathrow. Her fingers were hovering above the door handle when it turned beneath her. Alarmed, she jumped back as the door swung open and a shaven-headed man in sunglasses stepped into the room. The man was wearing khaki trousers and a dark pink casual shirt with the top two buttons undone to reveal a thin navy blue neck scarf tied in a single knot and tilted at an angle. ‘Um, excuse me,’ she started in Japanese, just as the man lifted a hand and flicked the sunglasses off. ‘I’m back.’ ‘Jack? Jack, is that you?’ He grinned. ‘I figured I ought to put them off the scent a bit by blending in with the locals. I sat around the station for a while and studied what the high school kids were wearing since I’m only eighteen months out of it myself.’ ‘But … pink?’ ‘It’s popular. And if the police are looking for me, they’ll be looking for a Westerner in Western clothes with a mop of Western hair. I’ve heard people say that Westerners think all Japanese look the same. Well, maybe it’s vice versa.’ Miyu smiled, but the word that she had picked out which meant so much was “if”. If the police were looking for him. That meant he hadn’t seen any of the news

reports. His sudden style change had just been a coincidence. She opened her mouth to tell him, then closed it again. What if he felt guilty that his family were looking for him and decided to leave anyway? She would be all alone again. She didn’t think she could handle that right now. ‘You all right?’ he asked. ‘You look a little pale.’ He plucked the beer out of her hand and held it up. ‘You didn’t save me much,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ He grinned. ‘No worries.’ She looked up at him, and suddenly she couldn’t resist. She felt like years had melted off her, taking the cynical, prematurely adult woman away and replacing it with a fourteen-year-old kid without a trouble in the world. She flung her arms around Jack’s neck and pulled him forward. He didn’t resist as she kissed him. His lips felt full and warm, slightly moist. She squeezed her eyes shut as his own arms slipped around behind her back, and she wished the moment would never end. It was Jack that pulled away first. ‘Wow, that was nice, but I think we should take it a little slower, don’t you?’ As she blushed, he added, ‘And anyway, I have something to tell you.’ ‘What?’ ‘I saw a girl,’ he said. Miyu felt a sudden, undeniable flash of jealousy, but then Jack added, ‘I saw a girl wearing that uniform.’

28

JACK

M iyu stared at him. The residue of her surprise kiss still lingered, and he wondered what it all meant. All he could think about was how pretty she looked even though it was obvious she’d made little effort to take care of herself and had recently been crying. She was like a fine rainbow shining through a dark cloud, her beauty indestructible. ‘Well?’ ‘Huh?’ She punched him in the stomach. His breath seemed to rush from his body and he doubled over, wheezing, gasping for air. For a moment he felt empty like a deflated balloon, then as a first trickle of air began to fill up his tortured lungs, he looked up into her concerned face. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m a little drunk. I didn’t mean to hit you so hard. Sorry, Jack!’ He forced a grin. ‘It’s … okay.’ ‘The uniform?’ ‘Oh, yeah.’ She helped him to sit down on the bed. His passion

had left him and all he wanted to do was lie down and stare out of the window, but Miyu was looming over him, eyes desperate and lovely. ‘I figured you’d need a bit of time,’ he said. ‘I saw some picture of a bunch of monkeys sitting in a bath and I thought it would be interesting to go and have a look. I’d just had my hair cut and figured if I was spending your money I might as well go crazy.’ He grinned. She didn’t. ‘But I got on the wrong train. You know, easy to do and all that. By the time I realised I was going in the wrong direction, I’d gone about ten stops. I got off in somewhere called Ueda. I had another hour to wait for the next train, so I went to see this castle which was actually just a piece of shit gatehouse in front of a park, but while I was wandering around there I spotted this kid in that uniform your sister was wearing.’ ‘Are you sure it was the right one?’ ‘After all the time I’ve spent looking at that damn photograph I couldn’t get it wrong. It had the right crest and everything.’ Miyu ran to the desk and pulled a map of Nagano prefecture out of the rubble of her father’s mementoes. She laid it flat on the bed beside Jack and ran a finger over the train lines and highways. ‘There,’ she said, pointing at a pair of kanji characters that Jack couldn’t read. ‘We passed it on the Shinkansen on the way up. It’s not that far.’ ‘It took about thirty minutes on the regular train.’ ‘She might have been going to a technical school. It’s pretty common to go to schools that are across town.’ ‘In England we go to whichever one is nearest.’ He shrugged. ‘Unless you’re a rich kid like me. In that case you do what you want.’ Miyu’s smile dropped for a moment as if she was

remembering something. Jack was about to ask her when she said, ‘I can look on the Internet. Give me a minute.’ And she bounced away to her bed, rolling on her side away from him as she looked up Ueda’s schools on her phone. Jack stared at her, at the curve of her shoulders, the beige, flawless skin of her arms, and wondered what would happen if she found her sister, and found her mother, and found her father. Would she forget about him after he disappeared either to prison or back to England, leaving him at the back of her mind as a simple afterthought to fill a few brief seconds in a bus queue or while she waited in line at the supermarket? Why did he even care? What did it matter if she remembered him or not? He’d get bored with her, go off with someone else, go home anyway. He always did. But as he stared at her, he wished she would turn over and look at him one more time. She was quiet for a few minutes. He gave up staring at her and rolled over, looking up at the white ceiling above them. A thousand scenarios played out up there, everything from them becoming a couple to him walking out of the room right now into the nearest police box where he would write down his name and tell them he was wanted in Tokyo for smashing up a girl’s face with a barstool. ‘Jack,’ Miyu said. He looked across as she turned over, his heart giving a little leap of joy. Those beautiful eyes were bright with excitement. ‘I found it.’ She came over and sat down on the edge of his bed, holding out her iPhone. The picture on the screen was of a nondescript school building with a label over the top that he couldn’t read.

‘Ueda Commercial High School,’ she said. ‘That’s the one. Saori must have studied business there. Jack, we can find her, I know it.’ She reached down and put a hand on his arm, and he couldn’t stop himself. He pulled her down on top of him, kissing her strongly as her arms slipped behind his neck. He rolled over until he was on top of her, and he felt the urge to give himself over to the passion, to let whatever wanted to happen just happen. He felt a desire unlike any he had felt in his life, but there was something wrong. It had always been like this. With every girl he had been with they had reached a point where they gave in to him, gave themselves up. He went back to their house or their car or simply a quiet place and then he took what he wanted. The first time was always the best, but while he had hung around some of the women for a while, the sex had always come with increasingly less satisfying returns. When the sex was at the front of everything, once you claimed it, the rewards became less and less until you moved on to the next conquest. He didn’t want Miyu to be a conquest. He liked her, and he wanted to like her first. ‘No,’ he said, pushing away from her, perhaps more roughly than he had planned. ‘I’m not … I’m not ready.’ She glared at him. Her top was undone and her hair fanned out around her head like a halo. ‘Jack? What do you mean?’ ‘Not like this. You’re happy because you’ve found your sister. That’s all. You’re making a mistake.’ ‘I don’t understand. Don’t you like me?’ He reached out for something, and the only thing was a small lamp on the bedside table. He tried to throw it but

the cord was in the wall and it jerked and fell on to the ground. ‘It’s because I like you that I can’t. Won’t. Whatever.’ She climbed to her feet and went back to her own bed. ‘You’ve … humiliated me.’ ‘No, I’ve saved you from making a stupid mistake.’ ‘I need a beer.’ He shook his head. ‘No, you need to sleep. Because in the morning we’re going to find your sister, and then in the afternoon we’re going to find your mother, and when all this is said and done if you still like me then, I’ll let you think about what you want to do. But until then…’ Miyu’s huge eyes stared at him and for a moment he felt like he had broken her heart. Then she gave a slow nod and climbed into the bed, pulling the covers up over her as she turned away from him. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Please switch out the light.’ There was a switch on the wall between their beds. As he pressed it, plunging the room into darkness, she added, ‘You throw like a girl. It was a good job that lamp was still plugged in or it would have been even more embarrassing.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘You’re welcome.’ ‘Goodnight.’ ‘Be quiet, I’m trying to sleep.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Good.’ A pause. Then Miyu added, ‘Thanks, Jack.’ ‘No problem.’ ‘Shut up, I’m trying to sleep.’ ‘Okay.’ He almost felt her smile. ‘Goodnight.’ He lay back in the darkness, listening to her breathing slowly lengthen as the last couple of trains thundered

into the station and wondered what was happening to him, what was happening to them.

29

MIYU

a busy schedule the next day was good for H aving Miyu because she didn’t really want to talk about what had happened the night before. She had got excited, and it was to Jack’s credit that he’d put her off, even if the thought of her jumping on him like some drunk slut filled her with self-loathing. At the time she had wanted to have sex with him and would have forgiven him for letting it happen, but now she felt like a stupid child and was torn between respecting him for resisting and hating him for not wanting her. It was easiest just to ignore him. ‘You don’t have to come,’ she said, as they headed for the train station to get a train to Ueda. ‘You can just stay here and visit the temple or something.’ ‘I want to come,’ he said. ‘Yeah, but I don’t need you, and you won’t understand anything.’ Immediately she felt bad for her words, but it was too late, they were already out. He shrugged. ‘I’ll find a coffee shop and wait.’ She nodded, her cheeks reddening. ‘Okay.’ Ueda Commercial High School was a couple of stops

past the main Ueda train station, in a quiet suburb with few shops other than a couple of convenience stores. Jack promised to meet her back at the station in a couple of hours and then went off to wander around the streets as she headed for the school. She still felt bad for what she had said to him, but the awkwardness seemed to be reciprocated, so a little time apart would probably do them some good. She headed up a slight hill towards the school, soon visible through the houses, a bland grey institutionallooking building rising four storeys high. Classes were in session when she arrived. She walked into the car park and entered through a glass door into an area of student foot lockers, beyond which was the school office, with a reception desk to admit visitors. Miyu took her shoes off and put on a pair of slippers from the box by the entrance, then tapped on the window to attract the attention of the old woman inside. ‘I’d like to talk to the principal or vice principal if possible,’ she said. The woman peered at a schedule on the wall, then made a quick phone call. She looked back at Miyu. ‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘Kubota Miyu. I’d like to talk to someone about a former student called Kubota Saori. My sister.’ ‘Okay, hang on a minute.’ Miyu waited for what felt like hours as the woman made another phone call. She shifted from foot to foot, wondering whether this would end up like her attempts to get information out of the city hall, being blocked by confidentiality. Damn it, Saori was her sister; she had a right to speak to her. ‘Second floor,’ the woman said. ‘The third door on the

left. The principal is out but the vice principal will see you.’ ‘Thank you,’ she answered, then hurried up the nearest set of stairs, almost slipping in her eagerness. The vice principal was a kindly man in his late fifties who introduced himself as Sanosaka. He bid Miyu to sit down on a plush leather sofa, then a secretary appeared with two cups of green tea and a small plate of snacks. Before Miyu could say anything, he took a book from a shelf and laid it down on the table. It was a graduation yearbook from 2011. ‘I’ve only been at this school for a year,’ he said. ‘I had a look on the computer though, and is this your sister?’ He opened the book on to a page of pen pics and pointed at a girl halfway down the page. Miyu gasped. It was a cropped version of the same picture her mother had sent, with Saori offering a faint smile out of a pretty face framed by straight black hair. ‘That’s her,’ she said. Sanosaka nodded. ‘I’m guessing just from the nature of this visit that you and your sister haven’t been in contact in some time?’ ‘We grew up apart,’ Miyu said. ‘She grew up with our mother, and I grew up with our father.’ It was only partly a lie, and the truth would require some investigation. She hoped she could get some information out of Sanosaka before he checked up on her story. ‘It happens,’ he said, giving a sigh. ‘More and more these days, unfortunately.’ ‘Do you know how I can contact her?’ He went back over to her desk and came back with a printed sheet of paper. ‘She went to university in Nagoya,’ he said. ‘She was studying economics. I’m afraid that once students graduate we no longer have any records

for them. I can give you the university’s number to try.’ ‘Can you give me the phone number of her mother?’ Sanosaka shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. We keep emergency contact information for all our current students, but only until they graduate.’ He smiled. ‘Call the university. I’m sure they’ll be able to help you.’ Miyu nodded. ‘Can I give you my number anyway, just in case something else comes up?’ Sanosaka nodded again. ‘Sure.’ He seemed like a warm enough person and willing to help, but there was only so much he could do. Miyu felt like the great pass-the-parcel game of her life had just lost another wrapper, only to reveal the same wrapper underneath. So be it. If they had to go to Nagoya to find her sister, they would. When did I start thinking in terms of “us”, she wondered. It was always me and now it’s us? What’s happening to me? She stood up and gave Sanosaka a smart bow. The vice principal wished her luck and saw her down to the main entrance. ‘I can’t imagine how it must feel for you to have grown up without your sister,’ he said to her as she pulled on her shoes. ‘The world just isn’t what it used to be anymore.’ Miyu gave a halfhearted shrug. ‘To be honest, until a few weeks ago I’d never really considered the possibility of ever finding her,’ she said. ‘I just knew she was gone and expected her to stay gone. Funny how things work out, isn’t it?’

JACK WAS NOWHERE to be found when she got back to the station. She bought herself a bottle of green tea from a vending machine and sat down to wait, brooding over her conversation with Mr. Sanosaka. So, her sister definitely existed. Why couldn’t things just be a little easier, though? Why couldn’t her sister have gone to university in Nagano, or just got a job? Miyu knew that when she rang the university in Nagoya she’d hit the same wall of confidentiality. They would have to get on the train again and head down there, go through the same rigmarole of trying to pick a needle out of a haystack. She wondered if it wouldn’t be better to just give up. Perhaps the elusiveness of her family was a sign, an indication that digging up the past was going to cause nothing but heartache. ‘I can’t give up,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘I can’t.’ If she gave up, what else was there? The man she considered her real father was dead. She had no one else. She couldn’t rely on Jack, even though she wanted to—she hadn’t yet known him a month. Just like everyone else in her life, he could disappear as quickly as smoke. ‘Hey.’ She jumped as a hand fell on her shoulder. She looked up to see Jack standing over her. In addition to the sunglasses he now wore a blue Japan Rail baseball cap. ‘Where have you been?’ ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was in the waiting room. I know we planned to meet outside but I … got nervous.’ ‘Why?’

