Novella: “They Say in Heaven Love Comes First” (Part One)

Note: This is another component of the Compulsory Figures thematic series, written over the 2019-2020 Advent-Christmas season.

1.

A Day in the Life

It was a dreary, lingering morning in late November, and Hanadera Keiko was drinking a homemade latte in her three-room apartment in Tokyo. It was raining softly and the back of her throat tickled. She was eight years into a career in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and today was a Friday when she had been told she need not come in until ten. Some sort of meeting that was above her pay grade was happening in the meantime, and almost everybody else with whom she worked was going to attend it. She had resolved to arrive at quarter of ten to make an auspicious impression on some of her juniors within the ministry. It was now half-past-eight and her office was twenty minutes from her apartment. She had almost another hour and very little to do in it other than putting on some makeup; at present she was already half-dressed, with her undergarments and blouse on but her jacket and skirt still draped over the back of the chair in which she had eaten breakfast.

            The previous evening Keiko had been out until about eleven with Ogasawara and Mamiya, two seniors of hers who had been working for the ministry since the late 1950s and drank like Ivan Karamazov, constantly and to no apparent effect. She had kept up with them in terms of sake for about one and a half hours and in terms of conversation for about three and a half; then the topic of the new Prime Minister was brought up and Ogasawara used the term “eminence grise” to refer to him. For some reason this had driven Mamiya absolutely up the wall and he had shouted so loudly that Keiko briefly forgot who and where she was. Five minutes later Mamiya was apologizing profusely to Fourth or Fifth Keiko while First, Second, Third, and Sixth Keiko looked on phlegmatically.

            When Keiko had been about five years old she had gone through a series of acutely unpleasant experiences and ever since then she had undergone bouts of selective amnesia in between which she behaved in very different ways. After a certain point she had begun to regard these different behavior patterns as in some sense different persons; some of them had sabotaged her academic career until, shortly before her high school entrance exams, she had imposed a psychological entity sort of like an overmind or Aristotle’s (or was it Averroes’s?) “active intelligence” to whip them all into shape. This entity’s inner voice was brash and masculine and it liked movies like Shane and The Wild Bunch. Latterly she had begun thinking of herself as “Team Keiko” and had assigned the various persons whom she comprised ordinal numbers from “First Keiko” up to “Sixth Keiko.” (The active intelligence was Second Keiko, after her composed, feminine public-facing self.) That had been when she was twenty-two and had been working for MITI for about four or five months following her graduation from Kyodai. These days Third through Sixth Keikos had mostly disappeared from the everyday overlooking panorama of her mind. She could call them up like a spirit medium sometimes and put specific tasks to them, but doing so barely felt different from racking her brains for information that she had forgotten, or reacquainting herself with skills that she had not practiced recently. Fourth or Fifth Keiko, whichever it was, having to field Mamiya’s apology had been the first time in a few months now that a Keiko from under the sphere of the active intelligence had had to swim to the surface.

            Keiko, this morning, turned the television on. Some risible morning show host was spreading some piece of scurrilous gossip about Nakamori Akina. Keiko who had spent three of the past seven nights lying awake with “Oh No, Oh Yes!” stuck in her head turned the television off again with a shrug. It had been her hope that the morning shows would be focusing on the business outlook—not because she had a particular yen for the business outlook outside of work, but because spending mid-morning not at work made her feel out of sorts and as if she should go on some sort of journey for which she was not prepared.

            At about five minutes past nine Keiko started putting on her makeup. It took five minutes, within which time First Keiko and Second Keiko agreed that First Keiko would be the one interacting with the world for the rest of the day, come what may. (This decision was imposed as a diktat upon Third and Fourth Keikos; Fifth and Sixth accepted it more graciously.) At nine-ten Team Keiko was able to regard herself briefly in her mirror—dark-suited; wide-eyed; lips dark red; hair in a perm—before putting on her shoes, gloves, and overcoat; striding through her apartment to her umbrella stand; picking out a garnet-red umbrella; and taking the elevator down and out into the day.

 ❦

The morning was dark and bitterly cold beyond how it had looked from inside. Somehow this did not bother Keiko much; it was difficult to say, but if there was a reason, it was probably that she knew that the early winter rain had a connection to the life of next spring. It was not quite cold and not nearly dry enough for her breath to mist in the air but her knuckles were red beneath her gloves by the time she took them off in the lobby of her office building.

            The elevator came down to meet her; it sighed open before her and, when she got in, sighed shut behind her. Up fourteen floors she went, just as down twelve floors she had come, thinking of rain and thinking of springtime. For some reason the phrase “dry season,” in English, came to mind, despite the damp and the increasing fog outside. Keiko closed her eyes passing the twelfth floor. She opened them when the elevator sighed open again. Mamiya was standing in front of her with a concerned expression on his face.

            “You’re more than twenty minutes early, Hanadera. Please don’t think you have to impress anybody on last night’s account.”

            “Oh, don’t worry, I’m not thinking that,” said Keiko. “Shouldn’t you be in the meeting?”

            “I was showing myself to the bathroom,” said Mamiya abashedly. “Men’s room is one floor down.”

            “Of course,” said Keiko, and stepped out of the elevator so that Mamiya could step on. The elevator whooshed down. Keiko wondered why he had not taken the stairs. Perhaps his knee, hurt in a neighborhood soccer game decades ago, was bothering him again.

            Keiko’s desk, when she got to it, was piled high with binders bearing legends on their covers that had to do with Japan’s balance of trade. The topmost binder had a note from Ogasawara attached to it instructing that Keiko was to spend the day looking over the numbers and writing up a narrative from them to be provided to their mutual supervisor, a man called Tsutsu. “I’m sorry it doesn’t have you traipsing about Kyoto or Sapporo meeting with industrial spies,” the note ended, “but it might interest you nonetheless.”

