ladies find him repulsive. Plain and simple. Dreams. I read up on ’em. Nobody really knows what dreams are. Your scientists, they disagree. One camp says your hippocampus shuffles through memories in your brain’s left side. Then your brain’s right side cobbles together tall stories to link the images.’ Monkfish does not expect me to say anything back – he would be having this conversation with the Zizzi Hikaru doll if I were not here. Kyoto exit 18 km. ‘More like scriptwriting than dreaming. Whatever.’ A hairy fly strolls across the windscreen. ‘Ever tell you my dream story? We all have one. I was your age. I was in love. Or maybe mentally ill. Same difference. Whatever. She – Kirara, her name was – was one of those pampered daughters-in-a-box. We went to the same swimming club. I had quite a body in my day. Daddy was the fascist mastermind of some evil organization. What was it? Oh yeah, the Ministry of Education. Which put Kirara way above my class. Made no difference. I was obsessed. I copied out a love poem from a book at school. I got a kiss! I still have this goaty appeal to the fairer sex, and Kirara succumbed. We started going out in my cousin’s car for sessions at the reservoir. Counted the stars. Counted her birthmarks. Never knew bliss like that, never will again. But then her father got wind of our dalliance. I was not prince material for her princess. Whatever. One word from Daddy and she dropped me like a scabby corpse. Even changed swimming club. For Kirara, I was just an entrée to be nibbled, but to me, she was the entire menu at the restaurant of love. Well, I was distraught. Insane. I sent her more poems. Kirara ignored them. I stopped sleeping, eating, thinking. I decided to prove my devotion by killing myself. I planned to hike out to the Sea of Trees at the foot of Mount Fuji and overdose on sleeping pills. Hardly original, I know, but I was eighteen and my uncle had a forest cabin out there. The morning I left, I posted a letter to Kirara saying that as I couldn’t live without her love I had no choice but to die, and describing where I would perform the deed – not much point dying for love if nobody notices, is there? Took the first train out, got off at a quiet country station and started hiking. The weather grew uncertain, but me, never. I was never so sure about a decision in my life. I found my uncle’s cabin, and walked past it until I came to a glade. This was the place, I decided. And guess what I see, up in the air.’
‘Uh . . . a bird?’
‘Kirara! My beloved with a noose around her neck! Feet doing the clockwise-anti-clockwise biz. What a sight! Bloated, shitted, crows and maggots already at work.’
‘That is . . .’
‘So ghastly that I woke up, still on the early train to Mount Fuji. Talk about a revelation! I got off at the next station, caught the next train back home. I found my suicide note, unread and unopened, on my doormat, Return to Sender scrawled across the front in blood-red pen. Kirara – or her father – returned it without even reading it. Did I feel stupid? Then she went off to university, and . . .’ Monkfish slows to let a truck pass. The driver waves. ‘Saw Kirara again, years later. At Kansai airport, from a distance. Flash husband, gold jangly things, brat in a pushchair. Guess what flashed through my head?’
‘Jealousy?’
‘Nothing. I felt not – one – thing. I was ready to hang myself for her, but I never even loved her. Not really. Only thought I did.’ We enter a tunnel of echoes and air. ‘Stories like that need morals. This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.’
More tunnels, valley bridges, service stations. The truck judders down Chugoku expressway to dawn. A twenty-first-century thirty minutes covers distances of days for noblemen and priests in earlier centuries. Half-rain, half-mist, half-speed windscreen wipers. Shapes get their names back, and names their shapes. Islands in estuaries. Herons fishing. Lavender concrete mixers sealing riverbanks. Bricked-up hillside tunnels. A beer crate depot, unending and uniform as Utopia. I imagine my mother lying awake, hundreds of kilometres ahead, thinking about me. I am still shocked at how I invited myself to Miyazaki. Is she