Author: Zoe Drake
Date: 2013-02-08 05:00:00+00:00
Description: A city of 12 million people. 12 months of the year. 4 seasons. 15 short stories. In these spine-chilling tales we meet 15 residents of modern Tokyo; businesspeople, high-school students, laborers, foreign exchange students, chefs, gangsters, down-and-outs... Each of them will encounter one of the Yohkai - the supernatural creatures immortalized in Japanese myths, legends and folk tales. Some of them will survive the experience. Some of them will not. All of them will be changed forever.
Publisher: Excalibur Books

"I have never liked crows ... they are everywhere in Tokyo. Black, angular creatures, a peculiarly loathsome amalgam of huge wings, gaping beak, and unflinching eyes. I have heard stories that they try to imitate the voices of human beings, that they have attacked and killed pigeons and small cats. I would not be at all surprised.

Are there any who see beauty in crows? Yes. Professor Sakurai would be one. But then, his madness was the same madness, the big, black emptiness in the eyes of birds, the unflinching eyes that they turn upon you, as they roost upon the buildings above.

Professor Sakurai's eyes were like that, once. I still shudder to think about it. His eyes, above the crude jutting beak, the mass of feathers covering his skull.

The darkness in the eyes of birds."

Dark Lanterns
Collection Copyright (c) 2012 Zoe Drake

This publication may not be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or in any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN 978-4-9906320-4-5

Typeset by Anastasia Pergakis, Anastasia Creatives
Cover design by Stephanie White

Excalibur Books
(A Division of Winston Saint Press)
4-4-12-303 Fuji-cho
Nishi-Tokyo-shi
Tokyo 202-0014

DEDICATION

For Lafcadio Hearn, who introduced the world of 'Kwaidan' to an enthralled readership outside Japan.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

January: An Appetite for the Unknown

February: Blood and Chocolate

March: Angel in a Cardboard Box

April: Regrettable Incidents on the Chuo Line

April: Fallen Through

May: The Madman in the Park

June: Kurokabe

July: Dig Your Own Hole

August: Days of the Dark Lantern

August: The Flowers of Edo

September: The Wings of the Crow

October: My Lost Face Looking for your Lost Love

November: The Anatomy of Dependence

December: Spellbound

December: Drowning in a Sea of Trees

Akira Shimizu woke to the sensation of smothering.

In panic, he cried out, his breath rattling harshly in his ears, his hands encountering the stiff, coarsened surface of a mask. Memory flooded back.

Sitting up in his futon, Shimizu eased the long-nosed Tengu mask off his head and sucked in the chilly air. Apart from the mask, and a homemade horned codpiece, he was naked - and he was back in his six-mat bedroom, above the restaurant he owned. Even the mold on the skirting board was comforting.

"How did I get back here?" he wondered aloud.

As he drew his knees up to his chest, mumbling questions to himself, memories fitted themselves together like an automated jigsaw puzzle. Mount Takao. The waterfalls. The dancing. The Tengu.

"Did I hallucinate the whole thing?" he mused. Pushing himself up from the futon, his back and ribs throbbing from last night's abuse, Shimizu picked grubby jeans, tee-shirt and sweater from the floor and dressed as quickly as he could.

Mount Takao had long been regarded as the spiritual home of the Tengu, the bird-spirit tricksters of Japanese mythology. There were images of their red, beaked faces in temples all over Tokyo. When he had gone to his own local shrine for the Hatsumode pilgrimage one year ago last New Year's Day, to pray for what he so desperately needed, he met the strange young man who had convinced him that the Tengu were real.

It had taken him a whole year, and a substantial amount of money spent on ritual offerings, to make the rounds of certain temples and shrines in the older quarters of Tokyo - places that were regarded with great caution by the area's human residents. After that, Shimizu had been ready to gamble everything on one mountainside ritual — at the interstice between one year and the next.

Treading gingerly on the steep, poorly lit staircase, Shimizu descended now into the izakaya - the Japanese-style diner - that he owned and lived above. Thin plasterboard partitions screened off the small wooden tables in the central area. Old copper saucepans hung from the rafters overhead, accompanied on high shelves by reproduction antique clocks, meaningless memorabilia that Shimizu had bought on trips up and down the country. The menu's dishes and prices were scrawled on parchment in flowing calligraphic characters and pasted around the walls, like Buddhist prayer scrolls at a temple. He stared morosely down at the traditional New Year's decorations, the bamboo and pine kadomatsu, the fat, white kagami-mochi rice cakes.

"Hell of a way to spend New Year's Eve," he muttered to himself.

Shimizu stood at the foot of the stairs, staring at a framed photograph above the cash register, beside a carving of the pot-bellied god Ebisu. A photograph of a younger Shimizu, with one arm around a wiry, denim-wearing elderly man, a hint of greased-back grey hair peeping from beneath a Yomiuri Giants baseball cap. Grimacing as if in pain, Shimizu shambled into the kitchen, pressing his fingers to the smooth, warm bulk of the rice-cooker, his flesh recalling last night's visceral coldness. Hiding from the rangers when the Takao-san national park closed after sundown. Drinking the potion of herbs that the young man had shown him how to make. Dancing, spinning and whirling like a dervish, wearing only the mask and codpiece, before sinking down in chilled exhaustion on the steps of the mournful Ichodaira shrine.

Shimizu began to shudder uncontrollably as a wintry fear slid its fingers through his vitals. With it came the sudden, vivid image of the creature from last night. The beast that had lifted up Shimizu's head and studied it dispassionately, its cruel and pock-marked beak just inches away from Shimizu's face. The stench of carrion on its breath almost forcing him to retch. The harsh croaking of its voice had sounded like the rusted creak of cemetery gates.

Had it worked? Had he entertained them sufficiently for them to grant his request?

Feeling the floor sway under his feet and distracted by a bell-like ringing in his head, Shimizu realized there was only one way to find out.

Over the days that followed, the doors to Shimizu's restaurant remained shut but the fires beneath his grill constantly smoldered, arousing the taste buds of that quiet, suburban part of east Tokyo. As a bewildering variety of smells infiltrated the streets like an invisible army, children took to irritating their mothers with constant questions, and bone-weary salarymen smacked their oily lips as they trudged past. Twin-suited Office Ladies gossiped in neighborhood cafes, speculating endlessly on the source of the fine cooking smells, their rouged mouths pausing from the chatter to sip macha latte, and to munch delicately on carefully chosen cakes.

During the second week, a wiry, tanned, baseball-cap-wearing figure pushed his bicycle uninvited into Shimizu's back yard, and swaggered up to the back entrance to rap loudly on the sliding wooden door. Teiichi Nagashima, full-time sushi chef, part-time busybody and occasional drinking partner of Akira Shimizu, had taken it upon himself to investigate the rumors spreading through the district.

His grainy, middle-aged features creased themselves into a preparatory smile of greeting, teeth gritting themselves around the toothpick he habitually chewed on. His smile promptly vanished as the door was opened.

"Shimizu?" the older man finally said. "Hey, Shimizu, you don't look too good. You had the flu?"

Nagashima, once through the door, put his nose up like a dog, trying to separate and label the aromas that assaulted his senses. It was all he could do to stop himself from sprinting to the kitchen and burying his face into whatever was simmering in the pots. "Say, that smells pretty good, Shimizu. You going to tell me what you're cooking there?"

"Why not? You'll find out sooner or later. Go on, you know where the kitchen is."

Shimizu rubbed his chin as his garrulous drinking partner mooched to the kitchen, slid the door aside, pushed his way in - and shrieked like a schoolgirl.

Rare seasonal vegetables from the slopes of the Japan Alps. Seafood flown express from the straits of Kyushu and Okinawa. O-sake from the most famous distilleries in Niigata.

Bags of Binchotan charcoal to fuel the grill, made from the densest hardwoods of Wakayama prefecture. Farm-raised chicken from Kagoshima and Akita, scallops from Hokkaido, Sakura shrimp from Ise, and wild eel from the rivers up and down the country.

Butchered frog-fish hanging from hooks above the cutting-board. Scorpion-fish and stingray, their bristling exteriors accounting for the plasters on Shimizu's hands. Siamese fighting chicken. A huge paste of foie gras, crab's brains and Japanese green tea languishing in a ceramic bowl.

"And what in the Goddess of Mercy's name are those?" the visitor cried, stabbing his finger at a pile of oozing black shells, each the size of a human hand.

"Amazon water snails," Shimizu informed him. "From Ecuador. Rich in proteins, low in fat, high in minerals, but still gentle on the stomach. You wouldn't believe how I got them."

"All this must have cost you a fortune," Nagashima spluttered. "Why are you doing this?"

"Because I want a hat with a pair of lips on it," Shimizu said wearily.

"What? Have you been on the Oolong Highs all day? What are you talking about?"

"Well, how can I put it ... do you watch that variety program on Monday nights, Funky Punch Bistro?"

"The one with the Tokyo Punch Bunch? Of course."

"The four chefs compete to cook some original recipes for their guest, usually some female pop-singer. At the end, the guest chooses the winning team, who get a pair of red lips - you know, like a kiss - to decorate their chef's hats."

"I think you're taking that too seriously, Shimizu. Why bother about what overpaid celebrities are doing? Cookery programs are on TV all the time these days." Nagashima began to flounce around the kitchen, his voice rising to the level of a lisping screech. "Why, my name's Keiko and I'm so glad to be on your program, why my head's in such a spin because this dish is so delicious, and the last one was delicious too, and so was the one before that! Oh, goodness!"

Shimizu, however, wasn't smiling. "A kiss, Teiichi. Why is that? Why is food so sexy? I think people today are hungry for something, old friend. I think they're hungry for something more than human restaurants are offering."

Shimizu walked slowly to a corner of the kitchen stacked with Styrofoam containers. "Cooking is creativity and expression. Cooking is power." He lifted one container's lid, water dripping onto his black rubber boots. Plunging his hand in, he hesitated while something inside sloshed and splattered at his touch. When he withdrew his hand, a reddish-brown octopus had wrapped itself around his forearm, a living, sucking glove.

"So what makes you sure you can make a go of all this, Shimizu? You're not exactly trained for haute cuisine."

"I've had some help from friends in high places ... Mount Takao, to be exact."

"What?"

"Never mind." Shimizu lifted his hand holding the octopus high, and then brought it down fast, giving the creature's head a cracking blow against the worktop edge. "Cooking is sexy," breathed Shimizu hoarsely, "and the man with the longest menu is the sexiest of all." Peeling off the suckers and throwing the octopus on to the cutting board, Shimizu picked up a nearby daikon radish and smote the creature a vicious blow that shook the restaurant's fragile sliding doors.

"Good luck, then, Shimizu," Nagashima said, slowly turning towards the izakaya's front entrance. "I'll see you at the reopening." Shimizu gave no sign that he had heard. He carried on swinging the vegetable up and down, tenderizing the octopus mercilessly. As Nagashima watched, the radish broke in two, the lower half flying away on the backstroke to hit the opposite wall.

"Think I'll get myself a Happy Burger with cheese," Nagashima muttered to himself on the way out.

The last few days before the reopening, Shimizu worked feverishly on the new recipes that bubbled like a thick, meaty soup in his brain. He coached his new staff of part-timers in the traditional Japanese way; they made the preparations, cutting, peeling, and cleaning, while Shimizu himself oversaw the stages of cooking every meal. A difficult task, to be everywhere at once - Shimizu felt the strain in his back and legs, and his face was looked paler and paler - but with plenty of hands to help and heads to slap, he was more than reasonably confident.

On the day of the reopening itself, a gratifyingly large number of people gathered to wait by the grand floral display outside the front entrance, drawn by the rumors — and also the fistfuls of discount vouchers that he had personally handed out in front of the local train station.

Whatever the reason for coming, Shimizu gave them plenty of reasons for coming back.

Chestnut gnocchi with red-wine stewed wild boar. Honey and mustard salmon in a baked nut crust. Bacon-wrapped baby rabbit stewed in milk. Coconut crab balls. Tomato stuffed with crisp fried stingray cartilage. Chilled seaweed topped with white yam sap. Crisp parcels of tender octopus and vegetables wrapped in rice paper. Steak in coffee marinade. Ravioli plump with escargot and frog. Towers of raw tuna, avocado, mango, papaya and wasabi.

Over and over, as Shimizu worked off his culinary fury in the kitchens, as the part-timers bustled in and out, bellowing the orders to each other and greeting fresh customers - beneath the rush and clatter of business, Shimizu heard the shocked comments of his customers. When their mouths were not occupied with the joyous task of masticating and swallowing, he could hear their breathless commentary on the food to each other, and over and over, the same words in reverent tones. Oishii. Umai. Sappari suru.

The reopening was a tremendous success.

For the rest of January, Shimizu kept the izakaya open seven days a week to build on his reputation. The customers kept coming; families taking a break from the home routine, salarymen reciting their grievances to each other over grilled snacks and chilled o-sake, under-agers seeking a discreet place to acquire their tastes for intoxication, and the biggest sector of his captive audience - the amateur gourmets of all ages who ruthlessly scrutinized his creations.

"Are you absolutely sure you're cut out to run a restaurant?" One of the financial consultants had said to Shimizu last year, after he'd been forced to take out a second mortgage on the place. "After all, it's not just about whipping up something tasty. It's also about running a business."

With stuffed shirts like that calling themselves consultants, it's no wonder I was making mistakes and losing customers, Shimizu thought to himself. He bowed modestly as another group of red-faced salarymen exited, clutching their fake leather briefcases as they drunkenly put on their shoes. Rice that was too mushy. Wasabi that was forgotten. Salmon croquettes half-raw inside. It's not fair, Shimizu thought with a pained little smile, to ask someone to be creative with the stress of having to worry about finances. But with those tricky critters the Tengu on my side, I don't have to worry. This is it. Akira Shimizu has arrived.

When that long profitable month was over, Shimizu announced that he was declaring a holiday for two days. "Yosh," the part-timers replied, wiping the sweat off their brows with their lounge-tanned forearms. Not that Shimizu cared much for their welfare. Despite the spell of the Tengu, he himself was approaching the verge of exhaustion.

On the last night before the planned holiday, Shimizu was supervising the swabbing down of the kitchens, yawning repeatedly with fatigue, when one of the part-timers entered the kitchen and began to hover irritatingly at Shimizu's elbow.

"What is it?" The master of the kitchen demanded.

"I'm sorry, boss, but there's a customer out there, who ... refuses to leave."

"What? Hasn't he finished eating yet?"

"He hasn't started. He wants to make an order now."

"Now?" Shimizu glanced at the clock, and then back to the part-timer, blinking in incomprehension. "Why did you let him in at this time of night?"

"That's the point," the part-timer whined. "Nobody saw him come in. This old guy just kind of ... appeared," he added, giving a nervous glance back at the doors leading to the restaurant.

"All right, I'll take care of this." Brushing past the youth and his colleagues, Shimizu pushed open the swing doors and advanced into his domain.

The intruder was old, certainly. He sat at one of the large tables at the back, tapping his fingers against the wood with the bold air of a visiting celebrity. His shapeless top and overshirt were both a fox-hide reddish-brown. His bald skull glinted back the soft lights positioned at the restaurant's corners, while his silvered moustache and beard were cut in an archaic, Chinese style. And his eyes ...

Shimizu cleared his throat noisily. "I'm sorry, sir, but we're closed."

The intruder spoke, his voice full and energetic for one so elderly. "Really? And I was so looking forward to sampling your dishes. You have made quite a reputation for yourself, Akira Shimizu."

"May I suggest, then, that you come back tomorrow lunchtime?"

"That would be rather inconvenient. To tell you the truth, a daytime visit would be impossible. And besides that, you owe me a meal, I think, Akira Shimizu."

Shimizu's eyes narrowed in anger. "Do I know you?"

"No. But you have made the acquaintance of some friends of mine." So saying, the old man slid in a peculiar way along the bench, to leave the table and stand up. The old man was now in the central aisle, facing Shimizu. The chef gave a strangled gasp.

The old man had no lower limbs. His torso floated above the ground, unsupported, apart from a nebulous vapor that obscured the floor tiles and table legs behind it.

"You're - you're - "

"Yes," the old man confirmed with a nod, "I am. You see, the skills that the Bird People gave you were for preparing spirit cuisine, Akira Shimizu. Divine cooking that can fill the emptiness in both the living and the unliving. They recommended this restaurant very highly, so I have traveled out of my way to get here. And . . . I will not be dining alone."

Shimizu glanced wildly around him. There were lights in the walls. The shapes of dim, floating things, growing brighter and brighter as they approached, glowing softly like paper lanterns at a festival. The clock began to chime midnight, and Shimizu felt a foul, unnamable taste coat his mouth and throat.

"Your customers are waiting, Akira Shimizu."

"Oni wa soto, fuku ga uchi!"

It was the time of Setsubun - February the 3rd - and this was the chant of Setsubun: "Oni wa fuku, soto ga uschi". Demons go out, good luck come in. Atsuko and her mother were advancing methodically through each room of their cramped two-storey house, scattering beans as they went - hard, uncooked soy beans. Atsuko knew that the beans meant something much more than a lucky charm, something to do with the spirits. What it really meant was she would have the job of cleaning up the beans again later.

Another custom of Setsubun was that for stronger, better luck, you should eat the same number of beans as your age.

"If Atsuko did that last night," one of the girls at junior high had said yesterday, "She must be over two hundred years old!" The other girls in the locker rooms had screeched with laughter, but Atsuko had turned her back on the ritual cruelty, putting her head down quietly as she changed into her P.E. gear.

At the age of twelve, Atsuko was rapidly approaching what the family doctor had reluctantly called obesity. The cute puppy-fat of her childhood had grown large enough to choke the girl's budding adolescence. Her face rested comfortably on the roll of flesh surrounding her jaws. Her breasts, which had formed absurdly early, appeared to melt into the barrel that formed her abdomen, pushing her school blouse and sweater out in front of her. Her skirt, cut in the regulation style above the knee, failed completely to hide her swollen legs, or to flatter her when she walked.

More and more, her parents muttered darkly of diabetes and the inconvenience of walking with a stick, yet for all the complaints, counseling and late-night closeted talk, the only results had been Papa getting drunk more often and Mama's constant tongue-clicking. A few more lines engraved on her parent's faces, pulling their smiles down like tiny leaden weights.

At school, Atsuko found solace in the comfort of other misfits, girls who were drawn together through the simple fact of being generally despised. Atsuko's small group of "nails that stuck out" huddled together almost every break time and built dream castles from manga characters, an imaginary fortress peopled with princesses and impossibly cute talking animals, until the tidal forces of the next class came to wash it away.

Atsuko was sheltered from the pain of school life by an elaborate set of defenses. Like a praline truffle enclosed by a crunchy chocolate-covered shell, Atsuko was closed off from the outside world. She had her shojo manga, her girl's comics, and the girls she avidly discussed them with were purely incidental. She also had her chocolate.

Meltykiss and Krunky at breaktimes, Strawberry Pocky at lunch, mushroom-shaped Kinoko no Yama on the way home. Haagen Daaz Caramel Apple Pie ice cream and Milk Tea Pocky when closeted in her room. Trips into the city were punctuated by Angel Cream Donuts, chocolat pan, and the crepe suzettes from the schoolgirl's paradise that was the Takeshita Street in Harajuku.

All of Atsuko's favorite indulgences were sweet. Chocolate, ice cream, sweet pastry, all stuff that melted at room temperature, melted inside her mouth. As the new sugar refueled the reservoirs in her bloodstream, Makoto felt as if she herself were melting, her burden of flesh loosening itself from her bones, blending with the air that surrounded her.

The winter of that year had been a particularly harsh one, and many schools wre forced to close for one or two days. Unfortunately for Atsuko, hers was not one of those schools. She lived in a suburb of Tokyo that bordered Chiba prefecture, a ward resting uncomfortably on reclaimed land close to Tokyo Bay. From Atsuko's bedroom window, if she craned her padded neck, she could see one of the bridges that straddled the Edogawa river. The ugly, skeletal arm vibrated night and day with the ceaseless hum of traffic.

On the 2nd of February, snow still clung stubbornly to some of the neighborhood streets, coating broken walls like moss. Atsuko shuffled to the school gates every morning at 8:30, her head down, praying not to be noticed.

Monday was the worst day because of PE. For two hours every week, reality intruded into Atsuko's carefully constructed world. In the changing rooms, she unwillingly stripped herself, layer upon layer peeled away, until she was left almost naked, her confidence screwed up and lying in a crumpled heap along with her clothes. She was left with her flesh, flesh that could not be concealed by the ridiculous white top and blue shorts.

An hour in the gym followed, an hour of ritual humiliation by wooden horse, springboard, and sitting out as scorekeeper during netball. Although Atsuko liked her PE teacher - she was cheerful, energetic, and had the lithe body of a manga character - Atsuko lived in fear of the short blast of the whistle followed by the calling of her name. Again and again, Atsuko willed herself to step back against the gymnasium wall and become part of it, unnoticed.

Blend into it. Melt into it.

On that certain Monday, after PE, she hastily pulled on her school uniform again to cover her body. She always left her navy blue cardigan buttoned and pulled it over her head; it felt as if she was wrapping up her whole body in it. In the math lesson that followed, she sat uncomfortably, paying even less attention to the teacher than usual. Something bothered her. Something was making her feel uncomfortable. Had she injured herself somehow in PE?

There was a lull in the drone of the teacher's voice, and Atsuko looked up sharply. No danger signs; no stares or cold insults; the teacher had simply paused to write something on the black board.

Atsuko looked around her. The late morning sun illuminated everything in the classroom with a piercing clarity. She could smell sweat on her upper lip, and it suddenly disgusted her. A cold thread of nausea abruptly began to snake its way out of her stomach, sliding through her gut, down towards the parts of her body which never troubled her waking, day-dreaming mind.

Was she going to be sick?

She sat nervously, flicking through the pages of her favorite comics in her head, until the strangeness in her body faded, and the lesson crawled laboriously to its end. She left the classroom rapidly, her face and palms shiny, groping in her bag for the Snickers bars that she kept in their own private pouch.

At last three-thirty arrived, and most of the girls and boys scurried away to their club activities in the gym and out on the school grounds, the younger kohai working as slaves to the older senpei masters.

Atsuko changed into her outdoor shoes at the entrance hall lockers, carefully checking them for any pins or trash that the older girls might have put inside. Today she was lucky. They had left her alone; busy with picking on someone else, or flirting with the boys. She impatiently walked the distance back to her house, carefully watching out for any senior girls who might have been walking nearby, only stopping to refill her supplies at the convenience store. At home, in the sanctuary of her bedroom, she ate her box of Yan-Yan creamy chocolate snacks with an air of desperation, unwrapping one slender wrapper with one hand while the other pushed chocolate between her slick, hungry lips.

A sharp pain, like a scratching, stung deep within her bowels. For the first time this year, she wondered if she had eaten too much chocolate. She sat up, frowning, thinking about her body, the mysterious package of organs and other workings deep inside her.

To end the day, the family took their ritual bath, each person vacating the tub and calling out through the screen door for the next. Atsuko squatted in the bathroom like a wrestler, listlessly waving the shower up and down her body. Settling into the deep, square tub, she put her box of Meiji Almond on the sill, feeling the water's heat prick and pull at her skin.

A day-dreaming age later, she tilted her head, lowering her hand from the chocolate box to the faucet to refill the tub.

And saw the blood.

"Mama!" she screamed from the bathroom door. "Mama!"

Her mother came rushing through the corridor from the kitchen. She saw her daughter, standing with a towel clasped to her breasts and her fingers clawing into it. Atsuko's face was red as a baby's, her mouth open and tears squeezing from her eyes. The cause of her distress was obvious; the thick dark blood that trickled sluggishly down the inside of Atsuko's thighs.

Mama took the towel and wrapped it around the crying girl, shushing her, looking around for tissues.

There was a sound in the house.

A sharp, high buzzing like insect wings, followed by the smash of breaking glass.

"What's happened?" called Papa from the living room.

"Nothing to worry about," Mama yelled back.

"But I'm bleeding," Atsuko managed to say. "I'm sick..."

"Sssssssh." Mama had found the tissues, and was briskly dabbing up the blood. There wasn't a great deal of it.

"What's wrong?" the girl sobbed. "Did I cut myself?"

"No, you didn't. It's perfectly natural."

Mama squeezed some of the tissues into something long and thin, and then with one deft movement reached down and plugged it between Atsuko's thighs.

The girl stared at the opposite wall as if in shock.

"Come upstairs," Mama cajoled her. "I'll make you some tea, and give you something to make you feel better. But dry your hair, for heaven's sake. And wash your face again!"

Later, in the stillness of her bedroom, Atsuko restlessly turned the pages of the biology textbook her mother had given her.

Her portable TV in the corner was turned down low, because the shrill voices of the idols — usually so cute - now seemed to cut right through her. The wreckage of two tubs of ice cream lay beside her on the tatami, licked clean.

Of course, she sometimes overheard some girls at school talking about their first periods. There had been some kind of speech in morning assembly, too, but Atsuko had fallen asleep halfway through. Something to do with being an adult ... something to do with changes in the body. But it was nothing to do with her.

Now Atsuko looked at the diagrams in the biology book with confusion and wonderment. The shock and sorrow of her discovery in the bath was giving way to a new, melancholy feeling that she could not understand.

Her body was changing. Atsuko sat back against the bedroom wall, the ice cream tubs nudging each other as the weight on the floor shifted. They yielded up the soft aroma of strawberry and cookies'n'cream.

She thought about walking to school the next day, not as a girl, but as a woman. Perhaps she would give off a new womanly scent, a mixture of early Spring flowers mixed with the sweetness of vanilla. She thought about putting on lipstick and she shivered, rubbing her hands over her legs and lower thighs.

She reached for her school bag and the Snickers bars inside, her mind and body crying out for more sugar.

Despite her new-found biological revelation, Atsuko spent the morning recess in her usual schedule. She sat at her desk at the back of the classroom, her fellow misfit Sayaka beside her, flipping the pages of Ribbon magazine with one hand while stuffing Kabaya Strawberry Choco into her mouth with the other.

"What are you going to do for Valentine's Day?" Sayaka suddenly asked.

"Eh?" Atsuko looked up, her pale mouth flabby and dark with chocolate.

"I mean, you know, aren't you going to do anything for anyone?"

"I dunno. Give some chocolate to Papa, I guess. Same as least year." Atsuko turned back to her comic, feeling vaguely annoyed.

"I'm thinking of giving something to Shoichi," Sayaka suddenly blurted.

Atsuko frowned. Shoichi? Which one was Shoichi? Oh yes. The short, stocky one, who'd recently had some hip hop stripes cut into his hair and got suspended for a week for it.

Sayaka was giving chocolates to him?

"I thought he was going out with Kayo?"

"Nah. Gossip says they split up last week."

