A pretentious, half-finished journal of solitary living, written in a juvenile style. I may never get the hang of writing fiction. Maybe something that language needs is simply missing from me. Honestly, I don’t think I can write anything well.

Step One: Prepare Your Roast Duck

001

“One sliced roast duck set, and a Coke.”

The chandelier lit up the fine textured relief on the dim ceiling, and the customer’s order drifted through the hazy glow. Nine o’clock at night, past the dinner rush, the restaurant had gradually fallen quiet, leaving behind only a scattering of pop music and the scraping of kitchen utensils.

In moments like these, slightly off from the ordinary, Hirosue Kiyoharu would typically narrow his slanted eyes at the scene before him and let his mechanical mind become tangled in compulsive imaginings. These imaginings were usually the dark thoughts he kept ordinarily suppressed, hidden beneath a veneer of politeness, like a colony of reptiles lurking beneath a suit. His gaze settled on the solitary customer. He looked the man over: somewhere in his forties, the wrinkles on his face like the roots of an old tree, hair greasy enough that he probably hadn’t washed it in nearly a week, wearing the most ordinary black office suit, his expression worn. His voice was slightly hoarse, the pitch higher than his appearance suggested. The moment he received the Asahi beer, the man’s face took on a look of modest satisfaction amid great resignation, which reminded Hirosue of Mishima Yukio’s severed head, that relic-like thing.

Why would someone come to a roast duck restaurant alone? When this question surfaced, Hirosue felt his mental wasteland begin to heave and stir, as if something were about to break through the earth. He looked more closely: the man’s practiced way of tilting back the beer spoke of long familiarity, likely from frequent business dinners. Unless he’d simply come to satisfy a craving, something must have disrupted his life, sending him here to drink alone in the middle of the night. Had his wife, exhausted by the irritability his long hours brought on, driven him from the house? Had some act of betrayal against his company been discovered, making him the sudden target of his colleagues’ contempt? Or perhaps he’d just arrived in this city with no friends or family, everything around him still foreign. He drained the beer in under a minute, swirled his thick glass, and stared in silence at the passing traffic outside. The man’s eyes trembled, flickering with the dim light of some complicated inner state, reflected against the illuminated signs beyond the window. The night seemed to freeze in the instant he turned his head. From Hirosue’s vantage point, the scene arranged itself into something almost gorgeous, a kind of harmony, like Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.

A few seconds passed. The man turned back and, with rekindled interest, fixed his eyes on the roast duck hanging beside Hirosue.

For reasons Hirosue couldn’t explain, this groundless excitement disgusted him. The moment the man’s gaze landed on the roast duck, the strangeness Hirosue had sensed in him seemed to lose form, melting down into black char, becoming a perfectly vulgar heap of refuse. This man was exactly like every regular customer, full of enthusiasm for the roast duck, as if he’d never encountered such a dish before. The most elementary and coarse kind of interest, without question. To Hirosue, the man’s adult persona had instantly collapsed, his psychology reverting to that of a noisy, childish boy. Hirosue kept imagining that the man’s lips were twitching, as though at any moment he might strike up a conversation about this creation, unprecedented to him, utterly unremarkable to Hirosue. The small light in the man’s eyes had been extinguished, replaced only by the rough, hardened color of the roast duck’s skin.

It was as if a basin of cold water had been thrown over him. Hirosue’s curiosity in the man evaporated entirely. He leaned against the tile wall by the entrance and fixed a needle-sharp gaze on the third roast duck from the left on the rack. That look was nothing like the man’s.

002

From the moment Hirosue stepped into the restaurant that morning, he’d felt a vague chill.

As he changed into his work clothes, despite being alone, he had the sense of being watched by some shadowy gaze. He looked around hastily, but beyond the usual brown walls and the slightly rusted iron cabinet doors, he could see nothing but the few roast ducks hanging at the entrance, swaying and rotating faintly in the cool daylight. Fear, something he hadn’t felt in a long time, crept up his skin. He kept shifting his eyes, moving cautiously toward the entrance. At first he shuffled numbly, but after a few steps, as though summoned by something mysterious, his stride quickened and grew more decisive. At the entrance, he found himself looking at the roast ducks against the sky, the two images overlapping.

His focus kept shifting. Gradually, he thought he could see a hazy but familiar face forming in that vast sky. Then, without warning, a dizziness like hypoglycemia flooded his vision with explosive darkness and color.

For five seconds, Hirosue watched that face ignite the ashen daylight, bathing the sky in rolling flames. On the ground below, writhing silhouettes lined up in a column like a marching army, and he couldn’t make out what any of them were. The ground stretched open, the buildings softened and melted backward into jagged mountains of bone. The buzzing in his ears grew louder; between the tinkling, swaying sounds and the oncoming footsteps, Hirosue thought he could hear someone muttering nearby. He looked down and saw four warty toads, one in a hood, one feathered, the other two covered in mucus. He stumbled back in fright, but felt himself collide with something. He turned to find a black goat, pupils enormously dilated, pressing its spiral horns into his waist. He quickly stepped aside and saw several naked old women circling the goat, and a woman, bare-chested, wearing a half-transparent green cloth below the waist, bent over stroking the goat’s large, erect, scale-covered phallus. The goat grunted. The woman released her hand; steam spiraled from her palm. She blew on it, and the steam transformed into candles flickering with blue light, floating like eerie ghost-fire. Someone handed her a cup of wine, which she drank in one swallow, then she untied the knot in her green cloth. Hirosue turned away and saw an infant lying motionless in a nearby wreath of oak leaves, its face as though eaten away, its mouth seemingly stuffed with moths. The crowd’s voices and footsteps grew louder; Hirosue could even hear heavy panting and moaning. He smelled the greasy rankness of cheese and the nauseating heat of sesame oil. Wine flowed like a river across the ground. The witches nearby dropped their candles, mounted their brooms, and began circling, leaping, screaming, dancing wildly. Lava seemed to erupt somewhere, and a tremendous tremor came from the distance. A hail of gravel fell from the sky, landing in the heart of this imagined earth, splitting the surface open, then all at once everything vanished, leaving only pale smoke, cracked ground, the smell of wine, cheese, sesame oil, and the pungent rot of chestnut flowers and heather. At that moment, the half-closed eyes of Hirosue reflected a bewitching, flickering light, as though he had been possessed by some ancient heretical text.

His legs buckled. Hirosue grabbed the counter, bowed his head, closed his eyes, forcing himself back to consciousness. What on earth had he just seen? Had work fatigue put him into some kind of waking dream? He found himself genuinely worried that all of it might have been real, that everyone else had disappeared, that he was the last person left in the world. The restaurant had just opened and no customers had come yet, so Hirosue walked out from behind the counter. He went to the manager’s office, saw the manager still on the phone, smiling, and breathed a quiet sigh of relief. He lingered near the office for over a minute, inhaling a few extra breaths of modern air. After a while the manager gave him a look, and Hirosue realized a customer was already hovering at the entrance. He quickly gathered himself, straightened his appearance, and went to greet the first customer of the day. Life seemed to return to its usual track. His hands grew busy again. He surrendered his body, his very existence, to the making and distribution of roast duck. Some immense blazing sky fell silent once more, and in the white light against the darkness, his mind gradually went numb.

“Number 811, one crispy roast duck.”

With every announcement, Hirosue’s mood sank a notch.

“Napkins are in the drawer under every table. Toothpicks too.”

The surging noise gradually swallowed Hirosue’s weakening voice.

003

“Hm?”

Hirosue stopped, his hand on the hook where the third roast duck from the left was hanging. This duck had been hung by the manager himself first thing that morning. In the careless glance he’d given it earlier, he hadn’t noticed anything unusual. But the moment he actually touched the hook, something like the duck’s desire seemed to pass through that cold steel into his palm, a violent, trembling grip. The sticky texture confused him. He brought his face close and examined the duck for a few seconds, saw nothing visibly wrong, only that it had more scorched spots than the others, more signs of imperfect roasting. He figured the manager must have been careless, so he hung it back and took down another duck from the right instead.

By the time the crowd finally thinned, Hirosue was already distracted. He coveted the soft sofa in the dining area, wishing he could sink into it and fully relax, but as a staff member he was confined to standing at the counter. He thought back to what the manager had said when he first started: “As the front desk, you represent this company’s image. So you need to show every new customer that comes in our dedication to the food, our passion for the roast duck! I’m confident you’ll settle into the work quickly.” That day, he had heard in the manager’s encouragement a genuine dedication to the food business and a real passion for roast duck, and yet, watching the manager’s excited expression, Hirosue had only sunk into a deeper gloom.