            It made Keiko smile to recall the incident to which the note referred. It had been two years ago and the industrial spy in question was now one of Keiko’s pen pals. Her name was Jenny Del Susto and she lived on the east coast of the United States, far enough away that they could only get one or two letters reliably back and forth per month. Tomorrow Keiko was going to spend part of the afternoon picking out a Christmas card to send to Jenny; Jenny was religious so Keiko was thinking of buying some from the Catholic convent in Chofu City. Some people had a particular interest in stamps or cookery or the theater; Keiko’s particular interest was older American women, and she was lucky to have Jenny in her life even as much as she did. She hoped that one day they would be able to talk to each other regularly over the computer the way some of Keiko’s seniors did to industrial and trade policy researchers elsewhere in the world.

            The computer at Keiko’s desk was an NEC PC-9801 that was about five years old. It had Ichitaro with an actually quite lovely font and on occasion she had stayed at the office to type out long letters—not to Jenny, who could not read Japanese, but to others—rather than having to write them longhand. This was not, technically, allowed, at least not according to Ogasawara and Mamiya, but Ogasawara and Mamiya had for a long time more or less looked the other way at it. Once Keiko had been told to spend half an hour transcribing a translation of a letter from Donald Rumsfeld; she had not been told who was the letter’s intended recipient or whether MITI was in the business of getting the letter to that recipient or to somebody else. That had been about a year ago and had been one of the two most exciting things to happen to Keiko in 1986, along with a personal vacation to Okinawa. In Okinawa she had avoided the beach (Keiko disliked being seen in bathing suits) but spent plenty of time looking at interesting wildlife and historic sites. Thumbtacked to a bulletin board next to her 9801 was a picture of her in a safari shirt and pink shorts crouching down next to an Iriomote mountain cat and holding a thermos.

            Keiko began to look through the balance-of-trade statistics. The medium-term trend was disconcerting. Japan’s balance of trade, both overall and with the United States, was still well in the black, but it had been trending downward for a few years now and the current emphasis on electronics was not doing as much to help as had been hoped. The Reagan administration’s price war against Japanese car manufacturers was a variable that she had had a hard time figuring into her work before, but these statistics made its effects a little clearer and the picture that emerged was of a Japanese car industry that was courting a more “élite” market in the US than Keiko would have preferred. When it came to computers, NEC and its domestic competitors’ resistance to switching to clone computing was making it almost impossible to find a market for Japanese PCs abroad, and so the high-tech exports that did exist came largely in two forms. The first form was microprocessors, transistors, silicon chips, and other parts of computers and computer-like devices whose nature Keiko, as an economist rather than an engineer, did not fully understand. First Keiko had Second Keiko try to wrap his head around some of the terms being used here while First Keiko herself tackled the second form, namely consumer brown goods. Video game corporations like Atari and Nintendo were doing well and driving increasing shares of the export market, as were companies like Sony that made televisions, radios, and other entertainment goods. Keiko’s personal favorite piece of information from the topmost of the three binders, however, had to do with Suntory Beverage and Food Limited, formerly Kotobukiya, formerly Torii Shoten. Keiko’s teenage and college years had coincided with the Suntory advertisements on TV featuring Western celebrities like Sammy Davis Jr. and Francis Ford Coppola, and she had an affection for the company qua company that far outstripped her attenuated fondness for consuming its actual products. (Twice she had watched Kagemusha, the film on whose set Coppola had been filmed hawking Suntory whiskey; the first time Second Keiko had hated it but the second time he had loved it.) Suntory was doing very well internationally; the first binder had nothing but promising things to say about it.

            The text file that Keiko typed up on the basis of the statistics in the first binder closely followed her own private thoughts on the matter, except it elided the parts about her personal history with Suntory. By the time she finished typing it up there were twenty minutes to go till her lunchtime; she spent these twenty minutes printing it out and making four or five photocopies of the printout so that Tsutsu would be able to share it with his own seniors. Then she took the elevator back downstairs.

            She took the elevator with Mamiya. “Would you care to join me at Midori-ya?” he asked her during the descent. “I’ve been having a hankering for some udon, myself.”

            “I would love that,” said Keiko.

            Mamiya was fifty-four years old and wore a combover. He wore suits a little shabbier than Keiko’s but not as shabby as those of most of her juniors, and he made up for it with nice cuff links and a sapphire tie tack that had been a gift from his late wife. Mrs. Mamiya had been dead for three years and Keiko had been to her funeral. She had died of some form of cancer that Keiko did not adequately understand. The third anniversary of her death had in fact just passed a week or two ago.

            “You seem unhappy,” Keiko said to Mamiya as they walked through the rain—now nothing more than a drizzle, with tentative white sun behind a bank of white clouds. “Is it…?”

            “It feels scarier and lonelier than you’d think,” said Mamiya.

            “Perhaps,” said Keiko. “I’ve known deep loneliness, just like I’ve known deep wrongdoing. Would I have done well not to ask?”

            “I wouldn’t say so. It can’t be helped, you know? Westerners talk about ‘the one,’ and Masako always thought that was silly, but ‘the one’ is whoever you spend enough time with, wouldn’t you say?”

            “There are worse things than Western imports,” said Keiko. “Don’t let Tsutsu know I said that!”

            “Of course,” said Mamiya. They were at Midori-ya by this point, and walked in; steam rose to meet them from the warmer interior of the izakaya, so that Keiko’s glasses fogged up a little. Through the fog she could see Yukio, the man who worked the noodle bar and whom she had known for seven years now, eyeing them eagerly. Yukio had once upon a time called Keiko and Mamiya “model customers.” That had been some years ago, but his regard did not seem to have changed. Yukio was younger than Mamiya but older than Keiko; he was married to a woman who worked at a higher-end restaurant and often talked about his two young children.

            Keiko and Mamiya ordered; then Mamiya leaned back, lit a cigarette, and said, “You know, the Ministry might hire a few more women soon, you hear? Roles like yours, not just office ladies.”

            “There are a few others right now, aren’t there?” asked Keiko.

            “I’ve heard they want more. There are those that do and those that don’t, of course.”

