the ball home. Familiar faces eddy by in the stream of shoppers – a Kagoshima music shopkeeper, my father’s secretary, Genji the barber, snipping with finger-scissors – but I know that one lapse in concentration is all an enemy player needs to rob the ball. The mall descends into a swampy fog and the air cools. Jellyfish fall from the air and die. I wade through their clear bodies, kneeing the ball along in draining slurps. I know the enemy are tracking me on radar units obtained from Nazi Germany, so why do they let me penetrate so deep into their territory? Here comes Claude Debussy, walking on the swamp-surface in snowshoes. ‘In possession, Monsieur Miyake? Fantastique!’ He stage-whispers: ‘I bring a classified message from your great-uncle. One of our team has turned traitor! Trust nobody, not even me!’
‘Buntaro?’
‘Machiko-san?’
Shooting Star was abandoned years ago. Tatty posters hang by single pins. I bolt the door behind me – a wise precaution, I see, as enemy players unmask themselves and gather on the pavement. The derelict state of the shop is why the enemy chose to hide their goalposts in my capsule. I push the ball behind the counter, and face the problem of the stairway, which is nine times higher than I imagined it. I boot the ball up, but it rebounds back. Meanwhile the enemy batter-ram the window with a wooden statue of the god of laughter – the glass bends, but does not yet break. I grip the ball between my feet, and amphibian-wriggle my way up, step by step. I am nearly at the top when I hear glass smashing. If I wriggle any faster the ball will slip and bounce down to the enemy. The enemy roar – traffic news – the top step – the enemy boom upward – I jam the doorlatch with pool cues.
My capsule is a gloomy warehouse, empty except for building rubble.
Ahead is my glory – the enemy goal.
Mr Ikeda screams in my ear: ‘What have you done?’
I turn to face my father. ‘I came to score the goal.’
‘This is our goal, not the enemy goal! Traitor! You showed them the way!’
The pool cues snap and splinter.
An ogre shakes my knee with one hand and grips the steering wheel with the other. ‘You were dreaming, son. Mumbling, you were.’ He is a sad ogre. I gaze at my surroundings, clueless. Amulets from temples and shrines festoon the cab of a truck. Ogre’s pool-ball eyes aim in different directions. ‘Who knows what you were mumbling? Not me. You made no sense at all.’ All at once Eiji Miyake and the last seven weeks come back to me. ‘No sense in any language ever recorded, that is,’ continues Ogre, whose name is Honda, I think, but it is too late to check now. I feel a weird lightness. I met my father this morning. I feel loss, I feel victory, but most of all I feel free. And now, in a perfect reversal of the way I imagined things, I am headed to Miyazaki to see my mother for the first time in six years. At less than 5 kph. Four lanes of traffic, crawling at slug-speed. The dashboard clock blinks 16.47. I have been asleep for over three hours, but still have a hefty overdraft at the bank of sleep. If Suga’s mailman virus works the way he boasted, Kozue Yamaya’s file has already spread to every e-mail contact on every address book of every e-mail contact on every address book, etc., for ninety-nine generations. That adds up to . . . more computers than there are in Japan, I guess. Way, way beyond the ability of anyone to cover it up. It is out of my hands now, anyway. ‘Going nowhere fast past Hadano, we are,’ says Ogre. ‘Traffic news says a milk-rig overturned ten clicks downstream.’ Urban Tokyo has unfolded into zones and charted rice-fields. ‘On a fine day,’ says Ogre, ‘you can see Mount Fuji over to the right.’ Drizzle fills the known world. Rain stars go nova on the windscreen, wipered away every ninth beat. Radio burbles. Tyres hiss on the wet Tomei expressway. A minibus of kids from a school for disabled children overtakes on the inside. They wave. Ogre flashes his headlights and the kids go wild. Ogre chuckles. ‘Who knows what makes kids tick? Not me. Alien species, kids.’ Line after line of hothouses troop by. I feel I should stoke the conversation to pay for