Cult mound. Tokyo.
Jesse Michael awoke at dawn on the floor of Haruka’s kitchen. It was raining outside. The building was a hollow square. The windows of her kitchen opened onto the shaft at the center. When he spent the night there, they waited until Haruka’s daughter was settled in her bedroom, then Jesse Michael and Haruka went into her bedroom. When Haruka fell asleep, he went to sleep on a towel spread on the kitchen floor. His conscience was clear. There were no questions. Haruka’s daughter usually woke him as she stepped over him to collect her breakfast in the morning. On those mornings, he watched her arrange pastries on a plate, pour a glass of milk. He fried Haruka an egg and allowed her daughter to claim credit. But having awoken long before the girl, he was unsure of what to do. Jesse Michael couldn’t leave. Jesse Michael looked at the time on his phone. Jesse Michael listened to the rain. From his back, he studied the counter. He got up and looked in the fridge. He quietly slid the door open to the dining room, stepped through, then slid the girl’s door open. She was awake already, lying on her stomach, looking at something on her phone. He whispered to her to follow him. She tugged at the collar of the long t-shirt she wore as a nightgown. She motioned for him to wait. She slid the door shut. She came out again. They slipped on their shoes and walked to the Doutor on the corner. She selected a hot dog, a pistachio brownie, and a brown sugar latte. He bought toast and espresso for Haruka. They carried it home. Haruka was standing in the door when they got there. Jesse Michael watched them eat and then he left.
A frying pan from the hundred-yen store above Cocos.
They spoke a language together that was a corruption of their own native tongues. From Haruka and her daughter came the dialect of Japanese public school English instruction, exclamations from Netflix series, borrowed words sent back into the original. From him came a sort of Japanese shorn of grammatical complication, learned from ward office volunteers and the chattier retirees on the arcade. Haruka and her daughter both called him, “Michael.”
Steam slowly turned the bag crinkly to soft and silent.
Jesse Michael went back to his room on the far side of Matsugaya. He stayed in Matsugaya because Haruka’s danchi was nearby. Rent was cheap. The room was small. No toilet or shower. There was a public bathroom across the street. He showered at Haruka’s. He went to the sento beside the firehouse. They accepted the coupons provided by the ward office. The building was between two cemeteries. If there were wicked ghosts in the area, he believed they wouldn’t bother him. The residents of the building’s other rooms were mostly, like him, single men in their thirties. As far as he knew, none of these men were from Tokyo. He did not see them at the festivals in the summer. Maybe they were intimidated by the unique rituals of the city. It was possible they didn’t believe in supernatural things. That was why they could live among the dead. They didn’t need to go to the shrines. They didn’t think it was possible to pray for luck. Jesse Michael was not from Tokyo. He did believe in supernatural things. The festivals were one of of the reasons he stayed in Matsugaya. He thought he was lucky to be awoken by the sound of the drums on the street outside. He walked with the processions at dusk. He went to the dances in the park. He went to the shrine fairs. He drank shochu with warm water. He paid to fire a cork rifle at stacks of cans, winking at the joke about Americans being good shots. He watched out of the corner of his eye the high school boys in their stiff slacks and shirts sweating over their dates. He went to collect a kumade. He stayed in Matsugaya because he liked being forced to go to the sento.
Wooden tablets for shoe lockers and wooden stakes for graves.
The cemeteries were invisible. They were guarded by tall concrete walls with broken glass scattered across their tops. The walls were too high to see over. The entrances to them were hidden in the temple yards. Jesse Michael never went inside. The last time he had been to a cemetery was in Minneapolis. It was a hot summer day. His mother there to watch a co-worker put into the ground.
Ripping a big handful of grass out of the lawn.
Haruka scolded her daughter for eating a hot dog for breakfast. Haruka scolded her daughter for wearing too much perfume. Haruka wanted to scold her daughter because she thought she had gone to Jesse Michael at dawn. Haruka changed out of her pyjamas and put on a skirt and a blouse. Her daughter put on her uniform. Her daughter left. Haruka did her hair. She sat on a zabuton in her dining room and watched a medical drama on her phone. She had an hour before work. It was a short walk. That was one of the reasons she stayed in Matsugaya. She had grown up on the other side of the elevated highway. Her parents lived there still. They had a house in Shitaya. When she was a girl, the house was surrounded by flat houses and fields, but it was now boxed in by towers. Haruka had not lived with her parents since she had moved out to follow her boyfriend to Nagoya. Haruka’s daughter was born in Nagoya. She moved back to Tokyo when the girl was seven. Haruka and her daughter had lived in the danchi for seven years. The ward office paid most of her rent. They helped her enroll in night classes. They helped her to find a job. They helped her to study for various licenses. She worked at a state-run home for elderly women. Her daughter went down to Nagoya during the holidays. Her daughter stayed with her parents when she worked late. Her daughter was gone most of the day. She would be home late. Haruka walked out into the rain. She got to work and did her rounds. On her lunch break, she sent Jesse Michael a message to remind him to meet her at Iriya Station at four o’clock.
Her building had old women, and his only young men.
Haruka’s life was a mystery to Jesse Michael. He had visited her parents once and seen her childhood bedroom, where he daughter now slept some nights. He saw photo albums with pictures of Haruka as a girl. She told him that she had a Playstation. She wouldn’t tell any stories about the man she had run away to Nagoya with. He didn’t ask her to tell him.