            “Put me down as one of those who don’t,” said Keiko.

            “Really? You’re a career woman yourself, but…”

            “It’s a bit difficult,” said Keiko, “but I have heard that the more women are hired, the more poorly the men treat the women in the firm. I forget where I read this, but I’ve seen it myself, when I was at Kyodai. When I was one of the only women in the class, there was some gentility to it. When there were more women in the class, the men forgot all concept of feminism, and all I can say is that it wasn’t pretty.”

            Mamiya shrugged his shoulders. “Possibly,” he said. “I suppose you would know better than I would.”

            Their noodles arrived; Keiko had ordered ramen in a miso-based broth and Mamiya had ordered kitsune udon prepared in a way particular to Midori-ya, with the pockets of deep-fried tofu seasoned before being put into the soup. Keiko’s was so hot that for a moment she almost thought her glasses would fog up again. The hot bowl was pleasing in her hands against the cold outside.

            “You probably wouldn’t want to come back here for drinks in the evening with me and Ogasawara, would you?” Mamiya asked.

            “No,” said Keiko carefully, “but not because of last night; I actually have a relative visiting from Kyoto, my niece Chika, and I need to meet her at the station at six-thirty.”

            “Ah, yes, I’d imagine you’d prefer sobriety for that. Not to mention we’d only have half an hour, that way.” Mamiya laughed his dry laugh. “Well, it can’t be helped; this is a secret, but I don’t much care for drinking parties myself. I expect Ogasawara will ask me out and I expect I’ll leave early.”

            “What do you make of Ogasawara? I rarely see you apart from him, and you’ve known him for many years, haven’t you?”

            “It’s hard to say what to make of him, but yes, I’ve known him thirty years now,” said Mamiya.

            “Hmm,” said Keiko. “So you began at the ministry in 1957?”

            “1956, after one year elsewhere in the public sector.”

            “One year for you or one year for both of you?”

            “One year for both of us; Ogasawara and I both graduated in ’55. I forget where he was for the year before he started at MITI. I was at the Foreign Ministry.”

            “I suppose it’s a natural shift from foreign affairs to trade. Were you working on economic policy at the Foreign Ministry as well?”

            “Really what I was working for at the Foreign Ministry was tracing out a life for myself,” said Mamiya. “I met Masako there, you know; she was an office lady two years younger than me. Two years out of high school.”

            “I thought you and Masako had a miai, right?”

            “Yes, that’s so; I left the Foreign Ministry for MITI, she stayed. A few months later, our families…” He smiled sheepishly and Keiko nodded. She had throughout this conversation been working away diligently at her noodles and by now most of what was left was the broth; she ate very quickly, at almost every meal, but especially on her lunch breaks. Something about spending a leisurely lunch hour had always seemed unwholesome to her. Mamiya felt otherwise, and Mamiya had only just finished savoring the second of his three fried tofu pockets, which he generally ate before his noodles. His way of eating had always mildly annoyed her, as hers had him.

            “You’re without noodles to spare,” he observed; then, using the chopsticks that she herself had just set down, he plucked the third tofu pocket up out of his bowl and dropped it down into hers with a soft kerplop. She swallowed a gasp, then took the chopsticks back from him.

            “Have you considered finding…?” he asked.

            “Well, now,” she said. She thought back to the only person she had ever actually had sex with, back at Kyodai; it had been fun but had not gone anywhere or ended well. She thought also about Jenny Del Susto, twice her age, seas and mountains away. The obvious answer to Mamiya’s question, those two things being the case, was no; somehow, however, she felt as if saying no would not be telling him the full story. So she just said “Well, now” and left it at that.

            “I understand,” Mamiya said with a laugh, and she guessed that he probably did understand; she liked his understanding, and she knew that he would not presume upon it any more than he already had by asking her the question. She laughed too; then she ate the tofu and lifted to bowl to start sipping the broth.

 ❦

Keiko spent that afternoon going over the second and third binders and typing up little narratives from them, too, on Ichitaro. The second binder dealt with the specifics of the price war involving cars. Keiko had cut her teeth with the ministry analyzing the US’s import quotas for Japanese cars when the Reagan administration had first imposed them on the Suzuki government six and a half years ago. These days they had her dealing mostly with computer technology—both times they had sent her out to the provinces to do skullduggery with foreigners it had been with employees of computer companies—but her first love was automotive industry policy and somebody upstairs knew it. She went through five cigarettes reading over the contents of the second binder—more than usual for her.

            The third binder had to do with the JR Group. “I thought you were very conservative,” Mamiya had said to her, marveling, when she had come in with a black armband after JNR had been sold off earlier in the year. “I am very conservative,” she had told him. “I think I have a very conservative position on the appropriateness of selling off national property.” It looked, from the binder, as if the JR Group companies were doing well so far. The one in which the binder was most interested was the Railway Technical Research Institute, which had both private and public funding. The Railway Technical Research Institute was in some vague way connected to the semiconductor industry, and the semiconductor industry was right in Keiko’s line of interest. She had personally ghostwritten some explanatory letters for the policy by which every electronics company was commanded to have a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor program up and running; moreover semiconductors were one of the few aspects of computers whose exact technological function she understood, on top of her understanding of the industry’s economic impact. For this reason, her write-up on the third binder—which she did before her write-up on the second—was chiefly about semiconductors and about the possible applications of RTRI’s work to research on semiconductors. Tsutsu, as was well-known in Keiko’s office, liked semiconductors almost as much as she did, so she expected he would be pleased with this.

            It was nearing three o’ clock and the grey day was fading around the edges when retiring, accepting, bashful Fifth Keiko peeked out into the main current of Team Keiko’s mindstream. Second Keiko was inclined to play the role of the strict teacher in this situation, since Fifth Keiko had absolutely no understanding of technical writing, but First Keiko convinced him to entertain her for a few minutes while she finished up the document. Then—still not letting Fifth Keiko swim all the way to the surface, but letting her get closer than she had been before—Team Keiko sat back in her chair and mulled going out into the hallway to call in Rikako.