Someone like me could never represent your company. He thought this bleakly. He had taken this job purely because after dropping out of university, he couldn’t find any work related to his field. He was nothing like the manager, with his enthusiasm for making and selling roast duck; Hirosue was merely renting out his existence to spare the manager a little burden. He had never felt any meaning in receiving all kinds of customers at the front desk, and had even come to believe that front desk work was simply not something a human being should do. A roast duck restaurant’s front desk staff was different from a hotel bartender. They weren’t on equal footing with the customers; customers wouldn’t confide in them. They were a character perpetually at someone’s beck and call, perpetually subject to blame, perpetually stationed at the entrance, perpetually out of place with everything around them. He had thought about the purpose of this job many times, and had eventually concluded that hiring a restaurant host was probably less useful than commissioning a cardboard cutout printed with a pretty face and popular menu items.

Unintentionally, he caught the eye of the third roast duck from the left. He looked at it again. Its skin seemed more or less the same as the others at first glance, but looking closer he could see quite a few charred marks on the bottom. A customer eating quickly might not notice the difference, but anyone working here should be able to tell. Had the manager, roasting it himself, lost control of the temperature? And yet every other duck he’d brought in was lustrous and vivid; only this one had that strange, deep red. It wasn’t entirely accurate to say Hirosue “caught its eye,” because the duck’s head had long since been removed. Yet in that moment, Hirosue seemed to forget this fact, and felt as if the duck were looking back at him, its black-pearl eyes glinting with cunning.

He slowly lifted the hook. At that moment his muscles nearly seized, the body’s heat evaporating all at once, breaking him into a cold sweat. Whether from dizziness or something else, he felt part of himself being pulled into a bottomless abyss. He watched that part of his self get dismembered by some perverse vortex, and finally sink into darkness and disappear.

“Excuse me, where’s the restroom?”

“Straight ahead, turn left at the end.”

A customer’s voice interrupted something majestic and annihilating. Hirosue answered on reflex, but hadn’t come back to himself yet, still deep in that just-concluded vision of an ending.

004

Steal it.

A warmth circulated through Hirosue’s body, melting the murky ice that had accumulated for a long time. At noon, the fierce daylight lay over the moving crowds. Hirosue grew increasingly excited. He handled the customers with practiced ease, but all of his thoughts were occupied with planning the theft.

He could find the right moment to hide the duck somewhere, then smooth things over by having the kitchen make one more; the cooks’ hands barely ever stopped anyway, and one extra duck wouldn’t register. After that, he just had to wait until the dead of night, until closing time. He’d let the manager leave first, then double back, take the duck and go. He had keys to the place; he could come and go whenever he liked. When everyone was too busy to notice, he’d grab the duck, wrap it in oil paper and bag it, and hide it in the lower-right cabinet of the front desk. No smell should seep out. There weren’t many staff to begin with; if the manager asked, he could say the duck was being set aside for takeout. If the manager scolded him about getting the procedure wrong or putting it in the wrong place, he’d just ignore it, and once the manager was gone, put it back somewhere out of sight.

No, the plan could be improved. There was actually no need to hide it at all: just package it through the standard takeout procedure and make sure no one took it away. Managing the takeout boxes was his job anyway.

At this point, Hirosue couldn’t help marveling at the seamlessness of his own plan. He’d given himself plenty of room for retreat, able to protect himself no matter what. Then another strange thought broke in:

What if the manager checks the security footage and catches me?

Hirosue didn’t slow down, still actively attending to the customers. He thought it over, on and off, for nearly an hour, without finding any way to prevent this.

Fine, then let him catch me. If I were going to steal something this thoughtlessly, same as doing my job, why would I even bother? Thinking this, Hirosue felt something loosen, even as the blood ran hotter through his veins.

Night arrived with ceremony.

005

In the biting cold wind, Hirosue carried the roast duck takeout box with extreme care, as if holding century-old porcelain.

Walking against the wind didn’t bother him at all. In fact, he felt this was exactly what he had long been searching for. The road ahead felt unexpectedly clear and bright. He had betrayed Christ, and now, like a penitent monk, he was prying open the gates of heaven and stepping toward the thorn-laden path of hell. He was walking a road of tribute to the devil. The cold wind cut against his skin like the point of a blade, leaving behind countless imagined crimson scratches. The cheap blue glass windows along the road looked just like cathedral stained glass, revealing in the clear moonlight a depth that seemed to carry its own hidden agenda. The instant his secret overlapped with the reflection in the window, he suddenly felt that this cold, laughing window was his kind; it understood his actions, his philosophy, his pursuit. It said nothing, watching Hirosue press forward along the asphalt road wrapped in darkness, with an air of expectation.

Hirosue shivered again; the cold made his body tremble, and his spirit had been trembling for a long time too. He really did feel that the strange roast duck carried some kind of magic, like the monkey’s paw that grants three wishes. The takeout box gave off the already-cooled scent of meat, which entered his nostrils and moistened his dried-up senses. Hirosue forgot that he had been a roast duck restaurant host. Now he was the protagonist of his own private crime novel, dancing a strange and joyful dance beneath the night sky, moving away from the milky-white streetlights in a rhythm of short notes, weak beats, and bass markings. He kept looking around, as if afraid someone might catch him, and yet there was no one on the street, and even if there were, no one would have cared what he was doing.

The walk home from that quiet little road took half an hour. Those thirty minutes were unlike any other thirty minutes of his life; they were a carefully crafted short film. Over those thirty minutes, he became Dante, following the Virgil within himself, voyaging through all of this world. His mind cleared. The depression he’d felt at the restaurant was transmuted into a strange, buoyant joy. He pushed open the door, placed the roast duck on the pine bedside table, looked it over from both sides, and still felt something was missing. He wandered the room for a long time, turned off the desk lamp, and put on the overhead light instead. Finally, he went to the tiny kitchen, just a few square meters, where he treated the duck against spoilage, sprinkled on spices, and decorated it with colorful paper confetti of uncertain origin. He found a clear plastic box of just the right size and ceremoniously enshrined the duck inside it.

The star clusters were moving at a speed he could never perceive. Hirosue tidied the scattered newspapers, books, and cardboard boxes in the room, turned off one of the overhead bulbs, leaving only the orange one to cast its false warmth and some centuries-old mystery over the room in solitude. He smiled, satisfied, entirely unbothered by the sizzling static from the lightbulb or the sharp smell of the mixed spices.

006

Early morning.

“You little thief. You think I wouldn’t notice?”

The manager slammed his steel pen onto the floor, and its cheap plastic casing split open with a long crack. Across the desk, he sat with one hand resting on the armrest, eyeing Hirosue coldly, like an emperor on a throne.

“I noticed yesterday morning that your behavior was suspicious, so I kept an eye on you throughout the day. I didn’t catch you doing anything unusual, but I was still uneasy, so I checked the security footage this morning. And sure enough — you actually stole an entire roast duck.”

The manager’s voice grew sharp as he stood, walked around the desk, bent down to pick up the pen and set it aside, then paced toward Hirosue.

“One whole roast duck. It can’t sell for much, though it is — one — whole — duck.”

His voice gradually rose, his gaze drifting off Hirosue. He ignored Hirosue standing there and kept walking.

“But the procurement… the, uh… the preparation, the marinating, the refrigeration, the roasting, the slicing — the whole process, how intricate, how marvelous it is. A roast duck. A roast duck. A roast duck.”

The manager turned back and swept his gaze over Hirosue, who stood motionless, from head to toe.

“It carries our countless efforts! Just think: the pure golden aromatic juice saturating that roast duck, the crisp, tender, gleaming skin that melts in your mouth, the springy, succulent meat, soft as a young girl’s skin — just talking about it makes the mouth water! The roast duck’s naked form is so exquisite. From its reluctant yet helpless expression, can’t you see how much care we put into handling each duck? Can’t you see that every single duck, every. single. one, matters so much to people like us who love roast duck? Hm? Well?”

The manager pushed his face close to Hirosue’s, his grimacing, terrifying expression nearly touching Hirosue’s nose. Unmistakably a monster’s face, the red face of a tengu. Facing it, Hirosue felt as though he were facing the stone lions sitting with unnerving solemnity before temple gates. He didn’t think, didn’t respond; he simply stood there and watched the manager’s hysterical performance. Who says I love roast duck the same way you do, he thought privately. He liked roast duck well enough, but only because he found it tasty. What was there to love about roast duck? He had nothing but contempt for the manager’s devotion.