‘While you went up to the school I found a little café a couple of streets away. There was a TV on over the bar and my face popped up on it. I almost fell out of my seat. I’m afraid the old guy running the café might have made the connection but I didn’t stick around to find out.’ ‘What do you mean?’ He blushed. ‘I kind of did a runner.’ ‘A what?’ ‘I bailed.’ ‘Jack, make sense!’ ‘I ran away without paying.’ He held up a hand. ‘Yeah, I know, I’m sorry. I panicked. If it makes you feel better, I sneaked back twenty minutes later and pushed a five hundred yen coin under the door. See? I’m mending my ways.’ Miyu looked up at him. From the look in his wide blue eyes she couldn’t be sure if he was telling the truth or not. There was a hint of regret as well as a hint of roguishness in there too. ‘Oh, Jack. And the hat?’ ‘I felt like I needed to level up the disguise a bit.’ She couldn’t help but laugh. There was nothing so absurd as a young foreigner wearing a Japan Rail baseball cap, the haunt of retired rice farmers and crusty old men everywhere. ‘Please take that stupid thing off. I really don’t want the whole of Japan to stare at us when we take the train back to Nagano.’ ‘Do I have to? I kind of like it.’ Miyu shrugged. ‘Okay. Keep it on. But please sit at least five places away from me and don’t even acknowledge me until we’re safely back at the hostel.’ ‘Do you really mean that?’ She grinned and aimed a weak punch at his ankle.

‘One hundred percent. If you’re going to dress like an old man you should act like one. No sitting next to young girls. You can just stare at me from a distance.’

30

JACK

M iyu was subdued the whole way back to Nagano. As promised, Jack sat a few seats away from her on the little local train, but on the opposite side so he could try to catch her eye. He was feeling a little guilty for what had happened, but it had been unavoidable. He had panicked. He wasn’t even sure he’d done anything wrong, because he’d just gone into the little café and before he could order anything a little old man in an apron had brought him a cup of hot oolong tea, muttered something Jack couldn’t understand, and then gone back behind a counter. The TV was on a corner shelf, and the man had taken up a spot on a barstool, occasionally glancing over at Jack as if waiting for an order. The tea might have been a free service, but when Jack’s face appeared on the screen he had jumped up and run out without stopping to check. Anything might be possible. The old man might have shrugged and gone to remove the tea cup, or he could have called in a squad of police. Jack didn’t want to think about it. He just stared at Miyu, hoping she would look

up at him. For the whole thirty minutes back to Nagano though, she found something more interesting on the backs of her hands. ‘What happened?’ he asked her, when they were back at the hostel. ‘Did you find out anything about your sister?’ She nodded and sat down on the edge of the bed to tell him what she had found learned. When she was done, he asked, ‘So she’s in Nagoya? At least you know which university.’ She gave a weak smile. ‘I was hoping she’d be in Nagano.’ ‘Look on the bright side. You’ve got a lead. It’s better than nothing.’ ‘I’ll call them tomorrow. One thing at a time. Today we have to go back up to the dinosaur park and see if my mother and father show up at that old plot. If I can just speak to them I can find out what happened to me.’ Jack didn’t feel the same confidence, but he muttered his agreement anyway. Miyu wanted to take a shower, so Jack sat at the desk, carefully looking through the mementoes Miyu had brought with her. There wasn’t much he could understand other than the photographs, and because he had never met any member of her family he had no idea who he was looking at. There were dozens of them, everything from black and white pictures of children to shots of Miyu dressed in a school uniform next to a man in a suit he assumed was her father. Or her uncle. Jack shook his head. It was no wonder she was screwed up, finding out something like that. He found the big pile of newspapers to be more interesting, even though he couldn’t read anything other than the date written in the top corner and the odd advert

with an English slogan. He was more interested in looking through the pictures, some in colour, some in black and white, of skiers and skaters and politicians and old men with placards and car crashes and… He turned back to the picture of the crash. The text of course was meaningless to him, but wasn’t Miyu’s theory that her real father had been injured in some kind of traffic accident? He looked at the headline. It was only a small piece tucked away in bottom corner on page five. There were a couple of large Japanese kanji characters in the headline, one with a number one beside it. As Jack stared at it, he began to feel a little sad. Perhaps that was a clue. As Miyu turned off the shower, he put it to one side, intending to mention it to her. Five minutes later though, when she stepped out of the shower, dressed in a pretty frock that he had never seen before, he forgot what he had been thinking to talk to her about, and found himself staring openmouthed. ‘I wanted to look nice for my parents,’ she said, giving him what he could only describe as a curtsey. The frock ended just above her knees. She had beautiful legs, smooth skin and toned calves. The frock fit her perfectly, and the jeans-and-t-shirt-clad outcast was banished. She had even brushed her hair and applied a tasteful layer of makeup. ‘I… I…’ he started to say, then gave up. ‘You look hot,’ he said at last. ‘Like, really hot.’ She gave him the sweetest smile a girl could give, so sugary he could almost feel his blood churning with diabetic lust. ‘Make sure you scrub the carpet after you clean your entrails off the floor,’ she said, her smile never wavering. As she went to the desk to collect her bag, he had to ask: ‘Where on earth did you learn the word “entrails”?’

She turned back towards him and flashed another smile. ‘European History class, of course. A bloodthirsty bunch, your ancestors. Now, let’s get going. You can wear that hat if you like. You’ll fit in perfectly up among those rice fields. You’ll be getting invites to sake nights and games of shogi before you know it.’

NOTHING SEEMED to have changed up by the old plot of land since they had first come. It hadn’t rained, and the crushed plants in the wheel ruts had gone brown. There was no one there when they arrived, and even the rice farmers had gone home for the day. The hillside stood silent as the shadows lengthened over the smell of harvested rice, only the occasional call of a bird or the rumble of a Shinkansen passing in the valley below breaking into it. Miyu sat beside Jack on the bench, looking out over the wide valley of Nagano City, with the highlands rising to the east and the north, the wide Shinano River meandering through the suburbs like a flattened, greybrown snake. ‘Do you think they’ll come?’ Miyu asked for the tenth time as her hand rested in his, gently kneading his fingers like a stress ball. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, and continued to stare out at the valley, wanting to support her but also wanting to enjoy the moment. As the sun fell behind the hills at their backs on the eastern side of the city valley, the shadows gradually crept down the harvested rice terraces as if it was descending a set of wide steps. Jack watched with fascination as it would creep and creep and then

suddenly be gone over the edge of a terrace, then begin slowly creeping across the next one below. Miyu jumped up at the sound of a car, but it passed on, heading for the dinosaur park, late picnickers perhaps, bringing with them a basket of food to eat while the lights of the city blinked on below them. Jack could see the first ones now, lights appearing at the foot of the terraced hill as the shadows reached the first houses. Further to the north where the hills were taller, the lights were already coming on. It would be quite a sight when darkness had completely fallen and the whole valley was a mass of glittering lights. The voices were almost upon them before Jack realised anyone was approaching. He felt Miyu’s fingers tense over his, and then he looked up, over the heads of the nearest weeds to see the stooped frame of an old woman moving along the path down the side of the plot of land. To Jack she looked like any other middle-aged Japanese woman; dark, shoulder-length hair flecked with grey, a face whose lines were hidden by shadows, a thin mouth that mumbled quiet words at the person sitting in the wheelchair in front of her, hidden by the weeds. He had expected Miyu to leap up and let fly with a torrent of words as was her general reaction to anything, but her hand was still in his, her body rigid with nerves as the wheelchair came into view at the corner of the plot, reversed a few inches, then turned towards them. The occupant was the shell of a man who might once have been living. His eyes stared straight ahead and even as they fell across Jack and Miyu and then passed on in an instant, there was no motion to suggest he might have seen them. The skin of his face seemed to have slumped as if his scalp had trouble holding it up, leaving him jowly and gaunt, his hair almost gone. Perhaps he

had once been attractive, Jack thought, but now there was little left other than a body, the man inside long departed. The woman, her concentration on pushing the wheelchair in front of her, didn’t notice them until she had taken a few steps towards the bench. Then she looked up and muttered a grunt of surprise, followed by one of the few Japanese words that Jack could remember: ‘Sumimasen.’ Excuse me. She had mistaken them for a young couple who had stumbled on a viewing place. Miyu had been receiving pictures of her sister of course, but there was no reason why her mother might recognise her after sixteen years. And then Miyu stood up and spoke. At first her words were quiet and brief. The woman’s mouth fell open and her brow furrowed. Jack couldn’t understand the words, but he guessed from the way she immediately began to back up that Miyu had surprised her. ‘Matte!’ Miyu shouted, another word Jack understood. Wait. The girl started forward towards the wheelchair, leaving Jack behind. The woman’s openmouthed expression of surprise turned to one of anger. A flood of words came rushing out, and Miyu took a step backwards as the woman stepped around the wheelchair and advanced, eyes hard. ‘Look, just calm down,’ Jack said, but his words were lost as Miyu and the woman started shouting into each other’s faces. He stepped forward to push them apart, but before he made it the woman shoved Miyu hard in the chest. It was bizarre to see an angry little lady shoving a girl

a full head taller than her, but as Miyu stumbled, her foot caught on a root pushing up out of the ground. One moment she was standing on the terrace, the next she had fallen over the edge. ‘Miyu!’ Jack reached the edge and looked down. She was lying on her back several feet below, her eyes closed. He swung his legs over the edge of the terrace and jumped down beside her. ‘Are you all right? Miyu? Are you okay?’ He patted the side of her face as a low groan came from her throat. Her eyelids flickered and then her eyes opened. She grimaced as she looked up at him. ‘Jack…’ ‘You’re going to be okay, Miyu. Are you hurt anywhere?’ She rolled over on to her side. Outwardly, at least, she looked fine. ‘I think I twisted my ankle. Are they still there?’ Jack turned to look back up at the edge of the terrace above them. He could just see the top of the bench, but the woman and the man in the wheelchair were gone. He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

31

MIYU

lanced up through her leg. If her ankle wasn’t P ain broken it certainly felt like it was, but from a fall of ten feet she’d been lucky not to have been seriously hurt. She had landed on the grassy verge of the rice field, her fall broken by a cushioning pile of discarded rice stems, before she had rolled forward onto the hard soil of the harvested, dried out plot. Her hip ached and so did her shoulder. A couple of beads of blood stood out on her bare arm where dry stalks poking out of the earth had scraped her. The hem of her dress had been torn, and now a loop of it hung loose. She looked up at the edge of the plot above her and saw Jack was right. They had gone already. Her lip trembled. She felt Jack’s hand caressing hers, but she didn’t know if she’d ever felt so alone. The man she had always known as her father was dead, and the man who had given his DNA to her had now disappeared too. And the woman … the woman. ‘Oka-san…’

The words the woman had spat at her before shoving her from the edge of the terrace would haunt her forever. I don’t want you. I threw you away once and I’ll throw you away a thousand more times. Don’t ever come back. ‘Jack,’ she whispered, trying to keep her voice from breaking, afraid that if she spoke any louder she would start to sob and be unable to stop. ‘Jack, please. Let’s go.’ ‘Can you walk?’ ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ Jack helped her to stand, but she couldn’t put any weight on her foot. With one arm over his shoulder, they hobbled to the edge of the rice field, to a path leading downhill to the road below the terraces. It was probably fifty metres; it looked impossibly far. ‘It hurts.’ ‘I’ll go and find someone. Maybe there’s a taxi I can call.’ ‘Okay.’ He sat her down on the edge of the rice field and hurried off down the path, disappearing from sight when he reached the road. Miyu put her head in her hands and wept, tears coming quickly. She didn’t know what she had expected, but not this. Maybe they would have been surprised, maybe a little angry, but for her mother to assault her … part of her wished she’d ducked her head and let the hard soil of the rice field do its work. If she could walk more than a few feet without needing to sit down, perhaps she could find something sharp to slit her wrists, or some kind of rope to hang herself from the nearest overladen apple tree, like a poisoned, unwanted fruit. Her father’s eyes had been unseeing. Her mother, though … her mother had spat fire and tried to send Miyu

on her way to hell. She wanted to believe that the spiteful little woman was someone else—that she couldn’t possibly be the laughing, smiling face from Miyu’s memories—but her words hadn’t lied. And neither had her face. Miyu had looked into those battered, aging features, and behind the sheen of misery and hardship, she had seen an older version of herself. She could have hoped it was a second wife or a care worker turned lover, but her mother’s looks had betrayed her identity. Her mother’s name was Yoshiko Kubota. Whoever Mayumi was, it was someone else. Someone was calling for her. Jack was standing at the bottom of the path with a Japanese man beside him. Jack pointed up at her and the man disappeared from sight. A moment later the grumble of an engine started up and then a little kei-truck appeared, trundling up the path with Jack following it on foot. As the little white van with the open back came to a stop just short of her, she recognised the man they had talked to a couple of nights ago, Mr. Matsumoto, the rice farmer. How Jack had found him or explained what had happened was anyone’s guess, but the old farmer’s face was creased with worry. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked her as he got out. ‘That foreign friend of yours was waving and shouting. I had no idea what he was talking about until he started faking an injury.’ Matsumoto smiled. ‘Anyone would think he came from an acting family.’ Miyu was about to say he did, but then thought it best to keep quiet in case the man had seen Jack on the news. ‘Thanks,’ she said. Guessing that Jack had been unable to explain any details, she added, ‘I got a little too

close to the edge and I slipped. I’m sorry.’ ‘You young folk need to be a little more careful,’ Matsumoto said, as he undid a couple of bolts on the side of the truck and then lowered the side wall. ‘Young people like you are always in a hurry. The world’s not going anywhere. Take your time.’ She nodded. ‘I’ll try.’ Apparently satisfied, he said, ‘Get your friend to help me put you in the front next to me. He can sit in the back. Do you need a doctor?’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll be fine with a bit of rest. If you could take us back to Shinonoi station that would be wonderful.’ ‘Are you sure? You should get yourself checked out, you know. Did you hit your head?’ ‘No. I think I’ve twisted my ankle, but if it still hurts in the morning I’ll go to a hospital and get it looked at.’ She told Jack to climb up into the back, and then Matsumoto bolted up the side. Rather than look alarmed, the idea of a ride in the back of a rickety old farmer’s truck seemed to appeal to Jack. ‘We’re only going to the station,’ she reassured him as he sat down with his back against the rear of the cab and his hands gripping the sides of the truck. As Matsumoto climbed in beside her, he said, ‘Nice young man you’ve got there. Anyone willing to make a fool of himself to help out a woman in distress is all right in my book. Wouldn’t have happened when I was a boy. Too much pride, we had.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘Foreigner, isn’t he?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, get him to take you back with him. This country is stifling for young people what with all the crazy work

hours they expect you to do. Honestly, and they wonder why the population’s decreasing. Spend all day at work and all you’ve got energy for in the evening is a bit of TV.’ Miyu nodded. She glanced in the wing mirror and saw Jack’s fingers gripping the side wall of the truck. ‘Maybe I will,’ she said. Convinced, perhaps, by her non-committal answer, the old farmer’s conversation began to turn towards more mundane matters, the suburbs that were swallowing up the rice paddies, the city governor’s wasteful spending on unnecessary road repairs, the hooligans with their loud music who had moved in a couple of doors down. A few minutes later they arrived at the station and he helped Miyu to climb out. ‘Thank you so much,’ Miyu said. ‘Good luck to the pair of you,’ Matsumoto answered. ‘Be careful where you step in the future, young lady. It’s a good thing you had this young man to help you this time.’ He patted Jack on the shoulder and gave a dry laugh. Jack helped her up the steps to the station as the farmer drove off. They only had a few minutes to wait for the next train, but without Matsumoto’s inane banter to fill the empty space, Miyu felt that same loneliness pressing to get a foothold. As they sat down on a bench beside the platform, she gripped Jack’s hand in hers and leaned on his shoulder. His other hand slipped around her, pulling her close. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,’ he said. She glanced up. She had forgotten that Jack couldn’t understand what her mother had said. She had got lost in the moment, but he had been lost in translation. She opened her mouth to speak but the words seemed so heavy on her tongue. ‘Later,’ she said.