            Saito Rikako was the factotum who made tea and coffee, carried heavy but not too-heavy objects, and answered phones for the senior figures on Keiko’s floor and the floor below. She was one of three office ladies on this floor, a function that asked and made less of her than Keiko’s function asked and made of Keiko, and Keiko had never been sure what to make of the impression of poised normality that Rikako gave her. The woman was twenty-four and had been at some Christian university for two or three years before joining the workforce; she was dating a man older than her but younger than Keiko who worked for a home appliances manufacturer, and at some point in the next year or two it was expected that they would get married and Rikako would become a housewife. It was a shame; Keiko liked Rikako better than the other office ladies and they had had some good conversations with each other over the years. Even so, there was not much that could be done about it and Keiko had long since resolved to enjoy as best she could the time she had left in which to know Rikako.

            When Keiko did eventually call Rikako in, Rikako came bearing tea, black, Chinese, with a little lemon and a little honey. In terms of cultured affectations it was somewhere on a spectrum ranging from Ogasawara and Mamiya’s fixation on matcha to Keiko’s cousin Wakaba’s love for Vietnamese coffee, the kind prepared with condensed milk and chicory.

            “Sit with me,” Keiko said to Rikako. “Have a cup for yourself.”

            “Mr. Mamiya wants some photocopies…”

            “Mr. Mamiya will understand; remember my rapport with him.”

            “Of course.” Rikako left and came back two or three minutes later with a cup of her own. She was having what smelled like jasmine tea and had an easygoing, almost relieved expression on her face. Keiko was filled with something not quite like admiration for her. She sat down and waited for Keiko to start drinking her tea.

            Once they had both had a few sips Rikako asked Keiko about her plans for this evening. Rikako was going to a movie and wanted to know if Keiko would like to come along too. Keiko was not interested in this particular movie and said so, but she extended an open invitation to go to something else together at some point in the next few weeks.

            “You always dress yourself so nicely, Rikako,” she said. “Perhaps we could go shopping.”

            “Thank you, Ms. Hanadera,” said Rikako. “I’m afraid outside of work I don’t dress as well.”

            “Who does? You should see some pictures of me the last time I visited my brother in Ueno. I accompanied him to some exercise classes, and he and I ran around a lot doing errands before and afterwards, so I was in neon-colored spandex half the time I was there.”

            “My, and you dress so conservatively here. Were you self-conscious?”

            “I often am.”

            “I understand that feeling. Sometimes I feel more like an old lady than a girl of twenty-four. Puttering to the grocery store in a tracksuit with my tote bags!” Rikako laughed and took another sip of tea. “There’s quite a feeling to my neighborhood. Have I ever told you about it?”

            “You haven’t,” said Keiko, although she remembered, dimly, Rikako once mentioning that she lived out in the suburbs in the direction of Chiba. For some reason it wasn’t an area that she particularly associated with Rikako’s apparent social stature or with MITI’s ambience in general. This conversation was doing a fair bit to change that.

            “I still live with my parents,” said Rikako in a tone of voice that Keiko associated with the younger generation. (Was she really old enough already to be thinking about the “younger generation”?, Third Keiko asked her from her submerged position in her consciousness.) It was an odd remark, especially from somebody who was getting married after a miai; where else, Keiko wondered, would Rikako live or want to live? Not everybody could have the cool on-one’s-own city life that Keiko was always trying to put together for herself. Even Keiko got lonely sometimes.

            “There’s nothing the matter with that,” said Keiko. “I might still live with my parents myself if they lived nearer to Tokyo.”

            “Your family is from the Kansai region at first, right?”

            “Right,” said Keiko. “Uji, just south of Kyoto, to be specific. A nice town.”

            “I think my high school light music band played at a competition in Uji once,” said Rikako. “I didn’t go, though.”

            “What were your clubs in high school?”
            “The literature club and the computer club—which might surprise you, I know! And yours?”
            “None but the art club. My high school didn’t have a computer club yet; this was in the early seventies. In middle school though I was on the softball team. My high school softball team had try-outs and I just barely missed the cut.”

            “Were you missing much, I wonder? I don’t know,” said Rikako. “My brother was on a soccer team and had almost no time for anything else. And they say it’s only getting worse with the younger generation.”

            This was the first time in Keiko’s life she had heard somebody who was already markedly younger than her refer to “the younger generation,” and her first reaction was to almost spit up some of her tea. Rikako appeared to see the reaction for what it was and laughed it off. “Like I said, I do feel like a bit too much the old lady sometimes,” she said. “My boyfriend doesn’t hate it.”

            “Would you call him your boyfriend now, then?” asked Keiko.

            “I might, although it’s tough to say if others would,” said Rikako. “We haven’t done anything yet.”

            “I see. Well, I don’t think that counts for everything.” Keiko finished her tea immediately after saying this and set the cup down on her desk next to a desk calendar with a Tale of the Heike passage for each month. Rikako stood to pick it up and take it to the sink in the floor’s mysterious kitchenette, but Keiko shook her head and motioned for Rikako to stay seated. “Tell me about the computer club,” she said languidly. “I’m interested in hearing about what I might have learned, if I were a little younger.”

 ❦

Rikako’s story about the computer club at her high school in Edogawa Ward took about ten minutes, by the end of which Keiko had learned a bit more about the state of computers immediately before the first PC-98 machines and Rikako had let her tea get cold. When Rikako realized this, she drank down the rest of her tea in a single guzzling gulp, then got up, apologized for having to rush off, put her blazer back on, bowed, and left Keiko alone in her office once again.

            Keiko ran her hand against her skirt where it came to an end just above her knees and thought longingly of the suit that she had worn for six and a half years before a dry cleaner had ruined it a few months ago. It had been the suit in which she had met Jenny, and before that the suit in which she had shown her worth on the car import quotas. It had been maybe a half-shade darker than this one and the pants had better suited her than the skirt she had now. Even so, she liked this one well enough. She got compliments on it occasionally; most of these compliments came from family members and women who frequented Midori-ya at the same times of evening as her and her colleagues; she wouldn’t have had it otherwise.