He had, of course, spent some time wondering why he’d been caught, but had never found an answer. He felt certain that everything he’d done was as perfect as the work of a genius alchemist. He didn’t know what he’d done that morning to arouse the manager’s suspicion; had it been that brief moment of distraction? Even though he’d considered this possibility in advance, knowing now that he had made a mistake, it was as if the magnificent abyss in his mind had caved in. His persona, his history, the faith he prided himself on as exalted — all of it contracted from the mottled dark, shrinking down until it became a featureless, colorless singularity, sitting silently in the void and emptiness. He stood just as silently, like a headstone.

The manager didn’t press the matter further. He simply docked Hirosue’s pay.

007

He walked home again, but the excitement had been ground away entirely by the morning’s dressing-down. The daylight slanted in, burning vivid colors, swaying freely, never pausing to consider anything on the earth below. Hirosue raised his heavy, melancholy eyes toward the film-like sky: the sun hung aloft like a deity commanding all things, golden evening clouds flowing around it. What a moving, grand sight, he thought. And yet he tightened his fists, hoping for rain clouds. He suddenly recalled his contempt for the manager’s devotion; since he had no particular passion for roast duck, why had he stolen it in the first place?

Why isn’t it raining now? he thought furiously at the sky. In films and novels alike, doesn’t a drizzle always appear after a minor character suffers some sudden upheaval, to paint a picture of grief and sorrow? He craved the release of rain in his loneliest, most helpless moments, the force of the downpour, the driving drops soaking through the pain that tore at him slowly, like a chronic illness. If he looked up now and saw the heavy leaden blue of storm clouds, he could find in the shift of weather some natural acknowledgment of himself, weave an image of beautiful memory from the appealing sound of rain.

But the unbroken sky was refusing, its barren blankness laying bare nothing but contempt. The sacred disc of the sun seemed to be reminding him that his sins would never be erased.

The air was solemn to the point of suffocation, the scorching heat cooking Hirosue’s consciousness.

Could he really escape from this broad concrete and dirt beneath his feet? The streetlights along the road showed their rust. Weeds survived, poorly, at their base. There was a thin white membrane on the grass; was this shed snakeskin? Hirosue had an urge to put it on his face. He walked toward the wreckage of this animal’s shed body, but stopped about thirty centimeters short. He felt the void calling out to him about reincarnation.

Why am I alive?

Part of his thinking gradually sank into abstract questions of worth and guilt. The sun stared into Hirosue’s heart, and sank alongside those thoughts.

Hirosue recalled a line of lyrics: “Summer is here to put you to death.” At that moment, the sun-scorched interior of his heart exposed a corner of its dark purple core.

008

A few days later, Hirosue found a part-time job at a pharmacy and quit the roast duck restaurant, scraping by on what little savings he had and a salary even lower than what the restaurant had paid. The change in environment brought a change in habit, and he began to try social networking online, territory he’d never ventured into before.

Before he started, Hirosue still held an image of girls as complete, divine beings, the embodiment of the world’s purity and beauty. He was introverted and had no romantic experience, but he wasn’t afraid of contact with women; he’d had no unpleasant experiences with them in either high school or university. Everything online floated above the cloud of reality, and he knew that nothing he said there would touch his actual life.

On an ordinary evening after work at the pharmacy, Hirosue returned to his empty room. He’d long grown tired of facing those desolate white walls. He felt as though the coarse granules and cracks on them were mocking his situation. The light swayed, dragging his shadow across the floor with a grating sound. He opened the computer and faced the diffuse white glow. The light fell like powder crumbling from a great tower, at odds with the murky yellows of everything around it. He moved the mouse with an unsteady hand, greedily searching his private messages for anything unread, like a hungry vampire. He kicked at the cardboard boxes by his feet in frustration, and they quickly warped, crumpled, and curled into a defeated heap in the corner, laughing bitterly through their tears.

There weren’t many people in the list, and he got through them fast. Out of over thirty women, nearly twenty had replied. Looks like everyone’s in the same boat as me, Hirosue thought with mild contempt; nothing going for them in life, so they come online looking for validation and amusement. But it didn’t take long for him to realize this was probably wrong. He stared blankly at the complaints, meltdowns, and outbursts on the social feed. What did any of this have to do with his own life? Everyone had their own lives, and what they were venting was simply whatever had gone wrong in those lives. Whose life had nothing going wrong? With that thought, Hirosue’s spirits sank again. But whose misfortunes were worse, theirs or his? Looking at his profile, all text and not a single photo, a gnawing sense of inadequacy came over him. Probably his were worse, he concluded. He felt a soreness in his right shoulder and bicep; his mouse posture was ergonomically unsound. He flung his arm in irritation, then put his hand back on the mouse. He seemed to be projecting onto the person on the other side of the screen again, imagining someone who would mock his sorry situation. At some point he had developed a self-protective hostility toward strangers. Most people clearly didn’t care much about his messages; they responded with polite, contentless pleasantries.

One girl, though, with the username “atonosaya,” got along reasonably well with Hirosue. Her account contained only scattered glimpses of daily life and passing moods, three public photos, all taken wearing a face mask. From her eyes and brows, she was clearly not unattractive. Hirosue had come across her through a singer’s follower list. A few days earlier he had politely sent a greeting, and they’d chatted for about half an hour on the subjects of life and art. The girl was studying at a decent university and enjoyed walking and drinking in her spare time. The atmosphere of the conversation was easy, and had briefly lightened some of the weight of Hirosue’s life. Outside the window, the cicadas sounded like the muffled violin of a beginner, restless, swelling up and down. The conversation ended when the girl went to sleep. After she said goodnight, Hirosue sat dully staring at the screen that had gone quiet. He found it hard to imagine why anyone would be so open with him; had she really been open? He also didn’t understand why he’d grown progressively more warm during the exchange, like returning to something from years ago. It seemed his present self was being absorbed into a fuzzy ball of a timeline, facing all his past selves in silence.

What kind of feeling was this? In that moment, Hirosue felt an even more acute emptiness. The emptiness lashed his body with its silent howl, making sleep impossible. He lay restless, tossing and turning at midnight, his heart speeding up at one moment and offering the illusion of calm the next.

He felt his body getting worse. Like drinking the poison of oleander, Hirosue felt something swelling in his throat, pressing against the last of his consciousness. In the disordered instant of falling asleep, he looked toward the cigarette butts and orange peel that had been abandoned by the bedside for days, and a thought rose in him, painful and agitated.

009

“Great! Let’s meet up then~”

She sent a message full of energy. And Hirosue was looking at the high-end roast duck restaurant he’d booked, rolling a few boxes of sleeping pills he’d taken from the pharmacy between his fingers.

---

Step Two: Roast the Duck Thoroughly and with Dedication

001

The twilight seeped through the dust-covered curtains. Ikeda Takuya rose lazily from the sofa.

“Ai, it’s about time.”

“Okay, okay, just a second.” Nozaki Ai was drawing her aegyo-sal at the vanity mirror and spoke without turning. When she finished, she turned around and saw Ikeda looking half-asleep, and frowned slightly. “Why do you look so worn out? Come on, get yourself together.”

“Like this is fine. I don’t really have the energy to bother.”

Ikeda turned back, hands resting on the windowsill, looking out at the distant city. It was a familiar city. No different from before. Cars, high-rises, the boundary line.

“Are you about ready? I’ll go get the things.”

“Pretty much, pretty much, just one more look.”

Nozaki struck different poses, checking her face for anything that could still be improved. Ikeda walked out of the room tinged with a purple glow and the scent of perfume, went to the kitchen, and took a freshly killed frozen duck out of the refrigerator. The duck’s neck twisted toward its belly, its head drooping, its eyes fixed vacantly on Ikeda.

This was death. A trace of blood showed through the duck’s white body, nothing like the blush on a girl’s cheek, more like a shadow on frosted glass, which made it more unsettling, but that was appropriate. Ikeda smiled with maternal satisfaction.

Ah. The weeping demon.

“Hey!”

Nozaki Ai suddenly patted Ikeda Takuya on the shoulder from behind. He startled, his legs buckled, and he nearly dropped the duck. He gave her a look of wounded reproach. She laughed foolishly, staring into his eyes.

“Stop it. Let’s go.”

Ikeda took her hand with his free one and walked out the door.

002

“What a nice breeze.”

“Yeah.”

A chord-like wind swept across the rooftop, carrying distorted sounds and hurling itself against the concrete ruins. The rooftop was separated from the source of the noise by a vertical distance like an atmospheric layer, yet the noise’s unselfconsciousness still seeped inevitably into Ikeda’s heart.

It had been a long time since he’d come up here.

The last time must have been during his student days.