Atsuko felt a surge of jealous hatred toward Kayo. She was one of the trendiest girls in their grade, who wore her skirt as short as possible and her socks so loose and baggy they almost hid her shoes. At recess, if she wasn't gossiping with her classmates, she was always texting on her cell phone, her long sparkly thumbnail tapping katakana and emoticons into the keypad in a rapid blur of movement.

An idea hit Atsuko with sudden immensity. That's what girls do, she realized, after they start to bleed.

Walking home after school, she felt the rod-like thing inside her shift and settle. This was the most upsetting thing about being a woman; that she needed the help of something artificial. It was like putting on a pair of spectacles for the first time. The device somehow rearranged the body, making everything unfamiliar.

As she climbed up the station steps, the chill wind toyed with the hem of her school uniform. Emerging onto the school platform, the late afternoon sun caught her full in the face and she blinked, momentarily blinded.

She stopped, feeling her heart pound away inside her. Things were getting too much.

Finally stepping out onto the platform, Atsuko noticed a trio of young punks near the entrance, flouting the No Smoking rule. In baggy jeans and wooly hats, they rubbed the air with their cackling voices and their rapid-fire slang, laughing too loud, too long.

Atsuko walked past them quickly and then leant against a concrete pillar, feeling her legs grow weak. The voices of the boys cut right through her.

She was sure they'd mentioned her name.

Safely cloistered in her room, swallowing scoops of ice cream, Atsuko almost cried as she watched TV. One of her favorite TV commercials came on; the idol band AKB48, dressed up as office ladies, dancing a really cute dance and singing in chorus, in an impossibly wide office with photocopiers ranked along the sides.

The next ad featured Shin Akanishi, and that made Atsuko sit up even more. He was the one who a lot of the girls were dating in their dreams. She studied his face, the heavy-lidded eyes, the carefully messed-up hair teased into tinted spikes.

Atsuko squinted at the screen. There was something different about his face. Something new.

The fifteen-second commercial blinked out of existence, to be replaced by another; two six-year-olds bouncing up and down on a car seat and singing as their papa drove them past Mount Fuji. Atsuko reached for one of her tarento magazines, and flicked through it to find a picture of the idol.

She found it. Akanishi's face floated in front of her, adrift on a sea of possibilities. Her gaze drifted in and out of focus, her fingers twisting themselves in her lank hair as she concentrated.

That was it. Something suddenly clicked into position. He reminded her of Ryuji!

Ryuji, her classmate. Why hadn't she noticed the resemblance before? He was so similar. The face, the build — and the atmosphere. There was something very cute about Ryuji. Perhaps she hadn't thought it before because he was kind of shy. He always hung around at the back of the class in sports lessons, looking lanky and quiet in his black and white track suit. He had the same puffy eyes as the tarento — eyes that made him look as if he watched too much TV. His face had a pale ivory color, like he was always hungry. Atsuko suddenly realized that she could remember the details of his cheekbones, their clarity beneath the skin.

The thought made her feel ... weird.

The next day Atsuko watched him warily as she endured the sports lesson.

"What are you staring at?" the girl next to her asked rudely.

"Nothing," Atsuko said quickly.

"You're looking at Ryuji, aren't you? Don't bother. He's too skinny, too tall. He'll never be cute."

Atsuko swallowed her own reply, suddenly understanding the girl's animosity toward Ryuji. He was being bullied too. Just like her, he was outside the circle of mainstream school life because he didn't fit in. There was something of the rebel about him, and she knew that a sudden connection had just been formed, as if a thread had been attached from her heart to his.

Across the gymnasium, Ryuji turned his head. Atsuko glanced away, embarrassed. The mirror of his eyes might shine back her feelings.

Late at night, Atsuko flopped and twisted in her bed, unable to stop thinking about Ryuji.

He had always been in the background, nothing in particular, not one of the loudest, cleverest or funniest boys. Now he'd moved, putting himself directly in front of her. She thought about his face, that odd, unhealthy sheen to his face, the narrowness of his shoulders ...

What would it be like to ... actually kiss him?

Thunk.

She froze. She lay absolutely still, shocked at the sound that had come from the living room.

It wasn't her parents. She could hear her father snoring through the thin wooden wall, and she knew her mother was in the futon next to his. The sound had come from the living room, a loud thud, as if something had fallen.

Or been dropped.

The sound was not repeated. After a while, Atsuko drifted into sleep, still thinking of Ryuji, AKB48 melodies soothing away her fright ...

"Atsuko?"

The girl had just finished dressing when her mother slid open the door to the bedroom. "Atsuko, did you play with the dolls last night?"

It was her mother's habit to raise a problem in as direct and abrupt manner as possible. Papa had already left the house; he took a bath at ten, went to bed at eleven, and awoke at six to begin the day's commute. It was a weekly schedule he never deviated from.

Atsuko and her mother walked into the living room where they had performed the Setsubun ritual. A few days ago, Papa had taken out the dolls for the Doll's Festival in early March, and put them up for display in the corner of the room. Twelve Japanese figures in traditional kimonos with traditionally painted faces; they represented the Imperial Family from the ancient Heian Period, with their samurai retainers and court musicians.

"This morning," said Mama, "I came in here and the dolls were all over the floor. Heartbreaking, it was. The Emperor and his wife had rolled into the corner were just lying there. Now please, Atsuko, be honest. Did you get up during the night and come into this room?"

Atsuko slowly shook her head. "Maybe there was an earthquake?"

"Don't talk to me like that, child. The only doll left on the shelf was the Emperor's daughter. Now if you say it wasn't you, I believe you, but ... well, I'm just glad that I get up before Papa does. I put them back on the shelf before he saw anything. There I was, just about ready to open the rice-cooker and start on his lunchbox, and ..."

Atsuko wished Mama would stop. She was too old to worry about dolls, she thought. She was a woman now. She frowned at the dolls on the top shelf, the tiny delicate eyes and mouths of the Emperor and his wife. The sound last night must have been the dolls falling off the shelves. What had happened?

Only the dolls knew, and they weren't saying anything.

Atsuko planned her move very carefully. After school, she went to the local supermarket to look at the Valentine displays. The collections swam before her eyes — the juxtaposition of smooth, dark chocolate, and brightly colored wrapping bringing her out in a sweat, her mouth watering in anticipation.

She finally decided on one that looked cute and was the right price for her meager collection of pocket money. Heart and gut suffused with a warm, satisfied glow, she returned home, thinking of the treat that was, for once, intended for the hands of some one else. She was doing something for another person! Wasn't she kind? This was what the Principal was always going on about in his anti-bullying speeches; you have to think about the preciousness of life. Now she understood what he meant. What could be more precious than giving sweets to the boy you...

To the boy you...

She was finding it difficult to breath. What would she get for White Day, that day in March when the boys were obliged to return the favor? Would he bow in front of her with his white candy — followed by soft words, and the soft touch of his hands?

What would they do together? She tried to imagine, but couldn't. The whole thing remained behind a screen of the sweetest mystery. In her mind there was a box, wrapped up in the cutest of paper, and inside were Atsuko and Ryuji, flowing with each other, melting into each other and forming a couple.

Valentine's day. At last.

Atsuko came to school hiding the elaborately wrapped box hidden inside amongst the schoolbooks, snacks and comics. She was taking no chances; she didn't want any inquisitive eyes noticing the package and asking questions before the big moment. All through the first lesson, Atsuko was sitting at the back as usual. The homeroom teacher had re-organized the seating plan after the oshogatsu vacation, but the cool girls sat where they wanted, and refused to sit next to Atsuko. The lesson lasted fifty minutes and Atsuko couldn't concentrate — even thinking about her comics was no good; it was difficult to draw breath.

The bell rang for the first recess. Atsuko bided her time, glancing around her, the pulse hammering in her dry throat until she felt she was being choked.

Most students had left their seats and were crowding together in the aisles, gossiping. She glanced behind her. Ryuji was alone, putting his books into his bag, wearing his usual sullen expression.

Now was her chance. She pulled the package out of her bag, concealing it by pressing it against her navy blue sweater, and half-stumbled, half-ran to the desks at the back.

"This is nothing special," she mumbled nervously, "but I'd like you to have it."

Ryuji started, as if he'd just been slapped in the face. "What?"

"It's Valentine's Day," she said, with the brightest smile she could manage. "And ... this is for you."

His face warped, as if he couldn't control his muscles. He stared at the box, at the wrapping, and his eyes opened wide. "Atsuko, I can't take that."

"Why not?" She grinned again, feeling a sudden tremor in her voice. "Go on. Take it. It's a Valentine's present."

Ryuji took his eyes off the box, but he didn't look at Atsuko. He flashed a glance over his shoulder, across the room, at the students goofing around near the door. He was embarrassed, and he wasn't smiling. And his eyes...

"I'm sorry," he said, "but I can't take it." Then, he scooped the rest of his books into his bag and pushed past her with a mumbled apology.

Atsuko stood facing the spot where Ryuji had been.

Behind her, she heard the voices of the other students. A squall of laughter ripped though the air, so shrill it hurt her ears. She daren't look. She daren't listen. Maybe they weren't laughing at her, but soon, they would be.

He didn't take the chocolates, she thought. I'm standing here, holding them, and I have to go back to my own desk and put them back in my bag.

But I can't. I can't walk past the other girls with these chocolates in my hand. I just can't.

She was a woman now, but he hadn't taken the chocolates. He hadn't even said thank you.

It started as a rippling beneath the floor.

The classroom chatter and laughter died as the windows began to rattle and the cupboards rocked back and forth against the walls.

Earthquake, everyone cried, in voices shrill and tight. This was Japan; everyone was prepared for earthquakes.

What they were not prepared for was the wooden boards of the classroom flooring shattering and exploding upwards, pushed by a huge gushing of dark brown sludge. Once, twice, three times, four times in the different corners of the class, dark fountains of muck burst and spouted into the air, spattering the white sailor-suit blouses of the screaming girls, tarring the faces of the shouting boys.

The students were a struggling mass at the doors, fighting and clawing at each other to get out, as the filthy black earth vented up from below and the building began to subside. Atsuko stood, alone, in the center of the classroom, her feet sinking into the mess.

She closed her eyes. She waited for Ryuji to join her in the soft melting sweetness, oozing into each other, becoming one at last.

The first thing Papa saw when he woke up in the morning was Paris. Mounted in a tarnished clip-frame, the picture hung on the wall, an aerial view of the Eiffel Tower and the surrounding avenues. Papa had cut it from a guidebook he'd found in a coin-laundry.

After waking, Papa carried out the routine familiar through years of habit. He took a swig of the water from the plastic bottle by his bedside. He carefully rolled up his sleeping-bag, and shoved it under the sawn-off coffee-table. He wistfully scanned the pictures of children in kimonos tacked to the wall, next to the Eiffel tower. Then he put on his moldering sports shoes, and climbed out of his cardboard box to check the morning weather.

March was a treacherous time to be homeless. It held the promise of spring, but a deliciously warm day could sometimes be followed by the vicious cold of a winter that refused to surrender. A cold that was, for many individuals Papa knew personally, potentially lethal. Leaving the twilight of the alley, and standing alone in the quiet alley outside, Papa scanned the sky. It would be clear today, but cold.

The alley lay in a neglected corner of central Shibuya, in Tokyo, sheltering under a pedestrian bridge and bordered by the parking lot of a department store. At one end of the alley stood the steps leading to a small park, shunned by all except the young, aggressive, Shibukaji kids who carried out nameless deals in its dark, graffiti-stained corners. At the other end lay the bustling streets that carried bright young people to the restaurants and department stores. None of them bothered or interrupted Papa and his compatriots, as they nestled underneath the bridge in their forlorn village of boxes.

Pulling his broom from behind the cardboard box, Papa stretched, hearing bones click like mah-jong tiles on a table, and began to methodically sweep the tunnel. The grit and discarded trash on the sidewalk could turn into an offensive dust when the wind picked up, getting into the eyes and the clothes of the alley's population. The tunnel was not frequented by many; most were unaware of its existence, and the few salarymen who traversed it, seeking a short cut to the station, marched through with heads bowed, eyes fixed on the ground or on their own slim leather briefcases.

Papa constantly badgered the rest of the tunnel's inmates to follow his example. In the morning, clear up and sort through any new garbage that had been placed in the surrounding area. Go to the station, and when the subway trains had pulled in and had disgorged their passengers, scan the racks for manga left behind. On a street near their tunnel, Papa and his compatriots would take turns throughout the day and evening, selling their finds for one hundred yen each. In the afternoon, he would take anyone who was well enough to the nearby temple or the charity centre, for hot food doled out by volunteers. Sometimes he would go alone to the back entrance of a nearby tonkatsu shop, where the sympathetic owner would give him bags of leftovers. He was a rare one, and an old acquaintance of Papa's; most managers would now deliberately grind cigarette ash and broken crockery in with the food scraps, to keep away the homeless. After leaving the discreet corner where they sold their manga, Papa and whoever he was with would carry their stock home, and in his box, Papa read from his store of books by a flashlight he taped in place on the ceiling.

It was good to have a routine.

Papa would have no truck with the new breed of homeless, who went up to ordinary people and pestered them for money. Some of them, he had heard, approached gaijin to beg in broken English.

Unacceptable. Papa had his routine, he had his tunnel, and he had his pride. He had seen many others come, and seen many go; but he always asked them to co-operate with each other.

Arriving at the Shibuya Community Centre a little before twelve, Papa was shown a seat and given pork cutlets over rice, and a bowl of steaming miso soup. Papa savored his meal slowly, exchanging comments with those closest to him on the flimsy plastic table, watching from beneath the brim of his baseball cap the nervous, fresh-faced volunteers in the kitchen.

On this afternoon, before he went on duty selling comics, he returned to his refuge and read some more - a novel he had read and admired many times, a great writer from the Meiji era. He sat in his Toshiba foldaway home, a threadbare rug over his knees, the flaps open to admit the dusty air. Every once in a while, Papa shifted position, when the grumbling from his back became too much.

Sometime before evening, as dusk began to bleed the life out of the sky, Papa's concentration was broken. Furtive scrabbling came from the makeshift homestead next to Papa's, and the old man felt it as well as heard it, his neighbor's movements vibrating the cardboard wall behind Papa's head. Moments later, he heard it: a low groan of discomfort. It was followed by others, growing into a steady monotone of distress, a half-wailing that grated on the nerves.

Papa frowned. His neighbour, Yamashita-san, was a little deficient in the mental department, but he was mostly quiet. He wasn't given to the horrible incoherent rambling that Papa had seen in some of his colleagues. Perhaps Yamashita-san was suffering from indigestion; very likely, considering the inedible trash he habitually shoveled into his mouth.

"Are you all right?" Papa called, a little halfheartedly. Then he realized; Yamashita-san was on the south side of Papa's box. Behind him there was only the storage box that held the manga. Papa had no neighbor on the other side.

Confused, concerned and a little angered, Papa climbed out to investigate. Squeezed into the space between Papa's box and the storage carton was a small hovel of cardboard and stiff paper. Papa could not remember seeing it before. Moreover, he could not think of who the tenant might be, and he prided himself on knowing all of the alley's occupants by name or nickname.

He peered closely at the corporate labels half-washed away from the sides of the box. Either his eyesight was fading, or the Japanese characters were of a type unknown to him. He stood there wondering whether he should greet the new tenant. The moaning had stopped, and so had the movement. Presumably whoever was inside had fallen asleep. Shadows clinging to his stiff arms and legs, Papa climbed back into his box.

It was not long before Papa was disturbed by his neighbor again. He had fallen into a fitful doze, the book falling onto his chest. He awoke with a start and a sudden feeling of alarm, as if there were the first rumblings of an earthquake.

The moaning had returned, from a point a few centimeters behind Papa's head. This time it was mixed with sobbing, and spates of occasional deep, sour cursing. "Are you all right?" Papa called, in resentment as well as concern. "Hello! What's up?"

This time he received an answer. "I've had enough," the voice said. It was a comment Papa had heard many times before. What shocked him now, though, was not the intensity of despair and scorn in the voice. What shocked him was that the voice belonged to a woman.

"I've had enough," the voice repeated. It was an elderly voice; it could have been the voice of a grandmother. Papa had met several homeless women around Tokyo in the past few years, and the experience had always been deeply unsettling.

"I've lived for too long," the quavering voice continued. "Why can't I just die? Why can't I just finish it?"

"That's foolish talk!" Papa called in a stern voice. "There's always something to be learned from your troubles. It doesn't matter how bad things are. There's always a reason for living, if you can find it and hold onto it. "

The moaning abated, and sank into a quiet, mournful, sniffing. After a while, the voice returned, calmer than before. "You're Papa, aren't you? They call you Papa. I know about you. I feel very encouraged to hear your voice."

Papa chuckled, and nodded his head in acknowledgement. Even when homeless and destitute, he could still be charming.

"Yes, I've heard about you," the voice said. "The people of this tunnel respect you a lot, even if they don't show it sometimes. You've helped them a lot. You've become quite a retainer for the homeless, haven't you? That's why I've been looking for you. That's why I followed you here."

Papa shrugged off the blanket. He was not going to keep his peace of mind tonight, he realized grimly. "What are you talking about?"

"I've been following you ever since Corridor 4, Papa," the voice replied.

A freezing breath spiked its way down Papa's back, and he jerked upright, the book falling to the cardboard floor. "What do you know about that?" he snapped.

"People respect you because of what happened all those months ago," the voice continued in its dry, dusty way. "On January 24th. The day when the police raided the largest homeless refuge in Shinjuku, the one in Subway Corridor 4. You helped organize the resistance against the police, Papa, an achievement you like to talk of."

"That's only because people ask me about it," the old man said defensively.

"And you tell them what they want to hear. Brave Papa, fighting the cold, faceless authorities." The voice hesitated, and when it returned, it had a hard, cold edge to it. "But you don't tell them the truth, do you? You conveniently forgot to tell them how you cowered under the truncheons and begged them not to hit you. How you managed to slip through a partition into a construction site in the confusion of the scene. Especially, how you managed to escape not only with your own possessions, but also a bag containing those of the other people in the shelter."

"I was protecting them!" cried Papa, his voice harsh and strident, thrown back towards him by the muffling cardboard. "The people in the shelter gave me their stuff to look after. We couldn't let it be taken by the cops. I thought I'd be able to return it later, after things had settled down."

"Did you? Did you even try? What happened to those watches? The cash? Not that there was much to begin with."

Papa was silent. After a long pause he tilted his head slightly, his left ear pressed against the wall of the box. "How do you know about this? Who are you?"

The cardboard buzzed with the answer, the cracked voice whispering directly into Papa's ear. "I am the one who's been looking for you ever since that day, Papa. It is my duty. It is my . . . curse."

A viscous gob of saliva caught in Papa's throat.

"I am the Dodomeki. . . the Hundred Eyed Woman. I was once a lonely spinster, who stole from her friends and acquaintances. As my karma dictates, I must haunt those who have performed the same crime. That is why I have been looking for you, Papa. It was difficult, it took a long time ... but now I've found you."

A memory slammed into Papa's mind, the force of it pinning him where he sat. The afternoon Kabuki plays he had seen, when in a better life. The eerie darkness of the stage, the sudden appearance of the avenging ghost, the bone-white face, the huge, staring eyes . . .

Why did the ghosts always have to be female?

"No!" With a speed that surprised himself, Papa was on his feet, bursting through the box's roof like a toy on a spring. With a rage that pushed him beyond conscious thought, he leant over the top of the box close to his, his fingers scrabbling at the flaps. "Who are you really?" he roared. "Why are you doing this?"

The damp cardboard peeled open and the occupant within raised its hands, as if to ward off the glow of the street light above. Papa stopped, appalled by what he saw.

At first he thought it was some skin disfigurement. The hands were wrapped around with rags, but through the rotten fabric Papa could see the bulges. Behind them was a face half-hidden by a hooded anorak and the shadows of the box, but Papa could see clearly enough the obtrusions that crowded over the skin - eyes, dozens of them, on the cheeks, on the palms and backs of the hands, beneath the hair, and on the neck and throat. Eyes separated by narrow margins of skin, a filthy, wrinkled skin alive with the rapid fluttering of eyelashes. And every eye was pellucid, stained milky white.

"Gods help us," Papa whispered. "You're blind."

The figure was short and dumpy, with rank, gray hair spilling from inside the hood. Her hands moved constantly, reaching towards Papa and then pulling back to protect her face, and attempting to hide a curious pouch she wore around her neck.

"Some years ago," she hissed in her repellent voice, "I realized I could not bear to look upon the living any more."

Fiery bile rose in Papa's throat. The supplicating gestures, and the cowed posture of the thing before him, turned his fear into an inexplicable feeling of rage.

"If you've sunk so low," he snarled, "You won't need this!"

Reaching down, Papa brushed aside the hands and grabbed the pouch. The figure howled wordlessly in protest, and the old man caught a glimpse of a lipless mouth with rows of teeth like scales. With a snap the strap gave way and Papa rocked back on his heels.

Then he was off, a sprint carried him through the tunnel to the far end of the alley, where he hesitated. A solid wall of noise, neon, and uncaring humans reared up before him. He steeled himself and plunged into the flow, buffeted by those moving too fast to avoid him, carried along by the uncaring speed of life, lost in banality.

Breathing hard, Papa looked about him. The faces were normal. The eyes of the crowd refused to meet his, looked away, stared into a grey zone of indifference, but at least they were human eyes.

Papa wiped his brow with his sleeve. What sort of a country was this, where even the ghosts were homeless?

The pouch in his hand was still there. It gave his hand a dull, tingling sensation. Slouching into the emergency exit of a bookstore, he picked at the fastening and pulled it open.

In the neon half-light that illuminated where he stood, Papa caught the dull glimmer of metal, something white, something yellow. He looked closer, catching his breath. The objects were unfamiliar, unsettling . . . but had the unmistakable sheen of precious metal.

Papa thought of his cardboard box, and the row of similar, makeshift refuges for the defeated. He thought of his brother down south in Shimane, who he hadn't spoken to in six years. He thought of the creature behind him, dwelling in darkness, feeling its way through the metal and concrete bowels of the city, waiting for its task to end.

He stepped out of the doorway, and melted into the constantly moving, perpetually unseeing crowd.

The small matter of the hats had always struck Hiromu Obata as rather curious.

At the end of platform 1 of Japan Railways Nakano station, Chuo line, a small flight of stone steps lay beyond a locked metal gate; this in turn led to a narrow wooden crossing over which the station staff could cross the train tracks safely, for the purposes of inspection, if they ever needed. While walking over this crossing - at a time when the signal lights had stopped the trains from entering the station, of course - the staff were required to take off their JR uniform peaked caps.

This was exactly what Obata was doing now. On this fine, calm April day, the air full of the breath of the cherry trees, Obata removed his peaked cap - the brim of which he kept polished to a high degree of reflectivity - and advanced across the thin metal rails. About five hundred meters away, the out-of-service A735K approached at a sedate pace. The tracks had been switched, shunting the train towards a siding where the Transport Department officials would inspect it later. Locomotive A735K; 120,000 kilos of steel, plastic and glass, pulling ten carriages behind it.

Such a touching, but slightly absurd gesture, Obata thought. A mark of respect for "Train-san", the mighty gentlemen under whose grace the population of the city travelled with punctuality and convenience every day. The metal tracks beneath his feet were the bones of the city; the?sturdy exoskeleton which the city depended on to survive. Without this structure, Tokyo would flop and wither away like a beached jellyfish.

It was Obata's duty to keep this flow of business untroubled. The trains must never stop. Obstructions must be prevented whenever possible, but if they occurred, they must be speedily removed.

Once more on the platform, Obata returned to the station-master's office. At the age of fifty-seven, after a lifetime career with Japan Railways, he had held the post of Station Manager for over ten years now. He lifted the platform lantern from its position on his desk and left the office, holding the lantern reverently in his white-gloved hands. Leaving the office, his eyes automatically glanced at the emergency stop button on the concrete wall.

The flow of business must never stop.

The lights now green, Obata marched the length of the station, acknowledging the smart bows of his subordinates. It was mid-afternoon — only students, housewives, shoppers, the odd salaryman on his way across the city to meet a client; the best time of day. No crowds to shepherd and cajole.

As the 14:28 train approached from the east, it's previous stop Shinjuku station, Obata felt the sharpness of his awareness increase. It was as if a thread running through all of his senses — sight, hearing, smell — were being pulled tight to draw them all together.

A human body falling onto the railway's wooden sleepers makes a distinct, somewhat hollow sound. If conscious, it is of course accompanied by a cry of distress. If insensible, through drink or fainting, the sound of the body striking the tracks is not unlike, say, that of a big bag of rice falling from a truck.

Obata's ears had trained themselves to pick up any such sound. His eyes narrowed as he watched both the approaching train and the behavior of the people on the platform.

The train pulled smoothly into the station, exactly on time. The doors slid open, allowing the passengers to exit and enter, permitting the flow of business.

Obata signalled with the lantern and carefully choreographed, white-gloved gestures that the doors could be closed. "The doors are about to close!" Obata announced through his wireless microphone, over the cheerful recorded jingle that filled the spring air. "Monitor - yosh! Signals — yosh! Departing - now!"

The train began its slow exit from the station. Obata scanned the platform with his keen, attentive gaze, hunting for signs of any irregular activity. Shifting his head slightly, his line of vision penetrated the windows to the inside of the carriage. As the train began to move, it was possible to make out the faces of the passengers. A bored schoolgirl, pulling a make-up pouch from her satchel. A tired-looking grandmother with bifocals and a gauze allergy mask. A college boy with a spiky haircut wearing a baseball jacket. Obata could catch every one of their faces. As the train picked up speed, it became harder and harder to focus on a single person; within seconds, their faces became a single, elongated blur, flesh and clothes melting together in the uniform anonymity of speed.

Another train had left punctually. Obata had performed his job. The flow of business must never stop.

Today Obata was on round-the clock-duty. He would stay overnight at Nakano station and oversee the platforms until seven-forty the next morning. That was what it said on his contract, but in reality his shift never finished at that time. That was the height of the rush-hour, and Obata was expected to stay overtime and help his subordinates manage the crowds.

Every season had its particular problems. The winter had snow; the summer had the heat and excessive humidity; the autumn had the onset of colds and fevers; and the spring had most of the staff and passengers wearing masks to alleviate the perpetual hay fever that plagued the residents of Tokyo. Spring also had the "cherry blossom problem" — the seasonal blooms fell to the tracks and clumped together into a mulchy substance with a hard, non-stick surface, reducing traction and hampering braking procedures. Japan Rail utilized overtime workers to inspect the rails overnight, using high-pressure hoses and air-blowers to clear the mess.

At five o'clock sharp Obata returned to the station master's office to attend the area manager's meeting. The staff not on duty sat on hard folding chairs in the stationmaster's office, slim cardboard folders in their hands. Obata sat up straight in his chair, listening to the rise and fall of the area manager's voice, doing his best to look attentive. The area manager was a physically slight man, several centimeters shorter than Obata. It was obvious that he had recently dyed his thinning hair black, but his age was showing through in the liver spots dabbed upon his dark, narrow face. When speaking, he punctuated his sentences with a hissing, sucking intake of breath that was so common to Japanese men thinking about what they were saying.

