and brief. Sir: please send a copy of the ID file on Eiji Miyake to box 333 Tokyo Evening Mail. Thank you. If it works, it works; if it fails, nothing I could say would have persuaded him anyway. I go back down to the garden and burn the three drafts – if Buntaro or Mrs Sasaki found out, they would tell me I am insane – not to mention irresponsible – for seeking out anyone connected with Morino, and of course they are right. But surely if the man posed a threat we would know about it by now. He sifted through my capsule for Morino so he already knows my address. I put the note into an envelope, address and seal it. That was the easy part. Now I have to go out and post it.
I pull my baseball cap down low, take the key from the hook by the door and put my shoes on. I raise the latch on the main gate, and enter the real world. No brakes. No mysterious cars. Just a quiet, residential street, built down a sedate slope. All the houses are set back from the road behind high fences with automatic gates. Several have video cameras. Each building probably costs more than a whole village in Yakushima. I may rain, says the weather, but there again I may not. I wonder if Ai Imajo lives in this sort of street, with that sort of bedroom window, above that sort of privet hedge. I hear a girl laughing, and from out of an alley fly a junior high-school kid on a bike with his girl standing on the rear wheel spindles. ‘What a gross story!’ she repeats, over and over, laughing and flicking back her hair. ‘Gross!’
The slope leads to a busy main road, lined with shops. So weird, all this motion and noise. A mission in every vehicle. I feel as though I am a ghost revisiting a place where I was never particularly happy. I pass a supermarket where mangoes and papayas lie exquisitely ribboned. Kids play tag in the aisles. In the supermarket carpark the men watch TV in their cars. A woman lifts a pooched-up doggy into her bicycle basket. A pregnant girl – my age – walks along, hands on her hump. Builders clamber along girders, a blowtorch hisses magnesium. I pass a kindergarten playground – children in colour-coded hats run along paths of Brownian motion. What is it for? What also weirds me out is that I am invisible. Nobody stops and points; no traffic crashes; no birds fall out of the sky; no ‘Hey! Look! There’s that kid who witnessed thirty or more men get blown away by gangsters three or four nights ago!’ Do soldiers feel this, when they get back from a war? The utter weirdness of utter normality. The post office is full of babies bawling and pensioners staring into inner distance. I wait my turn, looking at the ‘Have you seen this person?’ posters of society’s number-one enemies, with the plastic surgery faces they are fancied to have adopted. ‘Do not attempt to apprehend these criminals. They may be armed and dangerous.’ The person behind nudges me. The assistant asks for the third or fourth time. ‘Yes, sir?’
‘Uh, I’d like to post this, please.’
I pay, she gives me my stamps and change. It is true. What happened to me last Friday night is locked inside my head, and nothing shows on my face. I lick the stamps, stick them on, and balance the envelope on the lip of the box. Is this wise? I let the letter go; it falls with a papery slap. When did ‘wise’ ever come into it? Onwards, Plan G. I look up into the eye of a video camera. Outside, the air is heavier and gustier than it was, and swallows are diving low. Another video camera watches the supermarket carpark. Yet another is mounted on the bridge to meditate on passing traffic. I hurry back.
Evening ushers rain in slow motion. I am up in the attic. In the fading light the paper turned white to blue and now is nearly as grey as the ink. I watch the watercourses trickle down the windowpanes. I can almost hear the thirsty city make a frothing noise as its sponges up the rain. In Yakushima they boast about the rain. Uncle Pachinko says it rains thirty-five days per month. Here in Tokyo, when did it last rain? That