            It was almost always at around this time of day that Keiko became so acutely aware of her dress and grooming. Earlier in the day she was never particularly concerned with it once she left her apartment; later in the day her concern had a tendency to evaporate. She had once been asked, by a psychotherapist no less, why she thought this was, and she had said that it had something to do with when the regular school day ended; why she had made this connection was hard for her to remember now, though, since it had been Fourth Keiko who had said it, and Fourth Keiko was rarely forthcoming about subjects like this nowadays.

            “How do you feel about the ‘end of the good times,’ Hanadera?” Ogasawara asked her, accosting her out of nowhere while she was smoothing down her skirt as an object of mental focus as she stood at the water cooler. Ogasawara was a little better-preserved than Mamiya in terms of face and hair, and even though Keiko liked him less than she liked Mamiya, there was nothing really wrong with him. She did not feel threatened or overborne by being accosted like this and often these conversations with him next to the water cooler in the vaguely waning part of the afternoon had been positive experiences and yielded important knowledge to her. She expected this to be one such conversation. She was interested in the question that he had just asked her.

            “It depends on what you mean by ‘the good times,’ I think,” she said, taking a sip of water. “I wonder sometimes if this country has ever really had any ‘good times’; oftentimes it feels like we go from one exceptional state of crisis to the next. The crisis in these times is how crowded these cities are getting.

            “I don’t say that to be snide or vapid and I don’t say it to give a stock answer,” she said hurriedly when he made a little face.

            “No, I don’t think it’s snide or vapid or a stock answer at all,” he said. “The environment people live in affects the nature of their work, and therefore the nature of their lives; or rather it affects the nature of their lives, and therefore the nature of their work.”

            “Was it you or Mamiya who once told me that the great turning point in history was when humans stopped looking at the dangerous other as wild animals and started looking at it as unfamiliar people?” asked Keiko. “I know it was one or the other of my seniors.”

            “Do you not have seniors you talk to often other than us two?” Ogasawara asked. He seemed surprised, after almost eight years of knowing her, to think that she did not.

            “You sound surprised.”

            “You so often do surprise me, Hanadera.”

            “More people tell me the same than you might expect.”

            “I’m not surprised.”

            Keiko laughed. “This conversation isn’t going anywhere. I’m busy tonight, and tomorrow is the weekend, but let’s go to lunch together on Monday. I went with Mamiya today.”

            “I would enjoy that,” said Ogasawara. “Might we go somewhere other than the Midori-ya? I like the place, but after a while enough is enough.”

            “Of course,” said Keiko. “Do you like foreign food? Not Western; I mean from specific other countries.” Ogasawara nodded, noncommittal but genuine. “There’s a place that’s been getting good reviews that serves mostly Indian food along with some Mongolian barbecue,” said Keiko. “It’s called Namaste and it’s in Shinjuku. Do you ever go to Shinjuku?”

            “Shinjuku, I’m sure you can imagine, is not really my crowd; but I have been there on a couple of occasions, yes,” Ogasawara conceded. “I’ve heard of Namaste; it was profiled in a nightlife magazine that my daughter reads. She is nineteen and likes to look for places that are fun and peppy but without the note of sleaze in them.”

            “Do you find that most places frequented by younger people have ‘the note of sleaze’ in them?” asked Keiko. “I have to say, as a younger person myself, I find that to be a little…”

            “Oh, I see,” said Ogasawara. “Yes, I suppose it is like that. I didn’t mean to say that I found that to be the case, no; indeed, I don’t really see things that way at this point. But my daughter does seem to see things that way, to think there are disreputable people in the places that might otherwise be her haunts. But she is young and outgoing and has lots of friends, and a boyfriend. Not sure if she’s still a virgin, in no small part because it isn’t really my business anymore, at this stage.”

            “I’m not sure if I would say that,” said Keiko. “It’s a question of what she wants to share with you, wouldn’t you say? The answer to that question is definitely your business. You should probably try to find a way to answer it without asking your daughter point blank if she’s still a virgin, though.”

            “I probably should,” said Ogasawara. “I probably will, don’t you worry.”

            Keiko finished her water, bowed, and made her exit. She went back to her desk and started typing up her report about the contents of the third binder.

 ❦

For the last two hours of the workday Keiko found herself second-guessing, over and over again, a couple of the things that she had said to Ogasawara. His remark about his daughter had not seemed out of the ordinary for a man his age with a daughter that age, but she worried that the way she had responded to it might have been unusual. She almost wanted to ask Chika about it this evening, but she thought she had better not.

            She got all of her reports typed up, printed, and collated into a fourth, hitherto empty binder. At this point she had half an hour left in her day, so she went to make some photocopies, at which point she finally saw Tsutsu. Tsutsu had been in his office for the whole day up to this point, seeming not to have left even to go to the bathroom or for lunch, and when Keiko did see him he looked tired and upset. It was the kind of tired and upset that she associated with personal rather than professional problems, so she demurred from asking him about it and instead merely informed him of the work that she had done up till this point in the day. He thanked her and told her to bring the fourth binder, the one with her own reports in it, to Rikako either at the end of the day or early on Monday morning. She could keep the other three binders to consult at her own leisure; many copies of those documents now existed, and Mamiya and Ogasawara both had them as well. They had, in fact, been much of what had been discussed at this morning’s meeting.

            Such was Tsutsu’s counsel to Keiko with twenty-five minutes left in her workday and the sun very red now above the houses and hills in the western sky. It felt romantic to Keiko to look out the window right now, romantic with a certain mystique and profundity to it. She stood looking out that window until a long sigh emerged naturally from her—she had not wanted to sigh just for theatrics’ sake. Then she went back to her office, picked up the fourth binder, and trotted over to Rikako’s cubicle.