"And now we come, eerm," hiss hiss suck suck, "to the regrettable incidents upon this line," hiss hiss suck suck. He used the term jinshin jiko — 'human incident'. "It's been reported that each year, the national figures for suicide increase. A sizeable proportion of those choose to end their lives by jumping onto the tracks. It's clear to the management that we have to do something about these regrettable losses of life, which cause so much suffering and of course reflect badly upon Japan Railways. If you open the folders, I'll take you through the results of the Central Tokyo District Health and Safety Sub-Committee meeting."

All of those present fumbled with the envelopes, slipping out several sheets of paper bearing the Japan Railways crest.

"Proposal One, eerm," hiss hiss suck suck. "It has been decided to place large mirrors at strategic points along the platform. The mirrors will be approximately one point five meters by two meters, and be at a level where those waiting on the platform can clearly see their own reflections."

Obata looked at the diagram on the report. Sure enough, there was the railway's cuddly cartoon mascot, Kon-Kon-chan, and sure enough, he was holding up a large mirror. A red-faced salaryman was gawping at his own reflection in it.

"Proposal two," hiss hiss suck suck, "concerns the level crossings near the platforms. It has been decided to repaint them in bright, primary colors, and to illuminate them at night with fluorescent lights."

Obata turned to the appropriate page, and there was another poster of Kon-Kon-chan, leading a chain of salarymen holding hands, across a bright orange level crossing.

"It is the opinion of JR East that the regrettable incidents of suicide have befallen people who have — temporarily - lost their senses, so to speak. It's hoped that the new colors will have the effect of cheering people up, and that the mirrors will make people who are considering suicide examine themselves very closely. In this way, it's hoped customers will return to their senses, and quit the thoughts of taking their own life."

The area manager closed his report and laid it on the desk in front of him. "Gentlemen, I would appreciate your opinions."

The station staff stared back at him in silence.

"Everyone knows it's because JR are so generous with the fines!" Sakai yelled after the meeting, as the staff had a hurried lunchbox meal in the office back room. "If we charged the families of those jumpers what the subways charge for cleaning up the mess, you'd soon see the suicide figures go down, mark my words."

Tanaka laughed and joined in. "They should put posters of Kon-Kon-chan everywhere, and they should have a line like — oh wait, wait, I've got it now ..." He held up a hand in mock inspiration, a blob of glutinous rice falling unheeded from his dangling chopsticks — "If you don't want to make Kon-Kon cry, don't jump onto the tracks and die."

Obata permitted himself a smile as the laughter ricocheted off the walls, but he said nothing. Best not to. There was no telling what might get back to the Area Manager.

Obata was still smarting from the meeting the month before.

"One hour?"

Obata had closed his eyes, bowing his head in front of the Area Manager.

There were several station assistants in the room, but they were not expected to speak. It was Obara's station; he was responsible. He was expected to speak, and explain. And to apologize.

The Area Manager sat in Obata's chair, at Obata's desk. Obata had never thought of himself as tall, but the chair and the desk together made the Area Manager look smaller than usual for some reason, like a child sitting in an adult's seat, bony wrists poking out of polyester sleeves, square wire-rimmed spectacles sitting uncertainly on a button nose.

"Thirty minutes, Obata-kun. Thirty minutes is how long Japan Railways say it takes to restore service. To remove obstructions from the line after an incident. Yet yesterday, you and your staff took over one hour. One hour. At eight in the morning, the peak commuting time. How could this happen?"

"I truly apologize, Mr. Chief, and it's entirely my responsibility," Obata muttered in a low voice, his head rising and falling to punctuate his words. He spoke slowly, almost as if stammering. "I, er, that is, we ... that is ... we couldn't ... find the head."

"What?"

"The head, you see, the head, of the ... victim...we couldn't find it." Obata couldn't stop the words from coming out, even though he felt there was a ring of steel around his temples, squeezing a little bit tighter with every word he spoke. "The paramedics managed to collect all of the ... remains ... in the bags provided, but we were unable to find the head."

"Unable to find it," the Area Manager echoed.

"Eventually someone realized it had caught between the back axle of the train carriage and the wheels, and, er ... we assisted the paramedics to ... retrieve it ... sir."

The Area Manager was silent, his eyes bulbous behind his fishtank glasses.

Obara hung his head in shame. He had humiliated himself, and also his superior. The Area Manager had not wished to know the details of the operation. He had not wished to become involved with the mechanics of recovering a corpse from the tracks. The chief had simply required an earnest apology. But by being frank, Obata had shown that the immaculate white cotton gloves of the Station Master were soaked in blood.

After that, Obata had stepped out onto the platform, taking deep, grateful breaths of the warm air. He had been dismissed.

"You're taking this all too personally, Obata," the Area Manager had said to him finally. "Perhaps you need to refresh yourself. Take a few days off. Go to a hot spring, play a bit of golf. After that, you can return to your job stronger, fitter, and more cheerful than ever before. Do your best, and smile! Show your smile to your passengers! That's the spirit."

Obata had removed his hat, wiping a thin patina of sweat from his brow.

Try as he might, Obata could not even get away from the suicides at home. Sitting cross-legged on a cushion over the straw tatami matting, a packet of dried fish and a glass of chilled beer at hand, Obata chewed thoughtfully as he took in the reports flashing through the high-resolution, plasma TV screen that occupied nearly the whole of one wall.

There had been another incident that day, but not on Obata's line.

An unidentified middle-aged person had jumped onto the tracks in front of witnesses, on the Yamanote line, the huge loop that encompassed central Tokyo.

And there was more. The police had conducted another of their infrequent sweeps of Aokigahara Forest, the large national park that lay at the slopes of Mount Fuji. The remote, heavily wooded area was notorious as a site for those who chose to end their lives. On that day, the police reported that they had found twelve bodies within the forest, bringing the total number this year so far to thirty-six.

So far.

"It's the families I feel sorry for," Obata's wife declared, as she ferried dishes to and from the kitchen.

And she was right, of course, it was always the ones behind that felt the pain most, especially the railway suicides. Obata was well acquainted with the business practices concerning a death on the tracks. The bill for repairs and delay caused by the 'incident' were handed over to the victims' families, for them to pay. You would have thought this would discourage those thinking of suicide; but still, they came to the train stations.

They came to the Yamanote, the Tozai, and the Chuo, not to go to work with a well-shaven chin and a briefcase full of documents, but to lean forward and feel the kiss of tons of onrushing metal.

Obata leant back upon his cushion, sucking the fragments of cabbage and fatty meat from between his teeth, his attention wandering from his sons to the TV and back again. The conversation seemingly finished, they sat together slurping at their bowls of soup, their faces down-turned and brows drawn in concentration. How extraordinary, he thought once more, that these two healthy lads have entered the world because of me. Couldn't he see himself and his wife, every day, in the features that they possessed? The shape of their noses, the slope of their chins, the way their stiff glossy hair grew and was trimmed in the familiar high school cut? Wasn't it extraordinary that he had bought into the world slightly elongated versions of himself and his wife? Wasn't that reason enough for anyone to be grateful, and carry on living?

Bringing his own bowl out to the kitchen, he presented it to his wife as if it was a birthday present. "Thank you. It was a feast."

"Why, bringing out your empties! What's the matter, is there nothing on TV? No, that's OK, go back and sit down. Don't put those in the bowl, they're glass, they're washed separately. Now off you go."

Resuming his seat, Obata smiled again at his sons. Come to think of it, they did look a bit tired. It was the baseball club, most probably, the school requiring them to practice early morning before school, and in late afternoon after classes. Obata remembered his own high school days, how worn out he'd feel after lugging all that sports kit home on the train. How the coach and shouted and slapped them to instill the proper fighting spirit. Ah, those were the days.

How quiet they were, he thought, and how pale their skin looked, contrasting with the dark, slightly sunken eyes as they stared at the TV.

They're just tired, that's all, he thought, after the practice. They're just tired.

Obata stood before Aokigahara in his dream.

Although he would not remember it when he awoke, it was an extraordinarily vivid dream. If he strained his ears he could just hear, carried to him on a gentle breeze, the creaking of the ropes, the sound of the unseen men and women swinging gently by their necks, somewhere beneath the dark trees. On the ground Obata saw the dim shapes of a countless number of shoes, lined up neatly in front of the trees.

A short, dark figure walked out of the forest and approached. As he got closer, Obata could make out his features: the slicked-back hair, the sallow, bony face.

It was the Area Manager.

The Manager's white-gloved hands held something ragged, and dripping, and still wearing a pair of splintered eyeglasses.

"I believe this is what you were looking for," the Area Manager said, holding up the offending item.

There were no apologies during the rush hour.

There was no point. It was impossible to say sorry if at every move of your body you found yourself pressing against the unwelcome intimacy of a fellow passenger. You just endured it as best you could. It was common knowledge that the best way of coping with the crush was to surrender your mind when they pushed you into the carriage, to surrender your mind to something higher and nobler. He could see it in the faces of the passengers as he and the other station assistants braced themselves, stretched forth their white-gloved hands and pushed against the wall of warm, yielding polyester, pushing hard to squeeze one more salaryman into the few centimeters of space left behind those sliding doors. It was common for a briefcase or a shoe to be left sticking out of the gap between the doors, jamming them open, and on those occasions Obata had to be quick with his wits, signaling where the obstruction was, urging the white-gloved hands to mold and press the obstruction past the closing doors.

The 7:45 pulled away on time, condensation forming slightly on the inside of the windows from the faces of the honorable customers pressed against the glass. The next wave of passengers continued to ooze onto the platform, impatiently clucking their tongues and flicking their newspapers as they prepared to wait for the statutory two minutes.

Obata and his staff navigated the station, gingerly picking their way along the outside of the platform, carefully treading their way between the rows of passengers and where the train was about to pull in. Just watch that yellow line, Obata told himself. Just keep watching it.

Up ahead, a flurry of movement caught Obata's eye. He looked ahead, narrowed his eyes. A passenger had unfurled his umbrella, and seemed to be on the verge of putting it over his head.

Obata frowned. It was a beautiful spring day on a covered platform. No need for an umbrella, surely. The man, middle-aged and wearing eyeglasses, seemed agitated, clearing his throat, wiping his face and neck with a handkerchief. He seemed to be checking his wrist watch every few seconds.

Obata continued in the direction of the man, increasing his pace.

The 7:47 approached from up the tracks, and the passenger was halfway between Obata and its approaching bulk. Obata saw it approaching, its box-like orange front easing around the bend and coming into view. He saw the driver behind the glass as he applied the brakes, pulling into the station at the required twenty kilometers an hour.

The passenger was even more agitated now and was rocking back and forth on the platform. Obata tried, as best as he could without losing his footing, to force himself to run.

To no avail.

The fabric of the day broke, a sudden spell of silence as the middle-aged man launched himself into the path of the train. The blaring of the train's horn drowned out any screams and shouts of alarm. Obata himself was shouting, but he could not register any sound.

And then the roar and rushing air of the train swooped in to fill the shock, filling it with the screams of tortured metal and shocked commuters as the driver braked hard.

One of the station assistants had already pressed the emergency stop button, for the alarm signals were flashing on all of the station pillars, but the train was already slipping and sliding to a halt. Tanaka, on the duty in the ticket office, was on the roster as the first one to call the emergency services. The first thing to do was to get the passengers off the platform. Through his wireless mike, Obata shouted himself hoarse, asking the people waiting to go back up the stairs, where their tickets would be refunded. They began fitfully to move, glancing moodily in the direction of the train-tracks, shouting into their mobile phones as they peered at the darkness beneath the wheels. As they left, Obata gave the signal for the train doors to be opened, letting the flood of shocked passengers onto the platform, to be shepherded gently but firmly up the escalators in the direction of the taxi ranks.

When this job had been completed, and as they waited for the paramedics to arrive, Obata picked two of the elder staff to go with him, to descend via the wooden stairs onto the tracks, to inspect the remains.

As Obata knew from experience, what they had to do was follow the bloodstains — and after several minutes, a shout from Tanaka alerted them to where the passenger had gone. Tanaka pointed to a darkened bulk in the shadows underneath a carriage near the front of the train. The figure, that looked like nothing so much as a large bundle of rags, had been dragged quite a few meters from where Obata had first seen him. Obata crouched down to peer into a darkness that smelt of axle grease and sand mixed with something sharp and nauseous.

The man's skull had been split neatly down the nose and sinus, not unlike a piece of wood splitting along the grain when struck with an axe. One lens of the man's eyeglasses lay embedded in what remained of the flesh of the head — although both eyes were now gazing blindly in totally opposite directions.

The man's jacket and shirt had been ripped away by the wheels and suspension links that had snagged them. Bright yellow fat glistened alongside bloodied muscle and crushed bone, the upper torso mashed into a shapeless polyester pulp. Obata noticed that the guts, thankfully, had not burst, and there was little blood from the legs because the tissues had been crushed by the wheels, effectively sealing the wounds as the feet had been amputated at the lower thigh.

It could have been a lot worse.

Obata and his colleagues retreated to the platform, to make sure none of the other passengers strayed past the roped-off areas. The paramedics arrived perhaps fifteen minutes later. Obata and four of his team had by then changed into overalls and hard hats, and accompanied the paramedics onto the tracks.

With forceps and clasps with elongated handles, the paramedics removed the passenger's torso and legs from where they had stuck. Once the larger remains had been packed away and sealed in the black body bags, the paramedics wheeled their dispersal device onto the platform; the squat, tubby machine that reminded Obata of an industrial-issue vacuum cleaner. They thrust the long, corrugated nozzle under the carriage, and Obata watched and listened as it sucked up the fragments of bone and tissue too small to be removed manually.

After that, it was simply a case of putting sawdust over the blood, and sweeping it up with a shovel and bucket.

The train would be taken out of service, awaiting detailed inspection by the police. The paramedics hauled their stretcher and its cargo of black bags up the stairs to the exit, and Obata bowed to them as they left carrying their burden. Once more in the station master's office, Obata prepared to contact Central Office personally. To speak to the Area Manager.

Before that, he looked at the clock, and rubbed his hands, his stained white gloved hands, together. Twenty-four minutes. Some of the assistants were already in the smoking area, lighting up.

It had been a good day's work. The trains had been delayed for twenty-four minutes, but they would not stop. Not on Obata's watch. Never stop.

The flow of business must never stop.

Yasuo Ogawa stepped out from the ugly concrete shack housing the stairwell, and the first thing he noticed was the wind, buffeting him, snatching at the fabric of his suit like the hands of persistent children.

Everything looked unfamiliar. Around him stood the skyscrapers of Nihonbashi, Tokyo's business district. He had never seen them from this vantage point before; eighteen stories above the ground, on the roof of Nishigaki Securities Co.

Forcing himself to move quickly, Ogawa walked to the railing around the edge of the building. He took off his shoes, and carefully lined them up, pointing them back towards the stairwell. There were large gaps between the struts, and he bent down to squeeze his fifty-four year-old body between the flaking metal poles.

He straightened himself on the other side, and then froze, pressing himself against the railing. He caught a glimpse of the abyss opening up at his feet and a shock of nausea squirted up into his guts, his palms slick with a wrenching fear. His legs trembled violently, until he thought they might refuse to support his weight. The chill of the concrete spread through his thin woolen socks and numbed his feet.

It was not too late to go back. He could climb back over, rest in the stairwell, and mop away the stench of his mortality. He could return to his office, and think of other ways of coping with the hidden company losses that had just come to light. The billions of Yen parceled out in discreet tobaishi deals. He could endure the methodical humiliation from the media, the police, the government officials...

No, he could not.

The insurance policies that he had transferred into bonds would be already with his solicitor. His family would be well taken care of. The suicide letter was in the top drawer of his cleaned-out desk, where it would soon be located.

Ogawa pushed himself away from the railings. He realized suddenly, that under his breath, all this time, he had been humming an old folk song. He toppled quite slowly, and as his centre of gravity shifted he saw the parking lot beneath him, the small number of cars and limousines this early hour of the morning, the painted lines of official demarcation. Then he was past the point of no return. The emptiness took him by the hands and pulled him forward.

His head swung lower and lower until he began to somersault. The thought sprang into his mind that he would smash into the side of the building, but he had pushed himself away with his toes. He leveled out, and launched into free fall.

Eighteen stories. How long would it take? Five seconds? Less?

The feeling of losing control was terrifying, yet also exhilarating. Things were happening too fast for Ogawa to appreciate his own death. The towers of Nihonbashi leapt into space, bending and swaying as the world spun around him. The parking-lot suddenly unfolded itself like a bird opening its wings, the painted lines stretching into infinity. Ogawa had a piercingly sharp image of a drain cover directly beneath him.

He hit the ground -

And went THROUGH IT -

There was a millisecond's vision of blackness, a soft, spongy blackness like the scum on the surface of a river -

And Ogawa was through.

Around him, the dance of the skyscrapers continued unabated, the earth and the sky constantly changing partners. Nihonbashi spun like a roulette wheel. His eyes and his mind refused to accept, only his body could recognize the fact - he was still falling; but this time, falling upwards, hurtling back along the arc he had just traveled.

He was falling into the sky.

Ogawa had often wondered what to expect in the afterlife. Angels. Demons. Best of all, the numbness of oblivion. But he hadn't expected this. Where was the pain? Where was the impact, the bursting of bones and brains? Where was the end to it all?

Gravity tossed him higher, like a leaf helpless in the wind, until he felt a subtle change in his direction. Before him, he saw the agitated bulk of the Nishigaki Building. He was returning to the top.

While he was still trying to come to terms with this, he felt his body slowing before he reached the roof, and the square dullness of an office window filled his vision. Ogawa was deposited, as if by the meticulous hand of an unseen Kami, upon the ledge outside the fifteenth floor.

With the swiftness of instinct, his hands snapped out to clutch any form of support on the thin metal framing the window. Despite his fumbling, he preserved his balance, as if an invisible force was pressing him against the glass. He was stuck to the building. He was a cherry blossom that had returned to the branch.

Glancing around him, and over his shoulder, Ogawa tried to understand what had happened. If this was the Buddhist afterlife, it looked exactly like Tokyo on a blustery April day. He risked a look below, into the street. It still gave him a nauseous lurch of vertigo, but he could recognize the crawling shapes of distant pedestrians, although the wide streets were empty of cars. The car park had mysteriously disappeared; he seemed to be on the opposite side of the building.

Ogawa turned and pressed his face to the window, seeking to penetrate the darkness within. He raised his hand, wondering if he should bang on the window, shout, draw attention to himself, when he froze - peering through the glass at the figure that wavered amongst reflections and shadow.

Someone was inside the office. Watching him.

Ogawa stared harder, trying to make out the details. There was a figure sitting at a desk, who at once stood up, as if he had registered Ogawa's awareness of him. The figure was that of an elderly man; his clothes the dark cut of a senior salaryman, his body short and rotund, his face corpulent, bland, and topped with dyed slicked-back hair.

The figure left the desk and approached the window, his features gaining definition in the strange half-light. Ogawa tensed himself, but there was something in the stranger's manner that was kindly, almost paternal. Ogawa had the feeling he had seen this man before. As the figure stretched out its arms to open the window, Ogawa's memory clicked into place.

In recent years, he had seen this man's face every week, in departmental meetings. In the framed photograph on the office memorial shelf. His name was Tomotoda Fujisawa, he had been Chairman of the Board of Directors for twelve years ... and he had died in 2005.

The window slid open, and Ogawa saw his face reflected in the dead man's spectacles. He looked disheveled, wild; unseemly. Mr. Fujisawa smiled, and frowned with gentle curiosity.

"Good morning," said Mr. Fujisawa.

"Good morning," Ogawa replied, bowing with considerable difficulty.

Fujisawa's gaze shifted past Ogawa, into the distance. "The weather is quite beautiful today."

"Yes..." Ogawa struggled for words. "It really feels like spring now."

"Nippon Steel is up five points on the Nikkei Index, I heard."

"Really? That's...most impressive."

Mr. Fujisawa's gaze snapped back into focus. "How long have you been standing there?"

"Errm ... about two or three minutes."

"Was it an accident?"

"Erm..." Ogawa flushed with shame, but the older man shook his head and smiled. "There's no need to worry. It comes to us all, one way or the other. I ended my last day on the golf course, myself. A massive stroke. It was all quite amusing, really. I was winning at the time."

Mr Fujisawa gave a little shrug. "Oh, well. I can't stand here gossiping all day. I have some work to finish. I have enjoyed our little chat." The arms stretched out again, hands settling on the window clasp.

"I'm sorry for the inconvenience, sir," Ogawa blurted in panic, "but-but could you help me get inside?"

The ex-chairman's face clouded. "Have you made an appointment?""

"A ... a what?"

"An appointment. There are rules about this sort of thing, you know. Protocol that has to be maintained."

"Well ... I didn't really have time, you see, it was all a bit of a hurry..." Ogawa's voice trailed off and fell into empty space.

"I can't let anyone come in here when they feel like it, you know, or we'll have all sorts of strange types dropping in. After all, I used to be Chairman of the Board of Directors."

"Yes, sir, I know...I attended a few meetings when you were, erm, when you were there. You shook my hand when I was a freshman, sir."

"Did I really? I'm sorry I didn't recognize your face. How long did you work for us?"

"Thirty-four years." As the finality of the statement hit him, Ogawa felt his whole body sag, as if bullied by gravity.

"Don't feel too badly about it," Mr Fujisawa said. "The company was due for restructuring, anyway."

"I didn't give the statutory two months notice, I'm afraid..."

"That's all right. What do you think I am, some kind of demon?" Fujisawa jerked his head back and gave a short bark of a laugh. Ogawa stared, entranced, at teeth and a tongue that seemed eerily normal.

The ex-chairman swiveled on his heel, turning his back on Ogawa and seating himself at the computer. "This is a replication of the latest software," he explained with a proud glint behind his spectacles. "I've found that being dead is no excuse to neglect my business skills. "

As Ogawa rested his weight against the window to try to make himself more comfortable, the ex-chairman tapped tentatively on the keyboard. Ogawa glanced downward. Despite the horror of the drop a few centimeters away from his scuffed loafers, he peered at the shapes of pedestrians beneath him. Although ordinary at first, there did seem to be something odd about them. Flickering lights played about their bodies. It was as if they were not people at all, but lamps, being switched on and off at a speed impossible to calculate.

The ex-chairman's voice brought Ogawa's mind sharply back into focus. "Let me see. Yasuo Ogawa ... I see your pension and insurance contributions have been cashed ... yes, a wise move." After a few fumbled taps, he turned around to beam at Ogawa. "You still have some leave owing to you!"

"I didn't have time to use it," Ogawa said miserably.

Fujisawa stood up and returned to the window. Arms folded, he coolly appraised the man standing on the ledge. "I have a proposition for you," he said thoughtfully.

"Does it involve letting me inside?"

"Don't make an issue out of that."

"I ... I apologize, Mr. Fujisawa."

"I have been fortunate enough to acquire a managerial position in the world that we now inhabit."

"Congratulations, Mr. Fujisawa."

"As such, my responsibilities include dealing with new arrivals. People such as yourself. People with, of course, quite valuable skills and experience."

"Th-thank you, sir." Ogawa's forehead struck the window as he bowed.

"With this in mind, what I propose is a form of ... rehiring. This is not like the world you have just left, Ogawa. Here, nothing is wasted. Nothing."

"I'm extremely glad to hear that, sir," Ogawa stammered.

"What was the department you started your career in, at entry level?"

"Internal communications." Ogawa winced a little at the memory. "I worked in the mail room."

"Internal communications. That seems a good place to start." Returning to the desk, Fujisawa wrote something in flowing, well-ordered Japanese script. Tearing the sheet of paper from its memo pad, he walked back to the window. He opened the window a little wider, and Ogawa released his grip on the frame long enough to take the proffered memo. The paper had an oddly warm, textured feel to it. "Please take this to Jizo-san, in the redemptions department."

"Thank you, sir. Erm...when do I start?"

"Immediately." With a speed unexpected for one so plump, Fujisawa slid the window fully open and shoved Ogawa hard in the chest. With a gasp of surprise the younger man toppled backwards.

The onset of free fall came as a disturbingly familiar terror. Ogawa spun, cartwheeling downwards, and he realized that this time he was falling in the correct direction. Around him ... gray, gray, gray. The sky drew its brows together and assumed the color of accelerating concrete. Light winked from a thousand skyscrapers, and Ogawa had a sudden vision of his own image reflected in each window, reflected a thousand times across the panorama of this fake Nihonbashi. A tiny Ogawa in each window, a tired man in an anonymous polyester suit, tie and jacket and pants flapping like empty clothing on a windy washing day.

Ogawa's head tilted downwards, and he wondered where the white lines were, the painted lines on the parking lot that he had thought would take him away. They weren't there. Something had changed; something was blocking his view of the ground. Instead, he caught a glimpse of dark clotted-blood bone-streaked wetness, branching outwards from its concrete trunk. The side of the building had suddenly and without effort extended a wrist, a palm and quite terrible fingers to catch Ogawa as he fell.

Yasuo Ogawa was about to begin his first day of employment.

Halfway through the grounds of Kasaieki-mae Park, on her way home from school, Yuko Iwata stopped and stared to her left.

She saw a riotous sprawl of color on the ground around one of the garbage bins. That in itself didn't bother her much; what made her pause was the weird look of the stuff. It was like the scuffed earth had acquired a coat of paint. Last semester there'd been some science homework about lightning striking sand on the beach and turning it into glass; it reminded her of that.

As Yuko approached the trash bins, the mess resolved itself in her vision. It consisted of card or paper, cut into dozens of small squares all roughly the same size, covering an area about one meter square. Yuko crouched down to examine it, her brow wrinkling in puzzlement.

It was a map.

To be more accurate, it had once been a map.

The squares represented Tokyo. There were green areas of parks, gray areas of built-up residences and businesses, bordered by the red and yellow veins of roads. Yuko could make out the Kanji lettering of the Showa avenue, Hibiya Park, Ueno railway station, but nothing was where it should have been. Everything had been mixed up; the capital city had been cut into pieces and then rearranged in new, unexpected patterns.

Yuko got to her feet, swinging her satchel back onto her shoulder. Perhaps someone had put the map in the trash, and then someone else had come along and pulled it out. But why had they brought it to the park? Why had it been carefully cut into squares before being dumped?

She kept speculating on what could have happened all the way back to her house, an average wood-and-plaster two-storey building set in the tiny streets near Kasai station. To her relief, her parents weren't home. They hadn't returned from work yet.

