The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl

by Tomihiko Morimi

  No sooner had the leaves in the trees begun to rustle than the riding ground was abruptly enveloped in clouds of white.

  “Whoa, there it is!” The bookseller jumped up and ran to protect his wares.

  Luckily, we were under a big camphor tree, so we didn’t get rained on. Mr. Higuchi and I leisurely continued our tea party.

  He lit a cigarette.

  The mugginess that had filled up the area until a little while ago thinned out, and the sweet, somehow nostalgic smell of rain hung in the air. I recalled how I used to read picture books on rainy days at home on the garden porch.

  I stood motionless under a bookstore tent, sniffing the sweet smell of the rain. Standing next to me was the same boy from before. The downpour was so sudden that it stirred a flurry of frantic activity at first, but now the commotion had died down. The sky in the west was light, so I figured the weather would clear up before long.

  As I surveyed the area from beneath the tent, I saw many people picking out books to buy, unbothered by the rain. Especially surprising were the three whom I’d deemed a gang of book thieves on a whim. Though everyone had fled from the rain, leaving the middle area with the benches empty, those three were the exception, remaining in the same positions and opening umbrellas to tough it out.

  “Hey.” The boy suddenly called to me in a small voice, raising his slender arm to wave me over as if he were playing with an invisible yo-yo. “My father told me that if you picked up one book, the whole fair would float like a castle in the air. All the books are connected.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Even the books you were looking at before. Should I connect them?”

  “Try it.”

  “First, you found the complete set of Sherlock Holmes. The author Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a novel, rightly categorized as SF, called The Lost World, which was influenced by the French author Jules Verne’s work. Verne wrote Mathias Sandorf because he respected Dumas. And the one who adapted Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo was Ruiko Kuroiwa, who managed the newspaper Yorozu Choho. He appears as a character in The Meiji Tower of Babel. The author of that novel, Futaro Yamada, wrote in his Black Market Diary from the War Generation this one line disparaging Onibi as ‘rubbish.’ The author of that is Seishi Yokomizo. In Yokomizo’s younger days, he was editor-in-chief of a magazine called Shinseinen. He asked the author of Descendants of Androgynos, On Watanabe, to team up with him to edit it. Watanabe died on a business trip when the car he was riding in crashed into a train. In his memory, the one who wrote a piece called ‘Spring Chills’ was Junichiro Tanizaki. The one who criticized Tanizaki in a journal and debated literature with him was Ryunosuke Akutagawa, but several months after that, Akutagawa killed himself. Hyakken Uchida wrote the short story ‘Bowler Hat’ based on what Akutagawa was like around the time of the suicide. Yukio Mishima praised Hyakken Uchida’s prose. The one Mishima met when he was twenty-two years old and said ‘I hate you’ to was Osamu Dazai. A year before Dazai committed suicide, he wrote a memorial for someone and said, ‘You did good.’ That man, who died of tuberculosis, was Sakunosuke Oda. There’s someone reading a volume from his collected works over there.”

  The boy pointed over to the benches where the woman in Japanese dress was indeed reading the collected works of Sakunosuke Oda under her parasol.

  “Are you by any chance a monster?” I was astounded.

  “I know everything,” said the boy. “My father used to bring me here. And he taught me that books are connected. When I’m here, I can feel that the books are all equal and associating freely. They connect to create a sea, which is itself one big book. That’s why when my dad died, he wanted to release all his books back into this ocean.”

  “Your old man’s gone?”

  “Yep. That’s why I came here today. I’m on a mission to return my dad’s books to the sea.” He pointed up at the sky, which was beginning to clear up. “I will liberate books from the hands of wicked collectors. I am the God of Used Bookfairs!”

  I waited for the rain to lighten up before walking back into the bookfair. I thought about how the girl was probably taking cover from the rain somewhere around here. It made her all the more fascinating.

  “Going off into fantasyland on your own like that isn’t good for your mind or body,” the boy murmured as he peeled the tags off books.

  “Hey, you’re causing mischief again!”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “I can’t leave you alone if this is what you’re up to, stupid.”