‘Any time is fine,’ he said, rubbing her shoulder.

HALF AN HOUR later she was hobbling up the stairs to their room with Jack supporting her on one side. The moment she lay down on the bed she felt a huge surge of relief. The dull ache in her ankle immediately lifted as she took the weight off it, receding to a low buzz of pain that she was sure a couple of beers would ease. She tried to tell Jack to go and get some from the vending machine out in the corridor but he was busy slipping her socks off her feet. ‘Ouch,’ he said. ‘Looks painful.’ A big purple bruise encircled the bulge of her ankle bone. It would be a miracle if she could put weight on it at all tomorrow. ‘I’ll get the beers,’ he said, going out. As soon as she was alone she started crying, almost as if Jack leaving the room had pressed a button in her heart that let the misery pour out. Her mother’s hateful words were like stones battering her, the woman’s cold eyes like sharp sticks. What had happened? What had gone wrong? Her memories were of a kind, loving woman with an easy smile and gentle hands. There had been nothing left of that woman in the shell that had pushed her off the side of the terrace. ‘Miyu!’ She had rolled onto her side, burying her face in the pillow. Suddenly Jack’s body was pressing against her, holding her close. She felt his lips caress her cheek and his soft words in her ear, soothing her, wanting to take her pain away. She didn’t struggle as he wrapped his arms around her chest, cocooning her against his body.

She had always felt so strong, so independent. Even when she had been taking a punter’s money she had been the one in charge, the one making the choices. All that confidence was slipping away from her now, like she was a train losing its grip on the tracks with a dead driver at the controls. It was only a matter of time before it derailed completely and toppled over. How long could she keep going? How long could she last before everything just broke her? ‘Don’t say a single word,’ he said. ‘There’s another day for everything. Just close your eyes and rest. I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere.’ ‘Jack…’ ‘I’ll be right here.’ ‘Don’t leave me.’ ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ She closed her eyes, concentrating on the warmth of his body, trying to let the pain trickle out. At some point she realised she had started crying again, because her body was trembling, but Jack was there, unmoving, holding her against him. ‘She told me she threw me away,’ she whispered. ‘She told me she threw me away.’

32

MIYU

ankle hurt like hell when she woke up. She H er stretched it and a bolt of pain lanced up her leg. She sat up and bent her leg up under her so she could rub it, but with every touch she winced and hissed with pain. She needed to see a doctor, or at the very least spend the day resting. Doctors in Japan were overly cautious. One would probably put her ankle in plaster and condemn her to crutches for a week or more, but she could probably get by with just a support bandage. Perhaps she could get Jack to go and buy her one. She looked around, and found him sitting on his bed, the old newspapers she had brought with her spread out around him. In his hand he was holding her iPhone, frowning as he peered closely at the screen. ‘What are you doing?’ He looked up as if he had only just noticed her. His eyes widened in surprise and he dropped her phone like a thief caught stealing. ‘I was looking for clues,’ he said. She sat up. ‘What do you mean?’ He held up one of the newspapers. ‘Did you ever read

these?’ ‘Of course I did. ‘I thought they might have something useful in them, but then I realised they were all just reports of the Winter Olympics from 1998. My father was always a big fan of sport. He must have collected them as souvenirs.’ Jack shook his head. ‘No, he didn’t. I think you need to look again.’ He tossed one across to her. ‘Down there in the bottom corner. The picture of the smashed up car. I’ve been sitting here the last three hours translating words on your phone.’ His voice went quiet as he added, ‘That woman up on the hill wasn’t your mother, Miyu.’ Heat filled Miyu’s cheeks as if she’d been slapped. ‘What?’ ‘And she didn’t leave your father. Your father was married to another woman, and she’s … dead.’ Miyu stared at the tiny news article. How had she missed it? A car overturning on the Joshin Expressway, a few kilometres south of Nagano. A female passenger had died, while an unnamed man was in a critical condition. The woman was named as Kubota Mayumi, of Shinonoi, Nagano. She had glanced through all the papers, looking for something to stand out. With every one containing a pullout on the Winter Olympics, she assumed she had found the connection. A tiny article concerning a regulation traffic accident had passed under her gaze. She felt the blood draining out of her face. ‘Pass me the others. Does it say anything else?’ He tossed them over. ‘I looked. There are no other pictures.’ She began to flick through them page by page, her hands shaking. There, on page seven of one, hidden in a

little side bar, an update—the as-yet unnamed man was still in a critical condition. The next had an update on the cause—blamed on reckless driving—and the following one finally a name of the driver: Kubota Naoshi. ‘That woman by the rice field … she had to be my mother,’ Miyu gasped. ‘She had the face I remembered. Just not … the kindness.’ Jack pointed at the messy piles of pictures and documents strewn about the desk. ‘Go through them again,’ he said. ‘Let’s get organised. Did your father never mention an aunt? That your mother might have had a sister?’ ‘Never.’ ‘Well, I think she did. I think she had a sister, and when your mother left, that sister and your mother became one and the same.’ ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘I’m so sorry, Miyu, but I think your mother is dead. For whatever reason your father never told you. He told you she ran away, yet she died in a car crash which left Naoshi, your real father, a vegetable. What was she doing in that car? Your father must have known. Why wouldn’t he just tell you?’ Miyu stared at her hands. ‘It would have shamed him,’ she said quietly. ‘We Japanese are proud. What if that was true? What if my mother had an affair with my uncle?’ She began rifling through the photos, putting some in one pile, pushing others aside. Finally, she found what she was looking for, a selection of old university photographs from the late ‘80s. There were pictures of her father at parties with his friends, on trips around Tokyo, on university excursions. There were casual photos of people goofing off, and more formal group

photos. And the more she looked at them, the more one of his friends looked a lot less like a friend and a lot more like a brother. They wore different hair, different clothes, their expressions were different … but there was a curve to the jawline, something about the size of the nose, the look in the eyes. She was staring at a group photo taken on a beach in Okinawa when Jack leaned over her shoulder and pointed at two girls near the back of the group. ‘They look a little similar, don’t they? They’d look really similar, except one of them isn’t smiling.’ Miyu held the grainy photo closer to her eyes, studying the faces. They were hard to make out in any detail, but Jack was right. It was still a guess, but they could have been sisters, a pair of country girls to go with a pair of city boys. ‘I don’t believe it,’ Miyu said. ‘We need to find out for sure,’ Jack said. ‘If we can find someone who knew them, perhaps we can finally get to the truth of all this. At the moment we’re still just guessing.’ ‘But it’s an … academic guess.’ Jack grinned. He patted her on the leg. ‘Educated. Educated guess.’ ‘Yes.’ She slapped the desktop in frustration. ‘Why am I not seeing all these clues, Jack?’ ‘Because you’re searching for one answer, when what we need to do is piece together a puzzle. We need to look for once piece at a time.’ She frowned. ‘I think I understand.’ He grinned again. She found herself staring at him a little too long and purposefully looked away. What would she do if he left her? She didn’t think she could handle

this on her own. ‘The crash happened in 1998,’ Miyu said. ‘That was sixteen years ago. Naoshi Kubota must have had a job. Someone who knew him might know what it was, and there might be someone who was close to him. Japanese men tend to drink a lot after work. They say a lot of stuff when they’ve got a few beers in them.’ From the way Jack looked at her, Miyu wondered if she’d said too much, that he had guessed what she had done for money before her father died. She shrugged and looked away. ‘Are you okay with all this?’ Jack asked suddenly. ‘With what?’ ‘That newspaper tells you that your mother is dead. We came here looking for her, but all we’ve found is that she’s been dead for sixteen years.’ Miyu stared at the newspaper. ‘My mother … dead.’ She shook her head. ‘No, no. It might not be her. I mean, who knows what’s going on here?’ ‘Would you prefer it if it was that bitch up on the hill? She tried to murder you, remember?’ ‘My mother can’t be dead … I came here to find her.’ She felt like she was cracking up. In the space of twenty-four hours she had found her mother and lost her mother and found her again … and lost her? She could no longer be sure what was going on, and through it all, her real father had watched, an unseeing man with a lolling smile in a wheelchair. Jack seemed to sense she had reached the verge of tears again, because suddenly he was beside her, one arm around her shoulders, another pressing against her hair, holding her face against his chest. She didn’t know what was going on between them, whether they were on the cusp of a relationship or simply the tape stopping

each other from falling apart, but she wanted him near her. She needed him near her. ‘Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it,’ he said. ‘Together. And remember, it’s a jigsaw. Piece by piece.’ ‘Matsumoto,’ she said. ‘What?’ ‘The old farmer. He said he had considered my real father a friend once. We need to go back and see him. I need to find out where my father worked.’ ‘I think he’ll be getting bored of us by now, won’t he?’ She smiled. ‘I don’t know. He seemed pretty friendly. He liked you.’ Jack laughed. ‘What’s not to like?’ ‘Well, that baseball cap for a start…’ ‘I saw him looking at it enviously.’ ‘That’s probably because he was at least sixty-five. He probably has the whole collection.’ ‘Then we have to go and see him again. I really want to take a look at that. I’m rich. Maybe I can make an offer to buy it—’ Before she could stop herself she had twisted her head and pulled Jack down on top of her. He didn’t resist but eased his body alongside hers. She slipped her arms around his neck, pulling him close, letting his eyes linger on her a moment before his lips pressed against hers. She had wondered what might have happened before if they hadn’t stopped. Now neither of them wanted to stop, and within moments Miyu had pulled off her clothes, and Jack’s hard body was pressed against hers. His fingers and tongue were all over her, searching, exploring, and she gripped him hard, her fingers leaving red circles on his skin. When he entered her it was like electricity. For a few seconds she even forgot about the pain surging through

her ankle as they shifted about on the bed. She held on to the back of his head, holding him down on her, letting him go as far inside as he could. He groaned as he worked his body deeper, his lips never leaving hers, and under his breath she could hear him mumbling her name. As he finished, bringing her to orgasm at the same time, she fell back into the pillows of her bed, feeling the material sticking to the dampness across her back. Unlike the men who she’d been with for money, who had either rolled straight away or leered down at her with a satisfied smirk on their ugly faces, Jack held her close, his hands still stroking her, his lips kissing her ear, the side of her face, her neck. She didn’t know how long they lay like that, but she didn’t move until the sweat on her back had gone cold and begun to dry. ‘Um … Jack?’ He shhed her. ‘Don’t say anything,’ he said. ‘Okay.’ ‘I told you not to say anything.’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘Miyu!’ She grinned, and pulled the duvet over the top of them both. They lay there without speaking, enjoying the warmth of each other’s bodies. Miyu nestled her head against Jack’s chest. She wished she could stay like that forever, but she knew that sooner or later she would have to get up, hobble over to her shoes and get back out on the road. It would be so easy to leave it all behind and go back to Tokyo, get a job in a convenience store and rent a one room apartment out at the end of a long commute. Jack might even stay with her if she was lucky, and they might even forge some sort of life.

But she couldn’t. The answers were out there, and they were within reach. And even though everyone around her seemed to be dead or on the verge of leaving, she couldn’t stop. She needed to know.

33

JACK

A fter they finally untangled themselves, Miyu sent Jack out to find her an ankle brace. They had seen a large drug store a couple of streets from the station, and he left her behind to shower and get dressed while he went outside, sunglasses on and hat pulled down over his brow. He walked almost as if dazed, barely able to comprehend what had just happened. They’d had sex, something that had always been possible as they drew closer, but it had been unlike any sex he had ever experienced. Sex had always been disconnected for him, something that once finished made him feel more of a man, capable of going straight back out on the street and looking for more. He had always been a man’s man, doing whatever he liked to the girl, being a little rough with her, degrading her, not really caring about her feelings as long as he got off. He’d looked down at a dozen girls as he came and felt only the satisfaction that came with conquest, with dominance. Miyu had been something else. He had never felt

anything like it before and it made him feel great, but uncomfortable at the same time. A thousand insecurities began to seep in, that he was too young for any kind of commitment, that an international relationship was a really bad idea, that she came with too much baggage for it to work, and that it would be easiest for him to just walk away before it got any more serious. He passed a police box and found himself taking his hat off as he looked into the window, almost daring them to recognise him. The one man inside was doing paperwork at a desk though, and didn’t even look up, even when Jack lifted his hand in a cheeky wave. Across the street, he found himself walking down a back alley into the warren of streets that made up the station area’s main bar district. It was nothing compared to what he had seen in Tokyo, but Nagano still had its fair share of neon lights, signboards displaying girls with bouffant haircuts and caked in makeup, and large glowing signs with nothing but numbers lit up, beyond which tantalizing staircases waited. His only money was a few small banknotes Miyu had given him, but he had his looks, and his charm. He turned a corner and in front of him saw three tall Japanese girls rather reminiscent of those on the signboards, their hair ballooning out around him, dyed a variety of lighter browns and blondes, huge flickering eyelashes turning towards him like little hands beckoning him forward. They were standing outside another of those sets of steps leading up to some form of expensive entertainment. Even here in Nagano, it seemed the entertainment district was always still breathing. Most of the signs were dark, but perhaps there was always some stumbling fool out with a wallet full of cash and looking

for a good time. The memory of the sex with Miyu was still fresh in his mind, and as the first girl turned and smiled at him from a face that could have adorned a magazine, he felt a stirring in his pants. His body naturally took on a confident swagger, and he recognised from their body language that here was an opportunity that they didn’t get often, that he might have wandered into view right at the moment one or more of them were feeling generous. He stopped in front of them and smiled. One of them looked him up and down, her lips pursed. A second tilted her head slightly towards the set of stairs. Jack opened his mouth to speak, and the only word that he really found he wanted to say stepped down from his tongue like a long absent friend getting off a plane. ‘Drug store?’ The two girls nearest to him looked surprised. Their body language immediately became defensive, their smiles dropping away. The third gave a little laugh, pointed up the street, and said, ‘Next road, left.’ ‘Thank you.’ As he walked off to the sound of cat calls behind him, he gave a little smile and thought of Miyu. Her ankle looked like a bruised apple. He was in pretty good shape and she didn’t weigh much, but it would suck if he had to carry her around all day. He’d be too tired later if she wanted a repeat performance of this morning. I’ll try, he thought. If I get to see that smile again I’ll do anything I can.