Yuko's brother, Takenori, was upstairs, going through his collection of B'z and Mr. Children J-Pop CDs. She flopped down on his bed, sucking on a carton of choco-milk. Behind Takenori's head, and above the textbook-filled desk, hung the scroll given to her mother by Yuko's Calligraphy teacher. Sleep four hours a night and pass, it declared in beautifully lettered Kanji. Sleep five hours a night and fail.

"You know what that idiot cram school teacher did today?" Takenori fumed. "You know how he's always telling us not to be so passive in class, and to pay attention more? Well, he told us last week there was a test for today, and a cover teacher came to supervise it. One of the questions was, 'Does your regular teacher wear glasses?'. Some of us answered yes, and some answered no. Turned out the correct answer was, 'I used to, but I switched to contact lenses.' "

Yuko and Takenori were both leaving school at the end of the year. It was expected that Takenori would enter a private high school in Aoyama at the end of this year. It was also expected that Yuko, a high school senior, would enter university. Their parents could only afford to send one of them to a cram school, and it had been decided a long time ago that it would be the son.

Takenori and his father weren't on speaking terms at the moment. Last week, Takenori had returned worn out after attending regular school and cram school, and playing a match with the school basketball club. He'd fallen asleep in his room, and Papa had scolded him for not coming down for dinner at the correct time.

Yuko stared at her brother's pre-occupied face. How different he'd looked last week, she thought. Eyes screwed up tight, tears pumping down bright red cheeks. He'd picked up a chair and beaten it three times, up and down, on the kitchen floor. And he'd screamed — not words, but just noise — raw, penetrating noise. Papa was still smarting over it. He kept muttering that Takenori "didn't show enough respect these days".

"Maybe you should try something to keep Komatsu-sensei happy," Yuko volunteered. "A friend of mine told me that she had a teacher once who ate a lot of curry-rice. At the end of one test paper, she put down a really tasty recipe she knew for curry-rice. She got full marks."

"It'll take more than that to make Komatsu happy. He goes on about the environment a lot ... maybe I should write in green ink?"

He turned to his shelf of TV games, pulled Man-Made Death 4 out of its hologram-studded cover, and slipped it into his PlayStation Deluxe. The sleek black console hummed faintly and winked one tiny red light on its control display.

"You know, Yuko, there's something else I'm nervous about, right, it's ... well, I haven't got a girlfriend right now. I know you don't have much time, and your friends are older than me, but I was thinking ..."

Here we go again, Yuko thought. "Well, Miyoko's got a younger sister, about your age. She's pretty cute. I'll see what I can do."

Sucking the carton of Choco-Milk dry, she watched her brother as he started to say something about the girls at school, and failed to finish the sentence, his mouth pursing itself and eyes narrowing as the pre-game graphics flickered into life on the screen.

"Do my homework soon,' muttered Takenori, as if he were talking to himself. "Just want to see ... if ..."

The Saturday evening news was full of the murder.

After the family anime shows, while the Iwata family was having dinner sitting on the tatami in front of their giant plasma-TV screen, they found themselves confronted by scenes from their own neighborhood. Streets, houses, schools, in close-up and long-shot, the on-screen image shaking as if the cameraman's hands were trembling. Subtitles marked the names and the locations of the buildings involved, and the breathless commentary of the reporter underscored it with dates and events. A community cross-examined; a life under the lens.

"She was only sixteen," Yuko's mother was saying, "and she came from a school only a couple of blocks from here! Her poor parents ..."

"You'll have to stop walking home through that park," her father rumbled. "We've told you that before, Yuko. There could be all kinds of strange people in that park after school. There are violent kids hanging around, all kinds of unstable folk ... ah, this country just isn't safe any more."

Yuko remembered that her mother had thrown away the first page of the morning newspaper after breakfast; she'd said that the details they'd printed were "too disturbing". Excusing herself from the table, she went into the kitchen and quietly picked the front page out of the garbage.

Later, when her parents sent her upstairs to do her homework, she methodically flattened out the soiled page and read it.

"The girl's body had been found on waste ground near the river," Yuko read aloud, "several kilometers away, inside an oil drum half-filled with cement. She was partially naked, her body covered with bruises and cigarette burns, and she had been sexually assaulted several times."

She put down the sheet of newspaper, and looked across the plastic MacDonald's table covered with milkshakes and burger wrappers, at the disgusted faces of her friends.

"Oh, gross," said Namiko.

"Yuko, don't go all weird on us!" said Masumi.

Later, after window-shopping at the Shibuya 109 mall, Yuko and her friends were walking down the Center-gai Dori to get some crepes when a young man stepped in front of them and thrust a brightly-colored flyer towards their hands.

"Are you alone?" he asked.

He wore a baggy, pastel-colored suit, a cream shirt open at the neck to show off his gold chains, his hair carefully tousled and waxed in the latest Johnny's Junior boy-band style. He winked at them from under shaved eyebrows, and the girls giggled, walked past, ignoring him. They all knew he was a scoutman — a tout for the sleazy host bars and modeling clubs deeper in the unsavory parts of Shibuya.

"What a jerk," said Masumi.

"Yeah," said Namiko. "What was that all about? Are you alone? Anyone can see there were three of us."

Yuko looked back. The young man had gone; he had melted into the crowd. She didn't say anything.

She knew the young man had been talking only to her.

Yuko found it difficult to finish her homework that night. When it came to the pre-arranged time for her to go to bed, she tried to distract herself with her homework, her shojo manga ... but nothing worked. Nothing could capture her attention any more.

Except the map. The dismembered and rearranged fragments of the map.

Just before nine, she went downstairs, looking carefully distraught.

"Oh please, Mom ... I totally forgot about the test tomorrow! I'll just go over to Namiko's house and grab her notes ... she only lives a few blocks away ... I'll be back before eleven, I promise."

Once outside, still in her school uniform under her spring coat, she headed straight for Kasaieki-mae Park.

In the center of the park, where Yuko had found the map, the children's playground lay deserted in the darkness. The climbing frames looked like the bones of a prehistoric creature, flesh picked clean by the shadows, stark and brutal in the lamplight.

Yuko heard the wind whispering in the trees, asking her a question that had to be answered.

A figure was approaching.

It materialized at the edge of the playground, its substance oozing out from the darkness behind the leaves, moving into the circle cut out by the blades of lamplight. A filthy overcoat with a hood pulled over the face. Colorless, shapeless clothes, but unmistakably male. It spoke to Yoko in a voice that was the scraping of knives against a brick wall.

It asked her the question.

"Yes, she said in answer, "I'm alone." Her voice was hoarse, barely more than a whisper. "I'm really alone."

The figure stretched out a hand into the lamplight. Against the dead white skin, the map shone lividly. Schematic tattoos of factories and warehouses, the scars and stitches of highways and railway tracks. Warm, smoky fumes blew upon Yuko's face.

Holding her breath, Yuko took the figure's hand, and they walked together into the shadows beneath the trees.

There are rumors concerning the underpasses that traverse Tokyo, the tunnels for cars and trucks that lie just beneath the city like splinters under the skin. Some say they have witnessed terrible and inexplicable things while traveling through the tunnels. Figures that beckon from the sides of the road, or dart in front of the cars, only to vanish when the driver scrambles out of the car in panic. There have been tales of things glimpsed in rearview mirrors. Screaming faces. Eyes that do not belong to humans. Half-glimpsed figures that have no right to be among the living.

This is one such story.

On that day, a July day of steamy, ceaseless rain during Japan's wet season, a certain taxi driver was about to pass through the Sendagaya Tunnel. This was no ordinary underpass. Decades before, the keepers of the neighboring Senjuiin Temple had found themselves a way to compromise extending their grounds without inconveniencing the honorable flow of traffic. The Buddhist graveyard, with its stone jars full of ash and bone resting from their labors, was located directly above the mouth of the tunnel. Above the ceaseless river of cars, tree branches and creeping vines hung, reaching out from the graveyard boundary, their dark leaf shadow mottling the tarmac below. Behind the concrete parapet the thin skeletal fingers of wooden grave markers could be faintly seen, pointing toward the stone-colored sky.

On the day in question, the young woman named Kaori stood on the narrow sidewalk leading to the underpass. Seeing a taxi approach with the red 'FOR HIRE' sign glowing softly in the corner of the windshield, she raised her hand.

The vehicle jerked to a halt, and as was usual among Tokyo taxicabs, the passenger door opened automatically.

Kaori looked inside the gloom of the cab. The rain trickled through her overcoat, dripped from the rim of the umbrella she held. She paused, uncertain of the taxi's shadowed interior, the smooth vinyl seats, the plastic screen closing off the driver's seat from the back.

"Well, come in if you're coming in," called the driver, in a guttural Edoko accent.

She stooped and entered the cab, easing herself onto the seat, rain dripping from her coat onto the seat.

"Where to?" the driver prompted, twisting in his seat to look back at her. He had a broad, middle-aged face, the moles and the liver spots on his brow betraying his age, his grey hair a steely, close-cropped fuzz. His uniform - pale blue suit and white cotton gloves — was crisp and immaculate, despite the summer dampness.

Kaori paused. She realized she couldn't remember where she was going, or where she had just come from, and wondered why she couldn't. Her face slack, imposing on the taxi driver's patience, an address finally came into the vagueness of her mind. She spoke, giving him an address in the Chofu district. The driver put the car in gear and moved out into the traffic.

As the car pushed forward into the twilight of the tunnel, the girl twisted around in her seat and gazed back, looking past the tunnel entrance, back down the road, to a crossing that receded further and further.

What am I looking for?

Emerging into a curtained mist of rain, the taxi disturbed a trio of crows scavenging a garbage collection point. They flopped lazily into the air, tar-black wings flapping audibly as they passed over the taxi.

"Ugly brutes," the driver commented. "They're taking over the city these days. With all the waste we put out, they just get fatter and fatter."

She didn't reply.

"It's strange what you see on the roads, " the driver continued, warming to his theme. "You'll never guess what I saw running through the streets one night. Nearly ran it over, I did."

"Someone's cat?" the girl asked, looking up sharply. "A dog?"

"A fox," he said with a grin. "First time I've ever seen one in the city. Some people still believe they're spirits, you know. There's a shrine to the fox god Inari near where I used to live. Trickster spirits. You see one, you don't know whether it'll show you treasure, or lead you off into the woods to get lost and starve to death. Now they're here in the city, like the crows. Makes you wonder how long they've been here."

Foxes, Kaori thought. Spirits. Inari. What was the driver talking about? What kind of a person was driving her through the city?

The girl turned her head to stare through the window. She watched the blurred, gray shapes of the buildings pass by through the shower-stained glass. Pedestrians hurried down the narrow street, their faces hidden by umbrellas, pushing themselves through the rain as if through an endless series of bead curtains. Her name, she thought. Her name was Kaori. She was in a taxi. A car ...

In her mind she saw the image of another car. A car with its right side caved in like crumpled origami paper. The shattered glass around it had glittered in the lamplight as the paramedics eased her out of the wreckage, and Kaori remembered opening her eyes and seeing only the ground, as if her neck could no longer support her head. The ground had sparkled with stuff like sugar. Glass, glass all around, glistening wetly like spilt sugar in the kitchen. Mother would have been furious ... look, Kaori, you spilt sugar all over the floor ... Kaori, what have you done to yourself?

Mother. Kaori sat up straight, trying to pull her troubled thoughts together. The address she'd given the driver was her parent's address. Was she a schoolgirl? She looked down at her clothes, the fashionable blouse, skirt and pumps, the brand name bag on the seat beside her. She leaned forward so she could see her face in the driver's rear view mirror. She had shoulder length hair, tinted with brown. An efficiently made-up face, with deep crimson lips that refused to themselves into a smile. Not the face of a schoolgirl.

She was an adult, she remembered. She worked, she lived alone. What was the address? What was the address of her apartment?

As she struggled to concentrate, she became aware of other memories competing with her own. Things were oozing through into her mind, the soft voices of people whispering into her ear, invisible passengers sharing her taxi.

"The old folks call it the Kurokabe - the black wall," the driver was still babbling. "They say it appears in this world, every time a fox is born."

Kaori twitched in her seat, looking around her. "The address?"

The taxi driver flicked a glance in the rearview mirror. "Eh?"

"The address. Did I give you the address? "

"Sure you did," the driver said, his eyes settling back on the road, the gloves resting, confident on the wheel. "Don't worry, I'll get you home."

Kaori recalled the story, the story she'd heard so often. A taxi driver picks up a young girl standing alone near a cemetery, an underpass at night. She stands alone in the rain, holding an umbrella. The girl gets in, and gives a certain address. When the taxi arrives at the address, the driver turns around and finds that the passenger has disappeared, leaving a backseat covered in rainwater to prove the driver was not hallucinating. The driver goes to the house, and is received by the elderly couple living there. The mother tearfully realizes that the taxi's passenger was her own daughter, who had died some time before. She produces a faded photograph; the driver recognizes it as the face of his passenger.

That was the story told in Tokyo. Also in Sendai, in Kyoto ... so many other places. Everyone had heard the story, but nobody knew for certain whom it involved. A story told, long ago. Someone else's mother. A picture in a magazine.

How could she do that to her own mother?

"I've changed my mind," she said. "I don't want to go back to that address. Take me somewhere else. Take me to my apartment. It's in Gotanda. Near the station."

The driver, this time, gave no sign of replying. He simply drove, as if he'd been struck deaf, or as if Kaori had ceased to exist. "Hello?" she called again. "Can you hear me? What's wrong with you?"

What's wrong with me, she thought. Instinctively she looked at her hands. The flesh on them wasn't transparent. The varnish on her nails was chipped and had lost its spangly sheen, but that could have meant anything. She pulled up the hem of her skirt, looking for the scar from the ski accident she'd suffered while at college. The scar that she'd been obliged to wrap with tape every morning before putting on her stockings, because her manager said the bank's customers would think scars 'unsightly'. The bandage was still there. Was the scar still there too?

As she sat, feeling the filmy substance of her stockings across her fingers, she looked up again with a start as the taxi came to a stop. The vehicle had reached a wide intersection, stopping at the lights. On the other side of the crossing yawned the entrance to another tunnel, and above it, another bridge, this time a traffic flyover. An overpass carrying the signs and color-coding of the Minato district. The signs ... Shirogane. She recognized that name ...

This was the Shirogane Tunnel. That meant that Kaori was heading away from both her parent's house and her apartment ...

"Excuse me, driver," Kaori said, leaning forward in her seat. Her eyes scanned the road ahead, searching for what was bothering her. There was something else ... something had changed. The taxi was stationary, with a few cars behind it. In front, in the dip of the road, beyond the opposite set of lights, the maw of the tunnel beckoned. There was something wrong with the lights ....

"Driver," Kaori tapped on the glass, to get his attention. "Look at the lights ..."

The lights weren't green, or red, or amber. They had turned black. A sullen, inky black. Some malfunction, Kaori thought, they'd been switched off ... but then she looked past them and saw the same shade of black mirrored in the mouth of the tunnel. The gleam from the overhead lamps and the cats' eyes within had disappeared. Instead there was an icy, glassy darkness, stretched across the length of the tunnel. It was nothingness. It was a doorway into absence, a hole cut in the concrete of the world.

"What is it?" Kaori breathed.

"Like I told you, it's the Kurokabe - the Black Wall," the driver answered casually, "and it's a gateway. They say that one appears somewhere in this world every time a fox is born."

Kaori tried to tear her eyes away from the endless blackness of the thing in front, and noticed something inside the car. The driver's ID card, on the left side of the dashboard, had turned the same, featureless, icy black.

"What's happening?"

"I've been trying to tell you," the driver said wearily. "But you weren't listening, were you, young lady? All alone ... with so many problems."

He clucked his tongue and laughed. "I've been trying to tell you that the compassion of the Lord Buddha knows no boundaries, and forgets nothing."

Kaori glanced into the rearview mirror, and then quickly turned her head away, unable to face what she saw glowing in the driver's eyes. "You were one of the lucky ones. You wanted to go back so badly, I almost lost you. You almost got picked up by one of them, by one of the suffering. But I found you. And, if you remember, I said I was going to take you home."

The taxi surged forward, crossing the intersection, picking up speed as it advanced towards the mouth of the tunnel.

There are many rumors concerning the underpasses that traverse Tokyo, the tunnels that lie beneath the city like splinters beneath the skin. Some say that they have witnessed terrible and inexplicable things while driving through them. Faces glimpsed in the rearview mirror. Shadowy figures that appear and disappear.

And a few claim that they saw taxis vanish, silently and utterly, as they crossed the threshold of a certain place, at a certain time.

Dream Island, they called it. It's made out of trash.

The whole of Odaiba, down by Tokyo bay, is built on reclaimed land. And what that really means is a landfill.

Tokyo throws away enough garbage every year to fill the Tokyo Dome six times over. Every day the incinerators burn at maximum capacity, and the trucks and the container ships bring the ashes of the burnable garbage here for us to bury along with the non-burnable garbage.

We take all the trash the city throws out, bury it, cover it with concrete and sand, and put buildings on it. That's what our shining new city by the bay is built on — and that's my job. Waste Disposal Technician, Hideo Yamaguchi, that's me. But this story isn't about me. It's about my best buddy, a friend from high school who joined the Utilities Department the same time I did - Taro Urashima.

At high school Taro was always kind of a dreamer. When the other kids were putting their heads down on the desks and sleeping through the lessons, he'd be wide awake but looking out the windows, staring off into the distance.

It's no wonder that it was his daydreaming that killed him. A couple of weeks back one of the earthmovers was ready to bulldoze trash into one of the pits, and all of 'B' team was getting out of the way. Except for Taro. A workman noticed him still down there, and gave a shout, but it was too late. We looked down and he'd disappeared. Where he'd been standing was just a big pile of refuse.

So we dug him out. We jumped down onto the heap and we started shoveling away with spades, picks, our hands, anything we could. We dug through plastic, styrofoam, metal and aluminum foil, individual plastic wrappers and containers for Pocky, Chipstar, Morinaga hotcake mix and chocolate chip cookies, umeboshikombu, jagariko, Meiji chocolate. We were archeologists of our colleague, shifting aside containers of instant ramen, bento boxes and disposable chopsticks, curry rice containers, cup noodle containers. We located his fingers and began tugging at his arms to lift him free, scraping ketchup and mayonnaise bottle wrappers away from his face, brushing balled-up saran wrap away from his eyes, frantically pulling coffee cream cups and sweet-bean-jelly snack containers out of his mouth so he could breath. We gave him the kiss of life, we pounded his chest, and when he opened his eyes the only thing he could say was ...

"Why did you bring me back?"

I went to see him in hospital afterward, and he told me the craziest tale you could imagine. He said that when all the shit came down on him, he survived because it knocked him through a hole. He fell through a hole and he kept on falling, falling into darkness until he landed on something, something that turned out to be the back of the biggest turtle he'd ever seen. The turtle took him along an underground river out to sea and to a fantastic kingdom, a country ruled by the Dragon King. It was the most beautiful country, he said, a country where the plants slept and the oceans dreamed, where there were people made of sand and cities made of coral. The water was full of music and there were fish dances, octopus dances, clam dances, starfish dances, eel dances - the fish would dance just for the pure joy of it. This was the country, he said, where he settled down, and lived for two years — until we had pulled him back. Back out of the hole.

Taro, I said to him, you've had a Near-Death Experience. Your brain was shutting down because of lack of oxygen and you were hallucinating. It happens to a lot of people, their brain cells fire away and they think they're leaving their body, floating away into heaven on some silver thread. I knew about all that shit, I'd just read an article on it in the Shukan Jitsuwa. But all Taro did was shake his head like I was the one to feel sorry for.

"I got married," he said. "I married the Dragon King's daughter, Otohime. You took me away from my wife."

A couple of days after that he got discharged from hospital, but he wouldn't come back to work. I went round to his apartment, trying to get him out. Trying to get him back to the things we used to do before, when we hung out together — the pachinko, the billiards, the snack bars, the hostess bars where the girls get their tits out and give you a squeeze-all-you-like deal for \6000. But nothing worked. He just stayed, shut up in his six-mat tatami, and the Dragon Kingdom was all he talked about.

Until that day, two days ago. I was on the early shift that morning, and I was the first one to spot it. Out on Dream Island, at pretty much the same site where the accident happened, we found Taro's uniform. Neatly folded, recently dry-cleaned, his work-boots and hard-hat placed on top. About a meter away was a hole. A gap torn into the mess of plastic egg cartons, onigiri wrappers, UCC creamer packets, peanut cream jars, broken coat hangers, frayed connection cables and dead batteries. It was a hole. It looked like the hole had been dug with bare hands. We never did find Taro's body. But we did find a letter, tucked into one of his work-boots. Inside, was one sentence only;

The more you put in, the smaller it gets.

The story goes like this:

At the end of the school day, the kids are coming out of elementary school, ready for the journey home. They've got everything packed up in their big randoseru satchels and they're shouting, running, all on a high because now the play can go right on till bedtime. It's late afternoon, but it's already threatening to get dark - that smoky, sultry dusk that comes only in the Japanese midsummer.

A couple of kids catch sight of a woman standing alone near the school gate. Nobody else seems to notice her. She's wearing one of those white gauze masks over the lower part of her face that people have when they've got colds or hay fever. The kids can only see the woman's eyes. Wide open. Staring.

The woman walks closer to the kids and says hello. They return the greeting nervously.

The woman points to her face and says, "Do you think I'm beautiful?" The kids are too scared to answer so the woman says again, "Under this mask ... do you think I'm beautiful?" There's still no answer, so the woman says, "Well, why don't you find out?"

She takes off her mask. Underneath, her face is split from ear to ear. Her mouth is a wide red gash that opens wetly, widens as the children begin to scream, it opens in a grin to reveal rows of sharpened teeth receding into her skull ...

"Do you want to be beautiful, like me?"

Whack! The fat guy sitting on the train seat over to the left, and diagonally opposite Trisha, had just dropped his comic for the third time. Every few moments his actions repeated themselves. He flicked open a manga comic magazine the size of the New Jersey phonebook and started to read it, but after a few seconds his eyes rolled back, his jaw slackened, and he dozed until the comic slipped from numb fingers and hit the floor of the railway carriage. Whack! Like that. And then the guy would wake up, reach down and pick it up, and instead of putting it away and grabbing some shut-eye he opened it again and tried to carry on reading until he flaked out again, and the comic followed the line of least resistance once more.

Trisha lifted her paperback - trashy, but it was second-hand and in English - higher, trying to screen out the fat guy's face and by, association, the sound of the comic. The Chuo line train, carrying Trisha back to her apartment in Koenji, wasn't crowded at this time of the early evening; there were even some empty seats. Trying to concentrate on the novel, she noticed - over the barrier of the open pages - the eyes of the middle-aged guy in the navy blue suit and obvious under-shirt sitting opposite. Jeez, she thought sourly, why do they have to stare all the time? After all, this is Tokyo, not some hick town in the mountains. Foreigners are everywhere here, just open your window and throw out a rice ball in uptown Aoyama, you're bound to hit some gaijin. They're on the TV every few minutes in some trendy commercial; Tommy Lee Jones selling canned coffee or Brad Pitt driving a Toyota or whatever, what's the problem? Okay, she thought, I don't look bad ... I'm kinda good-looking but I'm no model, no way.

She stopped reading, and locked eyes with the guy opposite. He looked away. He could be a pervert, Trisha thought. He was certainly old enough to be one, although you had to watch out for even young guys these days. Yeah, he had perverted little eyes.

"You know what happened to me on the train last week?" This was her friend Sue, from Ohio, talking to her in the student cafeteria yesterday. "I was on the local train one afternoon, and this guy was sitting opposite, right? Quite a young guy, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that screamed 'I am a fruitcake'. There weren't that many people around because it was just after lunch. So I was kind of tired and I was zoning out, you know? I must have dozed off for a couple of minutes."

Trisha nodded, beginning to realize what was coming.

"So like, I open my eyes and there's the guy opposite, and his fly's open and he's got his dick in his hands."

Trisha was appropriately shocked in her reaction.

Sue continued. "He was holding his briefcase by his side so the people on his right couldn't see what he was doing, yeah? And there was nobody sitting on his left so it was just him and me, and I was like, well, excuse me!"

Sue paused and took a fast drag from her Salem Lite, then carried on talking, the smoke leaking out of her mouth behind her words. Trisha could see why Sue would be the centre of attention. She was short but was packing a lot of weight, with stocky hips and a big bust, a real magnet for the chubby-chasers. Added to that she had very long, straight, white hair - not blonde, but almost pure white. Even Trisha found herself staring at it in class sometimes.

"So you know what I did, don't you? I mean, I can't let something like that pass by. So I close my book, stand up, walk over to him, and say -

"If it's that small, I don't recommend taking it out in public," the two girls chorused in heavily accented Japanese.

"I mean, Jeez." She stubbed out her Salem Lite, warming to her theme. "I wish I knew how to say, 'I'll help you get it out, if I could find my eyebrow tweezers'."

Back to the present moment. The train had arrived at Koenji, and Trisha was relieved to find that the pervert guy didn't try to follow her when she got off.

Outside the station, the night was hot, wet and still, like a warm towel across the brow. The lights of streetlamps, convenience store signs, and vending machines glowed softly in the enveloping warmness. Red lanterns hung outside the yakitori and ramen shops. Trisha started the ten-minute walk to her apartment.

"Japan is still a very safety country," her students at the part-time English classes would mispronounce, whenever talk turned to relationships between Japan and the US.

Not any more, she thought. There are all kinds of freaks creeping out of the woodwork. Something's been stewing in this pressure-cooker ever since the War and a few years ago, someone took the lid off.

Notes from the dissertation of Patricia Holly.

Japanese culture — from the earliest folk tales, to the Kabuki, Noh and Ukiyo-e paintings of the feudal Edo period, to the modern film genre of J-Horror — has always been saturated with the supernatural.

Japanese ghost stories, known as "kaidan" and sometimes mistakenly pronounced as "kwaidan", are in cultural terms very different from what we understand to be ghost stories in the West. Western ghost stories are very often associated with the winter, partly due to the ancient festival of Samhain (now known as Halloween), which associates the beginning of the winter with the return of spirits to this world. In more recent times, the popularity of the British writers Charles Dickens and M. R. James established a tradition of enjoying the vicarious chill of the unknown on or around Christmas Eve, accompanied by a mature cheese and a glass of vintage port. We were used to our ghosts stalking the snow-covered woods, rattling the door handles and tapping at the windows, while we retreat to the warmth and light of the hearth.

In Japan, however, ghost stories are a product of the summer. They are part of the social and cultural activities that the whole community participates in at that time. The Japanese summer is often cruel in its sub-tropical heat and humidity, and from the feudal Edo period ways to escape its heat included the eating of watermelons, the liberal use of ornate fans, and the hanging of wind-chimes, whose clear, crystal tones brought visions of snow-laden mountain streams into the listener's mind.

