Chapter Text
The funeral is held on the 23rd of May, beneath a brilliant blue morning sky.
Shou gets the phone call an hour after he comes home. It’s early summer, and his apartment is simmering with heat, teasing beads of sweat from his neck as soon as he enters it. Come June the season will only be wetter and hotter; the dark, at least, is a welcome respite from streets pale with dust. He sheds his shoes and jacket onto the floor, pleased to be able to discard the trappings of formality demanded of him, out of respect for a man that didn’t deserve any, and heads into the bathroom.
Within five minutes of stepping out of the shower Shou’s put the electric kettle on and downed half a cup of instant coffee, grimacing at the acidic taste that clings to his tongue. Trying and failing to find a place to put the mug down on the tiny kitchen table, Shou dumps it in the sink instead. The table is covered with papers; official documents about wills and inheritance (all of it signed off to Shou, despite everything—where did the old man think he’s going to keep everything?), ill-matched with the sketches and colour samples dumped there. There’s a pattern of post-it notes stuck to the grimy surface like an arcane code, scribbled with ideas for projects, dates with appointments and exhibition opportunities.
Shou almost doesn’t find the cell phone in time when it starts buzzing, a beetle hiding somewhere in the unique ecosystem of his kitchen. He picks it up from where he dumped it earlier and puts it to his ear without checking caller ID.
“Suzuki Shou speaking.”
“Suzuki-san? This is Iijima calling, from Iijima & Co.; I’d like to offer my condolences.”
Shou frowns.
“Really? I didn’t think lawyers made social calls to their clients.”
Iijima coughs. Shou thinks the man should be used to him by now. Unlike the elder Suzuki, Shou doesn’t have much patience for formalities.
“Technically, you’re not my client—your late father was, and I’m calling because of something he left behind.”
Something in his chest tenses up at those words. Iijima oversaw Suzuki Touichirou’s will and the transfer of his inheritance – already complicated by the fact that he’d been murdered – and Shou isn’t feeling up to turning over stones his old man had left behind on the same day that he’d buried him.
“Will it take long?” he asks.
“I’ll keep it brief,” he says, voice sounding as sticky and grey as chewed up newspaper. It makes Shou shudder even over the phone. “It’s a peculiar thing, but probably of little consequence. If I may, I’d like to ask you if you could confirm it for me.”
Shou shoots a glance at the clock in the small kitchen. He has a meeting with a potential client tomorrow, and he hasn’t put together anything to show for it yet. Not that he’s concerned. He sits down in the one chair in his apartment, picking up and thumbing through his portfolio, letting the colourful samples flicker like a disjointed film reel.
Or perhaps more like a botched animation project. Shou hasn’t taken any jobs in the past two weeks.
“Where would you say your father was born?”
Shou’s eyebrows arch.
“Seasoning City,” he says, because it’s the truth. Suzuki Touichirou was born and raised here, and had often claimed to have known the taste of its omurice before he’d learnt how to write. “Why?”
“That’s what I thought,” the lawyer says and clears his throat in a way Shou recognises. He’s about to say something he thinks is important, incriminating, or both. It’s a highly unattractive sound.
“You see, most of his papers list Ponzu Hospital here in the city as his birthplace, but there’s an… irregularity. On the records of his birth.”
The clock echoes in the small apartment overseeing the canal. It’s lacking in many ways, too cramped and with paper-thin walls, but the view is one of Shou’s favourite things about it; the columns of concrete and glass rising in the near distance, blazing red and orange when the sun sets. The sky had been clear that morning, but clouds were rapidly rolling in. Despite himself, Iijima has Shou’s interest piqued.
“I see. What kind?”
“I looked it up with some of my contacts. There was a fire many years ago now, and some documents were irreparably lost,” Iijima says. “But new copies were made of most of them. However, after your father’s death, I gained access to his effects, and the birth certificate in his possession doesn’t match the one on record.”
Somewhere outside, a garbage truck is making too much noise. Shou shuts the portfolio with a frown, tapping his fingers on the cover.
“What does it say then?”
For a second, the line goes quiet. And then Iijima says, almost apologetically:
“A village called Ichioka, near Myōri-machi. Rather, his parents are listed as residents—it wasn’t big enough to have its own hospital.”
Shou stares at the ceiling, processing this new information. It was just like his old man to keep secrets, even after his death—although he supposes everyone takes something with them to their grave.
“If it had been a different hospital here, or even a place with a similar name… Oh, well. It’s probably a hiccup in the system – either in the new document or the old one, but I thought you should be informed.”
“Thanks, Iijima-san,” he says. “Gotta run now.”
He ends the call before the lawyer has a chance to reply. Before he knows it, Shou has opened Google Maps on his phone and started searching for the place his father is supposed to have been born.
For a long time the only part of Suzuki Touichirou found was an arm; the funeral arrangements had stalled, legal procedures growing more and more tangled, until they fished half a torso out of a river and could confirm that Suzuki Touichirou, no matter where the rest of him had ended up, was dead. Shou was in his apartment when they called him then, too, holed up in a corner nursing a hangover and a bottle of melon soda. He’d missed the call.