            “Suppose you came out with me some evening next week,” she said to Rikako.

            “With you, Mamiya, and Ogasawara? I couldn’t possibly,” said Rikako.    

            “No; you, me, and maybe some other friends of mine, from outside of work,” said Keiko, not knowing quite who she meant by this, but also not wanting to put Rikako on the spot next to her as one of two lone individuals.

            “I think I might like that very much,” said Rikako. She did not ask to bring her fiancé, but Keiko noticed that she had moved the snapshot of him that was thumbtacked to the side of her cubicle up to a more prominent position among the other photos there.

            “I’m glad,” said Keiko. “In any case, here are the reports on the balance-of-trade statistics. Boss Tsutsu said that I was free to bring them to you early Monday morning if I wanted to, so I assume he doesn’t need them till then. You might want to ask him for an exact time before you leave, though.” Rikako’s face fell. “Or—wait. Why don’t I ask him?”

            Rikako thanked her and she went to Tsutsu’s office and asked him. He gave her a range of times late Monday morning into early Monday afternoon. She went back to Rikako and informed her, then gathered her things in her own office and made for the elevator at a few minutes past five.

            As she went down the elevator, she thought of the relieved look on Rikako’s face when she had offered to go in and speak to Tsutsu on her behalf. Yes, Keiko really did hope that no more women like Rikako were hired by this office.

 ❦

The evening was clammy, a clamminess broken up somewhat by a stiff and oddly warm wind that seemed to be coming in from the bay. A few candy bar wrappers that somebody had littered blew down the street. Keiko decided to kill a bit of time in a department store near her office; it was having a closing sale because the chain that it was part of was slowly retreating from the Kanto area, and being in it felt somehow unwholesome. It felt less like being in a real store and more like being in an uneven concatenation of large, brightly-lit rooms in which unsold merchandise happened to be stocked. About half of the merchandise had already been sold off and most of what was left was too expensive for normal people and too cheap for the conspicuous-consumption set. Fortunately, this was exactly the right price for Keiko, and she was able to buy a new purse and quite a bit of hosiery before wandering back out into the evening. The bottom floor of the department store, when she passed through it again on the way out, smelled oddly like incense.

            Chika was changing trains at Shinagawa in about ten minutes according to Keiko’s watch, and Keiko was supposed to meet her at Shibuya Station in a little less than half an hour. From there, Keiko had agreed to walk around with Chika until they found somewhere that Chika thought looked promising as a dinner joint. All of the assorted Keikos had been in favor of this idea when Chika had first suggested it over the phone, but now a few of them were balking. First Keiko reminded them that it wasn’t as if they could back out now.

            Keiko found herself waiting for Chika at Shibuya Station a little earlier than she had intended to, mostly for lack of anything better to do with her next chunk of time. She had always felt that the Tokyo Metro stations had a faintly disreputable cast to them, but she was never able to explain to anybody why she felt this way and nobody else ever seemed to agree with her about it. Waiting for Chika, she found herself feeling differently. It was pleasant. The evening was getting chilly now, but that was not the worst thing in the world, after all. Her shopping bag felt pleasantly heavy where it hung from the crook in her arm.

            Chika came bounding up an escalator. She looked flushed and excited, and well-fed, and had very much luggage with her.

            Chika was the daughter of Keiko’s sister, a woman named Wada Nobuko. Nobuko was ten years Keiko’s elder, a baby of postwar privation and uncertainty, and did not have as certain and steady an attitude towards life as Keiko did, despite being psychologically vastly more whole, vastly more entire of herself. She had lived for a while in America in her early twenties, technically married but not yet living with her husband, studying at a college on the West Coast. At this college, her name had been first reversed to “Nobuko Wada,” then corrupted to “Nobuko Wamma” somehow, and then finally abbreviated, on all but the very most official forms, to “N. Wamma.” As “N. Wamma” she had received some sort of degree in fine arts, then returned to Japan, done a few paintings under her actual name that had been shown at exhibitions in 1970 and 1971, and, in the latter year, given birth to her daughter.

            The Wadas had two more children, both sons, Makoto and Tatsuo. Both were at least a decade younger than Chika; Makoto was entering kindergarten next spring and Tatsuo was still in diapers. Part of the motivation for Chika’s visit to Keiko had been to get away from her baby brother for a few days; Chika had said over the phone that she did like and love her brother but just got tired of the noise and melodrama occasionally. As the youngest of her own siblings, Keiko had no experience of this, but she had given Chika a sympathetic ear to the utmost of her ability, and now intended to make the very best of their weekend together.

            On Saturdays Chika was typically truant from cram school. She was not a studious girl at all and probably would not have chosen to attend high school in the first place were it not for Nobuko and her husband threatening to withhold their blessing from any job that she attempted to get without first getting her high school diploma. Chika wanted a job more than she wanted a boyfriend but she was not a career woman or a jet-setter in the way that Keiko herself was (or almost was). She was fascinated with lowlifes and ne’er-do-wells and what some books on poetry called poètes maudits. Writers and artists, often Frenchmen, these led aesthetically challenging and fulfilling lives on the wrong side of the law and often on very little money. Chika’s main career goal, so to speak, was to get through high school, work as a convenience store cashier for a few years, then become a lady trucker and write haiku about tractor-trailers to publish in newspaper poetry competitions in between bar fights. She also liked fashion and furniture shopping.

            “Did you have a pleasant journey up?” Keiko asked her after their greetings.

            “I did,” said Chika with a grin. “The train was comfortable. I read some comics and listened to music on my Walkman. Nothing special, but I was excited to get here to see you.”

            “Did you see Mt. Fuji?” asked Keiko. “When I’m taking the Tokaido Shinkansen I always try to spot it, but the weather often doesn’t cooperate; and it seems like it might not have cooperated on a day like this, do you think?”

            “I did see it, from afar,” said Chika. “I’ve seen it before, you realize; Mom and I climbed part of it together once, although we didn’t get anywhere close to the top.”