More than a social thermostat, however, kaidan were part of the festivities surrounding the summer festival of O-Bon. This festival takes places in either July or August, depending on the locality. Over a period of three days, the spirits of the ancestors return to the world of the living, and the occasion is marked by offerings, visits to family grave plots and the Bon-Odori ritual dance. I have personally attended several of these, and considering that most people complain here how traditional Japanese culture is on the decline, I have always been impressed at how well-attended these open-air summer festivals are. Young adults in their summer yukata robes, the cloth holding a soft phosphorescence in the night. Children buying cheap plastic masks of demons and goblins along with those of their favorite anime characters. Dozens joining in with the slow, dreamlike dance of Bon-Odori, raising their hands to the stars. They dance around a special platform in the center of the festival field, holding the musicians who dictate the dance's rhythms with their huge ceremonial Taiko drums.

In the Japanese summer, the gates between this world and the others swing open, and in this dissertation, I will attempt to show how this belief is perpetuated by the spread of urban myth.

Trisha's senses, suddenly alerted, grabbed the sound and tried to comprehend it. She was suddenly aware of her body, tensed, tangled in the sheets of the futon, and she lay still in the darkened bedroom, listening for whatever had woken her up.

Her roommate, Tim. The door slammed shut, and she heard footsteps and the rustling of clothes as he moved through the kitchen, past the door of her room, to his own room, right alongside hers.

Sweat beaded her brow and her upper lip, as she became more attentive, feeling the humid darkness that oozed around her. She really hoped that was all. The only sounds disturbing her tonight, she hoped, would be Tim shucking off his clothes, and hunkering down in his futon with a few sighs and coughs.

No way. She heard Tim speak in a low monotone. She entertained the stupid notion that he might be talking to himself, but a few seconds later she heard someone give a whispered reply.

Tim had picked up a new girlfriend, or one-night-stand, or whatever. The apartment - like most Japanese "manshon" buildings, as they euphemistically called them - was basically a large studio room divided up by thin partitions rolled back whenever necessary. Both Tim and Trisha had tried to soundproof the partitions by pinning up flattened cardboard boxes disguised by blankets. Even so, whenever Tim got laid, Trisha was still an unwilling audience.

Trisha had thought many times about moving out, but the apartment was so damn convenient. Close to Koenji railway station, and a fairly cheap taxi-ride away from the central Tokyo metropolis if she ever missed the last train back. No, the best thing would be for Tim to move out, to shack up at last with one of his girlfriends. Then she could get one of her friends from College to move in. A girl this time. A sister.

The two roommates had begun to argue, recently, on the subject of Tim's girlfriends. "But Japanese girls are so cool," he'd simpered the day before yesterday, when neither of them had classes and they'd found themselves in the shared kitchen at the same time. "They're more refined, more elegant. And they're so considerate about other people's feelings."

"Oh, come on!" Trisha had mocked, "What you mean is, they live in a culture where they're forced to be subservient to men. For hundreds of years - and that's one fuck of a long time, Tim - they've been conditioned to think the main role of the woman is to satisfy the man. Father, husband, boss, whatever, be a good little girl and don't rock the boat."

"But I'm not like that," Tim had protested. "I'm not a Japanese male, and I'm not a husband. Anyway, I'm not a permanent resident here either. What right have I got to criticize this culture?"

"That's just an excuse, Tim. You're taking advantage of this culture. Most white men here treat Tokyo like one big playground. Some of these girls, you know, they find they've got a nice young gaijin on their hands, but they behave the same as they would if the boyfriend was Japanese. They say or do whatever they think will please him." Trisha had slammed down her coffee in indignation, a wave breaking against the lip of the cup, and casting its backwash messily over the side. "Some guys here are the biggest nerds and geeks out, you know? They can't get laid back home, but over here, the girls are falling over them, just because they come from a 'freedom country'. Big fucking deal."

"Are you calling me a geek?" Tim said in a carefully measured tone.

"Don't be stupid, Tim. No. I'm not. I'm just saying that I thought things would be different here from back in the States. Well, they are, but - aw, you know, not in the way I expected."

A tremulous moan wormed its way through the inadequate barrier of chipboard, cardboard and wool, and Trisha tried to curb the rage gradually making her more and more awake. Or if she couldn't stop it, if she wasn't going to get any sleep again, perhaps she could at least analyze it. Study it. Use it to understand and empower herself, like in the self-improvement books.

It wasn't just the guys; Trisha had found herself becoming increasingly frustrated with her Japanese sisters. Sometimes it felt like living in a country of Stepford Wives. The schoolgirls everywhere had fake tans, micro-mini-skirts and walked around tapping on a cell-phone with stuffed Mickey Mouse toys hanging from their satchels. The adult women were mostly Chanel-Gucci-Vuitton clones who were proving themselves very faithful to their great Sugar-Daddy God of Shopping. The so-called female celebrities on TV were little better than twelve-year-olds; women who shouted and screamed and jumped up and down, and had cheerfully trained themselves to have voices that had the same effect on Trisha as the sound balloons make when you rub them.

Tarentos? Fucking retards, all of them.

It was only in some nightclubs and parties that Trisha had found some Japanese sisters who had anything to say. Even so, she found their unreserved admiration a little suspicious. How they wanted so much to live in the States. How they wanted to know so much about American culture.

Maybe they were all wearing masks, Trisha thought. Maybe this childish crap was an act to deceive the guys into thinking Japanese girls were their eternal handmaidens, so the girls themselves could twist them around into getting the things they wanted. But if that was true, who benefits? It just ended up perpetuating the whole shitty sexist culture. And still nobody knew what Japanese girls really wanted.

Seems like what the silly bitch in Tim's room wants is just a good poke, Trisha thought sourly, as she heard the girl on the futon moaning to let her lord and master in.

Wind-chimes tinkled outside in the night, from the jumble of apartment buildings pushed together by meticulous but dispassionate hands. Trisha tried to focus on the sound, to screen out everything else, as the squeals of the nameless girl got louder and louder.

Most Japanese visit the temples and shrines only on special occasions, such as the big festivals in the summer and winter. Their funerals are Buddhist and their weddings are Shinto — but these are just customs, they say. The Japanese believe that they themselves are not especially religious.

It is my contention that belief in the supernatural has survived, despite all the advances of modern life, in the form of urban legends. Some of these contemporary myths appear realistic; they survive because they have a degree of plausibility that permits suspension of disbelief.

In North American culture there are the ubiquitous tales of the Kentucky Fried Rat and the spider's eggs in the banana bunch. In Japan, their equivalents are such as the department store that showed its ignorance of Christmas customs by putting Santa Claus on a cross; the popular belief that Love Hotels have concealed cameras to videotape their customers' activities and sell them in the Kabukicho porno stores; and the rumors of the secret tunnels under Marunouchi leading away from the Imperial Palace, to ensure the Japanese Royal Family make their honorable escape in times of disaster.

Naturally, the urban legends told and spread by children contain the strongest elements of the supernatural, and so contain a primal sense of terror. One case in point is the Kuchisake-Onna mentioned in the introduction to this dissertation. Although the character originated in the illustrated scrolls of the Edo period, she made a notable appearance in the greater Tokyo area in the early Eighties. One Tokyo newspaper went so far as to publish a special editorial stating that the Kuchisake-Onna was not real, and appealed for calm. I have interviewed one subject — a female private student of mine — who personally witnessed an outbreak of hysteria at her elementary school, where the children refused to leave school because they actually believed the Kuchisake-Onna waited for them outside the gates.

Then there is Hanako-chan, the ghost in the toilet. Japanese children usually encounter this story during elementary school. Hanako-chan is a spirit that hides in school toilets and engages the girls in games of suspense and humiliation. The child is told by her peers to knock on the toilet door a certain number of times. If the number is the same number that Hanako-chan is thinking of, the child can enter the toilet unmolested. If the number is wrong, then the ghost throws open the toilet door, terrifying the unlucky child with her hideous face, and pushing the child's head down the toilet. Here we can see the childhood obsession with bodily functions cross over with the fear of the supernatural.

Perhaps the most fascinating (relic?) atavism from the Edo period is the anthropomorphic representation of fear itself. This is the creature known as the Buruburu. Strangely, there is no known artistic representation of the Buruburu; but whatever it looks like, if you meet it, a chill will run up and down your back. The Buruburu will follow you, driving you insane with fear, until one of two things happen;

a). The spirit erases your personality and takes your body over completely.

b). You die of fright.

Trisha stopped writing and leaned back in her chair, stretching her arms. Clicked 'stop' on her iTunes and took off her headphones. Nearly midnight.

She couldn't afford satellite or cable in student digs like this. The best she could do was a portable color Toshiba TV. Flicking it on now, she thought she'd have some mindless entertainment to wind down with, and hopefully she'd be asleep by the time Tim got home.

She stopped at one channel and frowned at the grainy black-and-white image she saw on the screen. Oh, Jeez. Of course. Because it was O-Bon, the TV channels had wheeled out their annual ghost specials. Reports of paranormal activity. Photographs with curious shadows and lights, the images of dead relatives glimpsed in vacation snapshots. The scene switched to the studio, where the host breathlessly explained one such photograph, taken by Mrs. Tanaka of Chiba. It was of a gathering at the time of the O-Higan, he said, the vernal equinox, when Mrs. Tanaka's family had attended a ceremony at the local temple. She had taken a picture of her husband, her sister and her daughter in the temple parking lot, and at first glance it just seemed like a normal photograph.

"But we have specially magnified part of the image for this program. If you look here, at this patch of shadow in the background - just inside the temple gate ..."

Trisha gasped, and looked away.

She went into the kitchen, started rearranging things in the cupboards, to calm herself down. To stop her heart from racing away from her. To take away that image she'd seen in the picture.

Why do I do this, she thought. Why do I do this to myself? Why do I have to scare myself stupid? It was a TV special on summer ghosts, for Chrissakes. She shouldn't have watched any of it.

She went back into her section of the apartment and hastily changed channels, looking for some mindless variety show, with the tarento retards screaming with laughter. Brain Bleach. Anything to calm her down, take away the image.

The image of that ... face in the shadows.

Trisha often joked to her friends that she was schizophrenic. Occasionally, she wondered if that were true - because she had been born in Black Hawk, Colorado, just down the highway from Central City.

Central City had been rich and snooty back in the day, complete with an opera house and beautiful old Victorian homes built with the riches from the Glory Hole gold mine. Black Hawk was the working-class town at the bottom of the heap, with its mining families choking on the fumes of puffing ore smelters. The trees had been cut down to feed the sawmills, and a great sulfur cloud hung over the bare hillsides.

Then the mines closed and casinos were opened in the Nineties. A fluke in highway engineering meant that gamblers from Denver reached Black Hawk first — and went no further. Black Hawk got rich on the rubes from all over Colorado, and Central City fumed as it watched its visitors and fortunes decline.

Growing up in high school, Trisha had realized what a crazy place it was. Two tiny communities, sometimes fighting with each other but mostly ignoring each other. It felt like a metaphor for what was going on inside her head.

Trisha had her first encounter with urban legends at her Catholic elementary school. A painting of the Pope hung opposite the door to the rest rooms, where the girls would gather after school to whisper ghost stories to each other. In her mind, the face of the Pope, the smell of urine and disinfectant, and the numbing sense of fear were all mixed together. Fear of the two girls who'd died in the service elevator, which was why it wasn't used any more. Fear of the ghost of the girl who jumped off the roof because of the bullying that never stopped. Fear of the school founder's portrait in the library — the eyes turned black when the founder's ghost went walking through the school, they said.

And then there was Bloody Mary, of course. Bloody Mary got everywhere. Just about every childhood friend of hers had stood in front of the mirror and said "Bloody Mary" three times. Nothing evil had happened to them, but ...

Trisha had been too scared to ever do it herself.

When Trisha was fourteen years old, she had told her grandmother about the weird scary thoughts and bad dreams she kept having, and Grandma had got quite angry. "You don't want crazy thoughts like that getting inside your head," she had said. "That's how the Devil tries to lead you off the path. You take this, my girl. You take this, and keep it." And she had given her one of the family Bibles, a volume small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, filled with crinkly cream paper and tiny black print. Trisha had kept it, all through her school days - but she had given it to her parents when she left to take up studying in Japan. It was in storage, along with most of her books and clothes, in her old bedroom.

She sometimes wondered if that had been a mistake.

In urban myths, things happen not because the world is a magical place full of wonder, as in folk tales, but because of the world is a place filled with terror. Gabler (1996) states that nothing is reliable, and normal morality is suspended. The alligators in the sewers remind us of a Hell below, populated by wild beasts. The baby-sitter and the phone calls from the upstairs room remind us that we are not safe in our own homes. The man who wakes up in a Mexican hotel room with a kidney missing reminds us of primal body horror.

The same is true in Japan; urban myths do not give us obstacles to test our character and 'ganbaru' (do our best). The child who has his face mutilated by the Kuchisake-Onna or is tortured in the rest-room by Hanako-chan has not done anything wrong; the whole process is, by its very nature, random. Like so much else in life — tabloids, celebrity gossip, reality shows — urban myths remind us that we are basically impotent. There are no lessons to be learned - there is just the overwhelming presence of fear. Fear of global warming, of environmental disaster, of a random school shooting, of terrorist attack, of financial collapse.

This fear is like a paper lantern of Japanese custom, but not a jolly red lantern like you would find outside a izakaya pub-restaurant. Imagine a lantern of black, ripped paper, and instead of light, it spreads darkness, it spread shorror, blackening the night, seeping into your dreams and turning them into nightmares.

In Japanese childhood, there is the tradition of the 'ghost walk'. The child is dared (or sometimes bullied) by his or her friends to walk through a local cemetery at night. The friends lie in wait behind the incense holders and prayer sticks, waiting to ambush the child and scare him into giving up, and turning back. This is the child's initiation into adult society and the constant, low-level fear that fuels it.

The constant, nagging fear that whatever you do, it will never be good enough.

Trisha walked out of the thick, liquid night and into the cool haven of the manshon lobby, fishing in her handbag for the key, turning her head — as she habitually did — to see if anyone had entered the building behind her. The sound hit her as soon as she opened the door. The girl's screams as she worked up to the climax, and just beneath it, Tim's voice. It was pitched too low for Trisha to hear any words. She couldn't even tell if he was speaking in English or Japanese, but she had a pretty good idea of the meaning. Dirty talk; his hot little mouth pressed against her sweaty skin.

Trisha stood in the parlor, not taking off her shoes, not putting down her bag or her key, just ... standing there. She had an overwhelming urge to turn around and walk back out. I will not, she thought. I will not be forced out of my own home.

She turned her head, and saw her reflection in the mirror next to the door, her pale, bland-looking face beneath her blond hair, tired and unsmiling, the gasping and panting from inside an unfunny counterpoint to her sour expression.

"Bloody ..." she began, then caught herself, the words sticking in her throat. She turned away from the mirror, and remembered Grandma's Bible. You don't ant thoughts like that getting inside your head.

Then she turned back, lifted up her face, and stared into her own eyes. "Bloody Mary," she said clearly. "Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary."

She waited, as the animal sounds ebbed and flowed. Well, she thought, picking up her bag again. That proves one —

The sensation hit her so fast she had no time to cry out. It was cold, it was intense, and it paralyzed her, freezing her arms and legs, but twisting her head back round to stare again into the mirror.

Bloody Mary's eyes were livid and shining, glaring through her tangled mane of hair, spittle hissing from between her lips.

Trisha's head moved slowly, slowly, as if ice-cold hands had gripped it and were moving it as they wanted. She saw the door to Tim's room was open. The young man and the anonymous girl lay on the futon, unmoving, their hacked and ripped limbs splayed in awkward positions, the futon sheets and walls around them stained and splattered with thick, dark liquid. By the futon lay the sushi knife Trisha had bought last month, its blade clotted with blood.

Trisha did not know if what she was looking at was real. She did not know if it was a vision thrown up by madness.

But she did know it would be a good start.

March, 1945.

Through the tumbledown streets of downtown Tokyo, the children were walking home. It was late in the evening, and the winding, narrow roads were almost empty of pedestrians. A few merchants creaked past, on bicycles laden with wicker baskets carrying unsold goods. The acrid fumes of one of the charcoal-fuelled cars passing nearby were carried to them by a chill, stinging wind.

The three boys' legs, bare and chicken-fleshed below the skimpy school shorts, looked sticklike through malnutrition. Their faces beneath the peaked, military-style school caps were pinched and fatigued. They had lived so long with hunger that they could no longer tell it from nausea. The girl, Taeko, was tall for her age of ten, her wrists poking from the sleeves of her navy blue sailor-suit uniform. She was a head taller than the two eight-year-old boys, Hideo and Yoshi, and almost at eye-level with the lanky eleven-year-old, Shunsuke.

As they walked, they listlessly played catch with an otedama, a homemade bean-bag filled with pebbles. Their weekly games of tennis and baseball had long since been forbidden — as unwanted foreign influences - and their exercise now was morning outdoor calisthenics performed in time to the radio.

"Boy's Day," Shunsuke was complaining, "I can't believe it. We've only just got over Girl's Day, and now we have to plan the Boy's Day celebrations."

"Yes, but you get to practice the archery, and the fencing, and things," Taeko said patiently. "Lots more to do than on Girl's Day. There always is."

"Yeah, but it means more school. Almost every night. Even in the air raids, we have to go to the underground classrooms. It's too much."

Yoshi shot quick, nervous glances toward the older boy. He respected Shunsuke; his quick temper meant he often got angry, but it also meant he was the first to react when something needed doing. But the teachers told them repeatedly that the word of the Emperor was always to be obeyed. Never to be questioned or doubted. And sometimes what Shunsuke said was, Yoshi was sure, not what the teachers said they ought to be thinking.

"We need archery and fencing, though," Hideo said abruptly. "The Americans are coming, and we can't stop them."

"Hideo!"

"Well, it's true. You're not in my homeroom, so you didn't hear what Maeda-sensei said. He said that if the Americans come, we have to be very brave. We have to stay here and fight in front of our houses until the last man gives his life for the Emperor." He recited the phrases quickly, and evenly - as every child had been instructed to memorize the lines so, earlier in the day.

A frown creased itself on Yoshi's brow. "My father said in his letter if the Americans come, we're all going to be evacuated to Nagano, and make a stand there, below the mountains."

He had spoken without thinking, surprised by Hideo's words, and now the two other boys turned scornful faces towards him.

"Nagano?" sneered Shunsuke. "What a stupid idea."

"Are you calling me a liar? Are you calling Maeda-sensei a liar?"

Receiving no answer, Shunsuke thumped the younger boy high up on his forearm with a small but stone-like fist. "Oi, I'm talking to you. They can't both be right, can they? Maeda-sensei and your father."

"Yes, they can," Yoshi said breathlessly, bowing his head to avoid the punches that came when Shunsuke's blood was up.

"What? What did you say?"

Yoshi's frown deepened. He was taking a leap further into the dark with each answer. "Maybe there are different kinds of right, one for fathers, one for teachers."

A moment's silence, and then the sharpness of Shunsuke's laughter ricocheted off the walls of the houses herding them in. The others were quick to follow suit.

"You're funny, Yoshi," Shunsuke said, still giggling, "Yeah, you're really funny."

Taeko reached out to tousle Yoshi's hair, and the boy turned his face away to hide his blushing. Taeko had short hair, even shorter than the regulation cut for girls, but it seemed to make her look even prettier, to go well with the fine nose and wide lips, the long eyelashes. Yoshi looked at them shyly and thought about butterflies. Taeko always wore a plastic butterfly hairclip to hold back her fringe.

"So, are we just going to keep arguing?" Taeko said slyly, turning to Shunsuke. "Or are we going to play a game?"

*

August, the present day.

The construction site lay at the heart of downtown Tokyo. A place of bare, clayish earth, ruddy like skin rubbed raw, it was spotted here and there with stubborn grass and stones. Pale yellow Komatsu earthmovers slumbered over to one side, near a row of prefabricated cabins. The site was bordered on one side by the leaden, modular high-rises that had materialized over the years, in the former residential areas. The overspill of corporations that had finally been beaten out of the uptown district by falling profits, their windows reflecting the blinding light of the merciless summer sun. A large tent, the front flap of an entrance pulled back and decorated with wreaths of flowers, with signs painted in flowing, calligraphic Japanese, stood incongruously in the site's center.

Near the gateway to the main road, between two of the crew's prefabricated cabins, Kenichi Minamoto was seated on one of the square gun-metal boxes that had been left outside. He could have been just another of the hard-hatted workmen on duty that morning, stopping for a cigarette or an early morning lunch. The overalls, however, concealed a slightly faded business suit, and his roundish, thirtyish face lacked the weathering that came froma laboring job. The softness of the skin of his hands, playing nervously with a packet of Caster Milds, would have instantly given him away on closer inspection. Minamoto hoped that he wouldn't have to hang around until that happened, however, and scanned the driveway where the cars came and went, waiting for his prey.

It wasn't long before he made his move. The morning had seen a steady flow of expensive cars through the gate, with chauffeurs escorting the occupants to the tent. Now a flurry of activity and expectant shouts near the entrance led Minamoto to hurriedly stamp out his cigarette. As he stood up, a black limousine glided carefully down the muddy and gravel-strewn tracks into the heart of the site. He squinted against the glare of the sun, but the windows of the car were specially darkened, giving nothing away. It must be him, he thought.

Emerging from the gap between the two cabins, Minamoto trudged along in his overalls, swinging a clipboard nonchalantly in his hand. The limousine had stopped, and a few nondescript men in suits were getting out. One of them opened the rear door and bowed as Tetsuo Kasai stepped out onto the site that he owned.

Kasai squinted, his eyes adjusting to the sun's glare after the underwater shadows of the limousine. Seizing his chance, Minamoto stepped boldly up to the small knot of people around the car and removed his hard-hat. "Mr. Kasai ... this is very rude of me, but ... I was wondering if I could have a word with you."

The anonymous suits tensed. For a moment, Kasai held the same look of outrage as his men, and then, as familiarity struck home, his features softened into a wily grin. "Well, well ... it's young Minamoto, isn't it? Those overalls are a bit of a change for you. Aren't they paying you enough at the Yomiuri?"

Kasai's laughter broke the tension in the humid air, his men following him after a second's delay. To Minamoto's ears, their laughter was as mirthless as the calls of crows.

Telling his men to begin preparations in the tent, Kasai beckoned to Minamoto to follow him. Despite his fearsome reputation, he didn't look like a typical construction magnate, didn't have the sleazy atmosphere of Yakuza cool that most rich Japanese businessmen affected - the arrogant stare, the quick temper, the insect-like morals. Kasai smiled easily, his crooked teeth showing in a sallow face, his hands nicotine-stained beneath the expensive manicured nails. He pulled out a soft packet of Seven Stars and offered one to Minamoto, walking beside him.

"I thought you might try to get in today. I thought, that is exactly the sort of thing I can expect from a journalist like young Minamoto. Except the overalls, of course." He blew smoke into the air as Minamoto watched him unsmilingly, the hard-hat held under his arm like a soldier's cap, his boots crunching against the fragments of debris that they were walking through.

"Can I ask you," Kasai began again, his smile melting now into the bright coldness like the smoke from his Seven Stars, "What did you expect to happen to this place? The memorial garden idea was voted out by not just the local ward office, but also turned down by the ministry itself. What did you expect us to do?"

"Perhaps waiting until your court case for corruption is concluded might be an idea worthy of consideration."

Kasai made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. "You know, Minamoto, I keep telling you, I only tolerate you out of respect for your father. The fact that you're still here, and haven't had the feel of my workmen's boots on your proud little rump as you leave, shows how much of a debt I still owe him. Your father understood, you see. He understood how the press clubs worked. He understood how Tokyo worked. If there were things that had to be done, if there was progress that had to be made, there was no point in asking questions that might be ... awkward."

Minamoto listened, his jaw silently working.

"You youngsters ..." Kasai paused, thought for a moment and then began again. "Look, Minamoto, people don't want to be reminded of what happened here. They've had over ten years to think about it. People don't want the 'venerable idea of a memorial garden', because they'd rather forget what happened. Get back to work. Breath a sigh of relief, because the past is now the past."

"Until it happens again," Minamoto commented quietly. "That's what really concerns people, Mr. Kasai. Yes, of course, they want to forget it. But more than that, they want to know that kind of stupidity won't lead to more people dying in the future."

Kasai stopped walking, turned round and finally looked Minamoto in the eye. "You talk to me about the past, and the future. I think you'd better stay for the ceremony. After that, you can talk about whether I care or not. You can report on whether I'm doing my job or not. You'll have to do something about these, of course," he said, lightly tapping the journalist's overall's, "I only hope you've got a suit under there. I don't want you to make a bad impression with our special guest. You might not have seen him when you were skulking around the site, he got here early this morning, before anyone else, in fact, and he's been preparing ever since."

Kasai reached out a hand to point at the tent. The central flap opened as someone pushed it away from the inside.

"Ah, here he is now."

*

Hide and seek was Yoshi's favorite game.

He was the same age as Hideo, but shorter and thinner, so the number of hiding places he could squeeze himself into was comparatively much wider. He trotted through the half-lit alleyways, down gaps between wooden houses where his shoulders almost brushed against each wall, through gardens where he skipped over the dried hollows of ornamental ponds, passing silently through the vegetable patches behind the local shrines.

"Mo ii-yo?" - "Are you ready?" he heard Taeko's lilting voice calling, carried by a cold wind that seemed to be gaining strength. "Mada da-yo," he called back, "Not yet," changing the direction of his flight. That was one of the best parts of the game. Giving the call and answer, trying to throw the hunters off the scent.

As he ran, Yoshi thought frantically of where he could hide. Maybe one of the local bomb-shelters, but that was too obvious. All of his little gang had tried that. He could clamber up one of the houses and hide on the tiled roof, but he'd tried that a few times, too. About the only places he'd never hidden in at all were the two canals that crisscrossed each other near the neighborhood they all lived in.

Yoshi stopped sharply in his tracks. He couldn't hide in the canal. But he might be able to hide on the canal . . .

Cutting to the left, Yoshi ran headlong past the row of shuttered shops, coming quickly to the murky, slow-flowing canal. He was in luck; there was a boat there. A low barge. He could just make out the hand-painted sign of the tonarigumi - the neighborhood fire-fighters. And there was a hatch left open invitingly. He lowered himself down into the barge without a second thought, and hurriedly closed the hatch cover.

Huddled in the damp sweat-smelling darkness, Yoshi felt the edges of a coarse blanket nearby, and pulled it over him, for warmth rather than concealment. Moments later, he heard Taeko's voice, calling in the distance. "Mo ii-yo?" Then Shunsuke's voice, deeper, commanding, holding a hint of puzzlement.

"Mo ii-yo?"

Yoshi stiffened when he heard it answered by the howl of an air-raid siren.

