Every year around Nozomi’s birthday there were meteor showers called the Perseids, or the Tears of St Lawrence to Catholics. She didn’t know who he was or why he cried, and she didn’t care all that much. She just wanted to get out of Tokyo, climb the nearest mountain and watch St Lawrence weep. Maybe she’d drink a beer and try not to get too big-headed that the universe was celebrating her existence once again.
Sometimes, especially on her birthday, Nozomi had gloomy thoughts about death. In the newspaper recently she’d read about a company offering a space burial service, their client’s ashes blasted up into orbit. She imagined herself buried across the galaxy, circling the Earth for all time but for ever outside it. With no stones or relics left behind, it was nicer to imagine simply leaving the Earth, as if she had never been there.
But Nozomi wasn’t feeling blue tonight. Even though she was working she was in a decidedly good mood – the kind that can only be brought on by clarity. She stopped sweeping now and blew her fringe out of her face.
It was a warm, sticky night. The red paper lanterns bobbed in the soft, summer eddies. Neon signs fizzed. Three homeless men in the empty lot at the end of the street were debating the advantages and disadvantages of the seventies as a decade. It sounded like the latter was winning out, as their conversation took in the Japanese Red Army, the Lod Airport massacre and the hijacking of Flight 351. Nozomi didn’t think the calendar itself could be blamed for any of those.
Her father’s place was just a shabby little watering hole in the brick arches beneath the train tracks near Yūrakuchō Station, but it was always busy. The beer was cheap, the snacks were passable, and her father always had a funny line for regulars and new faces alike. Good with jokes, bad with life – that’s what Nozomi said to him. Her father, no matter what the customer was saying, would make it seem like they were always in the right.
That’s the secret, Nozomi-chan. They might be morons everywhere else, but not here. Here they can do no wrong. That’s why they come back.
In the summers they laid out plastic tables and overturned beer crates. The punters would cram in to complain about their wives or husbands before finally resigning themselves to the train home. Treachery, bad blood, deep love – growing up, Nozomi had heard it all. She had never been in love herself but it occurred to her that there were as many different types of it as there were routes home from Yūrakuchō.
Yūrakuchō was wedged in between Ginza and Hibiya Park. Less flashy than its neighbours, it still offered a window into the old way. This little district contained countless izakaya and the prices ensured that salarymen would always find their way to Yūrakuchō, every night, like the migration of little black birds seeking winter sun.
Her father was usually the last to close up. That meant Nozomi was usually the last person out on the street, sweeping up cigarette butts. She’d seen a few things in her time holding that broom.
The Yamanote Line train passed by overhead now, the little bars beneath its girders trembling, as they always did. The electric lights from the train lit up a puddle by her feet, her reflection suddenly revealed to her. She thought of what her mother used to say before she left: How can you look so miserable, Nozomi? You’re just a child.
But she wasn’t a child anymore. Today she was twenty-six: Christmas-cake age – nobody wanted one after the 25th. Well, that was fine by her. In truth, there was very little that bothered Nozomi. Very little except the idea of living out the life she was expected to live.
There was no way she was going to take over the bar for a start. Nozomi liked people but had no interest in the business and certainly no interest in inheriting its debt. It wasn’t that she hated the bar, and she loved her father, though he could be stern and forgetful. She simply yearned for more. Or, perhaps ‘more’ wasn’t the right word. Just something else.
On the TV lately there had been talk of traditional values and time-honoured characteristics but she could feel a change in the air the way you could tell rain was coming. That very morning she had heard on the radio that in just fifteen years the percentage of people who worked in agriculture in Japan had decreased from 40 per cent to 15 per cent. For better or worse, she thought, Japan is doing new things.
And Nozomi had decided to do something new with her life too. Which was why, even sweeping up cigarette butts at 2 a.m., she was in such a good mood. She had decided to become a writer of horror fiction.
Nozomi had always loved authors like Edogawa Ranpo and Yumeno Kyūsaku. Why couldn’t she do what they did? People often asked her if she was planning to go into modelling or perhaps air-hostessing. Yet Nozomi couldn’t imagine anything more boring. Being posed and positioned and pawed at by some creep, or serving box meals in a metal tube, day in, day out. No, she had decided she would be a slave only to inspiration.
