The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl

by Tomihiko Morimi

  “You mean like Research on the History of Japanese Political Thought, or Thus Spoke Zarathustra, or Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus? Intimidating books like that?”

  “I’m impressed you can say ‘Zara-thu-stra’ without getting your tongue tangled up.” I was flabbergasted. “Why does a kid like you know a book like that?”

  “’Cause I know everything.”

  The only good thing about kids was their cuteness, and yet, he had overawed me with his exhaustive knowledge of anything to do with books. There wasn’t a book I picked up that he didn’t know. My self-respect shattered beneath the summer sky.

  Along the riding ground running north-south, each bookstore had its own camp surrounded by bookcases. They were like used-book fortresses. There were a great many stores in attendance, all in a row: Akao Shobundo, Inoue Shoten, Rinsen Shoten, Sanmitsudo Shoten, Kikuo Shoten, Ryokuudo Shoten, Hagi Shobo, Shiyou Shoin, Yuunan Shobo, etc. It was unclear which of the bookshelves scattered around belonged to which bookstore, which only compounded the sense of absolute chaos. Out back, behind the bookshelves in the shade of a tree or beneath a tent, were tables and chairs where proprietors and students who must have been part-timers licked their lips, waiting for customers.

  When I gazed at the spines of what must have been tens of thousands of books, I was tormented by a familiar delusion: Buried within the fray, there was one book that’d open up new horizons of glory in my life, a gift from the heavens. The books yelled, You haven’t even read me. You should be ashamed of yourself, you dummy!

  Read a book with some backbone and discipline your spirit! A book like me, for example.

  All you need to do is read me, and you’ll get it all: knowledge, ability, guts, soul, dignity, charisma, physical strength, health, and radiant skin. And as much food and drink as you like. What? You don’t need drinks? Well, it doesn’t matter. Just read me.

  “You don’t need to bend over backward, buddy,” the boy said, leaning against a bookshelf. “There’s no reason you have to read intimidating books. Don’t try so hard—just enjoy the chance meetings.”

  “I don’t need your consolation.”

  “There are plenty of other interesting-seeming books. Study hard while you’re young!”

  “Why should I listen to a pipsqueak like you?”

  “I’m saying it precisely because you need to hear it from me.” He smirked.

  “‘I want to try lining up all the books I’ve read in my life in order on a bookshelf.’ I read someone saying that once. Would you ever want to do that?” Mr. Higuchi asked. “I don’t read much, so it wouldn’t be very impressive even if I did line them up, but…”

  A bunch of books I’ve read came to mind. Of the more recent ones, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and then Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, or Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, Fumiko Enchi’s A Tale of False Fortunes, Shugoro Yamamoto’s Lives of Great Japanese Women. And I couldn’t forget Moto Hagio, Yumiko Oshima, and Izumi Kawahara. Going back to my elementary school era, I remembered a lot of children’s literature: Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives and The Flying Classroom, C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But if I went back even further…

  I remembered the words ra ta tam.

  Yes, ra ta tam!

  I encountered that gem of a book when I was still as small as a chickpea and didn’t have the good sense of a civilized person yet. Back then, I spent my days committing mischief such as sneakily sticking one-yen stamps on the dresser. I was naughty only when I was very young.

  Ra Ta Ta Tam: The Strange Story of a Little Engine is a story about a little white train built by a man named Matthew. When Matthew leaves on a trip, the little white train goes after him on a weird adventure. The illustrations are just fantastic and oh so beautiful; I used to stare intensely at them, thinking how I’d love to visit those places and destinations. Even just a glimpse at a corner of that mysterious scenery was enough to get my imagination going; I never got bored of gazing at it.

  As I nostalgically reminisced with Mr. Higuchi about that picture book I no longer had, I writhed in agony. “How did I lose it?!” I groaned.

  Despite being that obsessed with it, my eyes were drawn away by all the other books I’d met in my life, and I had ignored that picture book to which I owed so much. Even though I’d written my name in it! I’m a cheater! How shameless!