*

The figure stood by the entrance to the tent, standing and turning in the direction of Minamoto and the construction magnate, hesitating, as if his weak eyes were readjusting to the sunlight's glare. Yoshitaka Akiyama. The chief priest of the Shinto Shrine of Shibahiko, swathed in his official white robes, the kariginu kimono, the baggy white fabric sweeping from his shoulders down to the ankles showing above archaic wooden sandals. His thin, gnarled hands poked from the kimono's voluminous sleeves. Upon his head he wore the black conical hat that signified his rank as Chief Priest, and the kimono's fabric was shot through with the embroidered spiral motifs of the Shinto divinities.

He approached the two men, picking his way carefully on wooden geta sandals across puddles and potholes. As he grew closer, Minamoto recognized the face from the newspaper's photo files, the face the colour of old wood, the deep creases around his mouth and cheeks, the thick bifocals resting upon his thin nose. As he joined the two, he smiled curiously at the journalist in greeting.

"I can't express my apologies enough to you, Akiyama-sensei," said Kasai, "but it seems that we have an unexpected quest for today's ceremony. Let me introduce Mr. Minamoto, who will be joining us in the tent."

The reporter and the priest exchanged slow, formal bows.

"There is no trouble at all in another person joining us. The rules of Shinto are not as strict as you might remember, Mr. Minamoto. "

"It is a great honor to be part of your ceremony," Minamoto said carefully. "After all, the chief priest of this area must have great emotional ties to it."

"That's true." The priest lifted a kimono-laden sleeve, a bony hand sliding from beneath the fabric to point outwards at the site, and the skyscrapers beyond. "I was born here, Mr. Minamoto, and I chose to return here roughly ten years ago. I've belonged to one shrine or another all of my adult life, and at length I realized that this is where I had to be. Where it all began."

"There've been reports of mysterious lights in the sky, above this site. Have you ever seen anything like that yourself?"

Before Minamoto had finished asking the question, Kasai held up an arm across the reporter's chest, as if to shield the priest from bad influences. "You mustn't listen too much to young Minamoto," the magnate growled. "He's seen too many American TV dramas."

"Is it also true that several years ago, you performed an exorcism on this site?"

The priest's smile refused to waver. He nodded his head slightly, the dark cone of the hat tipping forward and back. "That depends on what you mean by exorcism. Yes, I appealed to the spirits that died here, to calm them, to try to find where ... they are supposed to be. But there's more to exorcism than that. In Japan, ghost lights have been said since ancient times to be the shades of the restless dead. There has been tragedy, here, that much is certain."

Akiyama gestured at the churned ground in front of him again, this time his hands making slow, esoteric signs as they indicated a corner here, a mound there. "We can clean the land, but we fail to clean our souls. That's where the true pollution lies. If we don't learn, then whatever we build, however grand or gorgeous it may be, however far it reaches up to the heavens, it will be grounded in the muck of corruption, and it will fall. "

The priest paused. Kasai stared at him, unsmiling, apparently speechless, whether with anger or surprise Minamoto could not tell. "Mr. Kasai," The priest said silkily, "would you object if Mr. Minamoto and I had a word together ... alone?"

Kasai's eyes widened even further. Turning on his heel, he stalked off towards the tent, pulling his Seven Stars out of his suit pocket. "The ceremony starts at twelve exactly," he called back over his shoulder. "There'll be no delay in the schedule."

"Akiyama-sensei," Minamoto began once Kasai was out of earshot, "let me apologize for my conduct. I didn't mean - "

The priest gestured for silence. "You have offended no-one. Men like Kasai will carry on, despite what people say or do to them. Men like Kasai say, 'I am here, because I have a job to do,' and they cannot see beyond that. You, however, are a different matter. I know that you're asking the questions that need to be asked. You see, Mr. Minamoto, you think you have come here today of your own free will. You have not. All of us - you, me, and Kasai - have been summoned here."

Minamoto stared at the priest, trying to make sense of what he was saying. "So ... you seem to agree that Kasai shouldn't build anything at all here. But are you still going to conduct the ceremony?"

"I am indeed. There's nobody else who could do it. This is a troubled area, Mr. Minamoto, with many sad memories. It's like a fault line causing earthquakes that stretches beneath the ground; but it stretches further than anyone realizes. You see, the New Sakura Hotel was not the first fire to bring tragedy here. In the old days, fires were so common, they were known as the Flowers of Edo."

"I'm familiar with the Edo period," Minamoto said, becoming increasingly confused. "But a fault line ... under this area ... I'm not sure that I -"

The priest turned away, with a sad smile. ""Mr. Kasai is getting impatient. Let us begin the ceremony."

*

The air-raid siren rose in pitch, and stayed here, a mournful wail breaking the city's fitful silence. It was followed a moment later by a man's harsh, amplified voice, echoing through the streets, telling the residents that this was not an exercise, enemy fighters had been spotted crossing the Japanese coast.

Hearing the booming voice through the barge's planks, but not enough to comprehend the words, Yoshi threw aside the blanket and stood up in the darkness. He fumbled and felt his way to the hatch. When he pushed it, it wouldn't give. He pushed again, the wooden cover refusing to budge, as if the soaked wood had jammed on its hinges.

"Yoshi? Yoshi?" came Shunsuke's voice, real urgency in it now." "I'm here," Yoshi called back, as loud as he could.

Seconds later, the barge's structure shuddered from the impact of many pairs of heavy boots landing on the deck. Yoshi sucked in his breath. The noise of the siren was supplanted by the roar of a gas-powered engine coughing into life nearby.

"Hello? Hello?" Yoshi tried to raise his voice above the noise of the engine. "Let me out!"

"It's the planes," Hideo started to whine. "The planes will be here soon, we've got to go home!"

"Shut up." Shunsuke twisted his head around, scowling, as if he was expecting American troops to burst out of the tiny alleyways and run towards him. "If Yoshi's smart, he would either start for home now or duck into one of the shelters around here."

"We've got to look for him," Taeko said firmly. "He might get lost and get too scared to think straight."

"But there's no time!" Almost in tears, Hideo grabbed Shunsuke's sleeve, his nails almost penetrating the skin. "Shunsuke, we've got to go home, we've got to go home!"

With a curse, the older boy shook Hideo away, and looked up and down the street again. Taeko stepped closer to the boy, her soft brown eyes seeking his. "Shunsuke. You know we can't go back without Yoshi. If anything happens to him, the teachers and the wardens will say that it's our fault. And anyway, he's the youngest. He needs somebody older and stronger to look after him."

Shunsuke sucked in breath, nodding his head resignedly. "All right. We'll go over to the Ogawa's house, it's the biggest and closest. He might have gone there." Their school coats had padded hoods designed to protect young ears from bomb-blasts, and the three grimly slipped them now over heir heads. Calling Yoshi's name, this time in rising desperation, the children turned away from the direction of the river, further into the knot of tiny streets.

Under the sonorous approach of the B29s, the city held its breath.

April, fifteen years ago.

Japan suffered one of the worst urban fires in postwar history when the New Sakura Hotel, built just one year before, burned to the ground. The cause of the fire remained unknown but the owner was held responsible, as he had ordered corners cut to save construction costs, and had failed to install basic safety equipment. This act of creative accounting resulted in thirty-three dead, another thirty-nine injured, and the owner receiving a prison sentence.

For years the building remained an empty, burned-out shell, despite the soaring real-estate values of the times. Most companies practiced a selective amnesia when it came to that particular part of the city. The residents of the area held regular ceremonies at temples and shrines to pray for the victims of the fire. Despite that, all kinds of rumors circulated, rumors of things seen and heard inside the blackened walls. It was even hard to employ security guards at the plot of land. Some would quit in less than a week - refusing to give a coherent reason why they left their jobs.

And so it remained, until Kasai Heavy Industries purchased the site, and Kasai himself had announced that his personal fortune-teller had told him "It was what the spirits wanted."

*

Minamoto walked apprehensively into the tent, trying to ignore the heads as they turned in his direction, fat necks straining against the collars of their starched white shirts, uniformed secretaries staring at the ground in their prescribed demure roles. Inside the tent were five ranks of white, plastic folding chairs, facing a small wooden stage erected specially for the occasion. The stage was bare except for a microphone stand and a diminutive altar, its inner contents screened by blue and white curtains. Kasai was standing in front of the microphone, coming to the end of a typically long-winded speech thanking his cronies for attending.

At two minutes before twelve, Kasai finished and stepped down, to take his place on one of the seats in the front row. After a few moments, the scattered conversations ceased as Akiyama entered the tent, flanked by several assistants wearing plain white robes. He held the ceremonial flask of rice wine in his hand, his spine straight and his jaw set. Minamoto looked for the conspiratorial spark that he had glimpsed five minutes before, but there were no clues in the old man's expression - just the resolution of someone with a job to be done.

In front of the stage, the priest handed the flask to the assistants, and climbed the three steps to stand before the altar. Lifting his arms, he brought his dry, long-fingered hands together twice. Clap. Clap. Harsh, percussive sounds to awaken the spirits and announce the presence of their acolytes.

"Shubatsu- no-gi," Akiyama intoned, signaling the first of the nine steps of the Ji Chin Sai - the ceremony to purify the land and call upon its spirits for harmony. Minamoto listened as Akiyama described the descent of the ancestor spirits to Earth in the Koshin-no-gi.

Reaching the end of the chant, Akiyama drew the curtains aside on the altar and tenderly picked up the ceremonial staff. The staff was a long bamboo stick with a cluster of paper streamers at one end, cut in the shape of the sacred Sasaki leaves. Turning and descending from the stage, the priest held the staff above those present, shaking the paper leaves like a shaman's fetish as he intoned the archaic language of the rite. The businessmen lowered their heads as they silently received the scrutiny of the ancestors. His head also down, Minamoto listened intently, becoming aware of something beyond the old man's words. There was something else ... something just at the edge of his hearing ... he closed his eyes to concentrate. There was something. An echo, a faint, sibilant muttering in the tent, as if there were many people whispering at once, not just the priest. A flaw in the microphone? Perhaps Kasai's preparations had not been that meticulous after all.

Climbing back onto the wooden platform and returning the staff to its former position, the priest chanted the first words of the Tamagushi Honten, signaling the crucial part of the ceremony. He was going to offer the sacred Sasaki sprig to Kasai.

With his left hand raised slightly above the right one, Akiyama held the green end of the sprig, faced the altar, and raised the sprig to cheek level. He bowed once more, and turned towards Kasai, extending his right hand, palm turned upwards.

Kasai stood, as he prepared to join the priest on the stage and accept the offering.

"As we stand in the presence of the ancestors-"

"TAEKO, SHUNSUKE, HIDEO - "

Minamoto jerked in shock, looking wildly around the tent. The hesitant muttering had returned, louder that before, and with it an unearthly crackling, like wood being snapped apart by giant hands.

Minamoto looked upward and saw the fabric of the tent's ceiling sag and split, as vivid orange tongues penetrated from the center.

"Fire," he managed to yell. "The tent's on fire!"

The massed ranks of the business community broke their respectful silence, crying out in alarm as they turned and fled for the small entrance flap. Elbows stabbed, hands grabbed at briefcases and handbags, spectacles fell from faces as bodies collided against each other.

Minamoto stayed by the entrance, urging everyone out, extending a hand to pull people along if they stumbled. Smoke and floating ashes began to sting his eyes and catch at his throat.

Leaving the tent at last, Minamoto glanced at the knot of people gathered on the construction site, coughing, mobbing brows with limp handkerchiefs, trying to regain their senses. "Where's Kasai? And Akiyama?"" he called. Nobody answered. He turned back to the tent. It was crowned by swirling crimson flames now, and there were sparks in the air — but not coming from the tent. Minamoto realized they were falling from the sky itself - lights, like burning snow, falling lazily upon the tent and the earth around it.

Shaking his head to regain his senses, he ran to the entrance of the tent. Thick, gray clouds swirled from the flap. A figure suddenly lurched out of the smoke, its arms and torso alive with flames that writhed like snakes, its head a blackened, smoking mass.

Kasai and Minamoto screamed together.

*

Stuck on the fire-fighter's barge as it pushed off and chugged slowly south, Yoshi didn't see the Flowers of Edo bloom in the night sky, their terrible radiance illuminating the city below. The residents of Tokyo stopped in their air-raid drills, staring upwards like children watching fireworks, mesmerized by a ferocity that they had never even imagined.

In wartime, the people of Tokyo had been discouraged at using communal shelters. Families had been drilled at staying at their homes, protecting them from fires in case of bombing. They had been formed into bucket-brigades, ferrying water from nearby wells and canals, trained to work together as local neighborhood units. They thought that living in Tokyo, where buildings of stone and brick were rarities, they were used to the dangers of fire.

They had no idea how useless their precautions were.

The B29s were not dropping regular explosives. They were dropping M-69 incendiaries, containing jellied petroleum. When the bombs hit solid ground, the detonators ignited, and the flaming semi-liquid substance sprayed outwards. Everything that it touched burned. Wood. Clothes. Skin.

It was the prototype of napalm.

As the wind fanned the flames before it, the chaos spread, burning debris and white-hot ash raining down on every building within reach. As the fire took hold, the translucent paper windows of each house lit up from within, glowing like magic lanterns. Ten minutes was all it took to destroy a house entirely.

Shunsuke, Taeko and Hideo found themselves in the middle of a screaming crowd, as the people abandoned their houses and belongings. The bloated B29s continued to ease their bulk across the sky and drop their cold metal seeds. The harsh spring winds had turned into an inferno of superheated air that sucked the air out of frantic lungs, that seared with its smoke, that sent charred timber pinwheeling through the sky onto roofs and fragile heads below.

The main thrust of the people was towards the two canals, and the areas where parks had been converted into makeshift firebreaks. The three children found themselves crushed into a tiny alleyway jammed with screaming, clawing strangers. The three of them tightened their grip on each other's hands to stop being knocked down or pulled away. Glowing embers fell on them like rain.

Near to Taeko, a mother was carrying a blanket-wrapped baby on her back. Taeko screamed as the bundle of clothing began to smolder, but there was no way the mother could hear her.

As the fiery wind swirled around the knot of people struggling to move forward, the women's shoes and the men's puttees and trousers began to burn first. They shouted and screamed even harder, stamping to put the flames out. In her panic, Taeko could see Hideo gasping for breath in his padded coat, so she reached out and pulled his hood back, pulling her own off at the same time. Hideo's hair ignited first, giving Taeko time to realize her mistake. Then her own hair was on fire, the butterfly hairclip beginning to melt.

All those trapped in the street were already dead, but they were still moving. Burning fiercely from the legs upwards, their arms reached out to touch each other and the walls of the houses, like sleepwalkers, feeling their way onwards.

Only Shunsuke made it to the river. His face black with ash, streaked with tears of pain and rage, he threw himself into the steaming water. He clung onto the bank. Around him things were bobbing and floating in the water, some of them moving, some of them screaming, some of them slipping past still and silent. The smoke blew along the river, a thick pall moving faster than the current. Shunsuke struggled to draw breath as the air grew fouler. His breathing grew more and more ragged until his eyes rolled back in his head, and his face at last slipped under the water.

When the fire fighters finally went below, giving up their futile efforts, they found Yoshi cowering in a corner, gripping his stinking blanket for comfort. Silently, one of them picked him up and took him up to the top deck. Flames danced in the thick black miasma that hung close to the ground. The bombing had stopped.

The city had gone.

Yoshi thought for a moment that the barge had sailed to a different place entirely, that the old Tokyo was still present but just somewhere else, not in the black heaps of shells and cinders that crumbled inwards as he watched.

He thought that his friends could still be there somewhere, still running through the streets, and if he strained his ears he might still hear Taeko's voice, "Mo ii-yo?"

"Taeko?" he called softly. "Shunsuke? Hideo?"

*

"Taeko. Shunsuke. Hideo." Yoshitaka Akiyama's voice was firm, chanting the names louder and louder, his eyes tightly shut, his face a mask of concentration. As the flames swirled around him, he stood oblivious, his back poker-straight, his hands clasped together in front of him. "I am here. I am ready."

Outside, Minamoto whipped off his coat and thrust it at Kasai, knocking him over. It had been a long time since he'd been on the newspaper's first aid course, but he could still remember the basics. Rolling the businessman in the dirt, Minamoto smothered him with his coat, until the flames released their grip and had subsided into stinking wisps of smoke.

Kasai grimaced and grunted in pain. Peering at the businessman's face, Minamoto noticed that it didn't seem to be as bad as he'd feared; nearly all the hair and skin was still there.

He rose to a kneeling position. Most of the guests were at the far end of the site, trying to open the gates. Many of them were looking upwards in panic, some jerking and brushing spasmodically at their clothes. Minamoto looked upwards, and gasped. It wasn't a hallucination, The air was sparkling, things in it glowing, like phosphorescent creatures in the night sea.

Turning, he saw that the wreckage of the tent was almost gone. "The priest," he murmured. As a section of fabric finally pared away and slid to the ground, he could see, through the swirling smoke, into the tent.

It wasn't possible, he told himself.

The priest was still at his altar, his back turned to Minamoto, his head bowed in prayer. He seemed not to notice or care about the fire that blazed around him. And ... someone ... the reporter could make out three small figures, like children ... glowing like the sun ... they held out their arms to the priest to support him, as he began to take slow, shuffling steps forward.

"He said this is a fault line," Minamoto babbled to the heedless Kasai, "You tried to build something on a fault line, but not a fault line in the ground. A fault line in time. How many people have died here?" The reporter shook his head, beaten by the madness without and within. "How many fires have there been?"

Minamoto had enough time to register the body of the priest flashing like a strobe light before the explosion hit him. A concussive wave of light and sound knocked him to the ground, slamming the breath out of his lungs. When he lifted his head from the gravel, to the groans of the semi-conscious businessman beside him, his head was ringing with the emptiness of silence.

The construction site was empty, apart from the two of them, and a smoking crater that held what looked like charcoal.

I have never liked crows. Big, ugly, brutes, living on the trash that human beings throw away or leave behind. I consider them the cockroaches of the air. They are omnivores by nature, feasting on everything they can - but they become frantic if there is meat, ripping open garbage bags and leaving the rotting food scraps scattered across the sidewalk.

They are everywhere in Tokyo. They stare and caw at passers-by from ledges and power-cables during the day, and at night, they roost in the parks, the cemeteries, even the trees surrounding the Imperial Palace. They gather and plot in their nests made from waste plastic, coat hangars stolen from balconies, animal hair from Ueno Zoo. They are intelligent; they work together in packs; and they attack human beings during the early summer, when their fledglings are hatched but still in the nest.

They are dark, angular creatures, a peculiarly loathsome amalgam of huge wings, gaping beak, and unflinching eyes. I have heard stories that they try to imitate the voices of human beings, that they have attacked and killed pigeons and small cats. I would not be at all surprised.

Are there any who see beauty in crows? Yes. Professor Sakurai would be one. But then, his madness was the same madness, the big, black emptiness in the eyes of birds, the unflinching eyes that they turn upon you, as they roost upon the buildings above.

Sakurai's eyes were like that, once. I still shudder to think about it. His eyes, above the crude jutting beak, the mass of feathers covering his skull.

The darkness in the eyes of birds.

I saw enough of crows in my former part-time job, as a security guard working in a big Tokyo department store, in the middle of Shinjuku. I've left now, and have taken a more ordinary way of working through my MA course, working nights in a FamilyMart. The department store job was good enough while it lasted. What the Japanese think of as a security guard is different from other countries, I believe. In the USA they probably all carry guns and have those wires trailing out of their ears. Here, perhaps the most taxing responsibility is making sure the traffic cones are lined up straight in the parking lot. That means it's the perfect job for senior citizens, and young people working their way through college.

In the late summer, the rooftop beer gardens were still open but approaching the end of the season, and my main responsibility was to patrol that area, just in case people got too drunk and inconvenienced other customers. No danger of falling, however; the rooftop was surrounded by a tall wire fence. No danger of anyone falling, I thought.

I don't particularly find heights troublesome. I'm a post-graduate student of physics at Meiji University; what heights and tall buildings always reminded me of, up to this point, was my father trying to demonstrate what had happened at the Tower of Pisa, how objects always fall with the same rate of acceleration. He was a science teacher, or had been until he retired. He was overjoyed when I left our little town by the Japan Alps and came to study at Tokyo as an undergraduate. Before that, he hadn't objected at all to my mother imposing curfews, and the personal tutor that she had hired out of her own housekeeping money.

Newton, my father had called as he waved to me from our apartment's balcony. I stood below in the building's parking lot, near where my bicycle was kept. My father had held up two objects of different sizes - an orange and a basketball - ready to drop them, craning his neck to see if there was anyone about to walk past below. This is called the Second Law of Motion, he had said.

I watched the two weights fall with my child's eyes, peering to see if there was any difference between their descent. All objects are the same when they fall, my father had said.

Taking into account - and we are very quick to forget those things that must be taken into account - such things as air resistance. If a man had wings the proportional size of a bird's, it would slow his fall.

If he fell at all.

The first time I saw him, I thought Sakurai looked the part of a university professor, and I was right. In fact, he reminded me of my own professor. The lecturer I haven't seen for months, who sent in assistants to deputize, thanks to his frequent research trips. Sakurai had that air of wisdom, the air of being clever or fortunate enough to sidestep the usual conveyor belt of Tokyo commuter life. The untidy grey hair and the large, square spectacles on top of a prominent nose also helped, of course.

On that bright September afternoon, scanning the rooftop at that time before the ice cream parlors closed and the beer garden opened, I saw him with the crows. Standing alone, with a small semi-circle of fat black birds observing him warily, occasionally condescending to pick up the crumbs that dropped from his hand. I half-marched across the multicolored stone paving, and at my approach, the crows took to the air with their insulting, hacksaw cries. The man turned to face me, his mouth unsmiling but somehow peaceful, his eyes widening behind his glasses.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I don't think you should feed those birds here."

"Oh, yes ... and why is that?"

His way of speaking convinced me that he was a lecturer. He replied to me with that air of infinite patience, the manner of someone asking a question to which they already know the answer, simply encouraging others to speak.

"Crows are scavengers, sir. They'll disturb the other customers."

"Indeed. Tell me ... why do we hate crows so much, do you think?"

"They feed on garbage, sir. And they're aggressive. They'll take the food off the tables, if we're not careful."

"And they'll snatch sandwiches out of the hands of innocent children, yes, and they'll rip open the garbage bags with their beaks. I am aware of what you mean. But who leaves the garbage there? Who wastes so much food, stuffing these flimsy vinyl bags with smelly, tempting morsels that no scavenger can resist? We do, of course."

He moved his face away from me slightly, in the direction that the birds had gone.

"Did you know that this garbage that we leave out - it's so nutritious that a crow that lays only two to three eggs in the wild will lay double that number, if it feeds on Tokyo garbage. Also, the chicks will grow to be much larger, and more aggressive than their countryside cousins.

"But it's not just physical differences. The urban crows are as intelligent as we are, albeit in a different way. They know exactly when and where we put out the garbage for collection, and they are able to share this information with others of their kind. They snatch golf balls from courses, and use them in games of their own devising. They use tools. They manipulate the environment around them. They drop walnuts in the paths of cars to break their shells, they work together in teams to lift the plastic netting that covers garbage collection sites."

He paused in his speech, as if remembering that I was there, and gave a little embarrassed smile.

"What a good listener you are ... did you ever attend one of my mathematics classes, by any chance?"

"I'm a Meiji graduate, sir. My name is Tatsuo Mori. Faculty of physics."

"Is that so ..." The professor nodded, then lifted his face up to the sky, tilted it quickly before meeting my gaze again, as if scanning the sky for something. "Well, then ... do give my regards to Professor Makizawa, won't you? If he's still lecturing there."

I saw him several times in the next few days after that, visiting the rooftop area, but he never fed the crows again. Or any other birds, for that matter. Looking back, I don't think this was a reflection on me, on my persuasive skills, or a comment on the slim academic connection that we shared. I think he was just the sort of person who obeyed rules. He was used to giving instructions, and also taking them.

He would walk to the fence, and stand there with his hands on his hips or in the pockets of his sports jacket. He would watch the crows and then his gaze, at times when I moved closer to him to see if he felt like conversation - his gaze seemed to move beyond the birds. At those times he would resume his lecture; for he had already accepted me as a kind of student, an audience of one, the one who had been chosen to receive the benefit of his oddly acquired wisdom.

"Their Latin name is Corvus Macrorhynchos," he told me, "which means jungle crows - and as the name suggests, they were originally forest-dwellers. They used to perch on the top of trees, looking out for prey, so they have adapted perfectly to the tall buildings of Tokyo, from which they look down on us. Usually 57 centimeters long, weighing only 825 grams, perhaps the same weight as two cans of soft drink."

Then he would look out at the sky, the intricate tapestry of clouds, the horizon glimpsed beyond the skyscrapers, the towering edifices of hotels and businesses. Sometimes I looked out across the towers in the direction that he was gazing. I saw flocks of crows, turning as one organism in an swirling arc across the cityscape, searching for a new resting place. Individual birds launched themselves into the vastness, black specks slowly fading into invisibility, as if the sky had sucked them out of existence through tiny holes in the firmament.

"The Yatasagaru, according to Japanese mythology, is a three legged crow that lives in the sun. It is the crow's mythical ancestor, and the messenger of Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess. She sent the Yatasagaru to guide the warriors of Jimmu - our first Emperor. Up until quite recently, people used to put New Year's offerings on the roofs of their houses, as a gesture of gratitude to the Yatagarasu."

He stared at me, a strange light in his eye.

"The crows are our shadows, Tatsuo. They deserve study, and understanding, not our hatred. They deserve our respect."

One day, in the staff canteen, I mentioned the professor to another member of staff, a young elevator operator named Midori. She shook her head and said, "Ah, yes, Professor Sakurai. So you've met him, have you? That's a sad case."

When I asked her what she meant, she answered me in a hushed, respectful tone, her eyes shining with intent and concentration. "About six months ago, someone committed suicide here. In broad daylight. Shopping hours. Due to some mix-up with security, nobody was on duty on the roof at the time, and a man climbed that big fence up there and jumped off the roof before anyone could stop him. Left behind his shoes, with a suicide note inside one of them."

This I recalled from certain TV reports - although, to be honest, when I had first started work I had done my best to forget about the incident, and the other staff, it seemed, had been following suit. But what I had never known about the matter was . . .

"When that man fell, he hit someone on the ground. It was Professor Sakurai's wife. They were about to go shopping inside the store, and the suicide hit the ground outside the east door. As he fell, he struck her with his arm. She died later in hospital. "

The professor, standing there in shock with his wife collapsed at his feet, with the blood and entrails of the suicide splayed out before him, as if to present divinations for some barbaric priest. One moment before they had probably been discussing what to buy. She had seen an item for sale, or perhaps it was something for a birthday or an anniversary - the professor would have unwillingly agreed, perhaps hoping to sit down somewhere in the store and work out theorems in his head, undisturbed, while his wife chatted to the assistants - and suddenly his wife was on the sidewalk, one of two bodies in front of him, one dead and one soon to die.

