Chapter 7

CHAPTER SIX The Other Shore of the Sky “Oh, that project? Yes, we did get it.” The editor was talking like this had nothing to do with him. On the other end of the line, I heard a voice say, “Come here a minute, Sakamoto.” “Ah, excuse me, could you hold for a moment?” Sakamoto set the receiver down with an obnoxious clunk. Scratch that one off the list, I thought, listening to the noise of the busy-sounding editorial department with one ear. I considered just hanging up, but obviously, I couldn’t do that. The office was silent except for the quiet sounds of rain and streaming radio. I was the only one here. “The city center was miraculously blessed with a sunburst for the Jingu Gaien fireworks display yesterday. However, the rain is back for revenge in full force today. The current temperature in downtown Tokyo is seventy degrees, substantially lower than average. The chill makes it hard to believe it’s August. The record-breaking long rains and cool summer are causing the cost of produce to skyrocket. The price of a pound of lettuce is nearly three times what it was last year—” As I hit the CLOSE button to turn the radio off, Sakamoto finally came back on the line. “My apologies for the wait, Mr. Suga. Um, we were discussing the project you’d sent us, correct? Hmm, I’m terribly sorry, but we held a meeting, and we’ve decided not to pick it up…” I drew an X over the project title with a red ballpoint pen. “On the Trail of the Rumored Sun Woman! The Abnormal Weather Is Gaia’s Will” had joined its fellow rejects, “The Golden Legend of Benten and the Dragon God That Sleeps in Kabuki-cho,” “In Search of the Elevator to the Hidden World,” and “Tokyo Tower Revealed to Be a Radio Tower to the Spirit World!” I’d pitched projects to several companies this week, and the only winner was “Fortysomething Journalist Gives Interview Everything He’s Got! An All-Out Report on Potency Enhancers.” “Is that right? No, yes, we’ll work hard on the next one, and I’ll be in touch.” As badly as I wanted to slam down the receiver, I replaced it gently, then immediately tsked at it. I yanked open the drawer, rummaged around inside, and found a carton of cigarettes. I took one out, and I’d just stuck it in my mouth when I heard a bell jingle and a little meeew. Rain had hopped up on the desk. The kid Hodaka had picked up the kitten without asking and started keeping it at the office, and he’d put a little bell around its neck. It sniffed at the end of the cigarette, then meowed again. Its little eyes were like glass beads staring straight into me. “…What’s your problem?” I started to feel like I was in trouble. Sighing, I snapped the unlit cigarette in two, then tossed it in the trash. I was actually in the middle of my umpteenth attempt at quitting, and this was reminding me of why. Since I was already on a roll, I picked up the receiver again, then punched in Mrs. Mamiya’s number. After several rings, I heard that stiff and proper voice. “Yes? Mamiya speaking.” Just the sound of that elegant old lady’s voice made me feel like I was in trouble again. I straightened up from my slouch, squared my shoulders, pulled myself together, and spoke all in a rush. “Mrs. Mamiya, this is Keisuke. I’m sorry to sound like I’m hurrying you, but about the meeting I requested earlier—” “This again?” Mrs. Mamiya made no attempt to hide her feelings. “I seem to recall refusing you already. I can’t let her go out on rainy days.” “Mrs. Mamiya, I’ve got the right to see her—” “As I said, what do you intend to do if I let the child go out in this awful weather and her asthma worsens? There’s rain in the forecast for next weekend as well, you know.” I choked back a sigh just before it got out. The lady was always like this. “What if it clears up…?!” “Pardon?” “If it happens to clear up this weekend,” I said, looking at Rain, “will you let me see her?” I’d been thinking about it for a while now, but it sounded crazy, even to me. “It doesn’t sound as though these long rains are expected to stop anytime soon.” “Yes, so like I said, if it does clear up. I’ll bring the car right up to your condo and get her.” “…If it happens, I’ll consider it.” With that, Mrs. Mamiya hung up. “Kei, you’re late! This is an important interview, all right?!” Natsumi was awfully impatient as I climbed into the small Honda. We were about to head over to an interview she’d gotten for us. She was technically working as my assistant, but she’s always been a people person, and she was way more gung ho about interviews than I was. I didn’t even feel like responding; I just settled silently into the passenger seat, putting my feet up on the dashboard with a thunk. “Ooh, somebody’s in a bad mood. Did a pitch fall through? Hmm?” Bingo, first try. Instead of answering, I just grumpily asked, “Where’s Hodaka?” The wipers were energetically whisking rain off the windshield. “He can’t come because