  On Mr. Higuchi’s suggestion, we headed north toward the picture book corner.

  “XX Shoten. XX Shoten, please come to the fair office.” A voice over a loudspeaker vibrated through the languorous air.

  When I heard the announcement over the loudspeaker, I was browsing the booksellers lined up along the western side of the riding ground. As I stood there vacantly, an old man in a suit walked up and shoved me aside. Miffed, I watched him go and saw him race into a certain shady-looking used bookstore. The store’s name wasn’t displayed anywhere. Gigantic bookcases surrounded the tent and made the area shadowy and intimidating. There weren’t any customers.

  As I tried to peek into the narrow entryway, the boy said, “I don’t like this place. You should think twice about going in there. There’s something bad in the air. It smells like danger.”

  “Then you can run along now. I’m going in.”

  “Tch. You’re a bully.”

  That’s what he said, but apparently, he couldn’t bring himself to go inside. He stood in the sun for a little while, but eventually, he whirled around and left.

  This bookstore was constructed so that two corridors of bookcases led to the back. There I found the register, where the owner in black-framed glasses was going at it with an old man with messy gray hair.

  “Please wait just a little longer,” the shopkeeper said coldly, propped up on his elbows.

  “Couldn’t you at least show it to me?” the old man pressed him.

  The shopkeeper shook his head. The old man seemed like he was about to whack the keeper with his small black planner.

  “That won’t change my mind,” said the shopkeeper, unfazed.

  I didn’t know what they were fighting about, but I spied on them, thinking how awful it was, when the old man must have sensed my presence. He shot me a glare that said, What do you want?

  “Well, fine, I’ll wait a bit longer,” he said, then whipped down the corridor like the wind and left.

  I’d thought there were only two corridors, but I noticed another one going off to the right by the register.

  Most of the shops here were merely tents surrounded by shelves, but this one used its bookcases to create a building of sorts. The passage that lead farther back from the register was made of two bookshelves with veneered boards as a roof. The glow of a naked light bulb made the book-filled corridor seem like the entrance to a mystical maze. Farther ahead, the passage bent left, and I didn’t know what was beyond that. Perhaps at the end lay a dazzling world of obscenities that could never be described in polite company.

  Thick sweat oozed out of my forehead.

  “Hey, it’s hot back there, so you might not want to go in,” the shopkeeper with the black glasses warned, looking straight ahead. It was strange he didn’t turn to look at me. “You don’t want to die of heatstroke, do you?” He started laughing, as if something was so funny he couldn’t help it.

  It was already three o’clock. The sun was partially hidden, and it’d grown even muggier.

  In the picture book corner, I found a lot of nostalgic books, but not Ra Ta Ta Tam. I kept thinking no one would sell such a beautiful book to a used bookstore, which made me feel even guiltier for losing it. I’m such a dummy! I said in my head.

  A little boy must have found it amusing that Mr. Higuchi and I were examining the spines of all the picture books so seriously, because he asked, “What are you looking for?”

  When I took a good look at him, I saw that he was the boy who’d been following my club
mate around earlier. Now that he was standing right here, I just wanted to bask in his cuteness. Since I didn’t see my clubmate anywhere, perhaps it was my misunderstanding that this boy was his brother.

  “A picture book about a train called Ra Ta Ta Tam.”

  “I’ve seen that before,” said the boy. “With Matthew Tiny, right?”

  I got excited and shouted, “Yes, that’s it! Where did you see it?”

  “We used to have a copy at my house, but not anymore. A bad guy took it. But it might be here somewhere, so I’ll help you look.”

  “Oh, how kind of you.”

  Then the boy and I searched for Ra Ta Ta Tam, but it was nowhere to be found. Just as I was getting discouraged, Mr. Higuchi said, “There’s still something we could try. We can ask a bookstore to look for us. Let’s ask the shopkeeper at Gabi Shobo.”

  “Do you think he’ll find it?”

  “I’m sure he’ll search like his life depends on it, so take heart.” Mr. Higuchi puffed out his chest. “That old rascal has a soft spot for black-haired maidens. He’s an awful guy, but at times like this, he comes in handy.”

