It had been a long while since I had last seen Tokyo skies.
No matter how many times I nearly met my end, or fates more incomprehensible, at the hands of some bizarre god, this was one place that never changed. Rokuhara glanced over my report, folding his fingers together.
“So. No irregularities, then?”
Rokuhara stared down at the bland and unremarkable words written on the page before him. No irregularities. That also meant no information regarding Misaki. From what I had been told, Rokuhara had once visited that village as well. The misshapen idol, the station at the end of the abandoned line. Nothing had changed for decades. Stagnant. That was the best word to describe that village. I wondered what Rokuhara had felt when he had seen that place.
“What did you think of the place?” Rokuhara asked, lifting his eyes from the page and directing them toward me.
“What did I think…?”
There was something I had been feeling ever since we returned, though I felt a little shy to admit it.
“Even though I didn’t find anything, I can’t shake this feeling that something was put to rest…”
Rokuhara stared back at me, his face as dismal as ever. He shrugged slightly.
“I felt the same way.”
My eyes widened.
“Like the pieces of something had fit together in some irreversible way. There was still something little, something small that felt left undone, but all in all, I felt as if it—whatever it was—is now over.”
Arrows of light pierced the room, reflecting off the many windows of the business district outside. Rokuhara and I stared out the window.
“Maybe it had to do with the god of the village—something that made us feel that way.”
The pile of documents cast a deep shadow. I wanted to ask Rokuhara if he had cried, too, when he left the village, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.
The hallways here always reminded me of a hospital. Miyaki was sitting on a backless sofa bench, its cushions worn thin. She glanced up at me, lifting a hand in greeting as I exited the room.
“How did it go?”
“Same old, same old. No irregularities.”
Miyaki grimaced.
“What about the handover at your old department?” I asked.
“No irregularities there, either. It looks like the transition is finally all wrapped up.”
I stuck a few coins into a vending machine tucked into the shadows and bought us each a coffee. The sounds of the cans tumbling out of the machine seemed unnecessarily heavy. I tossed one to Miyaki and then sat down next to her. Her handheld game console was blinking on top of her knee. Glancing at the screen, I saw what looked like pixelated black clouds, rendered in low resolution. A torii archway was depicted in the middle of a blank space. The black parts were supposed to be a forest.
“I’m making the last village we went to.”
“You’ve got weird tastes. I don’t ever want to set foot there again, not even in a game.”
I dragged the standing ashtray near the edge of the sofa closer to me, pulled out a cigarette, and lit up.
“If a tiny game machine can do that much, I wish someone would invent a phone you could stick in your pocket and carry around with you instead.”
“I don’t think they can.” Miyaki set down the device, bowing slightly in my direction before popping the tab on her can of coffee. “A game console is allowed to slide because it’s not actually useful. But something like a portable phone would be too amazing to overlook. They’d probably nix something like that in a heartbeat.”
“Nix? Who would do that? The government or something?”
“No, something a lot less manageable than that.”
“You know, you say some creepy stuff sometimes.”
Miyaki laughed dismissively.
“After we came back from that village, I got to thinking. What if the unknown god isn’t unknown? What if it just hides away everyone who learns of its existence?” she said.
Fluorescent light traced the lines of Miyaki’s profile. Ash fell from my fingertips.
“That…would be pretty hard to manage.”
“But at least we can still make conjectures about it. And it never leaves that village.”
Miyaki set her can down and stood up.
“If something was truly beyond our ability to do anything about, it would never even occur to us to try to deal with it in the first place. We wouldn’t even be aware that there was a phenomenon to deal with,” she said.
Despite leaving her seat, Miyaki didn’t seem to be going anywhere. She stood at the end of the hallway, facing the mesh-reinforced glass. The webbed pattern of light streaming through it swayed back and forth, soiling the hallway. We had faced a lot of inscrutable situations together, but maybe it was Miyaki herself who I truly understood the least. There was something I had never really asked her about seriously before. I decided to ask now.
“By the way…what was the name of the department you were stationed at before?”
