a short, simple message. I’ll post it tomorrow during my lunch break. I suck a champagne bomb. Ueno park is full of families, kids, couples, old people, rings of foreigners – Brazilians maybe, Chinese, each nationality on its own patch of territory. Museum-goers, photographers, skateboarders. Cicadas in the trees, babies under the trees, a funfair through the trees. Oily pigeons. Velocodrome motorbikes rip around the far perimeter. The air is candy floss, incense, zoo and octopus-dumpling-flavoured. I walk down to Shinobazu pond to watch people feed the ducks. I lie down against a tree and put Mind Games on my Discman. It is the hottest afternoon in the history of September. I watch clouds. Here comes Picture Lady, arguing with an invisible companion. I wonder if I will ever find the guts to ask Ai Imajo out on a date. I watch a young woman feeding the ducks bread crusts from a paper bag. She has a stack of library books on her bench. I drowse. The woman wheels her bicycle over, as if she wants to talk to me. She studies my face. I press ‘Stop’ on my Discman and park noises flood back. ‘No,’ she finally says, ‘this is not just one of those coincidences.’
‘I’m sorry?’
She shakes her head in disgusted disbelief. ‘Daimon is spying on me.’
I prop myself up. ‘Who are you?’
She sets her face hard. ‘I do not need this shit.’
Uh?
Her finger curses me as she hisses. ‘Tell him to go fuck himself! Tell him to sell his elopement fantasies to his squeaky schoolgirls! Tell him he is worth nothing! Tell him my country stopped being a Japanese colony at the end of the last war! Tell him if he tries to call I’ll change my number! Tell him that if he shows his face at my apartment I’ll drive a fork into it! Tell Yuzu Daimon to slime away and die! And all of this applies to you, too.’
Ducks honk.
All at once I understand. This woman is Miriam, the hostess at Queen of Spades. The woman who didn’t meet Yuzu Daimon at the games centre yesterday evening. The woman I helped Daimon get even with. This is awful. ‘I swear,’ I begin, ‘I . . . I had no idea, I wasn’t spying on you just now, I’ – ducks flap by – ‘I never realized, I mean, this is all a mistake, I had no idea you would be here – how could I? I mean, I don’t even know Daimon really—’
First, the sycamore tree blips spokes. Second, it sinks in that she kicked me hard and straight and true, in the balls. Third, I writhe on the ground as acorns of agony shower down around me. Fourth, I hear her voice, cold enough to freeze the pond. ‘I know exactly who you are, Eiji Miyake. You are a leech who tells lies for a living. Exactly like your father.’ She walks to her bike. I try to ignore the pain and replay her last line. ‘Wait!’ She is already cycling away. I wobble to my feet. ‘Wait!’ She is pedalling away, over the causeway between the duck-pond and the boating lake. I try to run but the pain takes my breath away. ‘Miriam! Wait!’ Mothers with pushchairs turn to look, a bunch of motorbike kids watch and laugh. Even the ducks laugh. ‘Miriam!’ I crouch down, defeated, and watch her disappear into mirages and spray from the fountains. She knows my father! I want to feel hope but I want to bawl with frustration. I hobble back to my stuff, where I find one thing more, lying in the dust between the roots of the sycamore. A library book which fell when Miriam crippled me. What book is it? I can’t read a word – it is in Korean.
In the Shibuya back streets I am lost in no time. Yesterday and this afternoon seem weeks apart. This grid of narrow streets and bright shadows, and the pink quarter of last night, seem to be different cities. Cats and crows pick through piles of trash. Brewery trucks reverse around corners. Water spatters from overflow pipes. Shibuya’s night zone is drowsing, like a hackneyed comedian between acts. My eyes begin to get lost in the signboards – Wild Orchid, Yamato Nadeshiko, Mac’s, Dickens, Yumi-chan’s. Even if I happened to find Queen of Spades, search fatigue would probably stop me seeing. I left Shooting Star without my watch, and I have no idea how fast the