I couldn't bear to think about it. I prayed that I would never see him again, that he would stay at home, that he would find peace of some kind and stop coming here, like some kind of criminal returning to the scene of the crime.

Here in my student's dormitory, as I sit and write this down, as I think of it, I can still feel the bruises, the aching ribs which were the professor's gift to me. They hurt. The shock has subsided now, but the physical memories remain, the realization that we are bags of blood and guts, parcels of flesh held together with delicate frameworks of bone. Frameworks that can be damaged, broken, deformed, twisted into terrible shapes.

We are wonderful creations, merely two meters of physical matter, directed by a brain. We can construct mathematical formulas of such complexity and beauty to make even the angels weep. But we cannot fly. We cannot conquer the air, except in cages of metal and plastic. We can never feel the air beneath our arms and use it to push and direct our flight, guiding us towards an impossible horizon.

All objects are the same when they fall.

One thing that still amazes me about that day was how he ever made it to the rooftop. I suppose it was the factor of surprise. We are not used to reacting to our environment here. On trains, if we see our fellow passengers behaving strangely, we look away, we tolerate and ignore it, rather than risk the shame of becoming involved with a stranger. When the professor entered the elevator and pressed the button for the rooftop, I think his fellow passengers took him for an advertising stunt, a special promotion taking place on the rooftop.

And so, Sakurai had stepped from the elevator into the September sunshine, the roof garden spread out before him leading to the wire-strung concrete horizon. He wore plywood wings probably constructed in the front room of his house, giving him a wingspan of maybe over two meters. A clumsily constructed tail shaped like a fan bumped against his posterior as he walked. His head ... he stared straight ahead as he walked, through a helmet plastered with feathers smoothed backwards from the helm - where had he got all of those feathers from? There were more coating his wings and his tail, I remember - and the helmet terminated in a short, jutting beak, covering his mouth and nose. Only his eyes could be seen clearly, fixed either side of the beak, giving him an aggressive, angry countenance. Angry with either himself, or the members of the public that he found himself sharing the roof garden with.

I was near the alfresco cafe when I saw him. He strode purposefully ahead, ignoring the attention he was now receiving, giving no indication that he'd noticed me.

Striding towards the fence.

He was already halfway up by the time I had sprinted across to reach him. I only had a vague idea of his age, perhaps in his early 50s, but he climbed with the vigour of a much younger man - despite being hindered by brightly painted straw sandals on his feet.

I stretched a hand up to grab his ankle, but he was already out of reach. Hauling himself onto the rim of the shaking fence, he swung one leg over and squatted precariously, the early energy of his movements suddenly calming themselves as he settled into stillness, staring straight ahead at the horizon.

"Professor," I yelled, "What are you doing? Come down!"

"I appreciate your concern," his voice came, muffled through his beak, "but you can leave me alone. Please don't try to stop me."

"Don't kill yourself, please, Professor! I know about your wife. I know it was terrible, but don't throw your life away too!"

His whole head swiveled around, as he gazed directly at me for the first time.

"My dear boy, whatever gave you the impression I want to kill myself?" he said rather waspishly. "I have been in contact with my new colleagues. I have studied them, and in the end, I was able to interpret their language. They taught me the mechanism of flight."

"Colleagues? What colleagues?"

"The crows. We discussed them before, if you were listening. I told you it was a mistake to underestimate them. Their intellect approaches genius, you know. But of course, it's a genius that is completely at odds with human thinking. It's beautiful in its starkness . . . it's freedom. I intend to fly into Heaven, my boy. Fly into Heaven, and be with my wife."

"Professor, stop it!" I remember screaming at that point, tearing at my hair in sheer rage and helplessness, as the flurry of panicked activity amongst the staff and customers increased behind me. My whole body shook with desperation, knowing that if I jumped onto the fence he would still have ample time to launch himself, from the roof. "How could the crows have spoken to you? It isn't possible!"

He nodded his head, tapping with his beak something that nestled in his shirt pocket. "They called me," he said petulantly, "on my cell phone."

The darkness in the eyes of birds.

"Well, if you don't mind, I have to go now."

"But don't you see? You'll fall and kill someone when you hit them! It'll happen again!"

"I told you," he continued, turning his head once again to face the horizon, "I intend to fly directly into Heaven. But if I hit someone on the way ...well ... I hope that they, too, will be blessed, as I was."

He gripped the fence harder, preparing to stand. "Wait!" I yelled. "How do you know that they really were crows?"

But he did not reply. Instead, he raised himself to his full height, spread his arms, opening his wood and feather wings to their fullest extent, and leaned forward.

Aerodynamics; birds taking flight. The two or three seconds it takes for the air to pass over the upper surface of the wings, and for the pressure underneath them to increase.

The gust of wind, the thermal updraft, the harbinger of early monsoon, whatever it was, the invisible presence of the air that could be seen only in its consequence. The professor had spread his wings just as a sharp gust had struck the wide surface area like a sail, blowing back toward the roof garden. Blowing him away from the edge of the building, back onto our side of the fence, down towards the paving and the object which was to break his fall and leave him uninjured.

That fortuitous object was me.

I only had time to grasp the image of that huge bird-shaped object, blocking out the sun, feathers in brilliant detail flaking away from the badly glued together plywood, before the bulk struck me in the face and bore me down to the ground.

I wonder what sound I made as the professor crushed me with his wings, sending us both smacking onto the floor, his arms and wings still spread-eagled, with me, a hapless security guard and student, pinioned by his weight.

Voices came closer, as staff came running to help us to our feet.

"I do apologize for this," came the Professor's distorted voice, heard through the stabbing pain in my side. It sounded considerably higher-pitched and strained.

"To tell the truth, I'm not sure the advice of crows is worthy of my trust anymore. I should have listened to the foxes."

When Masa awoke he was still in the Love Hotel. The radio was still playing, and the girl handcuffed to the bedposts was still dead.

He shifted position, finding comfort in the warmth of the shallow depression his body had made. All of the channels on the radio were the same: an abstract, ambient collage of wind, plucked strings, and chiming piano keys. A lazy waterfall of sound cascaded from hidden speakers, dripping down onto ornaments, furniture, Masa's brow, not quite succeeding in drowning out the sound of the incessant whispering that crept in from the corridors outside.

He sighed, and went back to sleep ...

*

The girl turned away from Masa, beckoning him to follow. They walked away from the shrine and turned into side streets that grew narrower and quieter, the endless flow of traffic hushing now, the footsteps of other couples walking furtively from assignation to assignation fading away as the night closed in around Masa and the girl. He touched his hand to hers, and she grasped it, her fingers meshing tightly with his. Masa's throat dried and his pulse hammered in his temple.

As they walked in silence, holding hands like high school sweethearts, Masa kept looking for signs that they were approaching the Hotel - but they arrived suddenly without any augurs or warnings. The girl stopped and tugged at Masa's arm, directing to his attention to a building composed of grey-pink stone. The facade gently shimmered in the false neon twilight, the arch of carved flowers above its entrance seeming to slowly turn and writhe as Masa watched.

Masa could see no signs or billboards; the Hotel had no name. The girl pulled him gently towards the smoked glass door, which slid silently aside to allow them in. They stepped down into a small but plush foyer, arrangements of cut flowers on podiums next to antique hanging scrolls. There were no photographs of the rooms available, as the usual Love Hotels had, with buttons beneath to press when you had made your selection. There was simply a hatch in the opposite wall - a hatch now opened by a lady reminiscent of Masa's grandmother, a lined, pallid face with over-rouged lips, hair swept severely back and held in place with bejeweled combs, her kimono black and shot through with a purple flowered design. Her thin, long-nailed hand stretched out, holding a wooden board with a single key attached. Masa accepted it with a bow of thanks.

As he turned to the elevator, from the corner of his eye he saw the old lady's face tremble slightly, as if a mask was dropping. Something feral replaced the sallow features, the flesh and bone structure twisted into ochre fur pulled back from bone-colored teeth. And then the hatch was closed.

Masa and the girl took the elevator to the third floor. There was nothing at all written on the key, but the girl knew which way to go, and Masa was putting himself at her mercy ... just as later she would put herself at his.

*

Masa heard someone's voice calling him, but he was busy killing the girl. It was Kyoko's voice; his wife's voice. The large double bed had split into two smaller twin beds, and Kyoko was asleep in the other one.

No, She was not fully asleep. As Masa turned his head, he noticed her eyes glint like chips of liquid crystal.

Regardless, he couldn't leave what he had started. The girl's wrists were tied, but she was not yet cuffed to the bed. Her full mouth was breaking into a grin wider and wider beneath her closed eyes, as if she were resisting the temptation to laugh. Masa couldn't breathe; the excitement swelled up inside him like a fist clenching itself in his chest.

Nobody's going to find me, he thought. It was important not to forget that, and to remember the night sky - stop the traffic. Stop the traffic, for the prices that never seem to change, never change in the world where you DREAM-

Twisting his head to one side, he saw Kyoko had left the bed and was standing up. In her underwear, pulling on one of her habitual Mild Seven and letting the smoke escape like steam. Masa got up from the bed to defend himself, and realized both beds were now empty. Where had the girl gone? Through his confusion, he heard the sound of the toilet flush. Oh, there. She'd be back in a moment to get killed.

"You can see the lights above the waterfalls -"

Kyoko faced him, her mouth set in a flat line of resolution, the eyes reflecting a hatred that he never knew existed. "I will never forget this," she said in a low monotone.

Masa woke up screaming. He was back in the same hotel room, and the girl tied up next to him was still dead.

*

Masa raised his head and turned away from the shrine, breathing in air reeking with the animal stench of sex, his eyes linking with the eyes of the girl standing in front of him.

She was completely unlike Kyoko. She was taller, big-breasted, round-faced, the fullness of her lips the same crimson color as the shrine torii gate. Her hair was permed, and short, set back from her forehead with a headband. The tight cocktail dress beneath her fur jacket balanced well with her pumps, and the black velvet choker around her neck.

Masa's throat was too dry for him to speak. The girl's lips moved, but no sound came out. They stared at each other in the intimate ring of silence within the shrine of Inari the Fox Goddess.

*

Masa awoke, and he was still in the hotel room. He sat up and gingerly slid off the edge of the bed, standing and stretching, turning to look upon his handiwork. The girl was silent and still in repose. An arrangement of ikebana, or a haiku, perhaps - a form defined by its restrictions. Her beauty was defined by its immobility, its stillness.

Its perfection.

The arrangement of her arms and legs as he had placed and tied them were in harmony, free from the motion and panic of the coming dawn. It was, Masa noted with a flush of sexual excitement, still breathtakingly beautiful.

*

In the organic neon heart of Tokyo, in the area between the Bunkamura complex and Shibuya station, lay what used to be the decadent area of Maruyamacho. In an era now beyond human memory, girls in kimonos holding wax paper parasols would wait in the foyer of the inns and taverns, waiting for their master's patronage.

The presence of the girls, their whitened faces and their fashionably blackened teeth still lingered. They lingered in the hanging scrolls placed in the dozens of Love Hotels sheltered in the side alleys leading off the Dogenzaka street. Like a concubine hiding her smile behind her elegant paper fan, the essence of Marumayacho hid itself behind a veil, the coquettish Love Hotels hiding themselves from the department stores, the restaurants, the everyday boutiques, nestling in the messy knot of alleys between the Dogenzaka street and the Bunkamura complex.

Here, the ornate facades of the Love Hotels betrayed the grand, deluded dreams of the owners and patrons, their elaborate follies imitating the grandeur of Renaissance Italy, of ancient Egypt, of the Sun King's Versailles, or the translucent paper doors behind bamboo groves recalling a vanished Japan. Delinquent fantasies turning themselves away from the public gaze, like flowers that bloomed only at night, secrets that revealed themselves only to the lost, the curious ... or those who knew what they were searching for.

Doors to the Love Hotels lay down cellar steps, up grand staircases, through arches of carved plastic flowers, behind cunningly automated waterfalls. The legend REST OR STAY always glowed beside the door, and the prices always remained unchanged, heedless of economic trivia. Commonly, deep in the night, an extra hieroglyphic flickered into life above the others, reflecting the fact that the hotel had room for no more fantasies: FULL.

Among the Love Hotels, among the jumbled collection of architectural conceits breathing warm, invisible heat into the blue sub-tropical night, rested the tiny shrine of Inari - the Fox Goddess.

It was situated near the intersection of two alleyways, set back from the sidewalk in a deep recess. Masa stood before it, his eyes taking in the stark crimson geometry of the carved torii gate framing the shrine, the same crimson painted upon the patient jaws of the stone fox statues that guarded the entrance. He withdrew the package in his rucksack and slowly unwrapped the cakes of inari-zushi, sugared rice wrapped in bean-curd, taking care that none slipped from his trembling hands. Placing the cakes as offerings before the main altar, below the fringe of twisted sasaki fiber and hand-written paper charms, Masa pulled two sticks of incense from his bag and lit them, sinking them into a small pot of sand on the altar, their heavy, oily smell spreading out into an October night already saturated with smells metallic, rancid and animal.

Masa put the palms of his hands together and bent forward, into the position of prayer. He whispered the incantation he had memorized. He concentrated, his lips moving, until he lost track of how many moments had passed.

When he opened his eyes, he could sense a change, a slight but unmistakable variation in the temperature of the steamed air. He turned his head, aware of his surroundings once more.

The girl was standing behind him.

*

The world ended for Masa as suddenly as it had begun. He opened his eyes, shocked by the apocalyptic roar of the voice that woke him, his body shaken by the rough hands that gripped his shoulders, fingernails scratching through the loose fabric of his clothes. "You bastard," the voice screamed, "You've killed her! You've killed her!"

Masa was back in the hotel room. The girl handcuffed to the bed was still dead. The door was in pieces, and a uniformed policeman was venting his rage by kicking the fragmented door out of its frame, the sledgehammer lying on the floor nearby.

The second unformed policeman, was leaning over Masa, alternately pushing him back on the bed and then pulling him up. The policeman's face filled Masa's vision, the lips pulled back in disgust, as he roared out accusations again and again. As Masa feebly put up his hands in a pathetic gesture, he stared at the flared nostrils, the stained teeth, the sallow, pockmarked skin of the face that continued to shout accusations at an almost incomprehensible speed.

"This isn't real," Masa croaked. "It's still part of the dream ..."

"Dream? You're going to wish you were still dreaming!" The cop stepped back, pulling Masa off the bed and bringing him to his feet. Masa swayed against the cop, struggling for balance, his legs weak as if he hadn't used them for days. The cop roughly shook off the hands that reached out for support.

"Look at this," the cop called across to his fellow officer. "Look at this pervert here. He took this poor girl to a Love Hotel - probably been stalking her for a few days, then had a few drinks to a bar, I wouldn't be surprised if he slipped something into her glass, eh? Then he brought her here and did this. When he finished, he curled up beside her and went to sleep. Like he's just done a good day's work. You know they have cameras here, don't you? Making movies on the side? It's common knowledge. Look at your handiwork!" The cop gripped Masa's chin and thrust his head forward, towards the bed and the figure that lay there. "You did this! Are you proud? Was it good for you, pervert?"

Masa knew the girl's figure well enough, In the dream, he had memorized the position of her limbs, the silent, pleading expression on her face. It was just as he had remembered it.

"She's not real," he mumbled, through the fingers clenched around his jaw. "She's a fox. Let me go. She's not dead, because she's not real."

"She's a fox." Masa felt the grip on him weaken, and he was released, swung round slightly to face the cop who ad held him.

The cop was only little taller than Masa himself, the fabric of his uniform stretched across his powerful arms and shoulders. The narrow eyes were shaded by the peak of the officer's cap as his gaze screwed itself into Masa's appearance. The face, a composition in bad skin and clenched muscles, was not a face that could know love, Masa thought. It was a face uniquely fitted for punishment.

"You said she's a fox," he repeated.

"Yes. Yes, she is."

He breathed heavily, a thin sound of air squeezing itself in and out. "Sato!" he called.

"Yes, sir."

"I think I heard someone outside. Go and check the corridor again."

"Yes, sir."

The cop left, without questioning. It occurred to Masa, through his rising panic, that it looked like a well-practiced drill. The officer facing Masa regarded him blankly, his chest rising and falling slowly with each breath.

"Get on your knees," the officer hissed.

Masa shook his head numbly.

"Get on your knees!" the officer roared, his hands lashing out to box Masa's ears. He then grabbed fistfuls of Masa's thick, sweat-matted hair, twisting it, forcing him down to kneel on the carpet.

"You thought you were screwing a ghost," the officer said in a surprisingly low voice, almost a whisper. "A fox spirit. Is that it?"

"Yes. I did. I know it's insane."

"So are you insane?"

Masa did not reply.

"I know what you are," the officer hissed. "You've wasted your life in pursuit of some fantasy. You had this corruption, this virus inside you, and you knew it. You knew that you weren't like other people, like normal people; oh no. You wanted to kill someone. You couldn't get rid of the urge; it just grew, and grew."

"Yes," Masa whispered back. It felt good, somehow, to have it all reaching an end. "Then I met someone in a bar in Kabukicho. An old man who told me about the Hotel. The Hotel with no name, owned by the foxes. He said that if you get inside, you can do anything you want, because none of it's real." Masa licked his lips.

"So you paid your dues, and you got yourself an invitation." The cop straightened up. "This old guy ... who was he?'

Masa trembled; it was cold in the room. Reality was cold. "I can't tell you."

"His name!"

"I can't tell you!" Masa yelled, tears boiling up in his eyes. "If I do, the foxes will kill me, and I'll be their slave in the spirit world. Forever!"

"Is that so."

There was the sound of a button popping open. The smell of leather and metal.

"I'm going to tell you what happened," the officer continued in a cool, even voice. "You became violent, and then attacked me." He walked slowly around Masa, taking his time, his shoes sinking into the carpet without a sound. "You tried to take the gun from me, and you had the strength of someone ... possessed." His voice broke into a chuckle. "In the struggle, the gun went off."

Masa felt his throat close in on itself. He shut his eyes, the last image he saw the bland anonymity of the policeman's uniform, a wall of drab navy blue.

"So you refuse to give me the name?"

"Yes."

"What do you want, pervert?" The cop said, almost gently. "What do you really want?"

"I want to stop feeling like this," Masa whispered.

The gunshot was surprisingly distant, echoing around him like a truck backfiring. Masa reeled, falling forwards onto his face, his hands grazing themselves against not the fur of the carpet but stone, opening his eyes and seeing sidewalk, feeling the sudden rush of stark daylight, noise and cool air surrounding him, a world that had sprung into sudden activity out of the cloistered silence.

The next sound was the pumping of a truck's air-horn, as Masa reared his head to stare at a radiator grill, the front of a truck emblazoned with a delivery company logo, the driver within the cab cursing and gesturing for Masa to get out of the way.

He got to his feet and stumbled to the side of the road. The truck went on its way with an impatient sigh of airbrakes. Putting his hand to a nearby wall to steady himself, Masa recognized the building as one of the Love Hotels he had walked past.

On his way to...

With ...

He rubbed his eyes, his face, feeling the growth of one long night's stubble, aware of a clamoring dryness in his throat. The smell of raw garbage wafted from an overfilled collection point.

In the morning haze, the cruel laughter of the crows filled the sky, the Love Hotel's architectural conceits drab and forlorn in the cool sunrise. At the corner of Masa's vision, a flicker of movement - an animal, turning its back, a bushy tail. It might have been a cat, a stray dog.

As Masa turned to see who or what had been watching him, the animal ducked around the side of a building and was gone.

"Listen," Kaori said in a conspiratorial voice. "Do you really want to know the future?"

Across the restaurant table, Ritsuko's throat tightened in anticipation. Kaori leaned forward through a cloud of menthol-tinged cigarette smoke, the shades of her make-up deepening in the discreet half-light.

"In one of my astrology magazines, I found this really interesting form of fortune-telling. It's one of the oldest there is — and it's so simple."

In the slight pause that followed as Kaori lit up another Kool, the other girls Mio and Miyoko, making up the four at the lunch table, chorused their need to know more. Ritsuko breathed in sharply, taking in the menthol, the fragrance of the red wine, the faintly scented candle smoke.

She glanced around, without turning her head. The almost entirely female clientele of the Queen Alice restaurant sat in various poses of contentment, picking thoughtfully at their food, nodding their heads together in dignified conversation. Ritsuko was one of them. She knew that now. The exclusive and very expensive Queen Alice was about to reveal its secrets.

"This form of fortune-telling," Kaori went on, "is called tsuji-ura. All you need to do is walk out one night, or daytime, on a busy street, and just walk down it. You listen to what the people around you, the passers-by, are saying. You piece together fragments of conversation, taken completely at random, and put them together in your mind like pearls on a string. You will eventually acquire ... vision, the article said."

Mio and Miyoko reclined in their seats with respectful murmurs of interest.

Ritsuko tried not to frown. Was that it? How could you foresee your own future from the chance comments of perfect strangers? It seemed — well, pointless was far too impolite for it.

However, Kaori seemed to know what she was talking about. She subscribed to a half a dozen astrology magazines. The designer boutique where Kaori worked, on the Omote-sando, was close to the store where she bought her healing crystals and her aromatherapy oils. (Ritsuko knew it cost a lot of money to find your spiritual side. Just like everything else.)

Her friend talked more of the techniques that she had found, accentuating her speech with waving her fingers and fluttering of long, artificial eyelashes. Offering rice cakes to a rod placed in a pot of soil. Prayers addressed to the Kami of the Crossroads. How the Kanji of the verb "to tell" was similar to that of an old-fashioned boxwood comb.

Ritsuko leaned back in her seat, pushing away the remnants of the exquisite chicken-and-wasabi set lunch. She took out another Kool, took a couple of puffs to get the taste, and carefully crushed it out in the ashtray. Around her, the beautifully dressed customers seemed to be nodding in agreement. Yes, they were saying, you should listen to Kaori. It's important.

"And that's how you find the name of your true love," Kaori finished.

"Then it's a shame Ritsuko's married," Mio said slowly.

"And with such a cute, loveable child," Miyoko added.

Her child.

Ritsuko paid the bill for the four of them, to show how much she appreciated their coming, even though her friends made a noisy show of protesting. They bustled out into the crisp November air, all promising to meet again soon.

"Give our regards to your husband!" Mio called.

Ritsuko cursed the train as she ran, her high heels striking the platform like gunshots, trying to push herself and her shopping bags into the crowded interior just as the doors hissed shut. She squeezed herself on with a muttered "sumimasen" to everyone in general, pulling her shopping bags in so they didn't get caught in the door. Alighting at last in Denenchofu, she picked up a taxi at the taxi rank and began the last stage of her journey home — the small detached house she shared with her husband and child.

Baby's all right, she said to herself, in the taxi. Baby's all right.

But all the time she felt a growing sourness, a dryness spoiling the aftertaste of the gourmet cuisine. Why should she be made to feel like this? Why couldn't she enjoy her precious time alone with her friends?

She heard the noise from outside the front door and dashed in, awkwardly pulling off her boots in the genkan. There, in the bedroom, lay her wailing baby, crimson with discomfort, lying helpless in its own misery.

"There, there," she said, kneeling down to pick the baby up, trying to smother its screaming with her breasts.

Baby's face was so hot she could feel it glowing through her Versace dress. "There, there. Mommy's here now."

"I can't relax," Hubby said at dinner time.

He looked quite relaxed to Ritsuko. He lay spread out on the cushion, his knees under the kotatsu heater, listlessly watching a TV variety show.

"Why not?"

"You know why not? Things are getting worse. I don't know how long it'll be until my company goes bankrupt."

"But you've been saying that for the past two years. Just do your best. Things will be all right."

Hubby took a deep slurp of his miso soup and avoided her gaze. "We might have to sell the car."

"What?" Ritsuko almost dropped her bowl of rice. "What are you talking about? We need the car. How am I going to take Baby out?"

Hubby screwed up his face. "You don't understand. We've got to do something."

"Why don't you take out another loan?"

"Yeah, that's your answer to everything." He slammed down his bowl of soup, so hard the remnants splashed over the side and spattered the tablecloth. "Your loans, your debts — that's the reason we're in this mess!"

In the corner of the living room, Baby started crying.

The next day, Ritsuko awoke with a positive feeling of determination. She prepared Hubby's breakfast of rice and grilled fish, and his lunchbox of rice, pickles and deep-fried chicken, all the while her anticipation growing. Today she was going to escape the feeling of depression left over from last night's argument, like an unwanted relative in the New Year's holiday.

Today she was going shopping.

Taking the Yamanote line from Shinjuku to Aoyama was torture. When she finally walked through the automatic doors of the first department store, a profound feeling of calm enveloped her. She felt herself slipping into a trance as she slowly paraded past the designer labels, examining each in turn. No thoughts. No mind. Time passed outside on the Omote-sando, but it could not touch her here.

Baby had come along this time. He sat back in his harness strapped to the front of her torso, head lolling, eyes rolling as he stared over her shoulder, mouth agape and brown eyes wide in pantomime of surprise. Baby could share in the excitement, she had thought, Baby can see what the world is made of. But the shop assistants were beginning to irritate her. They were fawning over her, as was appropriate, but they were even more obsequious to baby. Her attitude changing, Ritsuko became sullen and tight-lipped, requesting to be left alone as she browsed, flicking her hand in an imperious gesture.

Burdened down with an impressive weight of dresses and shoes, the names of the stores picked out in maroon, gold and emerald on the bags, she walked up the Omote-sando towards Harajuku station, the Christmas illuminations of the trees a dazzling display of stars and Disney characters. The avenue was crowded with shoppers and business people, and she was gradually swallowed by an amorphous, many-headed mass.

Strangely, though, she felt alone. (Alone, with Baby of course.) Her identity was intact; the names on the labels protected her. They were her lucky charms. She read off every brand in her mind, feeling stronger with every foreign-sounding syllable.

Gradually, she became aware of two things at the same time. First, a slight buzzing and hissing in her ears. Secondly, the memory of Kaori's words. What had she called it? Tsuji-ura. You walk down the street, and listen to the conversations of passing strangers. You pluck out the sounds of the future.

"The name of your true love," Kaori had said. An affair? Someone else in her life? Would someone murmur into her ear, his fingers cooling her skin with sudden shock?

She would try it.

She found it was quite easy to shift attention from her eyes to her ears, once she started to concentrate. The sounds of the street reared up around her, a tapestry woven from taxi horns, footsteps, the recorded jingles and Christmas songs playing outside shop entrances, the childlike melodies of the pedestrian crossings. A rhythmic sizzling with faint percussion booms sounded close by, and she realized it was another pedestrian's MP3.

Slowing her pace to almost a shuffle, she guided her way through the avenue of ambient sound. Everything around her was noise. It was the voice of the city she heard; a nonstop muttered conversation with itself. But there were no words. She listened to the people talking as they rushed past her, but it was only breath. Only noise. The meanings slipped away from her like water from a DKNY raincoat.