That was youth. The word “youth” sounded blue and green, but Ikeda’s had been like wildfire, brief and fierce. He thought of the people who used to gather on the rooftop, and then, as if something stretched too taut had snapped, they’d simply lost touch. Sometimes he saw them at stiff parties, glasses raised, wearing satisfied and coldly distant smiles. One day rain fell on the rooftop and no one opened the rusted iron door; it wasn’t until lunch break that he went up alone and walked out. That was the first time he’d come up here by himself. The rain soaked his uniform, the white fabric clinging to his skin, becoming semi-transparent, his skin color showing through faintly, the most honest skin of a young boy. The rain ran down his hair, carrying a slight scent of smoke and dust, like promises never kept. He had leaned against the railing and looked out through the prison-like iron bars. The school grounds, the trees, the buildings, colorless as rain. He could see the construction crane in the distance; it always seemed to him like an ancient colossus sent to destroy the city. The sound of the pile driver was like a jammed old tape recorder, and he felt dizzy and cold. After that he somehow returned to class soaking wet; the details he could no longer remember.

Ikeda’s thoughts began to tangle, knotting into a dead end. He thought about rain, thought about everything that had passed. His hands worked mechanically, moving the things he’d need: an iron chair, firewood, charcoal, a lighter, a frozen duck. Not that much, actually. He moved the piles of junk that had accumulated on the rooftop over to the weeds, clearing the center. Nozaki stood nearby watching him with tender, transfixed eyes, like a fixed star.

The sky shifted to a deep, bruised purple. From this rooftop, one could seem to observe the melancholy lodged in the forest of steel. A barely perceptible thin smoke rose, absorbing the coarseness of the blues. The rooftop’s fixtures were dilapidated, the jutting stones making the ground almost uneven. The low rusted railing nearby came up to about Ikeda’s waist. Thin, restless weeds grew all around, as if reminding passersby about life. The mottled watermarks and old brown on the ground separated the rooftop from the modernity of concrete below.

“Does this feel all right? This weather?” Ikeda asked.

“Feels pretty good.” Nozaki answered. She walked to Ikeda’s side, and the two of them gazed out into the distance. The distance, that blurry pointillist painting before them. That distance had never drawn close to Nozaki. The distance could never come close to you — she’d always thought so. Those indistinguishable places held life, held love. Streetlights, trees, power lines, fire escapes, all existing to live furiously. They radiated an energy like an orange sun, seeping into the perceptions of the people around them. So colorful, she thought. Such beautiful weather. Mild, neither cold nor hot, holding human life in its embrace.

She loved people.

Ikeda set down his tools and took hold of Nozaki’s soft, warm hand. Within the body that warm palm belonged to, there was a fiercely beating heart. Someday that heart would take flight, passing through the rust-covered iron bars and entering the thriving crowd. He didn’t know what she was thinking now; her eyes were reflecting the dazzling light. The light made Ikeda dizzy. He put his hand in his pocket and touched the pharmaceutical foil packaging. A faint crackling sound. Ikeda seemed to catch the blue-white chemical smell of the pills.

003

Eight o’clock came.

“Ah. I think it’s time,” Ikeda said, stiffly, releasing the hand holding Nozaki’s.

“Mm.” Nozaki felt a current-like flash of tension pass through her and leave a crooked brand on her skin.

Ikeda lifted the frozen duck from the tin foil on the broken tiles, gripping it by the neck. The head swung immediately toward the cracks in the ground. He carried the iron chair to the center of the rooftop with his other hand. The chair, like some kind of shrine, radiated a solemn air in the near-moonless night. For a moment, the desolation of the ground seemed to form a perfect ritual space, spiritual energy drifting out on all sides, the insects incessant.

“Ha.” Nozaki breathed out a puff of cold air, gathered the scattered firewood and charcoal from the ground, and spread them on the chair. Ikeda silently placed the frozen duck and the tin foil neatly on the firewood, with the reverence of a devotee. When he finished, he pressed his palms together and bowed once to the strange arrangement of chair, duck, and firewood. An invisible pendulum swung somewhere in the night sky, directing his movements. A sudden drowsiness made Ikeda yawn; halfway through, he cut himself off and kept his face carefully solemn. Beside him, Nozaki’s lips twitched almost imperceptibly in a small smile, and then she fell into thought, staring at the arrangement before Ikeda.

Nozaki stood still, her back to the city’s lights, hair blown loose by the wind. Ikeda didn’t hesitate, and gripped the lighter with practiced ease between two fingers. This was a motion he had rehearsed thousands of times, though Nozaki didn’t know this, because he had deliberately kept it from her. Did she really know him? He often found himself asking this at random moments in ordinary life. He didn’t feel he resembled Nozaki, and didn’t feel he had ever truly opened himself to her, but what was undeniable was that Nozaki loved him, and wanted his love in return. Ah, why am I worth her love? Can I even love her? Ikeda glanced at Nozaki; the glow in her eyes was pure to the point of frightening him. Every time he saw that look, he felt his chest cave in from the blow of an iron hammer, leaving a vast hollow. The wind on the rooftop further eroded the hollow in Ikeda’s heart, like a dentist shooting air into a cavity, driving out whatever had already rotted inside. Ikeda turned his eyes back to the lighter. His thumb touched the ignition switch, a closeness he found comforting. He felt the spring’s pleasant resistance, pressed it gently, then snapped it down hard, as though pulling a trigger, and the flame erupted in an instant, leaping and wrapping itself around the charcoal and the duck’s body. A violent red began to spread; this wildly swaying fire was more alive than Ikeda standing motionless beside it. Only when this fire caught did some slight thawing occur in the rooftop’s coldness. Ah, fire, fire. At what point in my life will I ever build a fire like this with my own hands? When I was small, watching my parents work the stove, the blue flames enchanted me; they were like ghosts, yet they gave off energy, a strange beauty. But since becoming an adult, I seem to have lost that feeling entirely. The ghost in the blue flame seems to have died, and no matter how I use these man-made devices, the feeling from childhood can’t be found. Ah, when I was small and I saw those absurd flames, I knew I had stepped into a funeral procession. The firewood was consumed by the flames, crackling and popping, crisp, warm, soothing. A small piece of wood fell from the chair, but the fire didn’t let it go, still chose to make it glow with a heartbreaking crimson until it became pale ash. Nozaki’s skirt hem kept trembling in the wind, and her eyes again held that pure light that frightened Ikeda, but Ikeda was looking elsewhere; he was watching the blazing fire roast the frozen duck, the duck gradually revealing an enticing color. Fire can change things! He realized this with excitement. The flames danced together, seemingly willing to contain everything; the charcoal silently endured its role as part of the fire. Do you still harbor grievances? Do you still feel rage? When you see this, do you still think your life consists only of surgical knives, bank documents, and missed calls? Ikeda examined his own interior. The iron chair hadn’t changed its shape, but the duck’s skin was by now almost crisped and running with oil. Nozaki’s figure seemed to fade into the shadow of the fire, and only at this point did Ikeda turn to look at her. She smiled back at him. The same smile as always.

004

A sudden downpour extinguished the rising fire.

“The forecast didn’t say anything about rain,” Ikeda said to Nozaki, head bowed, in what he hoped was his calmest tone. For a moment, he seemed to brush up against the spinning of the universe.

“No, it didn’t.” Nozaki answered, startled. She looked helplessly at the sky’s violence. The colorless raindrops fell on her body, as if trying to bleach her transparent too. She had checked the forecast over and over before coming, and worn this outfit only after confirming there was no rain. If the forecast had said rain, she would have brought an umbrella; no, if the forecast had said rain, she would have told Ikeda outright and had him pick another time.

The red glow on the charcoal faded, leaving behind a deep black like the night itself. The rain stretched long and pale, pounding the fire that had been reflecting youth and dreams until it couldn’t lift its head. The iron railing rang out dully, resisting the rain’s advance without much conviction. Ikeda suddenly realized: it was rain like this that had given it those cadaverous rust stains.

The rain soaked the firewood, soaked the duck, steeped them all in a curse. The light and warmth of the rooftop were replaced by mud and cold; the noise reclaimed the silence.

…

The noise went completely quiet. A high frequency swept through Ikeda’s consciousness, as though something were lodged in his throat. Everything concrete lost its outline. The blur of the distance was no longer a fine, subtle blur; it was all wrapped in a dark, murky fog.

Fire.

Rain.

Water reflected the light too, reflected the overcast sky, the collapsed heavens, the wet signboards, and the panicked people on the street below.