THEY TOOK a taxi back to Shinonoi rather than the train, and although Miyu handed over a note far larger than

Jack felt she could afford, she just smiled and said it was worth it. Matsumoto seemed pleased to see them, and it turned out he had a wife who was happy to fuss around Miyu like an old nanny. She made Miyu take off the brace Jack had bought and then wrapped her ankle with an ice pack while Jack sat on the floor beside a low table and drank little cups of green tea. Old Mr. Matsumoto sat opposite, engaging him in illegible conversation that Jack just nodded and muttered ‘yes’ to whenever he felt it appropriate. From the way Matsumoto would occasionally glance at Miyu, he wondered if he was agreeing to marriage, and to take Matsumoto and his wife back to England as live-in relationship councillors. Finally, when Miyu was wrapped up to a condition that Mrs. Matsumoto deemed appropriate, they got down to business. To Jack this involved drinking a lot more green tea and eating several Japanese rice cakes he learned were called mochi, while listening to the others talk. He got the impression from Miyu’s easy tone that most of what was said was simple pleasantries, rather than any in-depth information. After an hour or so, Mrs Matsumoto went to the kitchen to prepare some lunch, while Mr. Matsumoto went off to the bathroom. While they were gone, Miyu filled him in. ‘He said they were friends but they were more … how would you say? Over-the-fence neighbours. They weren’t particularly close, he said, but rumours go around.’ ‘What rumours?’ ‘Mostly that they weren’t happy. Yoshiko was a sullen woman, and Naoshi was outgoing, always wanting to go out drinking with his friends. They dealt with their problems by pretending they didn’t exist. He worked

during the day and came home late at night, after she had gone to bed. She stayed at home and cleaned the house, then cooked him dinner, which she left for him to find when he got home.’ ‘Sounds like a crap marriage.’ ‘That’s what often happens in Japan. That’s why the divorce statistics are so low. People don’t get divorced because it loses face. They just let their marriage turn into one of convenience. Shared finances, but not shared lives.’ He shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t appeal to me.’ ‘It’s common for the man to get transferred within his company,’ Miyu said. ‘It’s not unusual for him to be moved to an office in a different city, after which he’ll take up in a company apartment and only visit home once a month.’ ‘Even if they have kids?’ ‘They stay with the mother. The father either sends money, or his salary goes straight into the wife’s account.’ She nodded towards the kitchen. Mrs Matsumoto said that Yoshiko had often joked about Naoshi being transferred. It sounds like they were hoping for it.’ Jack looked down. ‘That’s sad, don’t you think?’ Miyu nodded. ‘They said that Yoshiko had a sister. I think that would be my real mother. She came up to visit often. The Matsumotos never really spoke to her and don’t even remember her name, but they gathered she was helping Yoshiko through the difficulties in their marriage.’ ‘And yet she was in a car with your real father? That’s a little suspicious, isn’t it?’ ‘Naoshi was taking her back to the train station when the car skidded on ice and collided with an oncoming car.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s exactly what they told me.

These hill roads can be treacherous when the air cools down on winter evenings, Mrs Matsumoto said. She had planned to catch an evening Shinkansen back to Tokyo.’ ‘And yet, Naoshi was your real father, according to the will?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘It’s too much of a coincidence. Perhaps they were running away.’ ‘I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. They told me that after the accident, Yoshiko had no choice but to look after her husband. The woman had never been jovial, they said, and after the crash she rarely smiled at all. They had to sell the house to pay for his care, but even though they come every Thursday, she never speaks to anyone. Mrs Matsumoto said she stands up there for almost exactly ten minutes, as if she’s timing it. She looks out at the view, but she never looks down. Mrs. Matsumoto said that once she called up to her, but Yoshiko just turned the wheelchair away and left.’ Mr. Matsumoto returned. Jack raised an eyebrow as the old man took two large bottles of beer out of a crate and put them on the table. Beside them he put a bottle of clear sake, and then he took the crate back out into the hall, returning with four small glasses. ‘It’s, um, before lunchtime,’ Jack said. Miyu smiled. ‘I don’t think we’re going to have much choice,’ she said. ‘Just enjoy it.’ ‘Oh, I will.’ He smiled as he patted her on the ankle, making her wince. ‘Should be a useful painkiller, at any rate.’ ‘That’s what I’m hoping.’

IT WAS mid-afternoon when they stumbled back to their hostel room, Jack supporting a laughing, drunken Miyu, barely able to stand up himself. He opened the door and half carried her inside. In a moment they were undressing each other. He had told himself throughout the whole of the taxi ride back—which Mr. Matsumoto had kindly paid for—that he wouldn’t touch her, that he would wait a while to make sure of his feelings and not give in to the lust that so often controlled him. Yet here they were, already in each other’s arms almost before the door closed, and this time Jack went after her body with a need that was barely less than a beast within him battling to get out. As Miyu responded to his every touch, he let himself fall under its control as it threw her around the bedroom like a tornado caught in a cage. They both finished quickly again, and Jack pulled her close, pressing her laughing, gasping face against his neck, letting her warmth and her sweat entwine with his, trying not to say the words that kept snapping at the back of his teeth, trying to find a way out. ‘Miyu … I … Miyu … I…’ He sounded like a stuck CD. He felt a sharp pain in his side and glanced down to see her pinching him. ‘Either say it or don’t,’ she said. ‘I love you.’ ‘Shut up.’ ‘No.’ ‘Please, shut up.’ ‘I love you. I’ve never loved anyone before, not even my parents. I love myself, of course, but that’s different.’ ‘Jack…’ ‘And what about you? Do you love me?’ ‘Jack…’

‘Say it or don’t. Jesus Christ. Hurry up before I fall asleep.’ ‘I’m not a good person, Jack. You don’t want to be around me.’ ‘I’m not a good person either. I’ve screwed over more people than I can count. I’ve cheated and lied and stolen. I’ve hurt people and I’ve done more things I regret than I can remember. I got sent out here because I got my head kicked in so often my parents thought I might end up dead in a river. You cannot talk about what is good and what isn’t, Miyu. I don’t care what you think makes you bad. All I’ve ever seen is a perfect, beautiful human trying to do the best she can. If you think that makes you bad, then the whole world is fucked.’ Jack.’ ‘What?’ ‘I love you…’ She started crying. Jack closed his mouth before any more drunken ramblings could slip out, and pulled her so tight against him he thought he might crush her. Bad things were outside the door, but inside the cheap little hostel room they were safe in the comfort of each other’s arms, together alone. He closed his eyes, and felt sleep drifting over him. With her face pressed against his chest, he heard Miyu’s breathing slowly begin to lengthen.

34

MIYU

she said around a bite of the sausage ‘A ichi Electric,’ muffin, one hand pressing against her temple beside her left eye as if she could force the hangover back inside. Right now it was beating a rhythm against the inside of her forehead. ‘What’s that?’ Jack groaned, lying on the bed across from her. He looked even worse than she did. Between them, they had gotten through all of Mr. Matsumoto’s sake and then a quarter of his whiskey. Matsumoto had laughed with them the whole afternoon, while even Mrs Matsumoto had gotten into the fun with a couple of beers. Miyu wondered if the two old people had enjoyed anything like the marathon of drunken sex that she and Jack had, and realised that she really didn’t want to think about it. Not until she had finished the greasy breakfast Jack had bought for her. ‘It’s a national electrical component company,’ she said. ‘They have factories and offices all over Japan. My father was an employee.’ ‘There’s an office in Nagano?’

‘Yes, it’s a short bus ride from here.’ ‘Is your ankle feeling better?’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. My whole body feels numb except for my head, which feels like someone’s hit it with a hammer.’ He reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘I think it was the same hammer they hit me with.’ She smiled. ‘Did you mean what you said last night?’ He reached out and took her hands in his, pulling her forward until their faces were just inches apart. ‘You’re the first person I’ve ever met who made me want to be something other than the arrogant little shit I’ve always been. There have been a lot of times where I’ve looked in the mirror and hated what I saw, but I never knew it was even possible to be different. I still don’t know, but I’ll try.’ She kissed him. He let it linger for a few seconds, then pulled away. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Much as I’d like to spend the day in here, we have work to do.’ Staring into his eyes, she found it difficult to believe he was the same man he had been just days before. Almost as if he had unzipped a suit he had been wearing, the real Jack had climbed out of his cocoon. The grub had become a beautiful butterfly. She started to laugh. ‘What?’ ‘Nothing.’

‘THANK you for agreeing to see me.’ The Nagano Area Manager of Aichi Electric, Mr. Nishizawa, indicated a chair on the other side of his desk.

‘Please sit down.’ She gave him a brief overview of her story. She left out the parts about her mother’s suspected affair, but otherwise she was far more honest than she had been with other people. She told him she had been made a ward of her uncle, and that she didn’t know why. The more information she offered, the more sympathetic his expression became. ‘I’ve been here twenty years,’ he told her when she was done. ‘I remember Kubota. He was a good worker, very hard-working, very dedicated to his job. I was just a junior manager then, but we weren’t in the same department, so our paths rarely crossed.’ She must have looked despondent, because he added: ‘But I was familiar with some of the guys he used to go out with after work. His best friend was a man called Sakai.’ ‘Is he still here?’ Nishizawa shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. He retired last year.’ ‘Oh.’ Miyu felt that familiar sense of failure, that no matter how close she would always be one step away from finding the truth. ‘But I have an address for him. We’re good friends. We play golf sometimes.’ He smiled. ‘Sakai can’t hit an iron shot to save his life.’

MIYU HELD up an address as she hurried across the car park to where Jack had been waiting on a bench under a line of trees near the factory’s main entrance. ‘I got a lead,’ she said. ‘At last.’ The dice had rolled favorably for them this time. Sakai

lived just a short walk from the company. As Miyu and Jack reached his house, the door opened and a rotund man of around sixty-five stepped out onto the porch steps. His arms were folded and he wore a look of dissatisfaction, bushy eyebrows curved into a deep frown. Nishizawa had obviously rung ahead, because Sakai looked like he was expecting them, and wasn’t too pleased about it. Miyu glanced at Jack, who gave a slight grimace. Without a smile, Mr. Sakai led them into a small living room with a kotatsu, a Japanese heated table, already set up in the centre of the room ready for the coming winter. He appeared to live alone, so they sat and waited while he brought a pot of green tea and set down three cups. A television was playing in the corner with the volume turned down low. ‘This is a surprise,’ he said, after serving them the tea and putting a bowl of rice crackers into the middle of the table. ‘Kubota was a good friend of mine, but since the accident … what can I say? The Kubota I knew is no longer there. It’s terribly unfortunate.’ ‘Did he ever talk to you?’ Miyu asked, after she had given him a brief explanation for their visit, leaving out the same parts she had for Nishizawa. ‘I mean, before the accident. About … what was going on?’ ‘What was going on? What do you mean?’ ‘Didn’t Mr. Nishizawa tell you who I am?’ Sakai scoffed. ‘That you think you’re Kubota’s daughter?’ He chuckled. ‘Oh yes. Completely ridiculous. He had Saori, of course, and he doted on her. She was his life. That I know of, they never even talked about another child.’ ‘It said in my father’s—my uncle’s—will that Naoshi was my real father. I was put under the guardianship of

my uncle when I was three.’ ‘First I’ve ever heard of it.’ ‘The lawyers’ document didn’t lie.’ Sakai scoffed again. ‘So sure about that, are you? Because lawyers never lie, do they?’ ‘Why would they?’ ‘All I know is that Kubota was a good man. He had a few marriage problems, but who didn’t? And Yoshiko-san stuck by him. All people have ever done is run her down, but patience of a saint, she has. Proved herself a good wife and neither of them need you coming back here, spreading your lies.’ ‘They’re not lies! Please, he’s my father. I just want to know what happened.’ ‘He’s not your damn father!’ As Sakai punched the tabletop, making the cups jump and slosh tea over the wood surface, Jack started to rise. Miyu grabbed his wrist and pulled him back down beside her. ‘You stay away from him, you hear me?’ Sakai said. ‘He’s not well. He’s never been well, and Yoshiko’s worried about him.’ ‘So you know where he is?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Tell me!’ Sakai shook his head. ‘I told you, he doesn’t need this. Take your little gaijin boyfriend back to Tokyo and get on with your life. Leave Kubota and Yoshiko-san in peace.’ Miyu tensed. Sakai knew where her father was. All he had to do was tell her an address and she could be there within the hour. She could force Yoshiko to talk to her, and finally find out the truth. It was that easy, and this man was standing in the way. ‘Please tell me.’

Sakai started to rise. ‘I think it’s time you left.’ ‘Please!’ He turned towards the door, but then paused. His brow furrowed, and he turned to look at Jack. Miyu glanced back at the television, and saw Jack’s face showing on a news report. She reached out and grabbed Jack’s hand, pulling him behind her. ‘Thanks for your time,’ she said to Sakai as she pulled Jack out the door. As Sakai closed it on them she saw him reaching into his pocket for a phone. ‘We need to get out of here,’ she said. ‘I think he’s going to call the police.’ ‘What did he say? It didn’t sound good.’ Miyu, her ankle feeling a little better, hobbled along beside Jack until they were a couple of streets away from Sakai’s house. They sat down on a wooden bench in a small park, and she told him as best she could what Sakai had said. ‘Seriously? What a dick.’ ‘Yeah, and now the police will know you’re in Nagano.’ ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘I’ll take whatever’s coming to me.’ He took hold of one of her hands. ‘But you said he knew where your father lives?’ She shrugged. ‘It sounded like it. He talked about them as if he sees them often.’ ‘Then we have to go back.’ ‘Why?’ Jack smiled. ‘We have to steal his phone.’ She slapped his wrist. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. This isn’t some sort of game, Jack. You’re in enough trouble as it is.’ ‘Exactly. A little more won’t make much difference. I’m already screwed as soon as they catch up with me.’

Before she could stop him, he jumped up and jogged off, back towards Sakai’s house. She shouted after him and tried to follow, but her ankle was hurting and after hobbling a few feet she gave up. Exasperated, she sat back down on the bench. Her heart was thundering. What if Sakai had really called the police? Jack would get there just as they arrived, and they’d arrest him. They’d take him away. They’d take him away from her. Tears filled her eyes. She was searching for so much that was out of reach, but the one thing that she had found among all the things she had not, she was failing to hold on to. It had been stupid to let her feelings get the better of her, but she’d been unable to help it. She had known from the start that sooner or later he would leave, despite what she might want, and now that eventuality was closer than ever. And there was nothing she could do about it except sit on the bench, try to ignore the throbbing of her sprained ankle, and hope that Jack returned.

