week. ‘If it was any more humid than this,’ I venture, ‘it would be raining.’ Ai tilts her face skyward. ‘Y’know, it is raining.’ She caught a coach back from Niigata yesterday evening, and looks travel-worn. I am as sweaty and dishevelled as a whorehouse bed. I imagine. ‘So how did it go with your father?’ Ai hums. ‘Pointless. I knew it would be . . .’ she begins. I make the right noises at the right time, but as usual when people discuss parental problems, I feel as if I am being told about a medical condition in an organ I lack. Still, I am booming with pleasure that Ai came to meet me for breakfast. We pass a tiny shrine – Ai breaks off to look at the trees, tori gate, straw ropes and twists of paper. A jizo statue sits behind an orange, a bottle of Suntory whisky and a vase of chrysanthemums. An old man is having a good long pray.
‘Are musicians superstitious?’ I ask.
‘Depends on the instrument. String players, technically including pianists, have the luxury of being able to practise until we get it right, and any mistakes we do make usually get swallowed up by the orchestra. Woodwind, and especially brass, have it tougher. However good you are, one unlucky blast and Bruckner’s celestial ninth gets blasted open with a – well, my last conductor’s metaphor – a shotgun fart. Most trumpet players I know have beta-blockers instead of cookies with their morning coffee. Are Yakushima pizza chefs superstitious?’
‘The last time I went to a shrine it was to, uh, decapitate its god.’
‘With a lightning bolt?’
‘I only had a junior carpenter set hacksaw.’
She sees I am serious. ‘Didn’t the god give you what you wanted?’
‘The god gave me exactly what I wanted.’
‘Which is why you sawed his head off?’
‘Yep.’
‘My, I must be careful about giving you what you want.’
‘Ai Imajo – I, Eiji Miyake, swear I will never saw your head off.’
‘That’s okay, then. But isn’t destroying religious artifacts a borstal-sized offence?’
‘I never told anyone until this morning.’
Ai gives me a look with ninety-nine possible meanings. McDonald’s has an electronic signboard above the door which reports how many seats are vacant – it flits in and out of single figures. Detectors are built into the seat, I guess. Ai tells me to go upstairs and find a table while she queues, and I am too exhausted to argue. McDonald’s stinks of McDonald’s but at least it will disguise the stink of Miyake the unshowered kitchen slave. Upstairs a flock of student nurses smoke, bitch and shriek into their mobiles. I add up the money I just earned and feel a little less tired. It is Europe Week in McDonald’s – a video screen hangs on the wall, and scenes of Rome glide by while soporific music sucks you in. Ai appears at the top of the steps holding the tray, looking around for me. I could wave, but I enjoy looking at her. Black leggings, a sky-blue T-shirt under a berry-juice silk shirt, and amber magma earrings. If Ai were a nurse I would break a major bone to get a bed in her ward. ‘They were out of chocolate shake,’ she says, ‘so I chose banana. I see you have a kinky fetish for nurse uniforms.’
‘They must have, uh, followed me in.’
Ai sticks the straw through my lid. ‘In your dreams – anyway, you reek of cheese. Sachiko says a lot of your customers are nurses – they train across the road. That squat grey building is Senso-ji Hospital.’
‘I thought it was a prison. Are you only having green tea?’
‘Green tea is all that my meal plan allows until lunch.’
‘Oh – I forget again. Sorry.’
‘No need to be. Diabetes is a medical condition, not a sin.’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Relax, relax; I know. Eat.’
A mighty river of drones flows below the window – civil servants rushing to get to their desks before their section chief is at his. ‘Once upon a time,’ says Ai, ‘people use to build Tokyo. But that changed somewhere down the line, and now Tokyo builds people.’
I let a squirt of shake dissolve on my tongue. ‘Back to your father: he said if you ignore him and go to Paris, you are never welcome in Niigata.’
‘So I said he can have it his way.’
‘So you won’t go to Paris?’
‘I am going to Paris. But I am never going back to Niigata.’