  I was going to thank the boy for searching with us, but he’d disappeared. It’s like he’s a phantom, I thought.

  I’m not saying I followed the boy’s suggestion, but I did give up on my ulterior motive of finding the secret book that’d bring me glory. Instead, I stuck to browsing things I was familiar with.

  Walking more freely between bookshelves, I ran into him again.

  “I went to look at the picture books like a proper child. You should’ve come. The one you love was there.”

  “What?!”

  “She’s looking for a book called Ra Ta Ta Tam.”

  “No, I’m not falling for that,” I said. “What a weird name for a book. You really expect me to believe that exists?”

  “I mean, it’s true.”

  “Please just get outta here. Why are you following me?”

  “You just keep going where I go. Don’t overthink it.”

  I ignored the boy and started going through some books. First, I found the complete set of Sherlock Holmes with a tremendous number of annotations by Baring-Gould. Then Jules Verne’s Mathias Sandorf. Then I gazed at the volumes of Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, marveled at the plastic-wrapped volumes of Ruiko Kuroiwa’s translation from the Taisho period, flipped through Futaro Yamada’s Black Market Diary from the War Generation, saw Seishi Yokomizo’s In the Vault and Onibi, and thought, Yep, that cover is frightening, later finding myself surprised to see Barajujisha’s edition of On Watanabe’s Descendants of Androgynos respectfully enshrined, then stumbled on a volume of the collected works of Junichiro Tanizaki in a “three for five hundred yen” corner and stood there reading it before finding a volume of the collected works of Ryunosuke Akutagawa in the same corner, which I also read while standing, until I saw Fukutake Shoten’s Newly Collected Works of Hyakken Uchida, which was enough to stop me in my tracks, but I still didn’t open my wallet, instead gazing at Yukio Mishima’s On Authors and flipping through Osamu Dazai’s Fairy Tales.

  While reading Dazai, I remembered I had a placard at home that I bought in Tohoku when I visited Shayokan, and I remembered that on it were the words Was it so wrong to fall for you? and I remembered my shameful first romance in high school, which I never wanted to remember ever again, and I remembered the original reason I was exhausting myself wandering this used bookfair, and even I felt overwhelmed, though I usually stood up quite well against my own memories.

  I returned to the center of the fair to take a load off both my feet and my mind on a bench.

  The boy was sitting next to me. He was fooling around with a bunch of paper tags. When I noticed each had a yen amount and a shop name, I realized they must have been price tags for books.

  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing? The booksellers are going to be furious.”

  “Don’t worry about it. These will come in handy later.”

  He was carefully sorting the tags, changing their positions in his hand as if he were playing cards.

  I sighed and glanced around for the girl while he was absorbed in his naughty task.

  She wasn’t there, but some other people stood out to me.

  I first noticed a beautiful woman in Japanese dress sitting on the bench next to mine. Her clothing was conspicuous, but the strange part was how she sat perfectly straight despite holding a parasol, absorbed in the collected works of Sakunosuke Oda. Opinions would split on whether she fit the bookfair atmosphere.

  Sitting next to her was an old man, skinny as a crane, with long, messy gray hair. He was completely focused on the black planner he held right up to his nose. He radiated such determination, it wouldn’t surprise me if he started chomping on the planner at any moment, and I figured he had to be one of the notorious used-book demons.

  Next to the bench stood a short student. He wore angular black-framed glasses and had an angular face, and there was an angular Duralumin trunk at his feet. It would seem his creed was to not cut corners. And strangely, he was absorbed in a train schedule.

  I let my imagination wander.

  A peaceful, relaxed summer bookfair. But behind the scenes, even now, a gang of book thieves is attempting to set their plot in motion. The woman with perfect posture reading the collected works of Sakunosuke Oda is the group’s leader; the old man in charge of the encrypted black planner, busy confirming their scheme one last time, is the brains of the organization; and the angular fellow’s Duralumin trunk contains his seven tools, and he’s the technician who takes on all the crafty jobs, like lock breaking and counterfeiting antique books. All for one, and one for all.

