I hope you brought your sunglasses. This girl’s future was as bright as a 10,000-watt light.
Go West, Knife Girl. You’ve burnt some bridges—but your blades will get you where you need to go.
She walks through the gate, then looks back. She’s sobbing. “Thanks for everything, boss,” she shouts. You’ve got it all wrong. I’m nobody’s boss now.
Golden Week is coming at the end of the month—but the airport is unnaturally quiet.
I watch her leave.
I watched her leave.
Then I was overcome by an unbearable emptiness.
This is the record of my defeat.
My failed Tokyo Exodus. It’s cold here—too cold.
Christmas Eve, 2002. Where am I? Ariake Station, on the Yurikamome Line. I walk through the gate and take the long escalator down. Mere metres in front of me: International Exhibition Station on the Rinkai Line. Time to switch trains. But which way? Tennozu Isle or Shin-Kiba? I go—where I’m taken. I don’t choose my platform. My platform chooses me. Time moves me.
I trace Tokyo’s outline underground.
A voice announces the next station: Shinonome—“dawn”.
The train passes through the station, keeps going. Towards the end of the Rinkai Line.
Here it is. Shin-Kiba. Where the Keiyo Line runs above ground and the Yurakucho Line runs underground. They’re waiting for me. The wickets call to me, but I don’t fall for their trap. I move towards sea level. Listen—I say to myself—you’ve got your limits. You will die at some point… that’s why you can’t stop now.
You can’t turn your back on the dream.
You can’t turn your back on the plan.
You’re still alive. Right? Don’t give up on getting out—not now.
Then I see it.
The area map. I’m staring right at it. I can’t believe my eyes. It’s Yume-no-shima. Translation: “Dream Island”. A man-made island that dates back to the sixties. A landfill made out of surplus soil.
An island made of trash—for keeping even more trash.
This is what dreams are made of. Yume-no-shima.
Be still, my beating fucking heart.
I walk straight for it.
The place is a park now. It has everything: baseball diamonds, soccer fields, an archery range, a gym, an indoor pool, a bike path. There’s even a tropical greenhouse—and eucalyptus everywhere. I follow Meiji Avenue into the park. I head right, over Eucalyptus Bridge. This place has all kinds of palm trees. One kind after another, almost like a family tree of palm trees. There’s a footpath near the stadium. I follow it.
Doesn’t seem to be anyone around.
I can’t see much. There are bushes and trees in my way. But I feel it. I’m close. To this place—to this Island of Dreams. I keep walking and come to a clearing…
A crater.
Or is it?
A huge bowl opens up in front of me. It looks just like a crater made by a meteorite. The coliseum—the pride of the park. But there’s no one here. Not today, not now. I see no actors onstage at the bottom of the bowl. No gladiators trying to dismember one another. No Ancient Roman orators come back to life. The absence thrills me to no end.
I feel it. It’s here.
But what is?
I don’t know. Not yet.
The bowl doesn’t have seats. Just stone steps that double as seats. I sit down—on the third or fourth step. Some pigeons on the next block take off when I crash the party. I wrap my arms around my knees. I can feel myself becoming part of the stone (hard, cold, artificial). Then I go to sleep. I could almost hear the thud. As I break through.
Through the wall dividing reality and dreams.
Thud.
I’m lying down this time. On that single bed. The bed in that “room”. I was asleep—but I’m up now. I’m holding something. Against my chest. The CD. I was sleeping with Sonny Rollins in my arms. It had to be the CD. Because it’s too important to let go.
Track eleven tells me everything I need to know. The truth. This is no hotel. This is no “room”.
On a Slow Boat to China.
That explains the vibrations—the buzz of the bed. But it isn’t the bed. It’s everything. The whole… vessel.
I’m on a slow boat.
I get out of bed. I know what I’m looking for. Where is it? I take half a step towards the desk. Brush away the heaps of dust. It kind of looks like snow. Something’s speeding up now. Getting faster. Time? I start digging. It has to be here somewhere. That slip of paper.
Found it. My ticket to ride.
The words are a blur. Can’t make them out.
Time is moving dangerously fast now.
Where am I going? Where’s this slow boat taking me? Hope… I still have hope. That I’m getting out of here. But I have no idea where I am—no idea where I’m going—and isn’t that the same as having no way out? The floor rumbles, speaks to me: You’re not going anywhere. The room has shape now. The shape of a cabin. Better hurry.
The rumbling doesn’t stop. It’s hypnotizing. This isn’t the first and you know it’s not the last. There’s nothing you can do, nowhere you can go.
Then I hear another voice. You’re wrong, she says.
Softly.
The window’s boarded up. It won’t let the outside in. The door is no good. The knob is dead. Got to get to the bottom of this. Or do you wanna be a fossil? You wanna turn to dust—trapped in this cabin? No fucking way.
I sail with my mind.
Like riding a dragon. Like in that movie, when the hero flies to the end of the world. To keep the world from ending. The scene plays back in my head.
Back to the bathroom. I step inside. Look at the mirror. It’s still cloudy. I wipe it clean with the bottom of my fist to find myself looking back at me. Is that really me? A question like the last judgement. Yes, I answer.