“The department itself is gone now. The name for the thing there now is a little different…,” Miyaki said, her back still facing me. “The…Imperial Household Agency, I guess it was called.”
“The Imperial Household Agency?”
It wasn’t a title I was familiar with.
“When you say ‘Imperial Household,’ do you mean like the palace with the moat in Chiyoda Ward?”
“Something like that.”
But that place was under the jurisdiction of the Special Administrative Bureau of the Imperial Household, a department that had been around for a hundred years. Ordinary people weren’t allowed to lay eyes on that department. I hadn’t even heard there had been some sort of transfer or shake-up over there.
“That would make you pretty elite, wouldn’t it? What did you do to get yourself banished here?”
“I guess I must have learned too much,” Miyaki said. Her tone was humorous, but I was having trouble getting a read on her true feelings.
“Speaking of which, you once said you have your own issues when it comes to divine incursions. Do those issues happen to have anything to do with your getting sidelined to our department?”
Miyaki was silent for a moment. She seemed to hesitate. Outside the window, the cityscape of white buildings that formed Tokyo sprawled hazily among the blue sky and clouds.
“It’s like the god of justifications,” Miyaki said suddenly. “In a lot of ways, some big and some small, we do the same thing, don’t we? We deal with the aftermath, because allowing divine incursions to become public knowledge would supposedly invite chaos.”
“I guess so…”
I tapped the end of my cigarette on the ashtray.
“The public doesn’t know what we do. They live their lives like normal, unaware that there are gods like that out in the world.”
Miyaki continued speaking, her back still toward me.
“Think about it. Isn’t it possible then that just as there are villages that the public is completely unaware of, there could be a world where a cold war is being waged, one that involves this country and that’s being played out on a far more incomprehensible scale? And that we are living in a world where distortions happen everywhere around us to forcibly disappear that conflict—?”
The words spilled from Miyaki’s lips as if a dam had broken. None of this was what I had expected to hear. I stared at her back, forgetting to exhale my cigarette smoke.
“Katagishi, have you ever thought that we might be living in a reality where, at some point, the justifications have already been made without our being aware of it?”
“I have.”
The smoke spilled out in a thick haze from the corners of my lips.
“But it’s the same as with the incursions. We don’t have any choice but to accept what is beyond our control and go on living. It’s not like we have the power to do anything about these things.”
Miyaki turned around and smiled softly.
“I’m glad I came here to this department.”
“And I’m glad to get such a stellar partner. Even if you can be a little strange at times.”
I stubbed my cigarette out in the ashtray. It went out like a sparkler, with a hiss. I stood up, walked over to Miyaki’s side, and stared down at the streets of Tokyo.
“No matter how many years go by, it never changes, does it? Tokyo.”
Miyaki stared at the winter sky, hazy with sunlight.
“Katagishi, what year is it? Of the Showa era?”
“Showa 104, of course.”
Miyaki seemed to tremble slightly. She inhaled deeply, silently, and then exhaled, as if sighing.
“His Majesty has lived for a very long time, hasn’t he?” she said.
“Well, he is a divine being, after all.”
Tokyo Tower stood, red and singular, among the white and blue world below, like a needle piercing heaven and earth.
“Just like us, up here in our loft, looking down from on high. Who cares what happens in the world below? From here, it’s always Tokyo. From here, it always looks the same,” I said.
“‘God’s in his heaven. All’s right with the world’?”
“I think I’ve had enough of gods for now.”
Or so I said, but I had a sneaking suspicion it was too early for me to run away just yet. A feeling like I was forgetting something important. I didn’t know if I would ever get there, to whatever it was I was looking for, but I knew that if I didn’t search, the road would forever close. The only choice was to continue that pursuit. How else can humanity confront the gods?
I couldn’t see any figures below; everything was earth and sky. It truly was god’s perspective from up here, far from the insignificant concerns of humans. But as long as there were humans, there would likely be gods. And we would still be needed.
The country, the distant villages, the city of Tokyo.
Nothing ever changes.