  As we were fighting like that, the bearded owner of the shop approached us. He scowled scarily when he saw the boy’s fist full of tags.

  “What the—? What do you think you’re doing?”

  I pretended I didn’t know the kid, and the boy clammed up.

  “Give me all that stuff in your hand.”

  When the shopkeeper closed in on him, the boy suddenly started wailing.

  “This guy, he said if I didn’t do this, then he’d do the bad thing to me! I’m scared of the bad thing!”

  Up until a moment ago, he’d been talking like a mature adult and making fun of me, but he was suddenly screaming in an unthinkably childish tone as he started to cry. I was thinking what a nasty little twerp he was when the shopkeeper turned his sword on me.

  “What’s going on? What did you do to him?”

  “Huh? I didn’t do anything.”

  “But he says you told him to do this.” He grabbed my arm. “I’ll call the police if I need to!”

  “I have no idea—gimme a break.”

  “You’re not getting out of this so easily.”

  It turned into a wrangle.

  I’m an exceedingly honest person—honesty oozes from my pores like broth—but the shopkeeper treated me like evil incarnate pulling the strings behind this poor little boy’s antics. It must’ve been due to the fantasy that kids are pure and beautiful kids are even purer. It’s always ignored that university students are the purest creatures in the whole wide world, as they try to petrifyingly navigate their grimy youth.

  Eventually, a plump man came forward out of the crowd that had gathered to watch the fuss. “This fellow is an acquaintance of mine…,” he said. It was the owner of Chitoseya.

  “Oh, hello.” The bookseller bobbed his head.

  “He wouldn’t do something like that. This kid is just a brat. I saw him causing trouble doing the same thing at another shop.”

  I looked around for the boy, but he’d taken advantage of the uproar to skedaddle.

  The one who saved me from that tough spot ran a traditional Kyoto cuisine restaurant in Ponto-cho. Once, when I had been wandering between Kiyamachi and Ponto-cho, I had occasion to go there—apparently, he remembered me.

  “I don’t mean to imply you owe me a reward, but I do have a favor to ask,” he said. “I have a good job for you. There must be some reason we met here.”

  The owner of Chitoseya explained as we walked.

  Somewhere at the fair today, Rihaku was holding a book sale. A phantom book of smut written and illustrated by Katsushika Hokusai would be there. The owner was a representative of the Bedroom Investigation Commission, an organization interested in the preservation of sexy cultural heritage, so he just had to get his hands on it. But rumor had it that participating entailed a harsh trial. No one knew what kind of trial it would be, so he was worried about being the only one competing…

  “That’s why I want you to participate, too. We’ll hedge our bets.”

  “Ah, I can’t, really. I have stuff to do, too.”

  “Well, if you ask me, I just saved your butt, so you should be willing to return the favor,” he said. “And besides, I won’t do you wrong. If we get the Hokusai book, you’ll get a proper thank-you. How does a hundred thousand yen sound?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  I took the job.

  The owner of Chitoseya led the way through the bookfair, but even as we walked along, I kept my eyes peeled fo
r the girl.

  The way things were going, I’d have to give up for the day. But once I snatched up a hundred thousand yen, they’d be my war chest, and my next move could be anything of my choosing.

  We eventually reached a bench in the middle of the riding ground. Those three eccentric strangers—the woman in Japanese dress reading Sakunosuke Oda, the old man with the gray hair, and the student with the angular face and the Duralumin trunk—were there. The woman didn’t look up from her book, but the old man and the student scowled at us.

  After we entered that strange atmosphere and waited a few minutes, the creepy bookseller with the black glasses sauntered over and grinned. “Is this everyone?”

  Just then a man of unclear age wearing a dingy yukata garment raced over, shouting, “Heyyy!” in a dopey voice. It was the weirdo Higuchi, who claimed to be a tengu that one night we met in Kiyamachi.

  I felt dizzy.

  It seemed as if this were going to be a party of monsters.