35

JACK

jogged back towards Sakai’s house, he let the A s old he Jack take over. He was doing his best to be a good guy for Miyu, to be well behaved and sensible, but sometimes people just made him angry. How dare that old bastard treat Miyu like that? She was trying to find her father. She had nothing else left in the world, and all she wanted do was find out about her real parents. She had a right to know. It was hardly a crime, but if the old man got in his way … Jack would find it hard not to commit one. For the first time in a few days he thought of the barstool. In some ways it was what had gotten him here, that inability to control his anger and frustration when something seemed to be getting in his way. The damage he might have caused was unforgivable, but it had brought him closer to Miyu, and for the first time in perhaps his whole life, he could see the light at the end of his own dark tunnel. Now, as Sakai’s house came in sight and he narrowed his eyes, he was turning away from that flicker of distant light, back towards the dark. The curtains were open, and there was no sign of

anyone in the living room where they had been sitting just fifteen minutes before. Sakai had seemed to live alone; there had been no sign of a wife or children, not even a dog. Jack had broken into houses before, both for fun and for revenge, once turning on the bathroom taps in the house that belonged to a guy who’d punched him in a nightclub. He guessed that what went around came around, but if you ducked out of sight it would keep on circling. A Nissan sat in the driveway. Jack went up to the front window and peered inside, seeing the telltale flashing light on the dashboard, the indication of a car alarm. He smiled. It was almost too easy. Sneaking down alongside the car, he looked for another way into the house. Down a thin alleyway he saw a small back garden with a veranda attached to the house. He was about to climb over the gate and have a look when a sliding door opened and Sakai stepped out. The old man had a cup in one hand and a newspaper in the other. He sighed as he pulled out a wooden chair and sat down, crossing one leg over the other as he opened the newspaper on his lap. Sakai had the air of a man not about to move for a while. Jack crept back to the front of the house and walked straight up to the front door, lifting a hand to feign a knock. The only house that had a direct view of Sakai’s front door was directly across the street and the driveway was currently empty, but it was better to cover his back if he could. After a few pretend knocks, he twisted the door handle and found it unlocked. Entering unbidden, Sakai’s formerly welcoming home took on a tenser atmosphere as Jack peered around a door into the living room where they had recently been

sitting. The cups they had drunk from had been removed, but the cushions they had sat on were still there, the impressions of their bodies remaining like ghosts. There was no sign of a phone. Jack walked into the room, hearing the gentle creak of floorboards under his feet. The living room opened onto a conjoined kitchen, a bar separating the living room from the cooking area. Several papers and forms were spread over it, an untidy mess of documents that Jack began to push aside, looking for a phone. A scraping sound made him duck down behind the bar, and a moment later he heard the back door opening as Sakai came into the kitchen. Jack didn’t dare breathe. If Sakai walked into the living room he would see Jack, and Jack would run, but probably not before something bad happened. He prayed Sakai stayed where he was. Sakai seemed to be making a drink, from the sound of clinking cups and glasses, and then the whoosh of a faucet being turned on and off. Jack glanced back towards the window and saw Sakai’s reflection in the glass of the wide sliding doors, moving about in the kitchen behind him. He grimaced. If he could see Sakai, Sakai could see him. All the old man had to do was look towards the front of the house and he would see the crouching foreigner reflected in the glass like a mirage imposed onto his front garden. Jack let his breath out slowly, then drew another in. He watched Sakai shuffling about, not daring to move in case it attracted Sakai’s attention. The old man opened a cupboard and then closed it, then went back to the sink and rinsed a glass under the tap. Jack began to wonder if making a bolt for it wouldn’t be the best option, then he glanced down and saw what he was looking for. The kotatsu was a squat, square table about eighteen

inches off the ground and about a metre square. It had an electrical heating element underneath, and a thick blanket was placed over the top to keep the heat in. Japanese people sat with their legs under the blanket during the cold winter months, eating and drinking off a removable tabletop that was placed on top of the blanket. Sakai’s phone was poking out from beneath a couple of folds in the blanket. Jack would have to stretch to reach it. Aware that Sakai could spot him at any time, he lowered himself to the ground and stuck out a hand. Lying flat he was less obvious in the reflection, but far less able to defend himself. There was a set of golf clubs leaning against the wall opposite the end of the bar. Jack eyed them warily as his fingers reached out. The tap shut off again. The silence rushed back in, and Jack was sure his breathing was loud enough to cause Sakai to pause in what he was doing and turn back towards the living room. In the sliding door’s reflection Jack saw Sakai facing the window as he lifted a drink to his lips. Lying on the floor, Jack’s fingers closed over Sakai’s phone, and he slid it towards him. Lying below the level of the kotatsu’s reflection, he was half out of sight. Of course, if Sakai was gazing through the glass on to the garden and the street beyond, Jack wouldn’t be noticed. Sakai took a step forward, and Jack saw a hand reach out to caress the top of a golf club. Sakai was practically on top of him. All he had to do was look down. Jack held his breath. One … two …three… Sakai sighed and turned away towards the back door. Jack looked up at the reflection and saw the back door open and the old man go outside. He gasped for air, grabbed the phone and jumped up, stuffing it into his

pocket as he dashed for the hall. He didn’t dare breathe again until he was outside at the end of the driveway. He glanced back up at the house and realised his back was soaked in sweat. But he had done it, he had got the phone Miyu needed and he had done so without causing any trouble. Sure, he’d stolen from an old man, but once they had Naoshi Kubota’s address, he’d bring the phone back. It was a loan, that was all. He started to walk away. And stopped. The old Jack bubbled to the surface and he couldn’t just leave it like that. He had to leave a mark, to let the old man know that he’d lost. He felt a surge of adrenalin and tried to control it, but he was no longer in the driver’s seat; it was Bad Jack, the guy who’d got shipped over to Japan like a crate of broken computer parts because he couldn’t stop getting into trouble. He took a couple of steps up to the car and jumped on the corner of the bonnet, making the car bounce. The alarm started to blare. Raising a single finger salute to the house, he turned and ran away down the street.

HE SAW Miyu standing up as he turned the corner and the small park appeared in front of him. As he reached her, gasping and out of breath, he pulled the phone out of his pocket and held it up like a trophy. ‘I got it,’ he gasped. ‘I got it!’ As he stood up, she slapped him hard across the face. ‘You stupid idiot. I heard the alarm. What did you do?’ Before he could answer, she slapped him again with the other hand, then cuffed him around the head with the

first as he tried to duck out of the way. The alarm had stopped after half a minute, but he hadn’t realised it could be heard this far away. Miyu’s eyes spat fire as she launched into a tirade of Japanese vitriol that he could only understand from the tone. As another hand lifted to slap him, he tripped over a tree root poking up from the ground and fell over onto the dusty earth. Miyu tried to kick him, but she seemed to have forgotten about her bad ankle and ended up sitting on the ground beside him as plumes of dust rose up around them. ‘You bastard,’ she said. ‘You stupid bastard. Jack, I love you, but you’re an idiot.’ Then she smiled. ‘But thanks.’ ‘I’ll take it back.’ ‘Of course you will.’ Leaning back against a tree, she opened Sakai’s old Samsung phone and scrolled through it. Jack watched her as she frowned down at the screen. ‘He’s old,’ she said. ‘Young people aren’t so thorough. I barely even write people’s names out to go with the numbers, but he’s got full names and addresses and everything … got it!’ She looked up, her eyes gleaming. ‘Thank you, Jack.’ She pulled her iPhone out of her pocket and took a picture of the screen of Sakai’s Samsung. Then she handed it back to Jack. ‘Return it, please,’ she said. ‘But be careful. I’ll wait here.’ As he went to stand up, she grabbed his arm. ‘Be very careful,’ she said. ‘If you have to, just throw it in a neighbour’s garden. I don’t want … I don’t want to…’ ‘What?’ She glared at him, but was unable to hide the tremble of her bottom lip. ‘Just … be careful.’

With the phone stuffed into his pocket, he headed back to Sakai’s house. As he turned the corner, though, he saw a police car parked on the drive in front of Sakai’s car. It almost made him smile; while Tokyo’s police had driven decent cars, the ones up here in Nagano drove around in little grandma cars that surely had to embarrass them. In Britain the police were respected if not liked; here they were almost comical. He couldn’t see them, but they were probably in the living room or around in the garden at the back. If he got much closer he’d be seen, but he had to get rid of the phone; it was evidence against him. Ducking back out of sight, he pulled off his shoe and took off his sock. He didn’t know how strong the Japanese police were on forensics, but wearing his sock like a glove he gave the phone a polish to remove any fingerprints, and then crept back up to the corner. He’d been pretty decent at cricket at school, and taking aim, he tossed the phone like a ball across the street to where it bounced and landed in the grass of Sakai’s front garden. It was fairly obvious, lying at the bottom of a pair of steps down from the glass doors. If the police called it from another phone they would probably hear it ringing. Satisfied, Jack put his sock and shoe back on and returned to Miyu. ‘Did he see you?’ she asked. Jack shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, then felt the lies sliding down his tongue. ‘I put it through his letterbox,’ he said. ‘He’ll probably think it fell out of his pocket when he came in or something. Don’t worry, we’re clear.’ She smiled. ‘Thanks, Jack. Come on, let’s go.’ As they headed for the nearest bus stop Jack tried to stop himself glancing back over his shoulder. The police

were back there somewhere, and if they hadn’t been on his trail before, they were now.

36

MIYU

it is,’ she said, pointing down a thin cul-de-sac ‘There at a single-storey house at the far end. ‘That’s where they live.’ She sighed. ‘Now we’re here,’ I don’t know what to do.’ Evening had fallen and the streetlights were on. The house looked so small and lonely sitting back there on its own, tiny compared to the larger, newer houses around it. It was definitely the right one—Miyu had sneaked up to the mailbox and seen Kubota written in kanji on the outside, but compared to whatever grand house must have sat on the plot on the hill, it was a pitiful downsize. A light was on in one room, igniting the curtains with an orange glow. ‘We have to try,’ Jack said. ‘I wish I could talk to them, but I can’t. I’ll be beside you the whole time though.’ ‘Thanks.’ If it was confidence he felt, she didn’t share it. All she wanted to do was turn and walk away. They had come so far and got so close … but what if Yoshiko refused to speak to them? What if she got violent again, or called the police? She couldn’t run off again, but she could

certainly get the law involved. ‘Just be nice,’ Jack said, as if reading her thoughts. ‘She pushed you off that rice terrace and that could have seriously hurt you, but try to get into her head. She was probably shocked to see you and let her anger get the better of her. When you go in there, be polite and regretful. Say you’re sorry for everything, but you really want to talk to your father.’ Miyu squeezed her eyes shut, trying to calm her pounding heart. She wasn’t sure she could say anything at all. Her tongue already felt dry and she hadn’t even knocked yet. ‘Perhaps if we took some flowers or something–’ ‘You know she’d just throw them at you.’ ‘Probably.’ ‘Or you’d throw them at her.’ Miyu smiled. ‘Maybe.’ Jack put a hand around her waist and pulled her close, kissing her on the cheek. While Miyu found Western affection a little too excessive, she appreciated the sentiment. ‘I trust you,’ he said. ‘Thanks. I don’t trust myself.’ ‘Try.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Go on, do it now. I’ll be waiting right here.’ She took a deep breath and stepped out of the shadows of the little street-side shrine they were hiding behind. She walked along the pavement, trying not to let her limp show, following the arc of the road as it wound around towards her real father’s house. She couldn’t believe she was doing this, couldn’t believe she had come this far. She felt like there were stones in her shoes but at the same time she felt like she was coming home.

There would be answers tonight, one way or another. She was still some way short of the house when the front door opened and a woman stepped out. Miyu stopped dead as the woman walked down the driveway past a parked car and turned down the road towards her. She was far too tall to be Yoshiko, and Miyu forced herself to start walking again. Perhaps this was a nurse or a social worker for her father, or a family friend. The more she thought about it, the more she realised that yes, it had to be a nurse. Her father was sick, he probably needed round-the-clock care… The streetlight above Miyu lit up the woman’s face as she passed, not giving Miyu a second glance. Miyu swallowed a gasp. Saori. Her sister. She walked on a few more feet before the urge to look back became too strong. Saori was still walking on down the street in the direction of where Jack was still hiding. Miyu stared. The resemblance was unmistakable. Saori had been a good three inches taller than her, but otherwise was an older version of Miyu. Miyu couldn’t understand why Saori hadn’t recognised her in turn, but then she remembered the way she had coloured her hair and curled it. Plus, she had seen a relatively recent picture of her sister. Unless her father had been sending photographs the other way—something she highly doubted—then Saori wouldn’t have seen her since she was a baby. She turned away from the house and started to follow. Breaking down fortress Yoshiko was a difficult challenge, whereas trying to side with her sister seemed a far easier option. She hobbled back towards Jack as fast as her

limp would allow her, even as Saori turned the corner at the end of the street and disappeared out of sight. ‘What are you doing?’ Jack hissed. ‘You can’t chicken out!’ ‘Did you see her?’ ‘Who?’ ‘That girl who just passed!’ Jack shrugged. ‘I saw a girl but I didn’t see where she came from. I was hiding.’ ‘She came out of that house. That was Saori, my sister!’ Jack turned to look in the direction the girl had gone, but of course she was already out of sight. ‘Your sister?’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes! I have to speak to her, but she’s getting away! I don’t know where she’s going and I can’t walk fast enough to catch up!’ She felt like crying all over again. She balled her fists and thumped them against a stone lantern, wincing at the pain. ‘Get on my back,’ Jack said. ‘What?’ ‘Piggyback. Come on, hurry up!’ He bent down and she wrapped her arms around his neck. As he lifted her up she felt ridiculous, but as she felt his strong body start moving, she marveled at the strength in his back and arms. He started off in a walk, then moved into a gentle trot as she bounced along on his back. ‘Wow, you’re heavy. Salad for dinner tonight, I think.’ She laughed in spite of everything. ‘Shut up! Sleep with the light on!’ ‘Only to look at you, my dear!’ ‘Just shut up and go faster!’