Nightmares, she called out to her mother. They rarely spoke.
Jesse Michael watched the morning news on the television set over the lockers. Nobody came to the sento in the morning. Jesse Michael undressed. Jesse Michael weighed himself. He wandered back to the television set. An explanation of the process by which a man on death row was scheduled to be removed from his cell and hanged. A traffic accident in Saitama. An update on a monkey on the loose in Setagaya, with video of the same animal in Adachi the year before, and a speculative route traced on the map for his west-east journey. But he was watching himself in the mirror, too. He was tensing his abdomen. He was clenching his fists and sticking out his chest. He was moving his hips to watch his penis wobble on his balls. He was smelling himself. Wet hair. Wet clothes. The cooking oil and jasmine incense from Haruka’s apartment. Her perfume. Her sweat. His sweat of the day before. Sweat of the night before. Sweat of the morning. He went through the sliding glass doors, taking a stool and a basin as he went. He sat in front of one of the low faucets. Rain tapped the flat roof. Rain tapped the cold and hot baths outside another set of sliding doors. He sat and washed himself, pouring basins of lukewarm water over his back, scrubbing himself with his fingers. He shaved his cheeks and under his chin with a cheap single-bladed disposable razor. He marinated himself in the free body wash. His body was as clean as his conscience. He went outside, stood under the rain. He walked slowly down the stairs into the cold pool. When anybody was around, he made sure to go all the way in. When it was empty, he went only to his knees.
The weeds in the boulevards cut right to the roots.
Jesse Michael climbed the overpass, so that he could watch Haruka coming down Showa-dori toward him. She walked with confidence, down the middle of the sidewalk, on the raised rubber track for the blind. She walked as if she knew that he was watching. He watched her face to see if she would glance upwards. She went into the Family Mart and he climbed down and went across the street.
Hands wet from the condensation. A bottle of lemon tansan.
The shrine yard was a bruise in the perfect sun-blasted concrete flank of East Tokyo. The shrine yard was dark and cold. The shrine yard was shaded by tall trees. There were streamers hanging from the trees. The shrine yard was crowded with old men and old women, who were waiting to cross through a reed loop, then to pray. On a platform above them, musicians played tinny drums. The yard was mud. There was a rack on which hung ema painted on one side with a warbler and inscribed on the other with prayers to a beatified scholar, who descended to hell to debate Yama. The yard had in one corner an iron fence and a gate, protecting a mound made of porous lava rocks and compacted dirt. The gate was open. Jesse Michael knew the story of the mound because he had read about it in a book. There had been, once, four hundred or so years ago, an ascetic, who believed in a god that was inside Mount Fuji. He believed the apocalypse was coming. He went to the mountain but was denied the peak. He starved himself to death on the mountain. Some of his followers tramped out to the mountain on pilgrimages. Some of his followers built replicas of the mountain. Jesse Michael knew that these things didn’t matter to the people that climbed the mound on the one day it was open each year to the public. The cult of Jikigyo Miroku was dead. Haruka said that she wouldn’t climb the mound. She wanted to walk through the reed gate and pray. She wanted to look at the crafts that the vendors were selling. They sat down together on a bench in the yard. The crowd left the yard and the band stopped playing.
Waiting, still, for the world to be cleansed and rebuilt.
A priest in a white gown and a tall black hat read a poem about the retreat and return of the gods. The text was distributed to the congregants by young women in red gowns. The priest scattered white paper squares. There was no wind. They settled into the mud. When the priest was done his reading, the young women began to sweep the paper squares out of the mud.
Bleached months back. A blonde tail halfway down her back.
They walked down the shadeless alleys around the shrine. He put his arm over her shoulder and pulled her close. He put his hand down across her chest, into her blouse and into her bra. Haruka said, “How should I walk like this?” She placed her arm around the small of his back, then withdrew it. “Slowly,” Jesse Michael said. He tried to match the rhythm of her steps. As they approached the butcher shop on the corner, he took his hand from her breast. They watched a fat boy on a bicycle looking at the pork croquettes in the warmer. They looked at each other and smiled and frowned. They sat together in the park. “When I was a girl,” Haruka told Jesse Michael, “we used to go to the shrine yard at night, when I snuck out at night. Maybe you wouldn’t feel scared. We felt so scared. We climbed the mountain. There was no fence in the back. There used to be houses right along the back of it. It was only a few times.” Jesse Michael asked her, “Who did you climb it with?” She couldn’t remember any names. “What did you do after you climbed it?” “We sat on top and talked,” Haruka said. “And we looked into the windows of the houses behind it.” Jesse Michael thought about how she had looked in the pictures he had seen. She had let her skin be tanned even deeper than she did now. Her eyes were very bright. She cut her hair short. He imagined her on the mound, late at night, looking down into the windows. He wished she had stayed home. She would have been happier, in the end. He wished he had never met her. She would have been happier, in the end.
Parking lots, instead. An apartment tower with a French name.
In her apartment, Jesse Michael cooked Haruka spaghetti with anchovies and cherry tomatoes. The airconditioner was on in her bedroom, but the door to the kitchen was closed. He sweated. Droplets fell at his feet. When he put the plate below her nose, she was still glueing on eyelashes. He lifted her blouse up over her head. He told her that she looked like a woman in a whiskey commercial.
“I thought it was a kofun. Until you told me…”