  The monsters (everyone except me) followed the bookseller with the black glasses through the fair. Now that the shower had ended, orangey summer sunshine illuminated everything in a dazzling light. In that glow, everything crowding around me appeared three-dimensional once more.

  And what chaos!

  Paperbacks and manga burying the shelves, odd volumes of collected works tossed into hundred-yen corners, valuable tomes elegantly displayed, fiction, poems, dictionaries, science books, reprints, chronicles, oversized art books and exhibition catalogs, stacks of old magazines, piles of B-movie tapes, classics—some in Chinese—whose titles I couldn’t read, tons of foreign books that’d crossed oceans to arrive in Kyoto, volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica and the World Encyclopedia that were so imposing, no one paid them any attention, colored copperplate prints in a box for ten yen a pop; brightly hued ukiyo-e hanging from tent poles, old maps of places I didn’t recognize, picture books children threw away, early Showa-period postcards from Kyoto, shady pamphlets, train schedules, self-published manuscripts, and even some books that could barely be called books… Any memory printed on paper could become a used book.

  Our party entered that creepy, deserted bookstore.

  It was gloomy and silent. We traveled down one of the corridors and were about to head into the side passage by the register when the woman in Japanese dress suddenly stopped.

  “My apologies, I’ve suddenly lost confidence.”

  “Oh, is that so?” said the bookseller in black glasses. “Well, anyone who feels the same should probably turn back now.”

  “It’s a bit awkward to ask a favor as I leave, but please give this to Mr. Rihaku.”

  She held out a book bound in the old Japanese style. The title was something-something and the characters for rare and jewel. The man with the black glasses nodded and took it.

  With only a sideways glance at the Sakunosuke Oda lady who dropped out so quickly, the rest of us carried on without a word. The book-lined corridor lit by naked light bulbs turned left and stretched out like an eel’s bed. The sounds of the fair were far behind us now. All we had was air chokingly thick with the smell of old books lining the walls and getting older and older as we walked. Finally, they were just bundles of discolored paper. Every so often, there was a window the size of a rice cracker in the ceiling. We could see the sun filtering through the trees into the hole. Before we knew it, the floor had changed from dirt to Western-style cobblestones.

  When that passage ended, we came upon a staircase that continued up a couple of stories. At the top was a thick iron door. A single lamp stood next to it, making it seem like some lonely street corner. A wooden label hung by the door written in big, bold cursive characters that read RIHAKU.

  The bookseller rang the bell.

  The moment he opened the door, a rush of air blew out with a roar and a rainbow-colored streamer-like something slipped past us and flew down the corridor of books. I had a bad feeling that gave me a chill. Beyond the door, the wind was so hot, it might have gushed forth from the cauldron of Hell.

  Everyone who entered the venue for the sale groaned as if they’d been hit in the back of the head with a blunt object.

  It was a long thin room about the size of a train car. Thick red carpet covered the floor, and in the back, a big grandfather clock stood swinging its pendulum. The phonograph emitting incomprehensible mantras created an uncanny atmosphere.

  Along the walls were multicolored braziers, candles as thick as the spiked clubs of demons, and lamps casting weak light. Grimacing red demon masks hung in a row on the wall, and a depiction of people engulfed in the flames of Hell loomed intimidatingly over us. Hanging from the ceiling was not a regular chandelier but a heated table, or a kotasu, illuminating all these curios that turned up the heat—physically and culturally. In the center of the banquet hall was another kotatsu, and on top of it, a hot pot split into two segments, brimming and bubbling with strange red and white soups. Thick, red floor pillows were arranged around the heated table, and awaiting us atop them were fluffy, warm-looking cotton-padded coats and a hot-water bottle for each participant.

  A cane chair had been placed in front of the clock, and Rihaku was sitting there relaxing in a traditional yukata garment.

  Grinning, he exposed his pasty, hairy legs and kicked noisily in a tub of water at his feet.

  “Welcome, my guests, welcome,” he said, flapping a fan toward his face.