On the road, diffuse reflections produced the city’s heavy, faintly transparent, busy life. The distance between here and Hakone Mountain was a hundred kilometers, and the two places had nothing in common, except that there were two cores burning to pour out flame, both drenched now in industrial pulp and the silhouettes of strangers. In his imagination, Ikeda leaned out of a skylight, tore off pages of paper, and threw them down on the uniformed figures hurrying below. But he hadn’t done that. What he was actually more likely to do was sit in his not-very-comfortable office chair, buy an atmospheric desk lamp, and observe how his colleagues and manager reacted differently to that lamp. Or he might one lunch hour try a road he’d never walked before, kicking aside fallen twigs, trying to communicate with the stray cats by the roadside. He was afraid of being scratched, but he’d never given up on trying to connect with strays. He had given up on almost every opportunity to connect with people. Connecting with people didn’t feel like connecting with tides.

The sudden rain made the air damp, the respiratory system labored.

The indeterminacy of fate, the sudden reversal in the dark, the downpour reflected another identical city, doubling the city’s melancholy.

Exhale.

Inhale.

Dirty water drifted to Ikeda’s feet.

Exhale.

Inhale.

The fire that had been willing to contain everything was dead.

……

……

\[Blackout\]

Where is my place in this world?

“Let’s go back!” Nozaki’s voice cut through Ikeda’s held breath. Ikeda realized he had been ignoring her entirely for some time. She rushed over and linked her arm through his, splashing water in all directions.

He looked at her rain-drenched face, her makeup washed and smeared.

Ikeda walked silently to the rooftop entrance, mud seeping into his shoes.

Dirty water full of mockery and scorch crept through the weave of his socks, threatening any moment to swallow his body.

Ikeda stamped his foot heavily on the uneven ground. More mud splashed, fouling Nozaki’s white legs.

Ikeda suddenly shook off Nozaki’s hand and rushed toward the frail iron railing.

005

Nozaki stood frozen in place as the sediment swirled past her feet.

Ikeda turned to look at Nozaki, his eyelids twitching. He sat on the railing and didn’t go further. His mouth trembled as if trying to say something; whether he held it back or couldn’t get it out, he stayed silent in the end, unmoving.

“Hey, what are you doing! Calm down!” Nozaki screamed, reaching out a hand, stepping slowly toward Ikeda. “Calm down, Takuya. Stop. Come back. Take my hand.” Ikeda’s glasses were covered in rain; he could only see a slender figure walking slowly toward him through the vibrating air.

Ikeda took a deep breath, and cried. The tears disappeared into the rain on his face almost immediately, as if tracing something back to its source. Like that abandoned duck, he bowed his head. Tears and rain ran down his body and finally separated from him, falling from the building. The lights below cast an unfamiliar glow; there were hardly any people on the street anymore. The noise had flowed away with the water on the road.

“What’s going on with you, can you think of something good? Think of the things you haven’t done yet!” Nozaki said in a rush, her wet hair plastered against her face. “Don’t do anything rash, please! Whatever you’re going through, I can understand!”

Tonight’s moon… isn’t full either.

Ikeda stared blankly at the sky. Only as a child would he ever stare upward like this, without purpose. But now he couldn’t seem to drift the way he had then.

Can you understand me……

The rain kept striking him. He was tired.

“Give me your hand!” Nozaki’s hand was only a fruit knife’s length from Ikeda’s. She didn’t dare pull him forcefully back onto the rooftop; she wasn’t sure she had the strength.

Ikeda turned his head again.

What were you thinking?

What were you contemplating in a place like this?

What do I feel anger over? What do I grieve over?

Ikeda lifted his hand, intertwining his fingers with hers. He gave Nozaki a pained smile, and Nozaki suddenly began to cry, saying in fragments, “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me…” Tears fell continuously down across both their hands. Ikeda reached up with his other hand and touched Nozaki’s hair.

Your hair is so black. Black like charcoal. Like the night sky.

He thought this, looking at Nozaki’s face. This face had still not become a stranger’s. Nozaki tilted her head up; even through the tears and mucus, she was still beautiful.

In an instant, a glimmer of light flashed in her eyes. Ikeda’s mind went blank with a hum. He felt no sorrow, no defeat. He felt only a kind of illusion, of butterflies fluttering along an endlessly lengthening shoreline. Is this what I feel for her? He seemed to know now what he felt for her.

Ikeda lost control of his own limbs; it was as if his childhood specter was directing him now.

Such happiness. Such clarity.

Ikeda closed his eyes.

Nozaki was pulled by a great dark force from the night.

The iron railing reached the end of its life.

Red-brown bubbles dissolved into the dream-like violet stain of the void.

On the plains of Sengahara, iris flowers bloomed across the whole field, like angels spreading their wings.

“I love you.”

Ikeda, head down, fell.

The quiet static approached one frame at a time.

I feel, I am this world.

Ikeda held Nozaki tight, like pastry skin wrapped around roast duck.

\[Red Out\]

---

Step Three: Plate It in a Way Nobody Expected!

001

When roast duck restaurant owner Tanaka Kenichi got home from work that night, he discovered the iron chair he kept outside his door was gone.

Maybe I left it on the roof? That was Tanaka’s first thought. Since his unit was the closest to the rooftop in the building, he often moved chairs up there to enjoy outdoor dinners with relatives and friends. He’d probably just not brought it down after the last gathering. After all, this rooftop had nothing going for it and no one ever came up here.

After the last dinner, Tanaka hadn’t been up there since.

He hummed a little tune and made his way up the stone steps with practiced ease. It had started raining heavily outside on the way back. Fortunately his shoes hadn’t gotten wet, or these steep, railing-free steps would be genuinely frightening to navigate. The door to the rooftop stood open, revealing an unremarkable corner, ordinary in every way, nothing like anything framed in a film, just an ordinary tile of the urban landscape.

He hadn’t been supposed to work this late tonight, but lately more and more people had been choosing roast duck for dinner, and Tanaka had no choice but to stay until seven or eight before he could leave. He probably needed to hire more staff. People in the evenings were always growing in number; whether it was because people were staying later at work these days or because they had higher expectations for dining out, the number coming for both dinner and late meals had grown significantly from a few years ago. As someone in the food industry, he naturally wasn’t going to let this money-making opportunity pass.

He pushed the rooftop door further open to widen the narrow gap, and stepped through. Coming up to the rooftop, he saw his chair sitting right in the center, perfectly undisturbed. Except there seemed to be something else on the chair. He blinked hard; fatigue, though with age his eyes were getting dry more easily too. He walked a few steps closer. His leather shoes struck the ground, sending a crisp sound through the uneven surface, which rose and fell with the terrain, producing a thoughtful, off-tempo beat. He saw, he could of course see, what was perhaps the thing he was most intimately familiar with in the whole of his life. What he knew best was not his wife’s heart, not his own ideals, not the state of the food industry, not Japanese politics: it was a golden-colored, gently contoured, meat-scented roast duck. There was no question that roast duck lacked the vitality of a living thing. That was precisely why it was so honest and pleasing. Tanaka always felt that roast duck had more charm than people. Of people’s charm, of course, he knew nothing. He and his wife had met through a quick matchmaking meeting; their parents had felt the time was right for them to marry, briefly looked over the family situation and finances, and promptly arranged them together. They had no objections and felt it was fine. Tanaka and his wife were now in their mid-forties, and they hadn’t had any children.

A feeling of still being at work left Tanaka somewhat puzzled. He looked around; all around him was just the sound of rustling grass in the wind and the cars passing below, sounds Tanaka had been perfectly accustomed to throughout his forty-odd years of life. It might have been the sudden presence of the roast duck that left him without a sense of reality. Right, who could have expected that, going up to the rooftop after a late night at work to collect a chair he hadn’t used in a long time, they’d find a roast duck on the seat, one that looked as if it had just been recently roasted? Anyone would recognize the strangeness of it, let alone Tanaka, who was the owner of a roast duck restaurant.

But precisely because Tanaka was the owner of a roast duck restaurant, he decided the roast duck’s unexpected arrival was a miracle. He cheerfully picked it up, carried it home, and proceeded directly to wash it under the kitchen tap, cleaning away the dirty water and the burned parts. Despite the duck’s sorry condition, in Tanaka’s eyes every single duck was beautiful, wreathed in angelic light. His technique was naturally impeccable, and in a minute or two the cleaning was done. When he came back to himself, he heard an unnatural commotion rising from downstairs.

He put down the duck, walked to the kitchen window, and looked below.

Two mangled bodies lay in a pool of rose-colored blood reflecting the glow of the signs. A crowd had gathered around them.

Tanaka pulled his head back in.

…

For five seconds, Tanaka’s heart was as calm as the surface of a still lake, without precedent.

The roll of a phantom snare drum, the tension of strings. Tanaka remembered that his chair was still upstairs.

Chair. Evidence. Bodies. Police.