They turned the corner and Miyu saw Saori again, about a hundred yards ahead. The girl was walking briskly but without urgency. Miyu wondered where she was going and then a glowing sign came into sight. A 7-Eleven. As she reached it, Saori turned in towards the sign, walking across the car park. She disappeared from view again, but Miyu felt confident enough to tell Jack to let her down, and she hobbled the rest of the distance with Jack holding her hand. They waited at the corner of the car park, in the shadows below the tall sign, and looked at the convenience store with all its glowing lights and window posters set back from the main road. A line of cars was parked in front of it, and a couple of people were smoking next to the recycle bins that stood outside. ‘There she is,’ Jack said. ‘In the window.’ Saori was standing at the magazine racks that lined the front windows of the store. Her head was visible, but it was turned down, reading. ‘You get told to pay or leave in England if you do that,’ Jack said. ‘You know, just stand and read the magazines.’ ‘Everyone does it here,’ she said. ‘Some people will stand there for ages. I hope she doesn’t.’ ‘What are you going to say to her? I assume you’re going to say something.’ ‘I have no idea. She didn’t even look at me, but I felt like I was looking in a mirror.’ ‘I didn’t really get a look at her, Jack said. ‘I was watching the house.’ ‘There’s no doubt it was her,’ Miyu said. ‘Why would she be at home? Shouldn’t she be at university? It’s October. Winter term will have started.’

‘Only one way to find out. Go and talk to her.’ ‘What if she runs away?’ Jack laughed. ‘Why the hell would she do that? I can understand her mother might not want to talk to you, but what’s the worst that could happen? Tell me.’ ‘She stabs me.’ ‘With what knife?’ ‘I don’t know, but—’ ‘Do it.’ ‘I’m scared.’ Jack smiled. He lifted a hand and gave her shoulder a light squeeze. ‘I’ll be scared for you. You just relax and go over there and talk to your sister.’ ‘What if—’ ‘Go!’ Her feet felt like they were dragging through molten lead as she hobbled across the 7-Eleven car park towards the door. Her heart was beating so fast she thought it would break off its moorings and come up out of her throat. She tried to swallow but her mouth felt dry and her tongue like an old sock someone had stuffed in between her cheeks. About halfway across the car park she glanced back at Jack, only to see him wave her forward. She gritted her teeth and turned back, just as Saori pushed out of the door into the cool evening air. Miyu froze. Saori made a beeline for the corner that turned back towards her parents’ house, angling to pass Miyu on the right. She glanced at Miyu and frowned, as if wondering why Miyu had stopped in the middle of the car park, but otherwise showed no sign of recognition. She was almost past her when Saori gulped down as much courage as she could and said, ‘Saori?’

Saori stopped and turned. ‘Um, yes?’ ‘It’s … it’s … me. It’s … Miyu.’ Saori cocked her head to one side, and Miyu felt like she was looking at her doppelganger. The likeness was uncanny. If she hadn’t dyed her hair, was a couple of years older and had a respectable job… ‘Miyu? Have we met before?’ ‘Yes, we have. A long time ago.’ ‘Miyu…’ Saori clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Oh my,’ she muttered through her fingers. ‘Miyu. Miyu?’ ‘My name’s Miyu,’ Miyu said, feeling awkward and stupid but so, so pleased she hadn’t been pushed over or told to get lost. Her ankle was throbbing and she didn’t think her pride could take yet another hit. ‘You’re my sister, aren’t you?’ ‘I’m your sister.’ ‘Oh, wow. It’s so nice to finally meet you again.’ Saori smiled. Miyu couldn’t have imagined how welcome that smile would be. She felt like sinking to her knees and kissing the ground. ‘I haven’t seen you since forever. Since I was a little girl.’ ‘Since the 1998 Winter Olympics were on,’ Miyu said. ‘I think that was probably the last time. I was three. I remember you. Always smiling and happy. Just like my mother.’ ‘Aunt Mayumi.’ Saori’s smile died. ‘I’m so sorry to hear about Uncle. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’ She nodded. ‘No wonder Mother was so upset. Did you go and see her? She was frantic when she called. Told me Father had suffered a turn, that I should come back for a few days. I wondered if perhaps he had understood, if he had known that his brother had died. When I got back here he was fine, of course. The same as always.’ ‘I saw her up at their old house, on the hill.’

‘Oh, there.’ Saori rolled her eyes. ‘No wonder.’ Miyu felt the same surge of emotions that she had been struggling with ever since the man she considered her true father had died. She wanted to cry, but at the same time she wanted to hug her sister, while landing a slap on her cheek for being so blasé about everything. And Jack … she wanted to hold Jack in her arms simply because she could. Because when she did she knew everything would work out. ‘He told me she ran away and left me,’ Miyu said. ‘That she took my sister with her.’ ‘Half-sister,’ Saori said. ‘We’re half-sisters. Different mothers.’ ‘Right.’ Saori was staring at her as if they were talking about nothing more interesting than the next day in a long, hot summer. ‘You look a lot different,’ she said. ‘I know it’s dark and everything, but I really didn’t recognise you.’ ‘Why would you? We haven’t seen each other since we were tiny.’ ‘Well, the photos you sent.’ Miyu felt like someone had stabbed an ice pick into her heart. Her ankle suddenly seemed the least of her troubles as her knees began to tremble and her breath came in little gasps. She heard Jack shouting her name, but as she muttered, ‘What photos?’, the world seemed to invert on itself, the sky becoming the ground and the lights of the 7-Eleven blurring into a smear of rain-ruined paint. She grunted as something hard met with her shoulder and she stared at the dark tarmac of the car park until what seemed like a million flying ants had filled her vision and taken everything away.

37

MIYU

held out the bottle of water until Miyu could get J ack her hands to move up and close around it, then he helped her hold it to her lips. Sitting on the edge of the pavement beside them, Saori watched, her eyebrows furrowed with concern. ‘Are you all right?’ Miyu gulped. ‘I think so. I fainted.’ ‘Are you sick?’ ‘No, it’s just … this is a shock to me. What are you talking about? What photos?’ Saori smiled. ‘I know we’ve not seen each other for years, but we’ve been writing since we were in elementary school. Two or three times a year, at least. Every year or so I send you a picture of me, and you send me one of you. We’ve often planned to meet, but our schedules never worked out. Did you forget or something? Are you sure you’re not sick?’ ‘I didn’t write those letters.’ ‘What? What are you talking about?’ ‘I didn’t write them. I’ve known nothing about you since my mother supposedly disappeared in 1998. Until

my father died a couple of weeks ago and I found out he wasn’t my real father, and then found some pictures of you in his things, I knew nothing about any of this.’ ‘Oh.’ Saori had gone pale, as if she might faint too. She rubbed an eyebrow with one finger. ‘This is strange. I feel almost … betrayed.’ Jack had been sitting quietly beside Miyu, holding the bottle of water. He cleared his throat and Miyu remembered he couldn’t understand their conversation. ‘Um, Saori, this is Jack,’ she said. Saori smiled. ‘Nice to meet you, Jack,’ she said in English. Then, in Japanese, she said to Miyu, ‘He’s so cute! Is he your boyfriend? You never mentioned him in your letters. Is it a new thing?’ At the mention of the mysterious letters, Miyu’s stomach lurched and she felt dizzy all over again. ‘Kind of, yes. Just a few weeks.’ ‘Wow!’ Jack smiled. ‘Watashi wa Jack desu,’ he said. ‘Hajimemashite.’ Miyu smiled. Saori reached out and shook his hand. For everything, Miyu was grateful that Saori didn’t seem to want to push her off any rice field terraces. ‘Nice to meet you too, Jack,’ Saori said, her English pronunciation a little clunky, as if it was rarely used. ‘Thank you for looking after my sister.’ ‘No problem.’ He turned to Miyu. ‘You need a little time, I take it? I can go and take a walk if you like.’ She looked at him for a moment and opened her mouth to agree, then she shook her head. If there was anyone she wanted near her right now it was Jack. ‘Stay with me, please,’ she said. He smiled. ‘Sure. I’d be happy to. Lend me your phone so I can surf the Internet or something though,

eh?’ ‘Okay.’ She turned to Saori. ‘Is there anywhere we can go to talk for a while? I really need to ask you some questions, if that’s okay.’ Saori nodded. ‘She held up her shopping bag. ‘I came out to get milk for Mother, but if you give me half an hour I’ll take it back home and then come out again to meet you. There’s a family restaurant just up the street from here. Can I meet you there?’ Miyu nodded. ‘That would be great.’ As Saori stood up, she patted Miyu on the shoulder. ‘It’s so nice to see you again,’ she said. ‘Even though it’s been a bit weird, you know? Especially after all those excuses you made last time I was down in Tokyo, you not having a cellphone and all that. I’m pleased to see you’ve got one now.’ ‘I’ve had once since junior high,’ Miyu said. ‘I think there’s a lot we need to talk about.’ Saori seemed to sense the seriousness in Miyu’s eyes. She nodded. ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘Give me half an hour. And don’t worry, I won’t tell Mother. Not just yet.’

MIYU AND JACK took a corner booth in the restaurant and ordered a couple of beers while they waited for Saori to return. Miyu could barely sit still, fidgeting in the seat while Jack sat beside her, an easy smile on his face, occasionally trying to calm her down. She was grateful for his support, but every time she tried to talk to him her words just came out a garbled mess. The truth was she didn’t know what was going on. She’d not known anything about Saori for sixteen years, yet Saori claimed they’d been penpals all this time.

There was only one answer, and Miyu didn’t know whether to cry or be relieved. Her father had been writing the letters. Pretending to be Miyu, he had been using her voice to reply to a sister she had thought lost. Was he protecting her? Hiding her away? What? It didn’t make sense. Saori arrived about thirty minutes later, having changed into jeans and a roll-neck sweater. She was strikingly attractive, with large, inquisitive eyes that brimmed with intelligence. Miyu felt very much the ugly duckling younger sister, despite Jack’s assertions that there was nothing between them. ‘Sorry I took so long,’ Saori said, sliding into the booth across from them. ‘Mother is always a bit paranoid. She’s never got over what happened. Honestly, when I was a kid she hardly ever let me go out. She was terrified I wouldn’t come back.’ With one hand clamped over Jack’s under the table, Miyu leaned forward towards her sister. ‘I didn’t write those letters, Saori. None of them. And I never saw a single one of yours.’ Saori’s smile fell away, and she looked down at the table top. ‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘At first I thought you were joking, but you couldn’t have been, could you? Not the way you fainted like that. I mean, it sounds crazy, but…’ She opened her bag and pulled out a small cardboard box. ‘That’s why I brought you these.’ She slid the box across the table. ‘That’s all of them, or at least as many as I could find.’ Miyu opened the box and looked inside. Piles of opened envelopes, fat with folded paper, were stacked inside. There had to be at least twenty or thirty. Saori stood up. ‘Aren’t you staying?’ Miyu said. ‘You’ve only just

arrived.’ Saori pointed at the box. ‘I think you need to get to know the … you … that I know first, don’t you?’ She grimaced, and Miyu thought she saw a sheen of tears in her sister’s eyes. ‘This is kind of difficult for me too.’ She reached back into her bag and got out her phone. ‘I’ll be in Nagano for at least four more days. Call me and let’s meet up. I imagine we’ll have a lot to talk about, don’t you?’ Miyu nodded. She had a lump in her throat as she saved her sister’s number into her phone contacts and briefly called it to check it was correct, watching as Saori’s display lit up. ‘Speak to you soon,’ Saori said, and left. Miyu stared at the box. She reached out for the letter on the top, but her hand paused. She felt like she was trying to push through an iron screen. In this box maybe she would find the answer to everything. Beside her, Jack reached out and gave her hand another squeeze. ‘I love you, Miyu,’ he said. ‘Whatever’s in that box, I’ll be right here whenever you need me.’ She smiled, but the lump in her throat still wouldn’t let her speak. She reached into the box and pulled out the first of her letters, the first chapter in her father’s hidden life.

I’M sorry it’s been so long since my last letter. I just got caught up in work, you know how it is. Things have been busy here as always, and the heat in Tokyo in the summer is sweltering. I’m so sorry I couldn’t meet you the last time you were down. I really regret it. After all, we haven’t seen each other for so long. I hope that next time things will

work out better… I’ve been thinking about everything a lot recently. You know, about what happened? I want to see my … father … so much, but I just think it’s better if I stay away. He’s not the man I once knew, and never will be again, so often I wonder if there would be any reason to. And my aunt … I know what she thinks of me and even though none of what happened was my fault, I still blame myself. I’m hurting inside, and although I try to douse the pain as best I can I can’t seem to let it go. Year by year it gets stronger, and I fear that one day it will overwhelm me.

SHE WAS A BEAUTY, a wonder, and her sister suffered in her shadow sometimes. When you have two trees, one of which is taller than the other, the shorter of the two will always suffer once it is forever in the shade. It can never catch up, while the taller of the two will always grow bigger and stronger, spreading its branches until the smaller is all but forgotten. She was a beauty in herself, but she could never compete, and only when the taller tree made its choice did she find herself there to pick up the pieces. He was second best and she was second best, but together they were nothing. Until you came along, and I didn’t. Then they were brighter than the sun.

IT WAS the city that swayed her, he told me once. She wanted to go back to Nagano, but his home was in the city, and she forced herself to stay. The lights of Asakusa never became home, and after her sister got sick and she

went back to care for her that first time, the excuses for return journeys came often. That they were twin brothers made it easier. The face was the same, but in the place she wanted, and that tree began to stand tall, putting its weaker sister in the shade. When her branches stretched her sister quickly withered. She still had you, and you were the seed that could bring back the sun. For a while you did, but it couldn’t last. She had sunk her roots deep, and there was no stopping them.

HE TOLD me about the day he found out. It was a routine health check, and he had been suspicious for a while. When the letter came, she was home, and her curiosity couldn’t stop her. When he returned the letter was open and she was gone and their life together was closed. He couldn’t have children, but for three years he’d had me. I was everything to him, his world. The thought of losing me drove him near to madness, so he always claimed my mother had run away, and she had taken my sister, when you’d only ever been visiting. Your first trip to Tokyo, and she took you back that night on the train, and when she got to your parents’ house she convinced my uncle to leave. Would they have come for you and me? I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know. I think it’s best that we trust that they would have. If we believe that their betrayal extended to us both, it’ll slowly gnaw away at us until eventually there’s nothing left.

