switch on the TV, salvaged from the trash last week. This TV is a pile of crap. Its greens are mauves and its blues pink. I can find five channels, plus one in a blizzard. All the programmes are crap, too. I watch the governor of Tokyo announce that in the event of an earthquake all the blacks, Hispanics and Koreans will run amok, loot, rape and pillage. I change channel. A farmer explains how a pig gets fat by eating its own shit. I change channel. Tokyo Giants trounce Hiroshima Carp. I get the box of discount sushi from the fridge. I change channel. A memory game comes on where contestants are posed questions about tiny details in a film section they have just watched. I imagine a shadow crouching in the corner of my eye. It launches itself at me and I half-drop my dinner.
‘Gaaah!’
A black cat lands at my feet. It yawns a mouth of hooks. Its tail is dunked in white. It has a tartan collar. ‘Cat,’ I blurt pointlessly, as my pulse tries to calm itself. It must have jumped on to my balcony from a ledge and entered through the gash in the mosquito netting. ‘Get lost!’ Cat is the coolest customer. I do the sudden stomp people do to intimidate animals, but Cat has seen it all before. Cat looks at my sushi and licks its lips. ‘Look,’ I say to it, ‘go and find a housewife with a freezer full of leftovers.’ Cat is too cool to reply. ‘One saucer of milk,’ I tell it, ‘then you go away.’ Cat downs it as I pour. More. ‘This is your last saucer, okay?’ As Cat laps more genteelly, I wonder when I started talking to animals. It watches me blow the fluff off the last of my sushi. So I end up eating a box of crackers while Cat chews on fresh yellowtail, octopus and cod roe.
Leave Ueno station through the park entrance, go past the concert hall and museums, skirt around the fountain, and you come to a sort of tree shrubbery. Homeless people live here, in tents made of sky-blue plastic sheeting and wooden poles. The best tents even have doors. I guess Picture Lady lives there. She appeared at the claims counter just before my lunch break on Thursday. It was the hottest day this week. Tarmac was as soft as cooking chocolate. She wore a headscarf tied tight, a long skirt of no clear colour or pattern, and battered gym shoes. Forty, fifty, sixty years old – hard to tell beneath the weathering and engrained grime. Suga saw her coming, did his smirk, announced it was his lunch break, and slipped away to flagellate himself in the toilet. The homeless woman reminds me of the farming wives on Yakushima, but she’s more spaced out. Her eyes don’t focus properly. Her voice is cracked and hissed. ‘I lost ’em.’
‘What have you lost?’
She mumbles to her feet. ‘Has anyone given ’em to you yet?’
My hands reach for the claim pad. ‘What is it you lost?’
She shoots a glance at me. ‘My pictures.’
‘You lost some pictures?’
She takes an onion out of her pocket and unpeels the crispy brown skin. Her fingers are scabby and dark.
I try again. ‘Did you lose the pictures on a train or in the station?’
She keeps flinching. ‘I got the old ones back . . .’
‘It would help me if you could tell me a little more about—’
She licks the onion. ‘But I ain’t got the new ones back.’
‘Were the pictures valuable?’
She bites. It crunches.
Mrs Sasaki appears from the side office, and nods at the picture lady. ‘Roasting weather we’re having, isn’t it?’
Picture Lady talks through onion cud. ‘I need ’em to cover up the clocks.’
‘We don’t have your pictures today, I’m afraid. Maybe tomorrow you’ll come across them. Have you looked around Shinobazu pond?’
Picture Lady scowls. ‘What would me pictures be doing there?’
Mrs Sasaki shrugs. ‘Who knows? It’s a cool spot on a hot day.’
She nods. ‘Who knows . . .’
I watch her wander away. ‘Is she a regular customer?’
Mrs Sasaki straightens up the desk. ‘We’re a part of her schedule. It costs nothing to be civil to her. Did you work out what her “pictures” are?’
‘Some sort of family albums, I figured.’
‘I took her literally at first, too.’ Mrs Sasaki speaks carefully, the way she does. ‘But I think she’s talking about her memories.’ We watch her disappear in the shimmer. Cicadas wind up and wind