Yes. This is my life.
And I won’t run.
From my chronicle of failures.
In that moment, I slip through the wall—through the mirror.
Into the real “dream”.
And I don’t wake up.
CHRONICLE
—2000—
We read the human genome. Mar. 31: Mt. Usu in Hokkaido erupted—after the region had been evacuated. It was the first time volcanic activity had been predicted beforehand. The leaders of North and South Korea had their first tête-à-tête in fifty-five years. Aug. 12: an atomic submarine sank in the Barents. The entire crew—118 souls—perished. Milošević’s dictatorship fell. Naoko Takahashi won gold in Sydney. The 20th century came to an end.
STARBUCKS OVERKILL
By Kaku Nohara
Right on time. There’s a knock at the door. But you can’t come in if you don’t know the password. Millimetres behind the door, I whisper the prompt: “Chiang”.
From the other side of the door: “Kai-shek”.
Permission granted. I unlock the triple-bolt and let my comrade in. It’s Fumio Narazaki.
“Pretty little mess you got here. How about cleaning up every year or so?”
“I clean all the time—like, every other month.”
“And another thing,” Fumio Narazaki says, “do we need really need a password? It’s not like we’re samurai from the Edo period or something… Hey, where is everybody?” He looks around the room.
“Hate to break it to you…” I make a sour face. “It’s just us. The others are busy with their real jobs…”
“Seriously? It’s just us?”
“Sucks lemons, I know.”
“Shit,” Fumio Narazaki says, “my boss asked me to stay late, too. But I told him to take his overtime and stuff it. I came because you said this was the ‘case to end all cases’.”
“Oh, it is. It’s huge.”
“How huge?”
I point him towards the open notebook in the middle of the war zone that I call my room. Narazaki and I lean in—our heads almost hit—and we re-enter The Incidents of Coincidenc
e. Just like we have since we were kids.
Case one: Private Residence. Arakicho, Yotsuya. An office worker on the way home from a ramen joint broke into her ex-lover’s apartment and killed him. The victim’s wife also sustained serious injuries. The suspect filled their mouths with large quantities of dried seaweed. Her confession: “He was never going to leave her… so I had to do something to shut his lying mouth for good.”
Case two: An office complex in Ryogoku’s third district. A taxi driver deep in debt killed three loan sharks. His weapon: a couple of chanko pots.
Case three: Numabukuro. On Asahi Avenue. A boy (sixteen years old) stabbed a housewife with a thirty-centimetre hunting blade purchased on the Internet. Over ten hours later, authorities learn that the victim was the suspect’s biological mother.
“Same as ever—the world’s totally unhinged…” Fumio Narazaki sighs. “I know snowballing interest can be a real nightmare, but to end the lives of a few loan sharks with ceramic pots…”
“There’s more, though. Check this out…”
I show him photos from the three crime scenes. I’ve circled items in red.
“Something hidden?”
“What do you think?”
“…”
“See that Starbucks cup on the ground? Caramel macchiato, according to the investigation. That’s the key to this bloody tale of ramen and revenge. The cup was the killer’s—she was sipping that macchiato moments before committing murder. It’s a fact. A fact that the authorities and the media have completely neglected.”
“Interesting.”
“Unusual, right?”
“Ramen and Starbucks? Highly unusual.”
“Next scene. Ryogoku. Shards everywhere, and… here.”
Fumio Narazaki eyeballs the photograph for a few seconds.
“A tall, right?”
“Precisely. Café latte.”
“And it was the driver’s drink?”
“These sharks don’t drink coffee. It’s been corroborated.”
“All right. What about Numabukuro? Got it… Next to the pool of blood. Let me guess. Café mocha?”
“Bingo.”
“Tall again, I see.”
Fumio Narazaki snarls.
Now for the hard question. What led these three Starbucks drinkers to commit murder? What’s the connection? First hypothesis: “Some kind of complex?” Maybe, maybe not. In no time, our conversation turns away from the three crime scenes. Back to the café that links them all.
“OK, OK—what about Starbucks?” I ask. “Guilty?”
“Wait, what’s the charge?”
“Crimes against Tokyo, I guess.”
“Not guilty. Got to say, I think Bucks has done more good than evil…”
“Seriously?”
“Beats McDonald’s—they only want families, family money. At least Starbucks is open to all types. People of all creeds and classes…”
“Starbucks was sort of exclusive… at least at first…”
“But it’s different now. Men and women, all ages, go to Starbucks—and they go for the coffee. It’s not like other chains, like Doutor, where people go to smoke. I dunno. My verdict: Starbucks has raised Tokyo’s quality of life.”
“I can get behind that.”
“Of course you can. It’s almost like, like Starbucks set us free.”
“Shit… That’s it.”
“What’s what?”
“Starbucks set us free…”
“Wait, from what?”