38

JACK

lay against him on the bed, her head nestled in She against the crook of his shoulder. The last of the letters lay open on his stomach, and Miyu sniffed as she finished her basic translation. Jack had been forced to swallow down tears on several occasions as the confessions continued, Miyu’s father’s sorrows and fears carefully concealed amidst an outer joviality as he pretended to be his own daughter. ‘It’s all in here,’ Miyu said. ‘I can’t believe it. He needed to tell someone how he felt and he couldn’t tell me, so he told my half-sister, pretending to be me.’ She looked up at him. ‘I don’t know how to feel, Jack. Should I feel betrayed? Or was he trying to protect me?’ ‘Both Takahiro and Naoshi Kubota loved your mother, and your mother fell for both of them,’ he said. ‘I think he understood that. She married Takahiro, but in the end she chose Naoshi. Who can ever be sure why? Perhaps she just wanted to go back to Nagano. It was just rather more complicated because she thought she had a daughter with Takahiro. When she found out Takahiro couldn’t have children and that the baby had to be his

brother’s, there was nothing to keep her here.’ ‘Except me! Shouldn’t I have kept her from leaving?’ ‘I don’t think she meant to abandon you. She was supposedly taking Saori back to Nagano and staying with her sister for a few days. There’s no way anyone can ever know what conversations Naoshi and Mayumi had, but you can never say she was going to abandon you. She didn’t plan on dying, remember?’ Miyu sighed. ‘When Yoshiko found out about me being Naoshi’s daughter, she would have had no choice but to let me into her home. Then when the accident happened and Naoshi was left paralysed, she had an excuse. Takahiro had thought he was my father for three years. It was easy enough to let him carry on being my father.’ ‘But would you have wanted it any other way? Does it really matter who gave you their DNA? Your father was the man who loved you as his own child and brought you up as best he could. It must have destroyed him to find out you weren’t his, but he carried on. Eventually it hollowed him out, but he still managed to bring you up.’ She frowned. ‘I had to do stuff to support us because his drinking was out of control,’ she said. ‘Things I’ve never told you, things I’m not sure I can tell you. He was drinking himself to death and I had to support him.’ Jack stroked her hair. It didn’t matter what she had done. He had done far worse out of spite and anger than she had ever done out of necessity or love, and if she could see him for what he wanted to be rather than what he was trying to forget, then she deserved the same and a million times more. Miyu was a better person than anyone Jack had ever known, and the more he found out about her father and the hardships he had fought through, the greater his

respect became. ‘I never met your father,’ he said, ‘but if there was one thing I could change over everything, it would be that I could shake his hand for bringing you into the world.’ ‘But he didn’t.’ ‘He did. You are Takahiro’s child and no one else’s. I couldn’t give a shit about biology or science. None of that matters. You’re a wonderful person because he’s a wonderful person.’ ‘Should I hate my mother, then? Or Aunt Yoshiko, for not being good enough to keep Naoshi from having an affair with my mother?’ Jack shook his head. ‘No one deserves any blame. Pity, maybe a little. Blame, no.’ Miyu started crying again. She’d cried a lot recently, and while it made his heart burn with love for her, he hated it at the same time. He wanted the fiery, angry Miyu back. As he stroked her hair and face while her tears slowly subsided, he knew he only had to wait it out. She was in there, and she would be back, once she’d swum through the mysteries of her past and pulled herself out the other side. It was only a matter of time. ‘I need to see her,’ Miyu said, when her tears had finally stopped. ‘Who? Saori?’ ‘Aunt Yoshiko. I need to tell her that I don’t blame her, and that none of this is her fault. She might hate me, she might attack me again, I don’t know. But I have to say those words. If there’s anything I can do it’s that.’ ‘Then let’s go and do it.’ It was midmorning, and the sun had been shining in through the window of their room for a couple of hours. After leaving the restaurant, they had sat up half of the night going through the letters, and then after they woke

up, Miyu had wanted to go through them again. Jack felt sure that over the next few days she would read them until she could practically recite each one by heart. He didn’t blame her. They were letters from herself, after all. They got dressed and got their things together. Miyu packed all the stuff she had brought from Tokyo into a bag and then called Saori. Her sister agreed to pick them up by the station and take them to see Naoshi and Yoshiko. She couldn’t guarantee Yoshiko would speak to Miyu or even let her in the house, but she said it was worth a try. As they headed out to the elevator at the end of the corridor, Jack took Miyu’s hand in his. As he pressed the down button and heard the elevator rising up to their floor, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the back of her fingers. ‘Whatever happens,’ he says, ‘I wouldn’t change anything that has happened. Not from the day I sat next to you in class and you threatened to cut my throat, to the day you vomited all over my shirt, to the day I did a runner from the police without any shoes and socks and ended up at your house wearing your father’s clothes.’ He shrugged. ‘Okay, there are a couple of things, but none of them have anything to do with you. I wouldn’t change a single moment that I’ve spent with you for anything in the world.’ ‘Why are you acting so strange?’ she asked, as they got into the elevator. Jack pressed the button for the first floor and it slowly began to descend. ‘I’ve done a lot of things wrong in my life,’ he said, ‘but meeting you wasn’t one of them. It was probably the only thing I’ve done right.’ ‘Jack…’ The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out into

the lobby. Three policemen were waiting by the reception desk, one leaning on it, another writing something in a notebook and a third standing with his arms folded. They looked up as Jack and Miyu exited, and the nearest one beckoned him forward. ‘Jack, what’s going on?’ He gave her a grim smile. ‘I called them while you were in the shower. You’ve faced up to your past, Miyu, and that made me realise I have to face up to mine. No more running away. I have to face whatever punishment I deserve and stop trying to make excuses for myself.’ ‘But I need you!’ He shook his head. ‘No, not anymore. You’ve got your sister, and she’ll be there for you. And when you’re done doing whatever you need to do, I’ll be waiting.’ The nearest policemen started to tug at his arm. ‘I love you, Miyu, but I have to go with them now. I have to do what’s right.’ A single tear bobbed out of her eye and she swiped it away angrily. ‘I love you, you stupid English bastard.’ He smiled. ‘Good.’ He reached out and gave her hand one last squeeze. ‘Now go and do what you have to do.’ The nearest policeman tugged him again. A girl from behind the reception desk went over to Miyu as the police led Jack away, putting an arm around her shoulder. She wiped another tear away and raised a hand to wave, only for the door to close so he could no longer see her. He glanced up at the sky, smiled at the sun, and let the police lead him towards the waiting police car. ‘Cute little things, aren’t they?’ he said, pointing at the squat, grandma car sitting at the curb with its lights flashing. ‘Kind of looks like you could put it in your pocket, doesn’t it?’ The policeman didn’t appear to understand. He

pointed at the back door as one of the others pulled it open, and indicated for Jack to climb inside. It was as cramped in the back as it looked like it would be from the outside. Two of the policemen climbed into the front and the third got into the back beside him. ‘You like Nagano?’ the man beside him said, as the little car pulled away from the curb and angled into the traffic. ‘Many foreigner come Nagano.’ Jack smiled. ‘Yeah, it’s a pretty nice place,’ he said. ‘I’ll never forget it, that’s for sure.’

39

MIYU

A t first she hated him, but with every minute that ticked past after Jack had gone, the more she respected what he had done. Initially she had thought it was typical of Jack to leave her at the moment of her greatest need, abandoning her as her mother had once done, and then she realised that he hadn’t done that at all. He had stayed with her through her greatest need, and only when he was sure she had come through the other side had he done what he needed to do for himself. The impetuous boy she had come to Nagano with had left in the back of a police car as a man. She was terrified he would end up in a jail somewhere, but he had been right; it was his to deal with now, as her problem was to her. I have to see her, but I’m terrified. Saori was standing outside a little Nissan in the shortstay section of the station car-parking area. She waved as Miyu approached, and helped her put the box of things into the back. ‘What’s all that?’ she said. ‘A few things I thought you might like to see,’ Miyu

said. ‘My father’s mementoes. My real father’s things.’ ‘Where’s Jack?’ Miyu smiled. ‘He had some business to attend to.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘He’ll be fine, I’m sure. I’m not so sure about me, though. I imagine Yoshiko wants to kill me.’ Saori shrugged. ‘Pretty much. Whether she likes it or not, though, I think this will be good for her. Don’t be too shocked when you see Father, though.’ They talked a little as Saori drove them through Nagano’s winding streets. She was studying economics in Nagoya, and working nights in a hospital. ‘It’s not glamourous,’ she said. ‘I just do laundry and throw out all these dirty, smelly things. I’d work in a convenience store but the hospital is right next to my dormitory building and it pays way better. Also, when I’m working nights it’s not all that busy, so I get plenty of time to study and read, or sometimes write you letters.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Or your father. You know, it’s going to take me a while to get used to that. All these years I thought I knew you, and I didn’t. I was talking to my uncle the whole time.’ ‘I hope we can still be friends,’ Miyu said. ‘I’m not sure I can get used to it either, but the more I think about it the more I know it was his way of looking after me. Confessing how he felt to you helped him to deal with everything, and because he had an outlet, he was able to look after me better. I’m just sorry you had to be the outlet.’ Saori shrugged. ‘To be honest, I never really thought about it. I kind of feel weird because I wrote some stuff about my high school boyfriends.’ ‘Not too much, I hope?’ ‘You didn’t seem all that interested. Now I know why.’

‘It would be weirder if I had.’ Saori grinned. ‘To be honest, I should have sussed it when you said you didn’t do social media, like you were allergic to the Internet or something. I was like, what, you don’t at least have Twitter? What’s wrong with you?’ Miyu smiled. ‘I don’t have Twitter.’ Saori gave her a light punch on the arm. ‘What’s wrong with you? Everyone has Twitter! Well, except Mother.’ She pulled the car into the curb. ‘Talking of which, we’re here. Are you sure you’re ready for this?’ ‘No, but I’ll try.’ ‘Just imagine Jack’s beside you, holding your hand.’ Miyu took a deep breath. ‘Some things you have to face on your own,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’ She had barely stepped onto the driveway when the door opened. Miyu’s breath caught in her throat, and her heart started to race. Yoshiko Kubota, her aunt, stepped outside. In the bright afternoon light she looked even older than she had when framed against the setting sun a few nights before. Her hair was nearly all grey, and her face was a mass of lines around sunken, tired eyes and a mouth that hung downwards as if she’d long ago given up fighting against the misery that had finally succeeded in overwhelming her life. For long seconds they stared at each other, and Miyu tried to imagine what might be going through her aunt’s mind. Miyu was the living embodiment of everything that had gone wrong in her life, a child fathered by her cheating husband who had found comfort in his sister-inlaw’s arms, because she herself hadn’t been enough. Miyu slowly lowered the box she was carrying to the ground, her eyes not leaving her aunt, as if the old woman was an animal ready to strike. She stared into

those old, beaten eyes, trying to see the youth that had once shone out, long gone now, crushed beneath years of undeserved penance. Miyu stepped forward. Her aunt didn’t come to meet her, but she didn’t turn away either. She just continued to glare at Miyu as if the devil himself were walking up the path to her door. Miyu felt Saori’s eyes on her from back by the car, heard the acutely loud sound of a bird singing in a tree nearby. The sun was cold on her face, the wind non-existent. As she came to within arms-length of her aunt, Miyu felt like she had stepped into a bubble separating them both from the rest of the world. There was only her and Yoshiko; the rest of the world was gone, faded into the background. Miyu swallowed, clearing her throat. Her aunt waited for her to speak, her face turned slightly to the side, as if ready to deflect her niece’s words. ‘My mother … Mayumi … she wasn’t half the woman you are,’ Miyu said. ‘My father married the wrong sister.’ Behind her, Saori gasped, the sound like a little pop as though the bubble of confrontation had been burst. At first Miyu couldn’t understand why, then she realised she had been staring so hard at her aunt that her vision had begun to waver. She relaxed her eyes, and Yoshiko smoothed back into focus. The little old woman was smiling. ‘I often thought so myself,’ she said, her voice cracked and gravelly, as though years of smoking had taken its toll. ‘But thank you for saying that.’ She took a step to the side. ‘I supposed you’d better come in.’

NAOSHI KUBOTA, her birth father, was sitting in an armchair in a small living room with a TV in the corner playing with the sound turned down low. Cushions pushed in around him helped him sit up, but it was impossible not to notice the braces on his legs and arms, the small chemical toilet at his feet. He was a wraith of a man, reminiscent of Takahiro in many ways, particularly the colour of the eyes and the shape of his face, but in others he was so far apart it was difficult to imagine they were brothers. While her father’s life had been cut away piece by piece by years of hard drinking, Naoshi had aged in the way that a relic in a shop might age, slowly, delicately—the lustre gradually losing its shine and the cracks beginning to form. His skin was still smooth, particularly around his mouth and nose, and his neatly brushed hair was still a dark brown with only the occasional flicker of grey. Apart from the eyes that sometimes blinked as he stared at the TV screen, she could almost believe that he was already dead, a mummification of a man who had fallen asleep in this chair many years ago and never woken up. ‘He can hear you,’ her aunt said. ‘He can’t respond, but he knows you’re here.’ ‘Hello,’ she said, feeling a little silly, almost as if she was talking to an overlarge doll with batteries that were running down. ‘Hello … Naoshi.’ Of course, her father didn’t respond. Miyu reached out and took his hand, finding the skin soft and supple, like a baby’s. She looked back over her shoulder towards Saori and Yoshiko standing in the doorway behind her. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ she said.

‘THERE WERE two suitcases in the back of the car,’ Yoshiko

said, clutching the cup of green tea in two hands as if it comforted her. Saori sat beside her on the sofa, one hand around her mother’s shoulders. Miyu was sitting on another chair opposite them. Yoshiko was staring straight ahead, not at Miyu but at a low table between them. ‘I told the police they belonged to me, and they didn’t question it. I said he had been taking Mayumi back to catch the Shinkansen, which is what they told me. It was a suitable answer don’t you think?’ Miyu just nodded. She got the feeling that Yoshiko didn’t need a response, only to have her listen. Perhaps no one had ever really listened. ‘We suspected, you know, your father and I— Takahiro, I mean—long before. He and Mayumi had been trying for a baby for years, and when you came it was a huge surprise. It wasn’t until you were three that a routine health check in his company discovered he was infertile, meaning you couldn’t possibly have been his. Mayumi must have seen the letter from the hospital and let her curiosity get the better of her. When she read what it said she must have known her secret would be discovered, that he would figure out where you came from. We looked so similar, you know, me and her, and Naoshi and Takahiro. No one would ever have known. Had it not been for that test, perhaps they might never have been forced to run away. Perhaps they would be carrying on their charade even now, her visiting Nagano, pretending that I needed her, then sneaking away with him whenever my back was turned.’ Yoshiko shook her head. ‘And what was I supposed to do in the aftermath? Admit that my sister had gotten pregnant by my husband and just take the shame of it? Move away? Give up everything I had ever known because of them?’ She sighed. ‘She died in the crash.