And as she sat at her little desk after work each night inspiration is what flowed through her – same as the dark freight trains whooshing past her bedroom window, her thoughts full of precious cargo, hurtling towards their destination.
Nozomi loved the sounds of those tracks. To her, the trains were like pets, making the apartment shake all day and all night, like nervous little embraces. The noise didn’t bother her. Not usually. Though sometimes it reminded her of life passing by, just out of reach. Vendettas, job interviews, perversions, presents, poetry – all of it flowing under her window like a river of possibilities, and none of them belonging to her.
Nozomi put away the broom now, locked up and switched off the lights. She went upstairs and carried out her nightly ablutions. Then, although exhausted, she sat at her desk, took out her writing book and flipped to the right page.
A train thundered past, the rails screeching goodbye in the distance. Downstairs, the television was blaring. By the music, Nozomi could tell it was the cologne advert with Charles Bronson in it. At first he appeared in a desert, riding a horse. Then, magically, he was transported to a boardroom overlooking the Tokyo skyscraper-skyline – as if he worked there. Now, wearing a jacket and tie, he slapped the cologne on and growled: ‘Mmmmm, Mandom.’
After that, it was a rerun of her father’s favourite show, Robot Detective K. Even for him, Nozomi thought it was ridiculous – a robot with eyes that changed colour according to its mood and which would often make deep, philosophical statements. Though its clothes were a little eccentric (yellow Gatsby cap, red blazer and white slacks), it fought crime as valiantly as any of the detectives in Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department. The thing her father liked best about the show was K’s car, a red Nissan Fairlady Z (which could fly). He usually fell asleep around the final act of the show, remote control in hand, mouth open, legs under the kotatsu. Often, she would have to tell him how the show had ended in the morning, or at least how she thought it had ended.
The TV was the only thing that really brought them together these days. Sometimes, if he had been drinking, her father would point out women onscreen that looked like her mother. This was strange to Nozomi because it wasn’t as if she didn’t have her own memories. Even so, he would jut his chin at some model or news anchor and say, ‘Just like your mother.’ Nozomi’s mother had left when she was just a little girl and nobody had heard from her since. Some months were easier than others, but Nozomi and her father got along fine.
Stretching, she looked down at her writing book. Nozomi had been playing around with her novella, The Mannequins, for the last month or so. Although she knew that there was a tendency for people to overestimate the quality of their own writing, she truly believed it had potential.
The inspiration for it had come from a strange place. Last spring there had been a terrible fire in a department store, one of the worst in Japan’s history: over one hundred people had died. Inside the building there were various other businesses, including a haunted house and a cabaret. It was thought that a cigarette butt had caused the blaze and within ten minutes of the fire starting thick black smoke was seen pouring out of the entire third and fourth floors – the dresses in the ladies’ clothing departments helping it spread. It had taken firefighters three days to put it out. There had been no survivors. Many had died inside the cabaret; its fire escape had been locked. Those who had not burned to death, died from smoke inhalation or been trampled in the panic, had jumped out of the windows.
Nozomi had followed all the news coverage closely and had bought three or four different newspapers each morning. She didn’t know what it was that fascinated her so much, but something about the fire had gripped her.
Then she came across the picture. Inside the department store, in a charred corner, stood four mannequins, their kimonos singed by the heat, their fingers melted and drooping down to their waists. Their wigs had been scorched away, leaving only burnt scalps, and their heads were inclined, as if just noticing the photographer. Smiling demurely, their blackened, lidless eyes stared down the lens. The image took Nozomi’s breath away.
What if they had caused the fire somehow? Scolding herself for such a ridiculous thought, she turned the page and tried to read what Osaka’s mayor had to say about the tragedy. But she quickly flipped back to the image.
What if they had cursed that place?
Nozomi imagined the mannequins silently whispering incantations, their lips unmoving, their eyes unblinking as the fire-escape bolt fell into place. As the smoke started to creep into the cabaret, she imagined background music playing through the empty, shining halls of the building. She imagined the muffled screams and desperate thudding at the cabaret doors.
Nozomi returned her gaze to the mannequins. Looking over her shoulder, she tore out the image with quick, precise rips then stuck it on the first page of a new notebook. She looked at them. They looked back at her. What Nozomi Iwata could not have known was that this tiny little whim would change her life.