            “I’ve been to the top, actually,” said Keiko.

            “Really? When?”

            “Once, a long time ago,” said Keiko. She realized as she was saying it that already she thought of university—which was when she had done this—as a long time ago, and she did not know how to feel about that. Somehow it had not sunk in when she had turned thirty back during the spring. Somehow it was sinking in now, and she had a hard time feeling comfortable with that. The physical discomfort of the clammy evening, somehow chillier now that the air was still, did not help with that. “I was twenty,” she said after a few moments’ silence. She turned to see Chika still rolling her wheeled luggage up the street behind her. “Okay,” she said, “we’re going to go back to my apartment before we go to dinner, all right? I know that wasn’t the schedule that we agreed on, but I’m not going to let a niece of mine wheel around such a big piece of luggage all evening, right?”

            “All right,” said Chika. She sounded disappointed but not crestfallen. For somebody who was interested in riffraff to the extent that Chika was, she had always had a fairly hard time of it whenever plans with family and friends had to be changed.

            They went to Keiko’s apartment building—it took them about fifteen minutes to get there—and left Chika’s luggage with a downstairs neighbor so they would not have to go to the trouble of taking the elevator up and back down. The neighbor was named Aya and she was a divorced stay-at-home mother (how that worked for her, Keiko was not sure) with two primary-school-aged boys who were watching a sentai program on TV when Keiko knocked on her door. Chika introduced herself politely and then she and Keiko were off again.

            “Do you have any restaurants you prefer, Auntie Keiko?” Chika asked.

            “I thought you were going to decide,” said Keiko. “We’re both dressed nicely and I can afford something upscale so I can treat you if you’d like.” (Chika was in her school uniform skirt, which was a dark color and a relatively demure length and could be dressed up easily, with a pinkish cashmere sweater. She had her hair in a medieval-princess-type style.)

            “That’d be nice,” said Chika. “I don’t go to fancy places very much.”
            “You don’t like fancy places very much!”

            “Once in a while is nice,” said Chika.

            “Well,” said Keiko, “there’s the Aquamarine Pavilion. They’re the kind of high-end restaurant you don’t see politicians at.”

            “Mostly businessmen and artists?”

            “I’d say so. Some former politicians and civil servants who’ve descended from the heavens onto corporate boards in old age. Also I ran into my boss Tsutsu there once, although he doesn’t go often. You definitely won’t see Takeshita or Doi or anybody like that.”

            “Is it important to you not to see them? It’s not to me as long as the food is good.”

            “It is a little important to me to remain outside that world, yes,” said Keiko. “I think statecraft is a dirty business. If the bureaucracy could remove itself from the government’s concern it would be a happy day.”

            “Odd opinion. I thought most people of your generation were hankering for more democracy.”

            “My, I wonder. Would a dictatorship be any better?” Keiko flashed a sarcastic but retiring smile. Chika understood it and laughed softly. “Yes, it’s mostly people from the business world we’ll be eating with. Neither of us is underdressed, though; it might surprise you what some of these young Tokyo businesswomen wear out to dinner.”
            “Slutty?”

            “Extremely. You shouldn’t use that word for it, though; it’s not kind.”

            “I’ll keep that in mind. You look every bit the professional lady yourself, you know.”

            “Would you believe that I used to look a bit boyish? I liked it better, almost. I like pants better than skirts. Your mother doesn’t, though; I don’t think I ever saw her wear pants when we were girls even around the house.”

            “She doesn’t. She’d probably be always in kimono if she could afford it and had the time to get dressed every morning. She says she still fits into her graduation kimono.”

            “After three kids, one as young as Tatsuo? Remarkable.”

            “I know! Would you ever have any kids yourself, Auntie Keiko?”

            “Probably not,” said Keiko, feeling somewhat guilty as she said it, as if she were personally contributing to some vast and impersonal problem, a human choice collapsed into a sociological statistic. Working for MITI, in her experience if not necessarily in anybody else’s, often involved being taken up into this sort of broad view of things, such that her behaviors were all part of a system, or a vast animal. Normally she did not mind being part of a vast animal. There was a Christian hymn, sung around the end (or beginning) of the year, that had in it the line If I were a wise man, I would do my part. Keiko was not a man and was only arguably wise, but somehow she managed to do her part nonetheless, most of the time. Chika’s question destabilized that self-image. Answering it forced Keiko to think of herself as an individual making individual choices for a second.

            “I want kids eventually,” said Chika. “I wonder if I could raise some kids on the road.”

            “Suppose you don’t tell your mother about that idea,” said Keiko with a laugh.

            Chika was slightly shorter than Keiko. Keiko moreover had a naturally fast gait, but Chika did not have to jog to catch up, because her natural gait was, it seemed, even faster now. Soon enough they were at the Aquamarine Pavilion. It was not yet as packed as it tended to get later in the evening. The building was low and relatively old-fashioned compared to the glitzy tower blocks around it. It had a discotheque-like neon façade in deference to the zeitgeist but inside it was similar to what one thought of from the high-class restaurants of Keiko’s childhood. Keiko and Chika did have to wait for a table to come open, but it only took about fifteen minutes. They spent those fifteen minutes talking about how Chika was doing in school; the answer was that she was doing surprisingly well, considering where her actual interests lay. She was studying classics with a teacher called Mr. Ibaragi and could declaim the opening to the Tale of the Heike very well indeed; she was getting graded on these declamations, even apart from knowing what the words actually referred to. Keiko did not really know what “the Gion Shoja bell” in that passage referred to, but Chika was able to explain it to her.

            “But my favorite class, I would have to say, is probably biology,” Chika said as they were finally shown to their table, in an approximately three-tatami room with a window facing the main thoroughfare. It was a Japanese-style low table, but the kind with a depression sunk into the floor underneath it so that you could put your legs under it. “Imagine! Each of us is a whole host of other tiny organisms, and many of those have even tinier organisms to be hosts of in turn. It makes you wonder what our host might be.”