he’s got another part-time job?” I opened the location-sharing app on my smartphone. Sky-blue GPS icons showed our current locations. We were heading west on Shin-Mejiro-dori. Hodaka was east of the Sumida River—around Hikifune. That’s Shitamachi. He’s got a job over there? “He’s been slacking off work lately, hasn’t he?” “It’s not like it really matters. It’s been dead at the company anyway.” Hands on the steering wheel, Natsumi went right for the jugular. Didn’t even blink. She was right: K&A Planning had definitely been getting less work recently. On top of that, Natsumi had finally decided she wanted to start job hunting. Even now, she was wearing a neatly creased white dress shirt and tight skirt. She’s a total knockout, and everywhere she goes, she leaves the world a little brighter. If she started looking in earnest, I knew she’d get results pretty fast. Still, she just showed up on her own say-so, and now she was leaving the exact same way. It kinda pissed me off. “He picked up a cat, too. Didn’t ask, of course. For a freeloader, he’s got some balls.” My frustration with Natsumi was complicated, so I redirected it and vented about Hodaka instead. After all, I was the one who’d told her over and over to “Hurry up and get a real job already.” “He’s just like you, then,” Natsumi answered coolly. “Huh?” “Hodaka probably couldn’t just leave him. They were too similar.” “…What’s that supposed to mean?” Natsumi was still gripping the steering wheel and looking straight ahead. “Well, you know…,” she said. “I bet Hodaka saw himself in that stray cat Rain. That’s the same reason you picked up Hodaka, right, Kei?” I didn’t know how to argue with that, so I swallowed my response and gazed crankily at the scenery. The wet, gray town flowed away behind us. “By the way, how much are you paying him?” she asked suddenly. “Hodaka, I mean. Per month.” I wordlessly put up three fingers. “What, just thirty thousand?!” Natsumi sounded startled. “Wow, you’re cheap!” Huh? “No…,” I mumbled, not sure whether I was about to land myself in hot water. “Three thousand…” “What?!” Natsumi’s face tensed up as I watched. “Huuuuuuuuuh? Wait, are you serious? Three thousand yen a month?! You scrooge! Are you running a sweatshop?! You’re gonna get yourself sued by the Labor Standards Bureau; kids these days will sue over anything! Heck, maybe I’ll tip them off about you myself!” Speeding up, Natsumi zipped past the cars ahead of us. Breaking out in a cold sweat, I offered excuse after excuse. “Well, I mean, I give him money for food, and he doesn’t have to pay rent, and the company pays for his cell phone, and I let the cat stay… It’s fine, isn’t it?” “Oh my god.” Natsumi glared at me with utter disgust. “No wonder he’s working other jobs…” * * * On the other side of a dense neighborhood of traditional, low-eaved houses, I could see the astonishingly huge silhouette of the Skytree. The clouds behind it had thinned, and the sun was peeking through. “My, isn’t that something? It really did clear up.” Our client, Mrs. Fumi Tachibana, looked up at the sky beyond the eaves, full of wonder. “You children are incredible. It’s a real shame you’re quitting.” Ms. Fumi was about my grandma’s age, and the way she spoke was brisk and lively, in true Shitamachi style. I was sitting beside her on the veranda. Hina was in the small garden, praying for sun, and Nagi was holding the sunshine doll umbrella over her. I watched their backs as I answered. “She ended up on television at the fireworks display, and after that, we got flooded with requests.” During the news coverage for the fireworks display, Hina had been shown as “the Sunshine Girl who’s all over the Internet!!” It was just a short clip of a girl in a yukata praying on a rooftop, filmed from the air, but the effect had been massive. The Sunshine Girl website had gotten bombarded with so many requests, it briefly crashed, and most of the vast number of requests that got through before the site went down had been some form of joke. “We really couldn’t take them all, and once we finish up the requests we’d accepted before that point—yours today, Mrs. Tachibana, and one more next weekend—we decided to close up shop for a while. Besides, I think she’s a little tired…” That was true. Hina was as energetic as ever, but lately, I’d started to see a very slight shadow in her expression. “Oh, hey, you’ve got guests?” I heard a voice, and when I turned around, a young man was walking out of the room that housed the family altar. “Ah, Taki, you came?” Ms. Fumi’s expression softened. The young man she’d called Taki looked kind; his hair was a bit lighter than average. I wonder if he’s her grandson, I thought. “You’re lighting the welcoming fire today, aren’t you? I wanted to help out. Anyway, your guests are pretty young. Are you guys friends with my grandma?” he asked us mildly. The three of us told him hello, in