  And they have just one mission…

  …To liberate books from the hands of villainous collectors.

  The owner of Gabi Shobo responded to Mr. Higuchi’s declaration with an “I seeee” and shrieked with laughter.

  The owner must have been over sixty years old. His head was shiny with almost no hair. He had a white towel over his shoulder that he frequently wiped his face with. But no matter how much he wiped, his teakettle head kept pouring out new sweat; it was a very strange sight indeed.

  Suddenly, the owner turned to me. Flustered, I averted my eyes and stopped admiring his head.

  “You can’t take anything this sly nurarihyon says at face value,” he said, referencing the old Japanese spirit who sneakily takes up residence in people’s homes. “I’ve never heard of a God of Used Bookfairs before.”

  “Don’t collectors make an offering of used books at the beginning of the month and hold a banquet?” I asked.

  “It’d be interesting if it were true.” He winced. “Yo, Higuchi. You better knock it off. Stop messing with this poor girl.”

  “I wasn’t teasing her. I swear to god it’s true.”

  “All that comes out of your mouth are jokes.”

  We were at the northernmost part of the riding ground at the Gabi Shobo base.

  A little while ago, the owner was working the register with his wife, surrounded by their bookshelves, but when Mr. Higuchi and I showed up, he left the rest to a young part-timer and came out. He led us behind the store into a grove of trees. There was incense smoldering in a can to ward off mosquitoes, and it was shrouding the clearing with smoke. A little table and chairs had been set out. It was a perfect forest hideaway for afternoon tea.

  I requested a search for the picture book Ra Ta Ta Tam, and the owner agreed. Then, as the three of us chatted over tea, Mr. Higuchi brought up the God of Used Bookfairs, which brings us back to the earlier conversation.

  The owner laughed and gulped down the tea he’d poured out of his thermos. “Collectors won’t be happy to have books liberated from them. For us, though, it’s great, because we can come across them again. But if that god came to today’s sale, it’d be a mess.”

  “If I were a god, I’d think it’s about time to visit some divine punishment on Rihaku.”

  “Don�
�t kid around.” The bookseller glared at Mr. Higuchi.

  According to his kind explanation, a private sale was to take place in one corner of the fair. It was being held by a man named Rihaku, who is someone I had drinks with once. He seemed to just be a nice old man, but he’s extremely rich, and I heard rumors he’s a heinous loan shark, so inhuman that he sheds neither blood nor tears. He was apparently selling books that he’d taken as collateral for loans and later added to his collection. And this sale wasn’t going to be an exchange of money but a bloody struggle for the participants’ very lives. In this fierce fight, only the most unwavering will be able to acquire the book of their dreams. In return, Mr. Rihaku would guarantee the quality of the items, so the goods would be quite something.

  The shop owner lowered his voice. “I honestly don’t much care for classics, but I heard some pretty amazing titles will pop up. On the modern side of things, he has the journal Ryusei Kishida lost when he was living in Okazaki. I wouldn’t believe it if Rihaku hadn’t said it himself.”

  “So you want me to get you that journal.”

  “Thanks. I’m sure if anyone can win, you can.”

  No used booksellers were allowed to participate in the sale. That was how Mr. Higuchi got his secret mission from the owner of Gabi Shobo. He was all set to participate. This was his other way of cleaning up today.

  “What sorts of things will they do at this secret sale?”

  The bookseller relaxed one of his cheeks into a crooked smile. The sky had grown even more overcast, darkening to the point where it almost felt as if the sun were going down. There was something menacing about his smile as he sat in the shadows of a tree.

  “Nobody knows what will happen before it happens. Only the ones who pass Mr. Rihaku’s trials receive the right to choose a book. But it’s no cakewalk! Many challengers lose their pride and everything else in the face of the unimaginable tribulation and are brought to their knees. Mr. Rihaku eats that up and washes it down with a drink…”