            “It does,” said Keiko. “There was a book that came out recently about Planet Earth as a single immense organism. The scientists laughed it off, but it might have some value as religion, wouldn’t you say?”

            “I could imagine so,” said Chika. “It’s just so fascinating—there are things so, so much bigger than us, and there are things so, so much smaller than us too.” She sighed happily. “I do like learning,” she said, “although I still don’t think doing it in the classroom is the best for me.”

            “How much of the Heike have you read?” asked Keiko.

            “Most of it, in Modern Japanese. Just the opening in Classical Japanese. Have you read it?”

            Keiko nodded. “I was good at classics myself and I read the whole thing in Classical Japanese at university, although I didn’t understand all of it,” she said. “Do you have a favorite passage?”

            “The burning of Nara,” said Chika. “It’s so horrifying but it’s written in such a gripping way! I’m sorry to be morbid,” she said then, suddenly a little embarrassed.

            “No need to be sorry!” said Keiko. “My favorite is Kiyomori’s dream about the skulls, which is almost as grisly as yours.”

            “Did I ever tell you that my classmate Tetsu—remember, that boy my friend Aoi asked out?—did I ever tell you that he thinks we shouldn’t have to study classics and should have business administration courses in high school instead?”

            “No, you didn’t, but I’m not shocked to hear that you know somebody who thinks that,” said Keiko. “There are a lot of genuinely bad people in this country, even among the younger generation.”

            “You think Tetsu is a bad person?”

            “I think he’s met bad people.” Keiko leaned back a little and kicked her legs out under the table; she slouched to one side so that the legs would not be pointed straight at Chika. “All I can tell you, really, is that it might have been nice to learn how to run a business in high school, but I definitely wouldn’t have given up the chance to read things like the Heike just for that. Not if I were you, anyway. They used to say England was a nation of shopkeepers; now Thatcher is trying to turn it into a nation of stockholders; that might work in England, but it’s not what I want for Japan.”

            “What do you want for Japan?”

            “For people to live as they please, within the bounds of morality,” said Keiko. “It’s when it comes to what ‘morality’ means that I start to get a bit more conservative, as I’m sure you know.”

            Chika looked at the menu for several seconds, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. Then she brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear, looked up with an expression of fixity on her face, and asked, “Are you a lesbian, Auntie Keiko?”

            “I’ve often wondered,” said Keiko.

            “I think Sakura, the convenience store clerk I’ve told you about, might be a lesbian,” said Chika conversationally. “She has this cool Grace Jones haircut! Do you know about Grace Jones?”

            “Naturally. At the time that that Eyes of Laura Mars movie, whatever it was called, came out in the United States I was on a university research trip in, of all places, Texas. I saw the movie at some theatre in Austin and when I came out of it I fell to conversing with this woman who was fascinated by the lifestyles of some of the fashion models, Grace Jones among them. She was about forty and seemed bored with her life; I was twenty-one and not yet interested in mine. The part of me that likes more staid and masculine things stopped being a supercritic for a little while and we had a long conversation about Grace Jones and Gia Carangi. I haven’t heard much about her since, though; doesn’t she have a music career now?”

            Chika did not answer immediately; instead, she started laughing, a laughter that Second Keiko felt slightly wounded his pride. He tried to get some of the other Keikos to back him up in his feelings about the matter and none of them would.

            “Yes,” Chika eventually said, “Grace Jones has a music career now.” Then she pointed to a picture of something on the menu and asked “Say, is this a whole sea bream, grilled?”

 ❦

After dinner they went back to Keiko’s apartment and Keiko read through some mail that she had gotten today while Chika put on a Nakamori album.

            “Is this Fushigi?” Keiko asked distractedly as she looked over a long, boring letter from a former university friend now resident in Fukuoka.

            “Yep,” said Chika.

            “Good; I actually like this album way better than Crimson.” Keiko set aside the letter from her old friend and saw that the one below it, miraculous to report, was from Jenny. Eagerly she tore it open; she could hear Chika looking up with surprise at how loud the envelope paper was when Keiko tore it.

 ❦

Dear Keiko,

            Things are going pretty well for me here in Convent Station! I had an interesting piece of work to do in Hawaii recently, and I thought of you because it’s partway to Japan. Have you ever been? I think you might like it. Very warm weather, and a good mix of rain and sun. I prefer cooler climes myself, but I remember you mentioning you enjoy Okinawa.

            I’m looking at sixty in a couple of years and I find myself envying your youth more than a little. You’ve mentioned before that you used to envy the mellowness of age; I wonder, do you still feel that way? If you do, I would love to hear it; my “old soul” could use the flattery!

            I’m sorry this letter can’t be longer but I’m afraid I’m dashing it off sitting in a cheese store waiting for a friend; later in the day I have a function, as they say, and I wanted to write you before it slipped my mind. I’ll try to write you again, at greater length, soon. As always, feel free to write back whenever and whatever you’d like.

Yours lovingly,

Jenny Del Susto

 ❦

Keiko was about to put the letter down when she saw that there was a P.S.

 ❦

P.S. I’m recommending to you as someone to talk to about things an acquaintance of mine named Kim Spaulding. She lives on the West Coast and does something in computers; you may be able to get in touch with her via Usenet or BBS if you ever use those. In a future letter I can give you her screen name if you are interested.

 ❦

Keiko understood most of this and thought that it sounded interesting. The prospect of using computers to talk to somebody on the West Coast of the United States was conceptually familiar enough to her now that it did not sound science-fictional, but it was distant enough from the way she actually used computers that it still seemed exotic. She was intrigued.

            “Do you mind if I go through your fridge, Auntie Keiko?” Chika asked.

            “Not at all. By all means do.”

            Chika started rifling through the fridge. Keiko sat in thought, then got up. She walked to the living room’s big window and looked out over the night. The window was also a mirror; Keiko looked back at herself, a person more complete and consummated day by day, thinking about how empty her life was, and yet how full.