There was no time to form complete thoughts, but from the fragments alone he could already tell this would be a catastrophe, like a century-old piece of porcelain on the verge of shattering. He bolted, taking the stone steps with none of his earlier ease. Arriving on the rooftop, when he saw the toppled remains of the rusted iron railing, he seemed to understand the connection between the bodies and the rooftop. His breathing grew heavier; he became more and more aware of the sound of his own breath, and that sound was as unpleasant as the piercing cicadas of August. But when he lifted the chair and paused his movement for a moment, he seemed to hear another sound.

Thump thump thump.

Not thunder.

Thump thump thump.

Not a drum roll either.

Footsteps!

Real thunder sounded, fixing Tanaka’s spine. He started running; he didn’t know in what direction, but he knew he had to run. Those footsteps gradually merged with his own into the sound of the rain, until they were indistinguishable.

The crowd gathering below grew larger and larger. Tanaka ran in the opposite direction, to the other side of the building, where the railing had not yet given way. He carefully set the chair among the trash pile, and immediately the chair became one of the countless pieces of debris on the rooftop, no longer an unidentified object standing in the center. The rust on this side’s railing was much less severe; it was even planted firmly in the ground. Tanaka, without considering the possibility of it coming loose, placed both hands on the railing and climbed over its protection.

Which is to say: Tanaka, open-mouthed in terror, slowly but resolutely shifted his body to the outside of the railing, to the edge of the rooftop where there was nowhere to stand.

Rain was pulled by gravity, falling onto Tanaka, as if trying to drag him down to the ground too. Tanaka gripped the railing, feet braced against the wall, and looked down at the ground below. It was thirty meters up. Tanaka felt the building suddenly extend infinitely, like being reproduced endlessly between two parallel mirrors. His vision swam for a moment, but fortunately his many years as a cook, wielding a wok, had made his arm muscles far stronger than any office worker his age, strong enough to hold his own weight. He could feel, at this moment, his weight very concretely. Better try to lose some weight after this, he thought.

Like a high, hoarse note heralding the start of a brass solo in bebop, the rooftop door was thrown open. Then a rush of scattered footsteps poured into the sky above the high floors.

“Is this the scene?”

“Should be, but there’s no witness who saw both of them fall. People noticed because of the sound they made when they hit the ground.”

“Does anyone know them? Is anyone here their neighbor?”

“No, officer. I’m a lower-floor resident. Other than running into them in the elevator, I’ve never spoken with them.”

“All right. Anyone else? Do you know their neighbors?”

“Ah, officer, I’m on the sixth floor. Their neighbor is a teacher, but she went back to visit her parents recently. Actually, we’re all fairly unfamiliar with the deceased; they only moved in last week, or the week before. They’d barely settled in before that neighbor left.”

Tanaka felt a sudden horror as his arms began going numb. He reached his feet downward, but still couldn’t reach the window ledge below.

“Right… no apparent motive. Although looking at the scene, I think we can also rule out homicide.”

“Ah, officer, officer…”

“That’s fine, that’s fine. No need to say anything more.”

“But I heard the two of them were a couple, and the man apparently…”

“Right, no weapon present; it’s a suicide, or a lovers’ death. Hm. The iron railing is somewhat damaged.”

Hearing the words iron railing, Tanaka broke out in a cold sweat. But the officer made no move to walk the whole rooftop inspecting the condition of the rails. Tanaka’s breathing accelerated, yet he had to desperately slow it down, suppress any sound. He could feel the demon of acrophobia squatting on both his shoulders, staring at him, making his back crawl. He held still, forced himself not to look down.

“That… I heard…”

“Quiet!”

The officer shouted, and the air froze for a moment. Tanaka’s energy reserves were nearly depleted. He stopped bracing his feet against the wall and just hung there. The distant wail of a police siren reached his ears. But a background noise from somewhere drowned out his hearing.

“All right, then! The time is about right, and I’m supposed to get off soon too. The people handling the bodies will be here shortly; if you’re going downstairs, help us manage…”

The officer’s words weren’t even finished before Tanaka couldn’t take in another syllable. He cautiously looked down again to check the distance between himself and the window ledge. It wasn’t actually that far, but he was still afraid of any possible accident: being spotted by the officer, missing the landing, being unable to keep his balance on the ledge.

002

Looking back on Tanaka’s life, he was nothing particularly notable. It was a mediocre, ordinary life. He was not striking in appearance; his grades in school hadn’t been striking either; the job after graduation was a low-level one. That he had eventually become the manager of a roast duck restaurant could partly be credited to his years of hard work, but largely came down to luck. He had no spectacular love story; nothing in his working life had any connection to criminal escapes, supernatural forces, or complex ethical entanglements. But he’d never had any particularly devastating sorrows either. He and his wife were both healthy; both sets of parents were still alive. It felt as though, for the rest of his life, he would simply continue on as the owner of a roast duck restaurant. What change might come for him in the future? He thought about having children, about the death of his parents, about unemployment, his wife’s betrayal, about being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Any of these possible? He didn’t know. What would the future look like?

It all felt like things a film protagonist might experience. Tanaka himself had watched few films in his life; reading was limited mostly to occasional browsing of business books. He was honest, hardworking, and warmhearted; people generally thought well of him. Sometimes he was overly strict with his staff, and at times dismissed them without hesitation, though always for a reason. That was about as ordinary as things could get for a restaurant manager, probably.

He was still adrift in the disorderly sea of noise, without the energy to make out any distinct sound. His thoughts had plunged into those murky waters too.

After everything that happened today, he would probably change in some way going forward.

But he himself didn’t know how, and I, as the author, don’t know either. I think no one knows. He might not change at all. This incident might be nothing more than a dream to him; or not even a dream; maybe he will gradually forget everything that happened today. I believe daily life will return to its course, and he will still be the owner of a roast duck restaurant.

But what do you all think? What do you hope will happen to his life? Change? Become more artistic? Find quiet happiness? Continue to strive and expand his business? Take up a different career, or move abroad and start a new life? Should someone add a little background music to his story? Or put him at the center of the frame?

Become rock or ice or dust, spinning in the orbit between Mars and Jupiter, letting one’s voice be silenced forever in the cosmos?

There’s no time to discuss more possibilities, because Mr. Tanaka Kenichi’s strength has run out. He let go lightly, as if guided by pale-grey angels, and left the edge of the rooftop, slowly, evenly, descending onto the window ledge.

His consciousness had only the remnants of a chorus left. He didn’t know whether he had already died and moved on to another world.

After a long time, perhaps half an hour, he forced his eyes open and pried the window apart with effort.

A familiar sight. His own kitchen.

He pushed his head in and then climbed through little by little. He had no strength left to close the window, so he drew the curtain halfway. The world tilted. He fell asleep, entering a dream. In the dream there should be wondrous hymns and the melody of a music box.

He curled up on the unlit stove, like a roast duck waiting to be carved.

---

Step Four: Done! Now Swallow to Your Heart’s Content

001

“Have a drink. I haven’t tried much wine, but this one should be good.”

The light fell on the mahogany cabinet of expensive wines beside them, the labels on the bottles shimmering with a metallic sheen. Shadow covered her face, and with her black hair, she appeared in silhouette. The restaurant played contemporary midnight jazz; a few foreigners were dancing tango in time with the saxophone, laughing with pleasure.

“Gin and lemon juice — I’m rather fond of this combination. Oh, I forgot to give my real name.”

“Hirosue Kiyoharu.” Hirosue extended his hand.

“Komori Saya.” She smiled and extended hers, taking his. Hirosue managed to look calm, but he’d had very little contact with women, and inside he was trembling. Of course Komori couldn’t tell any of this. Red light swept across his body without leaving any trace.

When he took her hand, it was as if a current of warmth ran through something in his mind.

Waiting for their food, Hirosue chatted with her while turning the wine glass in his fingers.

“How’s university life? Is the coursework very demanding?”

“Quite demanding, actually, but manageable. I’ve been lucky enough to have found a clear career goal and things I want to learn, which makes university a lot more bearable. When the pressure of exams is crushing me, I run through in my head all the efforts I’ve made toward becoming a teacher, and I feel like everything I’m doing now has purpose, that it’s building toward something I’ll be proud of later. When I think that, I feel lighter, and a little motivated.”

“Is that so? That sounds… genuinely good.”

“Yeah, yeah. A few of my friends are pretty troubled, though. Some history and economics majors feel like what they’re studying has no practical use. I don’t know how to help them. They’re pretty pessimistic about the future, and about where society’s heading.”

“Given the current state of things, being pessimistic about the future is hard to avoid. You might not fully understand yet since you haven’t worked, but I’ve always felt that the working version of me really is just a cog turning the wheels of society.”

“Ah? Why do you say that?”