Ritsuko felt a faint sadness at this, but could not get too upset. Her concentration had displaced her from emotions such as sorrow or anger; she had become a neutral observer. If someone stepped into her path, she was sure that the stranger would walk right through her body, as if she was a ghost.

At her breast, Baby gurgled.

Later, back in the small back garden of her own house, she remembered her experience and found herself repeating it. In the chilly November air, she was raking up the fallen autumn leaves that littered the grass. and the afternoon stretched out around her.

She heard the voices of the city, drifting in from the streets nearby. The constant surf of the traffic gathered on her skin; the metallic, recorded voice of the sodai gomi collectors, with the precise measured tones of the female voice requesting old computers, television sets, furniture, all the electronic goods that the city hall services would not carry away. The barking of a dog. The wailing of ambulance sirens, and the driver's voice, amplified by loudspeaker; "Please move your cars to the side. Please move your cars to the side."

The rake snagged an obstruction in her path and she stopped. She looked down.

The wet leaves had clumped together to form a single, sticky mass. They had entangled themselves in the metal fingers of the rake. She pulled at the shaft, but the mess would not break free of the grass.

As she looked down in disgust, a score of tiny holes opened in the leafy mass, elongated, rippled, and then spoke. "Take care of me," they said in unison, in a muddy wet whisper. "Take care of me."

It was Hubby's voice.

Ritsuko let go of the rake and hurried back in through the French window. She sat down on the sofa, shaking, sick to her stomach.

From the room above, she could hear Baby gurgling, laughing to himself.

She snapped up the remote and clicked the TV on. Some Korean TV drama with dubbed Nihongo. She grabbed her cigarettes and an ashtray from the kitchen and lit up a Kool. Baby carried on gurgling upstairs. Shut up, she thought. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

Her fingers were shaking and wouldn't stop. She felt perspiration breaking out over her forehead, neck, armpits, and back — she had a sudden urge to drench her whole body in perfume. The more she wanted to forget it, the more she tried to concentrate on the TV, the more she trembled. She thought of leaving the house, of running, escaping back to the Omote-Sando boutiques and Christmas lights.

Baby laughed.

"I don't know what time I'll be home," Hubby grunted as he put his shoes on in the parlor.

"Come back safely," Ritsuko said. "I'll leave something in the oven for you."

He grunted again and left the house, ready to squeeze himself onto a bus, so that he could squeeze himself onto the train.

Ritsuko silently washed the dishes. Rice, miso soup, grilled fish. She always made it a point to cook him a proper breakfast; he should have nothing to complain about. Another normal day with Baby was beginning, and everything would be fine.

Nothing like yesterday would happen. She must try to forget the leaves, the whispering leaves; they would make her ill. Perhaps it was something she ate. The news had said that eating food with the wrong kind of bacteria could have all kinds of effects; fevers, stomach cramps, headaches. Hallucinations? Perhaps that was it.

But she felt so restless. If only she could go out — if only she had someone to take care of Baby. She needed a new pair of shoes, she needed a handbag, she needed a new winter coat so that she would be able to go out in the first place ...

What else did she need?

She ran a bath, brushed her teeth and soaked in the bath for a while. She could hear Baby wheezing and snuffling in the front room. Afterwards, she took a few of her best dresses out of the closet, hung them up to look at them. She had felt so happy when she bought them. Now, she felt as if she was splitting into two people; one, the energetic wife, and another, who wanted to roll herself up in her own disappointment and go to sleep.

She dressed herself in the comfortable Alba Rosa top and slacks she wore for the housework and, before she really knew what she was doing, left the kitchen through the back door and stepped through the crisp air into the garage.

She eased herself past the Toyota sedan that Hubby used to drive her and Baby around at weekends, and moved to the tansu — the old chest of drawers — that one day, they would throw out. The garage held sodai gomi, furniture that Hubby had brought from his old apartment but was too big to fit in their house. The chest of drawers, the armchair, the hi-fi ... one day, Hubby said, he would get around to having it taken away. One day.

She knelt down and opened the left door of the chest, and looked inside. Bulky packages in plastic and brand-name stores lay piled up inside. These were the things she could not show Hubby. The shoes and the sweaters and the credit card receipts that she kept hidden. It wasn't his business; they had agreed to keep separate bank accounts, even though they lived together. He would never look in here, he was good like that; he left her things alone, didn't ask many questions.

She heard a sound from inside the house. Uh-oh, she thought, but before she could stand up, she heard something else — from much closer.

"Ritsuko-chan ..."

She stood up and the world swayed in front of her eyes. She felt the strength draining out of her. Although she refused to turn her head, she could see the armchair next to the chest, she could see the rip in the middle of the backrest that was flapping open and closed, an obscene mouth, and a voice that was old and dry and horribly withered, calling her name.

"Ritsuko-chan ... don't leave me ..."

This time, it was her father's voice.

She scrambled past the car, ran back into the house, and locked the kitchen door. In the front room, Baby was wailing as if he shared her fear. And fear; yes, fear is what it was. Fear of the whispering that came from the garage, the muttering and whispering rising around the house to seal it off from the rest of the world, the whispering that she could hear at every window.

She picked up Baby, held him close, shut her eyes and stood helpless in the middle of the front room. "Don't worry, Baby," she said through her tears. "It's going to be all right, Baby."

Baby was heavier than usual.

She shifted position, moving Baby from her right shoulder from her left, and as the head swung into view she looked straight into Baby's face.

It wasn't Baby. The head had swollen, and the eyes and mouth gaped like a deep-sea fish. The skin was hideously wrinkled. The eyes bulged further out as she stared in speechless horror and disgust. The worst horror was that the aged face reminded her one second of her husband, then her father, then her grand-father, but she knew it was none of them.

Baby's arms closed around her neck, and he pulled himself onto her chest.

She staggered back, unable to believe how heavy it was. It was like a lead weight at the sports club. She lost her footing, and fell, her head crashing into the wall. Everything went black for a moment. Then she stars; first white, then red.

Then her vision cleared. Baby squatted on her chest, its inhuman face staring down into hers.

"Take care of me ... take care of me..."

The pain was incredible. Baby's weight pressed down on her chest, growing heavier every second. She couldn't scream. She couldn't even breathe.

"Take care of me ..." The whispering had entered the house and began to fill the room around her.

The windows grew dark, and slowly faded to black.

The iridescent dreams of machines and men swam through the viscous air of Kabukicho.

Awash in the smog, the coral reefs of skyscrapers stood massive and serene, bejeweled with the neon eyes of artificial life; winking, luring, warning. The voice of the city gave forth its mermaid call, speaking from the cash machines, the elevators, the storefronts; it shrilled from the advertising screens that swarmed and multiplied upon the coral. Shoals of boneless mollusk humanity surged back and forth, appearing and disappearing with the tides of day and night.

Tetsuaki Sugita, sushi chef, swaggered along the Kabukicho streets as the December day oozed slowly into dusk. About him, the haunters of the red-light zone busked their wares; the hustlers shimmied in their ankle-length down jackets, pressing flyers and telephone numbers into his hands. The wet tongues of hostesses peeked at him through pink lips, as the girls bowed to him from softly lit doorways. Cars droned, computerized billboards teased. Sugita glanced about him with the disinterested contentment that came with endless nights sated with middle-age, sake and pornography.

A cold wind blew whirlpools of trash around his slacks. Shielding his eyes from the grit, he looked up at the giant sign above him; Salon Visu — Pachinko. Two neon dinosaurs clawed at each other in clockwork rage. Sugita grunted in satisfaction. A new pachinko parlor? When had that gone up? Who cared. Here in Tokyo, any building over thirty years old was ripe for demolition, making way for a new cell-phone shop, a new game centre, a new shot bar. He would kill some time before he resumed his evening shift killing prawns.

As he entered through the sliding doors, the roar of the interior broke over him, drenching him in his metallic tide. Recorded announcements of welcome; frenetic J-Pop blasting out of one speaker and Eurobeat blasting from another; the amplified voice of the host, reading out a rapid-fire list of which machines were winning at any given moment; and above all else, the deafening, relentless, crash of the ball-bearings as they surged into the rows of bagatelle Pachinko games lining the shop. Sugita picked up a complimentary rice-cracker from the tray near the door and crunched it thoughtfully as he paid for a cardboard box of ball bearings from the dispenser.

The place was quite full. The usual mix of off-duty salarymen, students in Uniqlo check shirts and baggy jeans, aggressive-looking old women. With his practiced eye, Sugita scanned each machine, looking for the main chance.

It was mid-way through December, and customers were looking for a few winnings to pad out their year-end expenses; come January the first, and Sugita was expected to give toshidama envelopes of cash to the three brats his son and daughter-in-law had squeezed out. Mendokusai. Better find a good machine. At least in December the shops paid out more, enticing the customers to come back and spend more. He glanced at the areas he favored, near the toilets, near the front entrance: occupied. He peered towards the back of the store, into the haze of cigarette smoke, and ...

There!

There was the machine he was looking for.

Sugita walked down the rows and eased himself into a plastic seat between a bone-thin chain-smoking old man and a fat, dead-eyed college student. He put down his cardboard box on the tray next to the seat and sat back, letting his muscles relax. Admiring the upright board of the machine in front of him, and the identical design of the machines around him, Sugita fed the balls into the delivery chute, ready for the start of play.

He'd never seen a machine like this before. A new shop, with new machines — yeah. A good sign; they'd be looking for customers that they could keep.

He lit up a Seven Stars and then fished in his pocket for his Bron cough mixture. Clearing his throat, he took a swig of the codeine-laced syrup and then another drag of his smoke.

He was ready. He clicked his tongue and twisted the black handle with his right hand, giving just the correct amount of pressure, and watched the balls go flying up into the main playing tube of the bagatelle. He had already seen, at a glance, that the arrangement of the nails on this board was as close to perfect as he could wish for. Slight degrees of alignment, a leaning toward this way instead of that, would direct the balls to the bottom of the board, to drop into the chakka hole — and net him some well-needed cash.

It was not just the ease of playing that made it a perfect machine; the design of the board held a beauty that Sugita rarely saw outside of a temple. The board was filled with a circle of fire, and the game played out within its radius. A brilliantly colored quincunx filled the interior; figures in monk-like robes floated serenely around the pins and the windmills. A manga-style Oni demon resided at the center of the circle, and outside the wheel, clutching the perimeter with claws of iron and baring its fearsome jaws, was the dreaded Ema, the Lord of Yoni — the land of the dead. The familiar face that used to chase him through his childhood nightmares.

Sugita smoked, relaxed, and played the game. The balls dropped just where he wanted them, and the score mounted. As each ball hit the delicate tulip shape of the chakka and slid through the jaws, the petals stayed open for a few seconds, and if Sugita was lucky a couple more balls would shoot down the gullet while it was so invitingly open.

After a while, a sudden diarrhea of ball-bearings in his catch-tray told him he'd hit the jackpot, and the 'game over' sign lit up. A good catch. Scooping up the balls into the box, Sugita grinned, muttering "Chakka, chakka" to himself, and went to convert his winnings into cash. The little booth around the corner was not supposed to do this, legally speaking, but the habits of pachinko parlor owners were more deeply ingrained than the law.

As the doors to the entrance slid open, he paused.

He sniffed the air suspiciously.

Cherry blossoms floated on a soft Spring breeze. Groups of young people in casual wear crowded the street, singing the school graduation song Hotaru no Hikari.

Sugita knew that something was wrong, but he couldn't figure out what. He suddenly realized that he couldn't remember where he was supposed to be going. He'd finished work, so he was on his way home ... go to Shinjuku station, catch the train back to ... back to ...

He shrugged, and went back inside. There was still lots of time before the last train.

It was easy to find a new machine, because they all seemed to have the same new design. He sat down again, prepared to repeat his lucky streak.

There was no wonder why the pachinko professionals compared their game to the aesthetics of the tea ceremony, or the discipline of the martial arts. All of them required an emptying of the mind, an abolition of thought. A perfect way to get out of the world of bank accounts, back pain, irritating children, the loss of hair and teeth. A perfect way to relax. How strange it was that, even though every seat in the pachinko parlour was occupied now, every player was utterly alone and absorbed in the outcome of their own game. How strange but somehow absurdly appropriate it was that Sugita was relaxed, and communicating perfectly, but to a machine.

It would have been an interesting thought; but Sugita was not thinking.

The monks in their burnt-parchment colored robes smiled at him with infinite compassion. Even the demonic oni blinked its multitude of eyes in recognition of him, its claws seeming to rattle as they gripped tighter upon the wheel, the fangs sinking deeper.

With a grunt of satisfaction, Sugita watched the second 'game over' sign flash up, and heard loud and clear through the parlor's cacophony the machine-gun clatter of his catch-tray filling up again.

After transferring the balls to the provided cardboard box at the side of the chair, Sugita stretched and yawned. His old bones creaked and clicked deep within his sluggish flesh, and he peered with weak eyes around the darkened parlor, tugging absently on his gray, straggling beard.

Holding his trophy cardboard box before him, he walked toward the door, and the broker who waited around the corner with a stack of ready cash.

The doors slid open, and Sugita paused at the threshold.

He looked out.

The city lay before him, silent and dark. The decaying wrecks of the skyscrapers were quietly sinking into gelatinous, grayish muck. The road was choked with the blackened, burnt-out shells of Honda and Toyota family sedans, some with doors flung wide open, some with bodywork still licked by the fitful flames of the last of the burning gasoline. The sidewalk was littered with sheets of paper and empty clothing that stirred in the hot, stinking wind.

Sugita pulled out his packet of cigarettes. Behind him, the doors were still open, releasing the crash of the ball-bearings and the amplified voice of the host as he chanted the numbers of the winning machines. Sugita cleared his throat and carefully spat, a small gobbet that sizzled on the cracked sidewalk like a frying egg.

He went back inside.

"The Japanese are finished!" Takashi Hino yelled, stepping on the gas to speed us down the Yamanashi-ken highway. He took one hand off the steering wheel and shook a fist at the pylons, the rice fields, the lonely farmhouses rolling by. "The way the population's declining, a hundred years from now there'll just be a few thousand oyaji rice farmers stuck in some radioactive wasteland wondering what happened to their Rising Sun. And good riddance."

I'd got used to Hino's rants over the last two weeks, and in my vulnerable position in the passenger seat, resigned myself to making toadying comments, trying to ignore the horseracing results blaring out of the car radio, and concentrating on the task ahead of me.

Takashi Hino was one of the lieutenants of the Shibuya Sumiyoshi-kai, not an Oyabun, but a fairly big player in the west Tokyo Yakuza. He'd made his mark coordinating dating scams and fake weddings for Thai prostitutes in his native Toyama-prefecture. He'd moved onto bigger things after coming to Tokyo, like running a handful of backstreet loan companies, and but he often talked about the Thai and the Chinese girls he'd 'broken in'. Never forget where you're from, he'd say. I'd been working for Hino for the last two weeks collecting money from Soapland massage parlors — but today, I was out with Hino for the first time, for my 'initiation'.

Hino slipped another Seven Stars cigarette from the packet, and I hurriedly moved to light it for him. "There it is," he said, gesturing to the left. "Mount Fuji."

I peered at the misty pyramid shape of dark blue and brown against the skyline. "It doesn't look that big when you get up close," I said.

Bam! Sparks exploded as the knuckles of his left hand connected with my right cheek. I turned my head, stared at his reddening face. Hold it together, I thought. Keep calm...

"Well then look at it properly, you son of a bitch," he shouted, "Show some respect! That's the most important site in the whole of Japan, that's our spirit, our pride. You see the snow on the top? But not much on the sides, there, huh, where it's all rocky and black? I saw something on the TV that said there's gonna be another eruption soon. The snow's melting quicker because the volcano's warming up and sometime in the future it's going to blow. Man, I can't wait to see that! Fuji blows its top, and a great cloud of volcanic ash fills the sky and just dumps its load on Tokyo. That'll teach 'em. The Roppongi Hills Megamall is gonna look like another Pompeii. A hundred years from now some archeologists are gonna dig through the ash and find the plaster cast of some office lady with her body curled around her Louis Vuitton bag to try to protect it, and they'll find the bones of a little Chihuahua inside the bag with one of those stupid pink ribbons around the dog's neck, and they'll think, who the fuck were these people?"

Hold it together, I thought. Keep calm...

"So what about you, boy?" he asked, after he'd got bored with ranting. "They told me you want into the gang full-time. So what's special about you, Naoto?"

My story. I looked ahead at the road, recalling the details that the real Naoto Iwasaki had unwillingly given to me.

"Well, you know ... thrown out of junior high school for pulling a knife on a teacher. Mum died when I was little, Dad was a taxi driver who hit the bottle. One night Dad came back from work, whacked some cash on the table and said, 'I'm too tired for this. Here's half of my savings, pack your bags and just get out.' After that I hung out in Shibuya, sleeping in Internet cafes, until I hooked up with some of your scoutmen who told me the score."

"Yeah, yeah. I heard it all before. There's plenty where you come from. Well don't worry kid, just do what you're told and you could make a lot of cash. And speaking of cash, here it is . . . our stop. The sea of trees."

I followed his gesture and looked ahead through the windscreen, to the thick rolling cloud of green coming up on the left. Aokigahara Jukai.

About fifteen hundred years ago, Mount Fuji erupted, and over time a forest grew over the lava and other unknown matter that had emerged from beneath the earth. Thirty square kilometers of ancient woodland, called the 'sea of trees', because from half way up Mount Fuji it really does look like an ocean. Dense, dark, and forbidding.

Also the most notorious suicide spot of the entire country.

"Every year around autumn time, the cops do a sweep of parts of the forest," Hino explained. "They find at least a hundred bodies. I saw this show on TV that said not all the people who die here are suicides. Some of them are hikers who get lost."

"Who'd actually want to go hiking in a place like this?"

"You got me, kid. Anyway, the show brought on one of these rent-a-scientists who said there was something weird about the magnetic field around here. GPS devices don't work. Compass needles don't work. This guy actually said," the gangster laughed at the wrong moment and began to cough on his own cigarette smoke, "that some University did an aerial survey, and they couldn't even figure out the size of the place. The forest seemed to be a few meters bigger than it was five years ago."

I turned my head away and smiled. "That's just crazy," I said.

We pulled over on the side of the road. With the engine and the radio off, we were suddenly plunged into mournful silence. We got out of the car. The tang of wood smoke hung upon the chill December air, and behind us lay squares of rice paddies and distant farms beneath the cold sunshine, and ahead of us stood a dark tangle of trees that cast everything into shadow.

"It's half an hour drive to the nearest town," Hino said. "Well, you can't really call it a town. Not much bigger than a village, and half of the buildings are empty and falling down. That's the countryside for you, kid. These bastards can't wait to get out and move to Tokyo."

We wore the uniforms of the local volunteer fire service, and had fake passes stamped with the Fujigoko Fire Department insignia. We also had color-coded plastic tapes to attach to the trees, not only to provide us with a cover story, but also so we could find our way back.

A gloomy screen of oak, elm, paulownia and chinkapin stood ahead of us. Hino hesitated a little, but then shrugged, pulled out another Seven Stars that I lit for him, and then pushed me forward. We walked under the canopy of leaves onto the public hiking path, and out of the light of day.

"Boss, there's an old riddle that goes if a tree falls in the middle of a forest, and there's nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound," I said.

Hino blew out smoke and gave me an angry look. "So?"

"So I was thinking, if a salaryman kills himself in these woods and there's nobody around to hear him, does he really make a sound?"

"Does anybody give a shit?"

We came to a rope stretched across the trees, with a sign that said NO PUBLIC ENTRANCE BEYOND THIS POINT — IT IS EASY TO GET LOST.

There was an even bigger sign above it that said this:

YOUR LIFE IS A PRECIOUS GIFT FROM YOUR PARENTS.

IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING SUICIDE, PLEASE TURN BACK.

DON'T KEEP IT TO YOURSELF: TALK TO SOMEONE.

Hino flicked his cigarette butt at the sign and laughed. We looked around; in the vague landscape of grey, brown and green, we were the only human figures. We climbed over the rope and started trekking, attaching the tape firmly to the trees as we went.

As we walked in further, the trunks seemed to huddle closer and closer and closer together, and the quality of the light turned thick and gloomy. We soon came across debris littered sporadically across the leaf mulch; PET bottles, empty plastic bento boxes and disposable wooden chopsticks, rotting manga, crushed cans of coffee.

"Look for the shoes," Hino told me. "Before they hang themselves, they take off their shoes and line them up neatly under the tree. When you find a body, remember, you're looking for cash, watches and jewelry. Even commuter train passes will do, if it's not out of date. Don't bother with the credit cards or driver's licenses."

"I heard that someone came down here and found a body with almost a hundred thousand yen in his suit pocket," I said. "And then he found about seventy thousand on another."

"With your luck, we'll find a suicide who decided to have a little camp fire and burn it all before he topped himself," he moaned with a curse.

"Boss, have you ever been down here before?"

"Nope. The Ueno branch picks up homeless guys and brings them down here to search for stuff we can use. I don't have anything to do that, though — today's just my turn on the rota to take the newbie for a walk."

"Sorry, boss."

"Shut up and keep looking."

"Boss," I said a while later, "have you ever heard of the Jinmenju?"

"Nope."

"I heard this old story," I told him with a sly glow of pleasure, "about these ghostly trees around here called the Jinmenju. People say they grow fruit on their branches - fruit that have human faces on them. Every time someone kills themselves in the forest, the trees steal their soul, and next season - the dead person's face starts growing on one of the fruit."

"You cut that out!" he snarled, turning around and aiming a slap at my face, which I flinched away from. "I don't want to hear any crap, okay? Just think of the money and keep your eyes open."

We trekked on into the desolate, dark green labyrinth. It was getting colder, and the silence was thick and oppressive, broken only by the rasping calls of a few distant crows. There were other tapes strung through the forest, left behind by police patrols and volunteer searchers, looking like the threads of some vast, luminescent cobweb. Some of them may also have been left by individuals who hadn't fully made up their minds about suicide, and wanted to leave a path back to the world they knew.

We walked past several blue tarpaulin tents that had collapsed to the ground, rotting sleeping bags with no owners inside. We found shoes — four pairs of them, two adults, two children, covered with mould and left on the gnarled roots of an elm. But no bodies, until ...

"Wait," Hino said finally. "Look up ahead. I think we've got one."

In the boughs of a tree I saw something. Blue denim jacket, jeans, arms out stiff like a shop manikin. As I got closer, it was obvious. A male figure, suspended in mid-air by the rope around his neck, unmoving in the still, cold air. His torso rested against the branch that he must have climbed upon to fix the noose. Sure enough, beneath him, lined up neatly, was a pair of hiking boots. Just like someone taking off their shoes when they enter a friend's house.

I stared at the man's face. Japan's winters are cold and dry, and it looked like he'd been mummified. Yellow, parched skin was tight against his cheekbones. His black, shriveled tongue protruded from his lipless mouth and his eyes were dark hollows of shadow.

"Jackpot," Hino muttered.

There was a heap of possessions at the base of the tree. Hino put on a pair of white gloves and began to go through them. There was a briefcase full of documents that he tossed onto the leafy ground. He found an envelope, full of photographs of children, in colorful kimonos and elementary school uniforms. He threw them into the bushes with a curse.

"Okay, time for you to show me what you're made of, kid."

I trod over the crackling leaf mulch to the body, stood on a clump of roots, and reached up to the jacket with white-gloved hands. I tried to ignore the exotic smell of decayed flesh and dried excrement. I pulled the jacket open and the whole of the man's body twitched, like a marionette on a string.

"Get on with it," Hino hissed. "The goddamn thing's not going to attack you!"

I gingerly reached into the inside jacket pocket. There was a wallet still inside; two or three gentle tugs and out it came, dislodging nameless bits of filth that dropped onto the shirt.

It was almost over. I had to keep myself together, my tender Iwasaki identity, for just a little longer. The trap was ready to close.

"The wallet," I said, handing it to him.

"Appreciated."

I stared past him, my eyes widening. "Boss," I said "There's something on that tree over there . . ."

"I told you, don't give me any crap!"

"I know, but . . . isn't that a face?"

Hino swore at me, but he still turned around to look. That's when I got him.

With a couple of strides I closed the distance between us and put both hands over his face. It was such a relief to let go, to release the hyphae within me, the thousands of fibrous threads and the millions of spores they carried. They flooded out of the pores of my hands, enveloping his face, burrowing into his mouth, his nose, filling up the jelly of his eyes and pouring through the sockets. He choked for a few seconds and then was quiet, his arms falling down to his sides, his body twitching and jerking in brief, random spasms. The threads shot down his throat and into his guts, eating their way outward into his body cavities, beginning to turn his tissues into sugar.

I released my grip and leaned him against a tree. His face was as slack as a rubber mask. The outside of his lips looked white and furry, but that would soon fade. It was important to keep his outer shape, his toughened skin, so to everyone else he would still look like Takashi Hino.

I released the last hold on my adopted shape of Naoto Iwasaki and sank back into the ground, to join with the rest of me. Another part of my consciousness now lived within Hino, lived inside him as he walked out of the forest and returned to Tokyo. I would think his thoughts and look through his eyes as he selected another specimen to bring here to Aokigahara.

Because some of the people who go into Aokigahara don't die.

Some of them come back — or to be more accurate, some of them are released. Released by the forest to walk the land, to search the country, looking for food, because the sea of trees is always hungry. The sea of trees needs food to live, to grow, and it will not stop growing until the entire country is one huge forest, dark, silent, each tree with a pair of shoes lined up neatly beneath it.

And to paraphrase what the guy said, if a man kills himself in the middle of the forest and there's nobody around to hear him, does he make a sound?

One day. One day you'll find out. And on that day, I'll be right by your side, right there to guide you.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would just like to mention a couple of people who were instrumental in the creation of Dark Lanterns; John Gribble, and the immensely supportive Tokyo Writer's Group - also Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda, authors of the fascinating "Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide", which I used to check some of the legends mentioned in this book.

"Angel in a Cardboard Box" was previously published in Terror Tales #10, under the title of "The Battle of Corridor 4", 2012.

"The Flowers of Edo" was previously published in Midnight Street # 9, 2007.

"Fallen Through" was previously published in Dead Things # 4, 2005.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

January: An Appetite for the Unknown

February: Blood and Chocolate

March: Angel in a Cardboard Box

April: Regrettable Incidents on the Chuo Line

April: Fallen Through

May: The Madman in the Park

June: Kurokabe

July: Dig Your Own Hole

August: Days of the Dark Lantern

August: The Flowers of Edo

September: The Wings of the Crow

October: My Lost Face Looking for your Lost Love

November: The Anatomy of Dependence

December: Spellbound

December: Drowning in a Sea of Trees

Acknowledgements