unison. “I wanted to at least make sure my husband had good weather on his hatsubon,” said Ms. Fumi. “Huh? …Oh, you’re right. It did stop raining, didn’t it? Grandpa was a sun man, after all.” Smiling, Taki dropped his sandals and stepped down into the garden. From the veranda, Ms. Fumi and I watched his back as he struck a match, then set fire to the hemp stalks. “I thought it might be hard for him to come back home if it was raining.” “Come back?” Nagi asked. He’d returned from the garden and started massaging Ms. Fumi’s shoulders for her before any of us noticed. This kid always hit it off really well with the clients. “You see…” Ms. Fumi was smiling comfortably. “Obon is the day when people who’ve died come back home from the sky.” “And hatsubon is the first Obon after the person has died, isn’t it?” That question came from Hina; she was standing next to the young man now. “That’s right.” “Then it’s our mother’s hatsubon, too.” I knew it. Finally, I knew for sure. The hemp stalks began to burn, crackling, and white smoke rose smoothly. Ms. Fumi turned to Hina. “Oh, your mother also passed away last year?” “Yes.” Hina and Nagi nodded. “Well, then,” Ms. Fumi said kindly. “You two step over the welcoming fire before you go, too. I’m sure your mother will protect you.” “Yes, ma’am!” The smoke from the welcoming fire rose into the blue sky showing through the hole in the clouds. “He’ll ride that smoke down from the other shore.” “The other shore?” “The world beyond. It’s always been a different world up there, beyond the sky.” Hina was shading her eyes with her hand, gazing at the world above. Out of nowhere, I wondered what it looked like through a sun girl’s eyes. * * * A dragon was flying majestically through the sky, riding the wind, while an enormous whale poked its head out of the clouds. Around it, like fish on the tide, countless tiny sky fish danced. “They say the priestess of weather saw this.” The voice, so hoarse it was barely there, belonged to the shrine’s priest. As Natsumi filmed him with her smartphone, she made an impressed noise. “It’s a fascinating picture. Fish flying in the sky! And a dragon, too! And another dragon above the mountain—that’s Mount Fuji, isn’t it? The sky is full of living things…” “That’s really something,” I said. She was right; the ceiling painting at this shrine wasn’t your average clouds-and-dragon picture. It was a painting of a dragon, but the dragon didn’t seem to be the theme. A mountain range was drawn all around its circular perimeter, and what with the billowing clouds and the fish, it seemed to show a whole world. The touch was far more delicate than an india ink painting, closer to a traditional Japanese Yamato-e painting. This place was apparently a shrine that worshipped the weather, which was unusual even for Japan. I was a little impressed with Natsumi for finding an interview subject like this guy. “Isn’t it? Isn’t it just?” the priest said happily. There was a kid in gym clothes who looked as if he’d just come from club standing next to him; he was messing with his smartphone, not interested in us. He might have been the priest’s grandkid, there to look after him. “The priestess of weather you mentioned, was she one of those? Something like a shaman?” I’d directed my question at the priest, but there was no answer—or so I thought, but then: “Huh?! What was that?” the priest shouted back at me, and for a second, I thought he was angry. The priest looked just about as worn and scratchy as his voice sounded, and apparently, he was hard of hearing as well. Made me wonder just how old he was. “Was she something like a shaman?” Natsumi relayed my question in a loud voice. A beat later, the priest nodded emphatically. “Yes, the priestess’s role is healing the weather,” he said. “I smell BS…,” I muttered in spite of myself. It would’ve made a great article for an occult magazine, but the sun woman project had already been eighty-sixed. I hadn’t managed to tell Natsumi about that yet. As for her, she was asking the priest questions with keen interest. “By healing, do you mean correcting the abnormal phenomena we’ve been getting this year?” “…Huh? ‘Abnormal phenomena,’ my eye!” The abrupt shout made us flinch, but the priest didn’t pay any attention. He was just getting more and more worked up. “Everyone is so quick to call something the ‘first in recorded history.’ It’s hogwash. All this panic is just disgraceful. ‘Recorded’? ‘First in history’? Well, how long have they been recording these things? A century at best. When do you suppose this picture was drawn? Eight hundred years ago!” “Eight hundred?!” Natsumi yelped. My eyes also widened. If he was for real, then this was from the Kamakura period. It just might be the oldest dragon-and-cloud painting in Japan. The priest was having a coughing fit. “Hey, Grandpa, take it easy,” his grandkid said, rubbing his back. “At its core, the weather is the mood of heaven,” the priest began again, when he finally got his coughing under control. “Heaven doesn’t care about what’s convenient for humans, and you can’t measure whether it’s regular or irregular. Humans are only allowed to live here temporarily; we just hold on to our place between the damp, thrashing heavens and the earth and try to keep from getting shaken off. Everyone used to know it well, long ago.” The priest’s voice seemed to echo to us from the depths of the earth. As I listened to him, I was remembering a Gyoki-style map of Japan I’d seen somewhere, way back when. It was an ancient map of Japan said to have been drawn by a single monk, before this island nation had ever been surveyed. All around an island that looked like a melted rock—something you really couldn’t have recognized as Honshu even if someone told you what it was—he’d drawn an enormous creature that looked like a dragon or a snake. That visual had made a strange sort of sense—we’re riding on the back of a dragon. The priest’s voice resounded clearly in the main shrine building, amid the sound of rain outside. “Even so, there is a tiny little thread that connects humans with heaven. That’s the priestess of weather. She’s a special individual who can take the people’s fervent wishes and deliver them to the sky. Long ago, there was someone like that in every country, every village.” When she heard that, Natsumi looked at me, her eyes full of excitement. “Kei, isn’t that the Sunshine Girl?!” True—for idle gossip, it wasn’t half-bad. An article that combined believable tradition with awareness of current issues would go over well with both editors and readers. As I thought to myself, the kid escort commented, “Hey, are you guys sure you wanna get stories from my grandpa? He’s pretty old, and so I’d take the stuff he says with a grain of salt!” “No, this is great. They’re valuable stories, and it’s a huge help!” Natsumi said, just as the priest conked the kid’s head with his fist. He’s in better shape than I figured, I thought with some relief. “Of course, everything has a price.” There was sadness in the priest’s voice now, and we all looked at him again. “Weather priestesses have a sorrowful destiny—” * * * “One, two, three!” Nagi and Hina hopped over the small welcoming fire. “You’re next, ma’am!” Nagi said. “Oh, don’t bother about me,” Ms. Fumi said with a thin smile, but Hina pulled at her hands. “Let’s go together.” “Thanks for making friends with my grandma,” Taki said, setting a plate piled high with watermelon on the veranda. He sat down beside me. “No, we’re here for a job, sort of…” I felt rather small and ashamed. When we heard laughter from the garden and looked over, we saw that the three of them had jumped over the welcoming fire together. “They look like they’re having fun,” Taki said, smiling. “How old are you guys?” he asked me. “Um, Nagi’s ten, and I’m sixteen. She’s— Oh!” Suddenly, I remembered what Hina had said earlier. “I’m pretty sure she’s turning eighteen soon.” The calendar in Hina’s apartment had had Birthday written on August 22 in Nagi’s handwriting. “A birthday! You’ll have to give her a present, then.” Taki sounded amused by something, and my heart skipped a beat. A birthday present for a girl?! I got the feeling that was way out of my depth, but it would be really cool to make Hina happy. What should I do…? Before I realized, I was deep in thought. “The watermelon’s ready, you three!” Taki called to Nagi and the others in the garden. “Yaaay!” they called back, jumping around. In the distance, thunder rumbled softly. The next thing I knew, the sky had clouded over again, and scattered raindrops had started to fall. Laughing, Hina, Nagi, and Ms. Fumi ran back to the veranda. * * * Even now, I remember feeling weirdly uneasy over what the priest had said as I drove back from the interview that day. At the time, I’d just thought it was one of your average old stories. In fact, I still don’t believe in weather priestesses or sunshine girls. There’s gotta be plenty of other, rational explanations for the things that happened after that. As a matter of fact, those anxieties might have had another, more practical cause. Like the fact that I was behind on rent payments for the office. Or our steadily dwindling number of jobs. Or my consistently crappy relationship with Mrs. Mamiya. Then there was the runaway minor I’d been keeping at the office for over a month. And all the crazy stuff he’d started doing the moment I turned my back. But it’s funny—no matter how much I think about it, I always come back to the same thing. Even if I could’ve given my past self some advice, even if I could have lived my whole life over again a few times—I bet from the moment I ran into Hodaka, I’d make the same choices every damn time. And that’s still true. I can’t tell you why, but I can tell you I’m certain.