“What do you think — do you feel that even though society’s pace keeps accelerating, people actually have more opportunities to develop their own interests?”

“I wouldn’t say that exactly…”

“Well, it’s true that doing any job long enough, you inevitably grow tired of it. School is the same way. When you first start learning something, there’s a sense of novelty, a drive to study. But after spending long enough in school, you feel as if your mind has been worn down by something; you can’t see or touch it, but it’s as if something has dried up, something has withered, and you find yourself no longer moving forward. You used to crave more knowledge every day, more research to do, but gradually the pointless, tasteless routines of daily life encase all of that like cement. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

Hirosue looked up, stopped what he was doing, and looked at Komori’s large eyes, bright as gemstones. Her eyes shimmered like the label on a wine bottle, but that shimmer seemed to come from somewhere else entirely.

“I feel that way sometimes too.” She looked down.

This answer was something Hirosue hadn’t anticipated. He’d assumed there would be no way that she could have anything in common with his own interior. He had expected their exchange to be nothing more than hollow, showy small talk. A silence of about ten seconds fell between them.

“This is a nice place, isn’t it. I’ve actually never been anywhere like this.”

Hirosue was the first to speak. But the moment he said it, he felt a twinge of regret.

Why? He hadn’t needed to be this guarded in his speech. He was supposed to be surveying the other person’s every move with a look of contempt by now; that was the scenario he had rehearsed countless times in his head. But with an actual female university student sitting across the table from him, he panicked. He still made an effort to maintain a relaxed expression, but during their conversation, his eyes had nowhere to land.

“Actually, me too… is it very expensive? Should we split it?” The girl looked at Hirosue with concern. Hirosue’s first-time hesitation paused for a few more seconds. Another answer he hadn’t predicted. But this somehow made him feel even more unsettled.

“No, it’s fine.”

“All right.”

“It’s nothing. Money’s there to be spent.”

That, at least, was what Hirosue genuinely believed. The money he made from work, beyond what he spent on rent, went into mobile games, late-night snacks, and various stationery. Hirosue had a particular affinity for stationery; perhaps because he felt that keeping a notebook and a pen was a small act of redemption for someone adrift in this world trending ever more virtual and artificial. To leave marks in ink on pure paper was, in itself, probably something romantic. The blue-black ink soaking into blank industrial paper, and in those seeping characters he could see his own reflection. His rented room was a bit spare, the furniture somewhat dated, the light not quite bright enough, but he found it comfortable to live in. With all those delivery boxes piling up, he was usually too lazy to sort them. On the slightly uneven, slightly cracked wooden table lay a scattered assortment of notebooks, fountain pens, pencils, gel pens, and ballpoints he used regularly. The stationery he treasured most was kept in the drawer under the desk, now dusty.

“Work must be exhausting! And job-hunting after graduation must have been quite hard. What kind of work do you do?” Komori asked, studying him with genuine curiosity.

“Ah… actually, I didn’t find this job after graduating…”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it…”

“It’s fine. I did go to university.”

“Then you…”

“While I was at university, my parents…”

Hirosue’s voice trailed off. A plain, subdued flash of anger crossed his eyes and was gone. He took a breath.

“I’m so sorry, I’m truly sorry. Are you… living alone, then? Do you plan to continue your studies?”

“…”

The camera slowed. Outside, the traffic became streaks of light. Rain threatened but didn’t fall, leaving the sky in its lingering dark amber, like earth stained with blood.

“Yes. But I’ve given up on school. I didn’t have much passion for studying anyway.”

Komori gave a flustered little laugh. “That’s all right, academic credentials don’t really matter for a person. Does a person’s worth really get decided by a diploma that’s like a lie? You’re still you! You’re already a very interesting person, honestly, school isn’t that useful, and what you can learn there… isn’t actually that much.”

Hirosue stared blankly at the crystal chandelier overhead; it glittered magnificently.

“A diploma doesn’t matter…”

He lifted his wine glass to his lips, tilted it, and found it was already empty.

002

“Your roast duck.”

A waiter in a suit carried out a plate of roast duck. This duck was vivid in color, a thin layer of golden oil barely visible on the skin, yet it didn’t feel greasy at all. Beside the duck, chrysanthemums and leaves added decoration, making the presentation all the more refined. The pancakes on the side were translucent and glistening; even the sliced cucumbers and scallions looked pure and authentic. This was nothing like the roast duck from the restaurant where I used to work, Hirosue thought. He glanced at the ducks roasting behind the glass, and though he felt nothing in particular, his saliva began to flow on its own. He looked at the table in front of him, the roast duck in front of him. The gap was too wide, he thought. He looked around: the bar and the cabinet behind it, nearly as large as a wall, filled with expensive wines and whiskeys; the blazing light from chandeliers, light strips, and decorative fixtures; romantic jazz; broad floor-to-ceiling windows and a terrace that laid the whole city out before you; staff members impeccably dressed and radiating enthusiasm; other customers dressed in fashion brands Hirosue couldn’t begin to identify, like apparitions. He felt dizzy again, almost unable to tell if what he was seeing was real. Manager Tanaka’s restaurant was considerably more humble by comparison, no such lavish decor, no space like this, no imperial-grade roast duck like this. Call yourself passionate about roast duck! Hirosue felt Tanaka was like a clown, always talking about unrealistic ideals, chasing a goal that was moving further away with every passing year. And now, looking back, the man always presenting himself as a leader in an ill-fitting uniform, always holding forth to half-asleep employees, was so laughable. His method of motivating his staff was to talk to them about ideals! Discussing ideals with the constantly-turning workforce of the food industry? Did they dream of growing someone else’s roast duck restaurant into something great? To Hirosue, the most effective way to motivate staff was simple: reduce their hours, or raise their pay. Otherwise, why were the servers here so different from himself?

Hirosue had thought all of that in a very short span of time. He didn’t continue.

Komori took Hirosue’s stillness as a sign for her to start first. She said “I’ll begin” and picked up the duck and side dishes one by one, wrapping them in a pancake.

When she’d finished wrapping it, she paused.

Then she smiled, and raised her hand toward Hirosue’s face.

“Ahh~”

Hirosue blinked. Another thing he hadn’t anticipated.

He took a bite of the pancake Komori had wrapped, holding it with one hand to keep it from falling. He clumsily finished it, swallowed.

“Is it good?” Komori asked with delight.

Of course it was good; the restaurant where Tanaka worked could never produce a roast duck this good. Yet Hirosue felt a sudden sting behind his nose, followed by a sensation that was something like an almost-yawn, almost-sneeze, but neither, leaving him slightly breathless.

“It’s good! Go ahead and eat too, don’t be shy.”

“Hehe, okay, okay.”

The jazz moved into a jam session. With looks between them, Hirosue and Komori quickly blended into the surrounding crowd and became a part of it, eating the roast duck with pleasure. Over the course of the conversation, Hirosue learned that Komori, like him, had no complete family. She’d originally lived in Fukuoka. When she was in middle school, her parents divorced and she moved to Tokyo with her mother. In her lowest moments, she had continued to love the sea at Fukuoka and the streets of Tokyo, so she’d started recording them in a sketchbook. Gradually, she grew interested in art, and at the same time, with her mother’s support, her mother also being a teacher, she found her way onto the path of education, with a clear goal, as though this were her calling from birth. But she said she felt none of the burden that might come with such a calling, because this really was something she loved.

Hirosue was so absorbed he started to think back on his own life. He thought about the turning point. A hundred and twenty hours after that day full of voices and laughter, the day he had successfully entered university, a black 2009 Honda Civic Coupe hit a budget Toyota carrying two people at ninety kilometers per hour on the street. Like the blow of a violent storm, glass fragments scattered across the ground like a diamond rain, the road covered in blood-stained crystal sand. The car’s paint was ripped apart in great swaths, with engine oil and blood flowing out from within, making it seem like a demon-possessed car that was bleeding. The car doors, hood, and trunk were warped and twisted; the whole scene stood incongruously in the road like installation art, emitting a tremendous buzzing sound. The crowd nearby screamed and scattered, and gradually more onlookers gathered, police arrived to set up a cordon, separating the mundane from this piece of installation art, turning the road into a cruel exhibition. When police and paramedics found the bodies, they were already in pieces; even when Hirosue viewed uncensored images online, he couldn’t make out, from those barely human-shaped remains, which was his mother, which was his father, the two people he’d lived alongside for nearly twenty years, and which was the culprit. The incident was caused by drunk driving; the car had no proper license plates and some of its core functions were damaged. But Hirosue had no chance for revenge, because the driver died on the spot. He could see that the driver’s death had been no less gruesome than his parents’. He couldn’t even savor the sight of it, because he couldn’t tell which of the three bodies belonged to the culprit. The blow this delivered to him was self-evident; his rage and grief had nowhere to go, and all he could do was curse the driver silently, curse society, or bury everything deep inside.