She was lucky. They thought he was going to die, but he pulled through. I had already covered over their affair in public, so I had no choice but to give up everything to look after him. You have no idea how much I lost, Miyu.’ ‘Mother, are you okay talking about this?’ Saori asked, but Yoshiko put down the cup and patted her knee. ‘I’m fine. This might be for the best. It had to happen at some point, didn’t it?’ Miyu looked back at her father, sitting in the chair in the corner, and wondered how much he could understand, whether he could hear them, or whether there was nothing behind those blank eyes. How had Yoshiko stood it, living all these years with a ghost who had betrayed her? ‘It broke both our hearts,’ she said. ‘Mine and Takahiro’s. Behind closed doors we had some legal stuff to deal with. We signed forms, arranged documents. I wouldn’t have you near me, regardless of you being Naoshi’s child, and since Takahiro had always thought of you as his own it made sense to let him keep you. We never said it straight out, but the day we walked out of that lawyer’s office in Tokyo something unspoken passed between us, that we would never cross paths nor even speak of what had gone on again.’ She turned to look at Saori, then back at Miyu. ‘I never knew about those letters. It seems Takahiro, pretending to be you, swore Saori to secrecy, and they were so infrequent I never suspected. It’s hard to come to terms with, but I suppose it was Takahiro’s way of dealing with it. It kept him alive longer than me.’ As Miyu raised an eyebrow, Yoshiko sighed again. ‘I’ve been dead for years.’ ‘Mother, don’t say that.’ ‘Saori, I might not have been the shining light that

your aunt was, but I wasn’t always like this. Old, bitter, spiteful.’ She smiled, a glimmer of humour slipping into her face. ‘I was young once, you know.’ ‘Thank you,’ Miyu said. She put her cup down on the table. ‘You can’t know how much it’s meant to me to talk to you.’ She stood up. ‘I think it’s best if I was going now.’ Yoshiko nodded. ‘You and I can never be friends, Miyu. You know that, don’t you? And much as I hate to say it, I hope never to see you again. Despite everything, though, I hope you’ll stay friends with your sister. You’re both still young. You still have a chance to get over this.’ Miyu nodded. She went up to her father, sitting in the chair, and knelt down in front of him. ‘Goodbye … Fa … Fa … Mr. Kubota.’ She had wanted to say ‘father’, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the word. She felt nothing for this man other than pity. She had never known him and never would. She wondered if she could feel bad about that, but all she felt was a sense of emptiness, as if Naoshi Kubota was no more than a stranger sitting opposite her on the train. Yoshiko walked her to the door, Saori standing back behind her, flashing occasional awkward smiles as though this were nothing other than a simple misunderstanding. As Miyu knocked her ankle on the foot of a table in the hall and winced, Yoshiko said, ‘I’m so sorry about the other day. I don’t know what came over me. I’m so glad you weren’t hurt.’ ‘It’s nothing,’ Miyu said. ‘I’ll take you back to Nagano,’ Saori said as they went out onto the drive. ‘It’ll be good to catch up as sisters, don’t you think?’ ‘I’m looking forward to it.’ Yoshiko stood back in the doorway. Miyu looked at

her, and even though she smiled, Yoshiko didn’t smile in return, nor lift a hand to wave. She watched Miyu patiently, as if seeing off a ship from port. Miyu knew without a doubt that she would never set eyes on her aunt, or indeed her real father, again. The door was closing forever. ‘Thank you,’ she said again. ‘Thank you for what you told me.’ Yoshiko gave a slight nod, then stepped inside and closed the door. Saori was already waiting in the car. She had put Miyu’s box of goods in the back and now leaned over to open the passenger door. As Miyu got in, she said, ‘If it’s not too much trouble, could you show me where she’s buried?’ ‘Your mother? Aunt Mayumi?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Of course. She’s buried at the family shrine. We can go there now if you’d like.’ ‘I’d very much like that.’

IT WAS SITUATED JUST OUT of the city, down a pretty path that led further on into the forest. The shrine was made of granite and marble, and looked well-tended. Miyu climbed the steps and knelt in front of the stone engraved with her mother’s name. She laid the bunch of flowers she had bought on the way on a small step in front, and then lit a stick of incense. Saori had stayed back in the car, making an excuse about calling her boyfriend. Her sister was bubbly and easy to like, and Miyu was sure they’d spend time together in the future, whether it was in Tokyo or Nagoya

or somewhere else. For now, though, she needed to be alone. ‘I guess I found you in the end, Mother,’ she said, running a finger over the engraved name and brushing a few fallen leaves out of the way. ‘It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t in the way I wanted, but things don’t always turn out as we would like, do they? Everything is just pieces from pieces, just like you and me. Lying around, waiting to be broken again. But sooner or later we have to move on, don’t we? We have to put them behind us.’ She smiled. ‘I’ll never know for sure if you ever planned to come for me, and I’ll never know for sure whether it would have worked out better for me if you had. Would things have worked out better for Yoshiko and Father if you and Uncle Naoshi had got your wish to drive off and start again together? Perhaps they’d have been better, perhaps not. I know you loved me. I can still remember your smile and your touch. I know that Father loved me too, and for him that must have been the hardest thing in the world.’ She stood up. ‘Goodbye, Mother. I’ll always love you.’ She reached out and touched the engraved name one more time, then turned and walked down the steps towards the waiting car at the end of the forest path. Saori got out and waved as she approached, a sad smile on her face. ‘Do you feel better?’ she asked. Miyu nodded. ‘I feel better than I have in a long time.’ ‘That’s good to hear. What are you going to do now?’ ‘The only thing I can do. Keep moving forward. There’s no point always looking back, is there?’

40

JACK

filled three bin liners, but bits of discarded junk H e’d food wrappers, old beer cans, and other assorted rubbish continued to poke up out of the overlong grass to taunt him. This was his third day on the job and the park looked no cleaner than it had when he had started. It was almost as if bratty little kids came slinking around after dark to undo the work he had spent all day doing. Just like he might once have done. He glanced at his watch and saw it was five to eleven, close enough to stop for a break. He hefted his rucksack and headed for the nearest bench. November had brought chilly winds, but little rain. The sun beamed down from a cold sky as he opened his bag and pulled out a flask of coffee. He smiled as he poured himself half a cup and then took a sip of the bitter, lukewarm liquid. Why was it that flasks made every drink taste like plastic? He put down the cup and rubbed at the calluses on his hands. They gave him a strange sense of pride, and he loved the way they felt under his fingertips, crusty and rough, as though they were a sign that he’d finally done

something useful in his life. The wind raked at his hair as he looked up the hill towards the trees at the top of the park, surrounding a play area fenced off from the main road behind. Further downhill was the skateboard park where he had once had his head kicked into the concrete, but he’d finished picking the litter up in that area. The wide, grassy hillside and the play park with its swings and slides was much more appealing, even if people seemed incapable of putting their trash into the provided bins. Still, that was why he was here. He finished the rest of the coffee and screwed the cup back on to the top of the flask. He was putting it back into his bag when he heard the crunch of feet on the fallen leaves of the path behind him. ‘Hey, Jack.’ He smiled, relishing the voice for a moment before he turned around. He had hoped it wouldn’t be too long before he heard it again, but over the last four weeks he’d felt a growing knot in his stomach that wouldn’t disappear no matter how much he threw himself into his volunteer work. He’d been beginning to think about trying to overturn the deportation order to go back and look for her, fearful that she might have given up on him and moved on. Miyu was standing on the path, looking lovely in a brown puffer jacket that matched the autumn leaves, white earmuffs holding her light brown hair against her head. She looked a little different, more relaxed, maybe, more at peace with herself than he remembered. ‘How did you find me?’ he said, standing up and going to her, reaching out for her hands. ‘I thought you’d never come.’ ‘I had some things to sort out first. Legal things,

boring stuff. I changed my phone, too.’ He stared. ‘Really?’ She smiled. ‘Just an upgrade. But I saved your picture. You know, that map of how to get to your house that you downloaded from the Internet and set as my background wallpaper?’ He pulled her closer, her arms going around her waist. ‘I wondered if that might be a bit subtle.’ ‘I got the hint.’ ‘I’m glad.’ ‘Your housekeeper told me I’d find you here. I wondered if I might meet your parents.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Dad’s filming a war movie in Spain, and Mum’s up in London doing some fashion thing. They were worried about me for about a week. Once they heard I’d been arrested but that I was just being deported rather than jailed, they got straight back into their work. I think they were almost proud of me. Dad said it gave his current movie a huge rankings boost in Japan. They’ve promised to be home by December, but who knows.’ ‘I thought the housekeeper was your mother.’ She smiled. ‘I’m glad she was old. Otherwise I might have been a little jealous.’ He pulled her close and kissed her forehead. ‘Much as my ego would like it, you don’t have to be. I assume you need somewhere to stay? I had a room made up for you. I even got Japanese TV on cable and I bought you a Pokemon bedspread.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’ ‘Okay, that was a joke about the bedspread. In any case, I hope you’ll be open to the suggestion of sneaking across the hallway to my room at night?’ ‘It depends what’s on TV. I assume there’s a lock on

the door?’ ‘A padlock and deadbolt. And it’s electrified.’ ‘Good. I’ll need to use it to keep you out while I study. I enrolled at a language school here in Bristol.’ ‘I’ll be quite happy to help you with your homework.’ ‘Thanks. I’ll fax it to you.’ Much as he was loving their conversation, looking at her face was killing him. He stroked her hair as he kissed her, thinking rather ironically as he did how they must look like one of the scenes in his father’s movies, kissing each other on a path through a park while autumn leaves swirled in the air around them, even if the rustling of the bin liners was killing the romantic atmosphere. ‘I love you, Miyu,’ he said, when they finally pulled away. ‘You put me back together.’ ‘I love you too, Jack,’ she said. ‘Even though you smell like a McDonald’s wrapper.’ He grinned. ‘I think it’s time for an early lunch,’ he said. ‘Come on,’ I’ll show you around. There’s a really nice café just up the street.’ As they walked away down the path that led back toward the main road and the town beyond it, Jack listened to the rustling of the leaves and the bin liners, and it almost sounded like applause. We found it, he thought. What we were looking for, we found it.

END

A Sneak Preview

‘Stop staring at me.’ The bottle of pills didn’t answer. Chiaki narrowed her eyes. She felt the thick eyeliner crack. She closed her

eyes and remembered how it had felt, stuffing them into her mouth, the dry chalkiness making her cough before the tickle of the lemonade had washed them down. She remembered that moment of peace, that everything would now be all right, followed by the haziness as her vision stared to blur and she fell into a pale, dreamless sleep— The door flew open and Ryo peered in, his grey hair slicked back. With a start Chiaki twisted sideways, blocking his view of the dressing table so that he wouldn’t see the bottle. She brushed a strand of hair away from her face and tilted her head. ‘Yes?’ ‘Are you coming? I know it’s hardly the Budokan, but we’re still keeping people waiting.’ She noted the use of “we’re”, as if it were anyone other than her own fault. She felt that familiar rising anger, but swallowed it down. He was trying. ‘Give me a minute.’ Ryo nodded. ‘Sure.’ Chiaki lifted her fingers and gave them a quick flex. Even now, after years of performing, she felt nervous being without the piano. It was her crutch, and without it she had always felt alienated, but the truth was that her own piano playing, while good, wasn’t quite concert standard. It— She shook her head. It didn’t matter. Ryo, and the audience, were waiting. She closed the door and headed down the narrow corridor to the stage entrance. The lights were up as she climbed onto the stage and strode to the microphone on its stand in the centre, forcing confidence into her movements. The crowd was already on its feet, clapping heartily in the kind of organd rhythm that Japanese audiences had perfected, with a

few scattered cheers thrown in, mostly from the galleries. Ryo had already taken his place behind the piano, and the spotlight around the microphone waited for Chiaki, a circle of gold that could make or ruin her over the next hour. ‘Please welcome Ms Chiaki Hasegawa,’ came an amplified voice from overhead. A second wave of clapping and cheering ensued. Her heart was thundering as she took hold of the microphone to steady herself. She could feel the pills waving to her from the dressing room. It had felt so easy once; perhaps, when her nerves had settled, it would be just as easy again— Ryo struck the first chord on the piano, and like a swan taking flight, on autopilot Chiaki broke into the song that had made her famous, Heart from a Fallen Sun. As the words of the minor key ballad filled the silent hall, her eyes drifted out above the crowd, concentrating on the feelings of loss and isolation that had make her write the first awkward incarnation of this song in her bedroom nearly twenty years ago. As the song ended and the lights dropped, the crowd erupted into applause and cheers. They sounded glad to have her back, despite everything, despite all the roadblocks and the scandals that had soiled her career. She managed a smile and a brief thank-you, then Ryo, aware of her career-long reluctance to engage the audience, began the next song. Her voice felt strong again, almost as it had been before the surgeries and the problems. She had dropped a key in the fifteen years since her debut, no doubt something that would be hotly debated by internet trolls over the next few days, but that was out of her hands now. All she could do was sing her heart out and convince her manager that she had

another album in her. Ikebukuro’s Higashi Kaikan was nearly full; she could tell whenever the lights dimmed enough to give her a look at the galleries. Ryo was right: it was no Budokan, but for a live comeback after two failed albums it was impressive. She actually preferred the smaller venues. She had never got as far as stadiums, but she had played Saitama Super Arena once, and the vastness of the stage had brought tears of loneliness to her eyes, despite the fifteen thousand cheering fans. Iida-sensei had never cared about her wishes, and would gleefully book up every arena in Japan if he could sell her new material. She had long ago given up on commercial success, but all the management ever saw were dollar signs. She was starting to sweat. A spinning fan set into the floor at her feet was turned too low. She wanted to adjust it, but the veil she had chosen to wear was easily shed, and in the t-shirt she wore underneath she would be more comfortable. As the song ended she slipped it back over her shoulders and laid it down on the stage at the foot of her central monitor speaker. The gasps from the nearest rows were obvious as she stood up straight again. A murmur rippled back through the crowd from those close enough to see clearly. Chiaki grimaced as she remembered, cursing herself for her mistake, but it she had been off the stage so long that she had forgotten her supposed stage persona. Now it was too late. Her fans could see that the nineteen-year-old girl they had fallen in love with was gone. Big Dragon Records, an offshoot of an American major label, had marketed her as the next fragile damsel, a tortured soul with a voice that could bring tears to the

eyes of God Himself. She was damaged and brittle, but above everything she was pure, the kind of girl that other girls wanted to be and boys wanted to be with. It was a marketing plan that had sold two million copies of her debut record. She hadn’t graced a stage of any kind in three years. No tours, no TV, not even radio interviews. The public had quickly forgotten about the two records released on a small independent label; they wanted the Chiaki Hasegawa of the Heart from a Fallen Sun years, the girl who had broken their hearts by breaking her own. That girl was gone. In her place was a thirty-five-yearold woman who remembered the glory years far less fondly than the fans did. The crowd was settling down, but the spell had been broken. They would listen because many of them were still fans, but they would be full of bitterness as they made their way home, having seen their angel die live on stage. In her haste to shed the silk veil that she had worn around her shoulders, she had forgotten what its absence would reveal: the tattoos that curled from her wrists up to her shoulders like a pair of protective snakes.

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