  The bookseller with the black glasses gave the Sakunosuke Oda lady’s book to him, whispered something in his ear, and then left, mumbling, “Ugh, it’s so hot.” Rihaku put the book on a small black lacquer bookcase at his side. It was already full of many other books of all sizes. He patted the case.

  “These are things I received from a man in the distilling industry. It’s a fairly eclectic collection, but is an interesting lineup nonetheless. Now, sit under the kotatsu and warm up. The last one of you remaining can choose a book to take home. As a special exception, I’ll allow multivolume works to count as one book.”

  Rihaku’s face looked sinister in the candlelight. I was sure I saw him lick his lips.

  “Now then, gentlemen, have you already decided what you’re aiming for?”

  Five people announced their participation in this intense, life-and-death contest.

  The first was the mysterious yukata man, Higuchi, going for a journal written by Ryusei Kishida himself. The second was the student with the Duralumin trunk, a member of the Keifuku Electric Railroad Research Society, who was after a year’s worth of the timetable Guide to Trips by Train and Steamship (published in Tokyo by Kouinshinshisha). The third was an elderly scholar aiming for a manuscript of the Kokin Wakashu written by some poet from the Heian period called Fujiwara something-or-other. The fourth was the owner of Chitoseya, whose goal as a member of the Bedroom Investigation Commission was a book of smut written and illustrated by Katsushika Hokusai. And the fifth was the Chitoseya owner’s assistant, me.

  We donned our padded red coats and sat around the kotatsu.

  Before our eyes, in an old iron pot split with an S-shaped divider, red and white soups simmered. The smell wafting over nearly made my head explode. Unidentifiable fungi and vegetables steeped as the pot bubbled furiously like Hell’s cauldron.

  “This is what you call fire hot pot,” declared Rihaku, beaming at us from his chair. “Dip it in the dish of sesame oil at your places and eat up. It’s tasty!”

  Higuchi lifted a kettle as big as a watermelon and poured piping hot barley tea into everyone’s cups. All five of us downed it in one gulp.

  Following Rihaku’s orders, we each plucked a scrap of mystery meat from the red soup and crammed it into our mouths. The moment I began to chew, the world flashed purple and rippled.

  “Ugghyagh!” everyone screamed, unable to bear it. “What is this?!”

  The flavor spreading across our tongues could no longer be called a flavor—it was more like a blow from a roughly hewn club. It was so hot that it seemed as if e
very last bit of spiciness within a mile radius of Shimogamo Shrine had been gathered and boiled in this pot. In our agony, we reached for the hot barley tea, which only poured fuel on the flames. Rihaku smiled as he watched us writhe.

  It was decided that we’d take turns eating. When I let my guard down and thought maybe the white soup would rest my tongue, it was about as hot as the red one. At the peak of spiciness, ordinary people like ourselves couldn’t register the subtle difference between the two, so there was no reason to have the red and white soups separated from each other, apart from the cultural meaning of seeming “somewhat celebratory.”

  I was shedding globs of sweat in no time.

  At this rate, our lives will be in danger. Hurry up and surrender, I thought.

  I had zero intention of helping out the owner of Chitoseya in the first place. It goes without saying that my tiny reserve of patience was being tested from the moment we had to wear coats under the heated table. If Higuchi hadn’t mentioned a certain picture book, I would have been the first to wave the white flag.

  As we sat panting around the hot pot, Rihaku showed us the books from his collection one by one. When he got to the book each of the others was thinking of, it psyched them up. When the Hokusai-whatever came up, the owner of Chitoseya eyed me repeatedly. I had my hands full enduring the fire hot pot, so the Hokusai could stew in it for all I cared.

  There were all sorts of different books, some of them picture books.

  Eventually, Rihaku held up a picture book that made Higuchi go, “Oh?” He asked me, “Isn’t that the book that girl wanted?” as he took it from Rihaku and flipped through it.

  “Hey, Higuchi, don’t let any of your sweat fall on it!” he warned.

  “Look, there’s a name written here.”

  When I leaned over to take a look, it was the black-haired maiden’s name written in a terribly childish script.

  I’d like you to imagine how surprised I was to see that.