A sudden bleakness. Hirosue momentarily forgot the original purpose of this dinner with Komori. He told her everything he’d been through: after his parents died he’d had to drop out and start working, his credentials not even reaching the level of a vocational school graduate, with no particular distinguishing quality beyond being more polite in dealing with people and a bit more perceptive. He could only do odd jobs in small shops or small restaurants, barely getting by. His parents had left him a small apartment, which was serviceable but which he hardly bothered to maintain anymore. After drifting through several places, he was now working at a pharmacy. He had thought about learning something from the boss, slowly working his way up, but found that the boss wasn’t very educated either; there was nothing to learn from him. Komori looked at him with empathetic eyes, comforting him, affirming him. Hirosue couldn’t understand why this woman he had barely known for long had any reason to trust him so; he didn’t feel he deserved it. Yet there was no question that today was the happiest day he’d had in these two years. While eating the roast duck, he found himself stealing glances at Komori’s face, letting his thoughts roam through her long lashes and her gentle, moving eyes.

This was an angel who had stepped suddenly into his life. And he intended to kill her.

Like a shot of stimulant, his pupils contracted to a cat’s narrowness. For a moment he felt she had to die, and felt too that this death would be something exquisite for her. He wanted to sever the spider’s silk and take her with him into hell. There was no salvation in this world. He was certain of it.

But let’s enjoy this beautiful evening.

At that thought, he felt lightness through his whole body, as if today were the last day of his life, all grief erased, leaving only the stuff of dreams. They finished the roast duck and walked together down the street. At times Hirosue unabashedly looked the girl beside him over; he wasn’t sure she was real. She was still herself, the figure of Bouguereau’s bather, a gentle flush of wine color on her cheeks. Watching her walk, Hirosue suddenly realized that her gait resembled that of a girl he had noticed many times in high school. He knew very well they weren’t the same person; that girl had been in his year and should be nearly done with university by now, while Komori had only just started. When he arrived at this realization, his mind went darker, dizzily uncontrollable, like a hypoglycemic episode. This quiet night seemed to be a gift from God to Hirosue. Much of Tokyo at night should be full of bright noise, but this little lane they walked down offered nothing but the clear sound of the moon and each other’s voices. Komori’s voice was lovely, warm and enthusiastic, like the nightingale in John Keats: “Light-winged Dryad of the trees / In some melodious plot / Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, / Singest of summer in full-throated ease.” Though around them there were only low buildings and small shops, something like the fragrance of violets and the trembling of sea waves seemed to drift in the air around Hirosue. The night’s darkness held the warmth particular to summer and to poetry.

Beneath a buzzing orange-yellow streetlight, surrounded by stars, a kiss erupted quietly, one that could have shocked the world.

003

“I want to turn off the light. Is that okay?”

“Yes.”

Hirosue drew the curtains and switched off the room’s light.

…

“Why are you just standing there?” Komori said with a laugh. “Could this be your… first time?”

In those two petrified seconds, Hirosue reviewed his experience-sparse life at astronomical speed, and then gave Komori an affirmative answer. The air conditioning blew cold against him, humming, a scattered noise in the void. He walked toward Komori, his step resolute, like a crusader going to war.

“It’s all right, take your time.”

Hirosue got onto the bed. Komori’s hands rested lightly on his shoulders, and a subtle electric numbness crept up his skin. In the dark, Hirosue could only make out the echo of Komori’s breathing. Am I on the moon? It was quiet and lightless here, the air thin. Komori’s hands moved slowly downward, her body drawing close at a speed almost imperceptible. With each two centimeters her hand descended, Hirosue’s heartbeat sped up by two beats. Hirosue felt Komori’s breath land against him like the soft hammer of piano keys, notes floating up in this ark that could hold only two people, spreading a thin film of tender feeling over this desolate ground. A meteorite fell toward the lunar surface, blocking the throat, and something unwrought felt the pull of gravity. Its approach was like fate. Hirosue suddenly pulled her slender, swan-like neck to him; the meteorite plunged down, driven into the moon’s depths. The heat of the explosion spread from both their lips and mouths, this purple haze flowing and enveloping the whole planet. Together they tuned the synthesizer’s frequency; at an unhurried pace, they followed instinct to chase the drifting clouds through the ocean inside each other’s body. The clouds shifted shape, raining something sweet, dissolving little by little into a pink, incandescent warmth. Hirosue’s pupils widened; he leaned forward, his hands learning the softness of clouds, his warmth weaving with the clouds, rising, and he opened the dream. Deep fragrance and breathing spiraled and layered, tracing her body in the dark. He was almost dissolved by her.

Hirosue thought of the grandest love in the world, born aboard a ship sailing through a city of cholera. But how was that any different from himself in this moment? A vortex, a storm, two suns rising and setting together on the horizon.

Every living being dissolved into the mountains of their bodies, and pale shadows were left behind, not permitted entry to this world. Hirosue wandered into an enchanted forest, and wound through it, searching out every passionate detail. The sky darkened; he grew somewhat tired, but then he looked up and saw the blue moon hanging in the clean sky. The violin’s accompaniment shifted from soft to soaring; the moonlight cleaved through the clouds and fell fearlessly over the earth. He looked down and saw the mirror-like lake surface rippling with crystal waves, their crystalline gleam tenderly drawing him near. So he intensified the bowing, the symphony resonated, shattering the shadows and the dirges. He heard the sound of wine flowing. Waves rolled and pitched, striking the shore, radiating an intoxicating sweetness. The trees swayed, drunk. Hirosue worked hard to control the oar, to keep himself from being drowned in this lake. The music didn’t diminish, but seemed to grow ever more distant; Hirosue’s innermost consciousness was turning over, blooming into countless flowers. With each blossom, the world’s noise dropped by one degree, until at last there was nothing left but darkness and breath. This silence seemed to last a century, enough to contain all of human history from destruction to reconstruction, enough to contain one person from birth to death. Then in a flash, peal after peal of rolling thunder melted the snow that had been hardening on the mountaintop for over twenty years into an endless flowing spring, pouring into this pool shimmering with dream-like light.

Every star burst open like fireworks. A universe collapsed into a singularity. No sound. No light. No scent. No matter. No concept.

Outside the hotel window, the sky sent down a reviving rain. Rain struck the window frame like the closing credits of a film.

004

Hirosue rummaged through his bag, took out a crumpled cigarette, lit it, and began to smoke. He opened the curtains and looked out at the city lights.

After entering the room, while she showered, he had taken all the sleeping pills stolen from the pharmacy and dissolved them into one of the bottles of water in the room, shaking it until it was evenly mixed. That bottle now sat quietly on the cabinet, keeping its distance from the other two identical bottles. He stared at it, as if trying to find in it some justification for what he was about to do. The hazy faith he once carried had vanished somewhere; perhaps taken back by Satan.

Was he Satan’s faithful devotee? He had no energy left to think about it, and no desire to review his life again. He had reviewed it too many times already. But he felt, now, that he wasn’t anymore.

He placed the drugged water beside the other two bottles, shuffled their order, and made a cross on his chest.

May I be granted God’s salvation.

Through the drifting smoke, through the pulsing glow at the tip of the cigarette, he looked in silence at the painting on the far wall of the room. The light was too dim to make out what was depicted, though he didn’t care in the slightest. He held the cigarette between two fingers, which twitched faintly, loosened his mouth, exhaled something of his own past and a portion of his soul. He pursed his lips and smiled, then very quickly began to sob. After a while, perhaps finding it pointless, he took out a few paper napkins and wiped the tears and the bed dry. Then he looked again at those three bottles. Two were pure water; one had been laced with an overdose of sleeping pills. He closed his eyes for a moment, to rest them. From behind him came the steady sound of Komori’s breathing. Hirosue picked up a bottle at random, drained it, and threw the other two in the bin.

Komori had fallen into a deep sleep, drifting peacefully into dreams beside a man she had known only days. Hirosue had never so desperately wanted to be alive. He looked at Komori Saya’s white, bare skin. She was like an unprocessed roast duck hanging from a hook.

---

A Song About Wine

O the solemn-faced crematory
I tear out the pages and toss them
into your roaring furnace
You open your mouth without concern and swallow
the broken stories, and strike up
a sizzling of char.
You may set aside, for now, your
resentment of the departed,
casting driftwood into clear flowing streams
pressing back the withered ones
into the mundane world full of bitter dust,
leaving behind
a floor of blood-red devotion and
the Guanyin with severed hands.