“From life’s unwritten rules. Like, suck it up, deal with it. All that. Now you can go to Bucks… Enjoy a caramel macchiato…”
“Yeah yeah yeah. The killers smelt the coffee—and woke up. Like, ‘I should end that fucking liar’s life. Fuck it, his wife had it coming, too…’”
“I guess that’s one kind of enlightenment…”
We sit there in silence for a minute.
“Pretty sure we cracked it.”
“Cool.”
Case closed. Time to celebrate. We open a bottle of sparkling wine and pour it into the Starbucks cups I’d prepared as evidence. We put the lids on and watch the bubbles ooze through the slits. Then we raise our grandes and take a swig.
Pop, pop, pop. Goodbye, my year 2000.
BOAT EIGHT
AND KEEP YOUR HEAD UP
Hello.
I imagine this letter comes as a surprise. We’ve never met, but please read this to the end. I’ll get right to it. You once knew someone very close to me.
My sister.
My older sister. Technically, we’re half-sisters. We have different fathers. But that has nothing to do with what I want to tell you.
I’m a lot younger than my sister. I’m only nineteen. I started taking care of her as soon as I finished high school. Like a nurse. It was a long battle. Over two years. But it’s over now. In the spring, I’ll start college somewhere. The only reason I can even think about going to school is because she’s gone.
She passed away in the fall.
What she had wasn’t the sort of thing that gets better. But the hardest part for me (and the most painful part for her) wasn’t the hopelessness, not really. It was the contradiction—the fact that she had to keep getting treatment even though things were never going to turn around. I don’t know. Maybe “contradiction” isn’t the right word. Everyone knew how it was going to end. But she still spent the last two years of her life in pyjamas and slippers…
I loved my sister. That’s why I didn’t mind looking after her. She told me all sorts of stories. She let me into her life. It was almost like being in love. How can I put this? Nursing someone means being their shadow. Her routine became mine. My own life was a total blank, and it was filled with my sister’s memories. Something like that. Like I became the book of her life.
And in that book you play a major role.
I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m serious. You may not even remember her. You’ve probably forgotten her name, her face—everything. You only had a month together, and it was back in grade school.
In the mountains.
“But,” she told me, “that’s where I was saved.”
You saved her.
She told me that many times. In her own words: “He was the one who taught me to talk with the world. To speak so that others could understand. Until the summer of sixth grade, I was only sleeping—living in a dream world. Then he came along and woke me up.”
She called you her summer-school sweetheart.
After that summer she had a normal life. She got married—maybe a little earlier than most people get married these days. She was in her early twenties. A couple of years later, she found out that she was sick.
But fate’s not bad or good. A few months after she started going to the hospital, we were in the waiting room, flipping through magazines. That’s when we saw this article—“The Café Vanishes”—which was about this place you used to run. It had your name in it, and a small photo of you. (I have to say, it didn’t look like you wanted to have your photo taken.)
My sister knew it was you, right away.
I’m glad I found a way to reach you. Now that I have, I need to say something from my sister:
“Thank you.”
And, from me, too. Thank you. For everything you did to make my sister thankful. I learnt a lot from her—about courage, about love. My sister lives on, inside of me. Can I tell you the last thing she said to me?
“Stand tall—and keep your head up.”
I’m enclosing something for you—from her and me. I know it’s strange, since we’ve never even met. I just wanted you to have it. My sister really loved this CD. She was always listening to it—even at the hospital, on headphones. Her favourite was track eleven. It’s a standard number called “On a Slow Boat to China”.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but her husband was Chinese. He runs a small import business in Yokohama.
That’s probably what kept pulling her back
to that track. She was always listening to it.
Up to the end.
Goodbye. I hope this letter reaches you.
LAST BOAT
TO CHINA
I tried using a map, but no luck. The topography was unclear. If I’m reading the compass right, I’m somewhere west of the Amami Islands. But no ocean means no islands…
The East China Sea is nothing but desert. But I keep my head.
I learn what I can from the campers—where I can get my hands on potable water, cans of food, etc. Bartering is dangerous business, but sustenance is necessary. It just drives home the point—you do what you can to stay alive.
Sometimes surviving means flirting with death.
I check my water supply, drink the bare minimum. In these parts, they sell water in 1.5-litre bottles with Diet Pepsi labels on them.
The sun is my greatest enemy—I try to stay out of its way. And there are nomadic tribes all around (some are just bands of savage children), so I can’t afford to drop my guard. Sometimes I stumble upon the aftermath of their marauding deeds. I see paw prints. Some gangs must be running attack hounds.
When I regained consciousness, I spent two full days walking. No leads on any waterways. Then, this morning, I looked up at the blue blue sky—there were birds flying right over me.
*
I heard a steam whistle. A weird whistle—kind of like a tenor sax.
Then, way off in the distance, I saw the shape of a ship.
No, I tell myself, it isn’t that far. Do the math. It’s headed this way, right? Got to get a read on the sail. Got to get ahead of the ship. Got to start footing it.
The soles of my feet were burning up, but I kept going.
After three hours, I came to a thin strip of water. Just wide enough for a single cargo ship. In fact, one was coming this way.
A sailor asks from the deck: “Need a lift?”
Slow Boat Page 8
