door of your heart at this very moment – he wants to know if you have a few minutes to spare so he can tell you about the joy that will be yours – if you unlock your heart and let in His Love.’ I breathe sheer relief – they take this as a ‘yes’ and turn up their zeal volume even higher. ‘Your heart seems no stranger to trouble, my friend. We are here with the Church of the Latter Day Saints – perhaps you’ve heard of our missionary work?’
‘No, no. I haven’t actually.’ Another stupid thing to say. When I finally close the door – these Mormons’ smiles are ironed on – and get back to the living room nobody is there. I open the balcony doors, surprised. Did I imagine my grim visitor? ‘Mrs Yamaya?’ The crow is gone too. Nothing but the layered buzzes and summer creaks and hisses. A butterfly with gold-digger eyes mistakes me for a bush. I watch it, and moments telescope into minutes. When I go back in I notice what I missed at first – a brown envelope, lying on the sofa where Mrs Yamaya had sat. Any brief hope that she left me the document wallet on my father is snuffed out right away – the envelope is labelled ‘Tokyo Evening Mail – Correspondence Box 333’. Inside is a letter, addressed to me in the spidery hand of a very old person. I sit down and slit it open.
Where mossy drapes hung so thick that Goatwriter could no longer push onward, he sploshed in a babbling brook. The stream jaggered clattery underhoof not with rolling stones, but with dinner plates. The water was the colour of tea. Goatwriter sipped a mouthful – high-quality, cool tea. He drank his fill and his head cleared. ‘A stream of consciousness!’ he rejoyced. ‘I must be in the Darjeeling foothills.’ Goatwriter paddled upstream. Lantern orchids bloomed the noon gloom beneath spinster aspidistra. Opal-wingtipped hummingbirds probed syrup-bleeding figs. Far above the forest canopy was chalk-dusted with daylight. It seemed to Goatwriter that these random dabs of light formed words. ‘All my life, I searched for the truly untold tale in the arcane, in the profound. Could my quixotic quest be a quite quotidian query? Does profundity hide in the obvious?’
Goatwriter paddled into a glade misty with sunlight. A girl with flaxen hair swing-swung, singing a melody with no beginning and no name. Goatwriter reached the foot of her tree. Her voice was that of the whisperings, heard by the old goat nightly since midsummer. ‘You are in search of the truly untold tale.’ She swung up, and Antarctica drifted unmeasured miles.
‘Yes,’ replied Goatwriter.
She swung down. Ursa Minor rose. ‘Untold tales are in the highlands.’
‘How m-might I find these highlands?’
‘Go around the bend to the sacred pool, up the wall, and over the waterfall.’
‘Over the waterfall . . .’
The girl with the flaxen hair swung up. ‘Are you prepared to pay?’
‘I’ve paid all my life.’
‘Ah, but Goatwriter. You haven’t paid everything yet.’
‘What can be left to pay, pray?’
The swing fell to earth, quite empty.
When Goatwriter came to the sacred pool he removed his glasses to wipe away the waterfall spray, but to his surprise he found he could see better without them. So he left them on the marble rock and pondered the pool. Peculiar. Firstly, the waterfall was soundless. Secondly, the water did not fall from the precipice far above, but rose upward in a giddied, lurching, foaming – and silent – torrent. Goatwriter could see no path up the rock face. He spoke to himself, but no sound came out. ‘I’m not a kid any more. I’m getting too old for symbolic quests.’ He considered turning back, even at this eleventh hour. Mrs Comb would be distraught when he failed to return – but she had Pithecanthropus to care for, and to care for her. The writer within the animal sighed. And he thought of his truly untold tale, and he jumped from the marble rock. The pool was as cold and sudden as death itself.
Wednesday 20th SeptemberTokyoDear Eiji Miyake,I hope you will forgive the sudden, unusual and possibly intrusive nature of this letter. Quite possibly, moreover, you and its intended recipient are not the same person, which would cause considerable embarrassment. Nonetheless, I feel it is a risk worth taking. Permit me to explain.I am writing in response to an advertisement which appeared in the personal column of Tokyo Evening Mail on 14