“It’s huuuuuge!”
As soon as they stepped outside the east exit of Shibuya Station, amid the remaining soundproof walls, Sae shouted, as if she had been waiting for this moment, “You built such a huge building, Dad!”
“Calm down, Sae,” Miyoko said. “You’ll scare Kota.”
Mitsuhiro was pushing a stroller with their four-year-old son, Kotaro, sitting in it.
“C’mon, Kota,” Sae said, turning around to lecture him. “How long’re you going to stay in the stroller?”
“No! No! Sae, no!” Kotaro immediately started kicking and flailing his arms.
“No teasing Kota,” Miyoko said, waggling her finger at Sae. “You’ll make him cry.”
“Okay…”
“Don’t stop,” Mitsuhiro said. “People are going to run into us. Let’s go.”
He kept pushing the stroller, paying no attention to Kotaro’s struggling. He wanted to get away from this intersection, with people constantly coming and going everywhere. There was a water tank deep below where they were standing, and although he had never seen it with his own eyes, Mitsuhiro was convinced that a piece of his father’s gravestone was still there.
It was Miyoko who first suggested that the family go see the newly completed East Wing. She said it was a normal thing to do, since the company she and her husband worked for spent so much time and money to build it. That was certainly true, and not even Mitsuhiro wanted to shun the place for the rest of his life. Yoshio Tamai had taught him well what wasn’t much of a concern and what he should avoid at all costs.
They now lived farther away from here since the move, but he had a premonition that he’d be a more frequent visitor in the future. He was told not to offer flowers or anything like that, but there were other things he could do. For example, he could hold his father’s belongings in his hands, recite words of appeasement in his mind, and just pray that he would never be cursed again.
Chief Sugawara told him that he made a regular habit of that. The burns he’d suffered from the car had apparently pained him for the following month, and some of the bruise-like lesions he suffered from had stubbornly refused to go away, but he was able to have them removed by Tamai Construction. Mitsuhiro didn’t ask what kind of bruises they were. He guessed that it had something to do with Chief Sugawara’s younger brother, but both Mitsuhiro and Sugawara avoided the topic. They didn’t want to create needless karma between each other.
It took Takenaka several weeks to heal the burns he’d suffered in the arson attack as well. He formally expelled Mitsuhiro from the IR department in the meantime, but Chief Sugawara scooped him up, inviting him to join the Materials Management department. It was a challenging job, as the system improvements this department oversaw had a direct link to the company’s stock price, but it was rewarding work, too.
He often thought about the construction company his father had run, and on rare occasions, he also received documents related to the ritual hall. His former colleague in the IR department had told him that the investigation work he did had become a pet project of the chairman, and its purpose had shifted to supporting the unhoused population around Shibuya Station. Maybe Takenaka and the IR team wanted to use this movement for some kind of upcoming business strategy, but Mitsuhiro didn’t really care any longer.
After that whole thing, he never heard from Okuyama at Helping Hands again. That stuck in his mind a bit. He wondered if Okuyama still concerned himself about the whereabouts of the fourteen missing people. Would Mitsuhiro ever feel the urge to call up Okuyama and tell him something he should never say to anyone? Those were questions that, for good or bad, he had a duty to bury deep inside himself.
Mitsuhiro’s family braved a long line of families and couples, went up the elevator, and ate at the restaurant they were looking for.
“Good thing we made a reservation,” said Miyoko, expressing her relief as she surveyed the massive crowd inside.
As they enjoyed their meal, Mitsuhiro caught a glimpse of someone standing at the entrance. He recognized the vague silhouette. Making sure his family didn’t notice, he checked the feel of the stone wrapped in the handkerchief in his breast pocket before taking a second look.
Araki was standing there, and Mitsuhiro felt a dull pain in his right shoulder. That always happened when it rained or whenever his heart raced. He was supposed to be completely cured, but sometimes his shoulder would just go numb on him, and he wouldn’t be able to lift his arm at all.
Mitsuhiro held his breath, trying to avoid attracting attention, and waited for the pain to go away on its own.
The sight of Araki didn’t panic him. This wasn’t a ghost escaping from the ritual hall.
Yoshio had described it as something akin to a reflection on a glass window. A reflection of fate. The mere sight of it didn’t cause any harm, and it soon disappeared anyway, but he was advised to not stare. Apparently, if you started to look directly at it, it’d gradually drift closer to you. That wasn’t a big deal, either, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience.
Mitsuhiro looked away from Araki, smiling as Sae fed Kotaro pancakes and Miyoko admonished her for putting so much syrup on them. Then he looked out the window. Just as Shimaoka had hoped, crowds of young shoppers would return to this station soon. Plus, the Tokyo Olympics were next year, and with that would come even more tourists. Regardless of whatever unexpected disasters awaited them in the future, the future of the city was bright. After all, they had done all the necessary compensation to ensure it.
Thanks to those Olympics, though, construction-material costs were rising, and distribution channels were getting constricted. Those problems would inevitably dampen investor sentiment, so there’d probably be another meeting on the subject at the beginning of the week. As he considered these things, he found himself naturally, unintentionally staring back at the people standing on the sidewalk below, looking back up at him from ground level.
There were two of them. His father and Yoshikazu Hara. He should have looked away, but he couldn’t. He put his hand on the window, wishing he could call them over.
“What are you looking at?” Miyoko asked, following Mitsuhiro’s gaze.
—Did you know that we’re all living on top of the dead?
He wanted to say it so badly, but of course he didn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to. He could imagine Miyoko or Sae someday feeling obligated to carry a belonging of his around—that Father’s Day handkerchief, maybe—and he just couldn’t say it.
“Oh, just thinking about how there’re more people around now.”
His father and Yoshikazu Hara stopped looking up and began walking with the passersby, as if they were alive, too. Mitsuhiro didn’t bother following them with his eyes. He just quietly turned his face back toward his family.