The reason for Shido Kumano’s exile from the village was quite simple. The son of the family that lived on the fifth floor had his eye on Shido’s fiancée. He already had a wife from the fourth floor, but he also kept a few lovers on the third and second levels. Shido was a nuisance to him, and he cooked up an order of expulsion based on some violation that Shido had never committed. He recalled it containing difficult words like rectitude, apostasy, and tempestuousness. He definitely remembered that the decree had spelled his name Shido Kumada, which was wrong.
There was no court or justice system in the settlement, of course. When someone from the fifth floor mandated something, there was no means to overturn it.
“You were such a good child. Why would God mistreat you so horribly?” Shido’s mother wept. When she said “God,” she was not talking about the fifth-floorer but actual, literal God. To the third-floorers, the decrees of the fifth-floor family, whom they virtually never met, were less like human decisions and closer to natural phenomena. It was the same for Shido—except that in his case, it was closer to the arrival of an entirely new, previously unknown season of the year.
Ever since meeting and speaking with the man who controlled the automated turnstiles, a desire had been building larger and larger in his subconscious—a wish to leave the village. And his exile was simply the first step to actually realizing it. Thus, he gathered his belongings and decided to go several days earlier than the deadline indicated on the edict. The only note he left behind was for Mimi.
You did nothing wrong.
He had absolutely nowhere else to go, so his first goal was to find the man named Keijin Nijo. Shido had no idea if the man’s offer to hire him was still good, as it had been years. But he tried to contact the address on the business card anyway. The only response he received was a message that the address was no longer in use. Suikanet addresses could change on their own, simply from the station’s expansion. There was nothing more to be done about it, so Shido elected to make for Kyoto instead. Whether Keijin was there or not, he presumed he’d find work in the city.
There was no reason to rush the journey, so Shido avoided the escalator slopes on the mountains, first heading downhill and then slowly north through the Nara Basin, performing contract work where he went, and seeing various ruins and other famous sites.
“There are many ancient tombstones around these parts,” said an old man he met in Asuka, pointing at the wall. The facades in that area were completely unlike the standard concrete walls of Yokohama Station. Yet they were much stranger than the natural stone you could see in movies. The best way Shido could describe it was natural rock that had been cut into rectangular shapes.
“Long, long, long ago, this place used to be the tomb of royalty. This stone comes from that era,” the old man explained.
According to the vague knowledge Shido had picked up reading historical novels, the ancient kings ruled over this area over two thousand years ago, long before Yokohama Station took over. He didn’t know why this stone would be inside the station, but he listened to the elderly man’s story with great interest.
Because he took many detours, Shido didn’t reach Kyoto until about a month after his exile.
Like other basins Inside, Kyoto became a stratified city as Yokohama Station filled the empty space between the high ground. What set it apart from places like Kofu, however, was that its corridors were extremely orderly, generated in a neat lattice pattern. The structural genetic field incorporated the memory of the original grid-based city and built layer upon layer in that pattern.
According to his last correspondence, Keijin’s place of business was Kitaoji, Horikawa, Kanoetora 7. Physical addresses in Kyoto had three coordinates, indicating north-south, east-west, and up-down. Kitaoji was near the city’s northern edge, Horikawa was slightly east of the center, and Kanoetora referred to the 27th level. Presently, the highest floor in Kyoto was Kinoeuma (the 31st), so Kanoetora was very high up. He’d heard that the strata in Kyoto were not a literal hierarchy the way they were in his village, but Shido understood that the wealthy still tended to live higher up. Keijin’s business was doing well.
In most cities, the haphazard development of Yokohama Station made addresses a source of confusion above all else, so Kyoto’s orderly, systematic address style was a true wonder in motion. Shido’s village was small enough that they possessed no concept of an address.
But when he reached the spot the address indicated, Keijin was not there. The lot belonged to a tofu restaurant. The restaurant manager said that the previous owner had sold the place three years ago, and he didn’t know where they’d gone. Shido tried asking around in the area, but it sounded as though the turnstile-based shipping business went up in smoke, and no one knew where Keijin was.
That left Shido to find a different source of work. Unfortunately, Kyoto was cold to outsiders, and he did not have anyone to vouch for him, so it was difficult to find honest employment. His area of expertise was Suika installation, but that was a job where trust was paramount, and no one would ask a wanderer like Shido to do such a sensitive process.
He settled in the lower-level slums, looking for contract jobs to get by, eventually becoming a delivery man for a tobacco seller. His role was to take the cigarettes discovered in vending machines here and there to station hollows in places like Arashiyama and Mt. Hiei. Smoking was forbidden Inside, so the station hollows closest to the big cities became de facto smoking areas. The work came with a lot of hassles if the police caught you, so highly expendable people like Shido were perfectly suited to it.
There were two police forces in Kyoto while Shido was there. The east and west sides of the city were managed by different groups, known as the left and right police. Each side justified its style while vilifying the other as illegitimate.
The left police claimed that they traced their lineage directly from the Kyoto Police that existed in the Japanese government era. The right police, meanwhile, insisted that the Kyoto Police perished in the Winter War, and thus their rival’s assertion was totally fabricated. Instead, they were the offshoot of the vigilante force that came together to maintain order in the post-war chaos. The actual civilians under their protection didn’t care, of course, and only wanted the two sides to knock it off.
There were subtle legal differences between the opposing factions. The left police outlawed tobacco and collected fines from those in possession, while the right considered it legal but subject to heavy taxation. A cigarette courier was responsible for all monetary losses.
“The worst is if they catch you on Suzaku Avenue,” an older courier told Shido. Both left and right police wandered around that centralized area, so if one side got you, the other was soon to follow, and you’d have to pay them both.
One day, in the first month of Shido’s job, he got caught by a left police officer named Higashiyama, who found the cigarettes under his clothes. Shido resigned himself to paying the fee of 30,000 milliyen, but the low-ranking officer stopped him and said, “Make an individual payment to my Suika for ten thousand milliyen, and I’ll let you go.” Naturally, Shido agreed to that.
Higashiyama had been employed by the left police for many years, but his arrogant attitude kept him from getting any promotions. For extra income, he took bribes from organized criminals. Shido made regular payments to him and received information about left police patrol routes in return. All they did was robotically follow designated routes the Suikanet gave them, so as long as he knew the paths ahead of time, he didn’t have to worry about them. After that, Shido enjoyed success as a transporter, and his boss had reason to remember his name.
He continued carrying cigarettes until he knew quite a bit about the Kyoto underworld, and eventually, he heard a few rumors about Keijin Nijo. A turnstile-based shipping business would make it safer to transport cigarettes and more dangerous drugs, so the fate of his operation was of great interest. However, the man had shuttered his place three years earlier, and no one knew where he was. Fortunately, he had a daughter named Keiha, who wasn’t even twenty yet, and she still lived in Kyoto.
Shido paid Higashiyama some money to access the citizen database using his police privileges, which was how he learned that Keiha Nijo lived at Rokujo Karasuma Kanoeuma, on the seventh floor of the city.