Perhaps he should have missed the funeral, too. It would hardly have made him more of a suspect than he already was.
The younger and elder Suzukis’ falling-out was hardly a secret, and Shou saw no reason to hide it from the policemen who’d interrogated him after the investigation began. If they didn’t hear it from him, one of his father’’s business associates would’ve been happy to tell the police about the estranged son who walked out at twenty. As soon as he hit the age of majority, Shou had stuffed everything he owned of any value (and some of his father’s that he was unlikely to miss if Shou pawned them off) and left to pursue a fine arts career.
He could have refused to go to the funeral. It’s not like anyone else wanted him there – to his father’s former colleagues he was a disgrace, the selfish son of their esteemed partner who’d chosen to go against his father’s wishes to try and become an artist. Shou had almost wanted one of them to make a fuss, if only so that he could’ve been distracted from the suffocating propriety of everything. The idea that any of them might have thought he was feeling regret, or had any respect left to pay his father in the end frustrates him.
Shou looks over the pile of paper, hand hovering in the air before finding what he’s looking for. The funeral program is snatched from the pile and thrown into the sink, where it will hopefully dissolve just like Shou’s memory of today.
Outside, it begins to rain.
-
It’s still raining the next morning when Shou decides to leave.
He wakes up to the sound of raindrops tapping against the window, their trails making paths down the smooth surface. The thought is there in his mind even before he’s awake, fully crystallised as soon as Shou opens his eyes; to leave, to lay everything to rest.
Suzuki Touichirou was an inscrutable man when he was alive, and Shou had given up on trying to understand him early in life, instead settling for being as contrary as he could. It could be a mistake, a hiccup in the system like Iijima had proposed, but something as irregular as a mixed up birthplace seemed suspicious for someone as meticulous as Shou’s old man. He’d never spoken at length about his childhood or extended family either.
Letting Touichirou take his secrets to the grave irked him, as if it was too much like letting him win.
Shou boils and practically inhales two eggs for breakfast. He rifles through his meagre closet space for good travelling clothes and throws them into a pile on the floor while finishing up his coffee. Toothbrush and hair products go in a plastic bag, but he takes a bit longer to collect art materials and stuff them in the saddlebag he manages to dig out from the bottom of the closet. He scribbles a note for his landlord before going on a small treasure hunt for the keys to his motorcycle, buried somewhere beneath the mausoleum of paper mass that is Shou’s kitchen table, and doesn’t bother to double-check if he’s forgotten anything except his phone and wallet.
With his father’s fortune, Shou knows he doesn’t have to be concerned about money anymore. The transaction had been smooth, almost suspiciously so, but Shou isn’t a lawyer. He doesn’t know anything about forging birth certificates either, but he reckons it’s a fair amount easier if you have money – as most things are.
Ichioka. The town’s name beats red against the inside of his skull like a brand, like a promise.
-
The first thing Shou bought after leaving home for good was a motorcycle.
At least, it was the first big thing he bought for himself that he didn’t actually need . Of the considerable range in education offered by his father while growing up, riding a motorbike wasn’t part of it, but that hadn’t dampened Shou’s enthusiasm. The burnt orange Kawasaki Z1000 straddled by his thighs is comfortable and familiar by now, more than any bicycle had been when he was a kid.
Even so, he’d never meant to use it for long-distance travel. By the time Shou starts to catch the name of the village on the road signs, he’s cold and damp from the rain that rakes the landscapes he drives through, and the layer of clouds in the sky are thick enough that Shou can’t tell whether the sun has dipped below the treetops or not. He’s only stopped to refill the gas tank, eat lunch and double-check the directions a couple of times, and it’s still taken four hours to get there.
The trees and fields stretch tall and wide out here, flanked by mountains in the far distance. The grey clouds look like they could touch the ground, and the landscape is dark and electric in the rain, like it could light up from within at any moment. The water turns the world outside of Shou’s helmet into a Turner painting, contours blurring into spots of green and brown and grey all around him. Rain pricks the strip of skin between his helmet and jacket, and Shou’s fingers are numb where they squeeze the hand grip of the motorbike with pent-up energy and frustration. His lower back hurts, his ass itches from the friction, and the trip is beginning to feel as ill-advised as it is when he passes a sign and he’s there, tires grumbling as they roll over wet concrete and slipping on heaps of pine needles and leaves.
On some level Shou had expected muddy roads and half-rotten houses: a ghost town for the ghost of his father. It’s not until he slows down and looks closer that he can see how many of the houses are empty, the windows revealing nothing but darkness behind them.
The depopulation of the countryside isn’t a topic on the news that he ever paid much attention to, but now it stares him right in the face. Some of the houses are obviously long since abandoned, the gardens overgrown and the facades worn from wind and weather. Some were most likely left recently, only a broken window-pane or empty porch bearing witness to their solitude. Unable to sell them, the former residents must have simply left their homes standing. Other buildings proclaim that people still live here; Shou spots a small school in the centre of the village, as well as a gas station doubling as a very cramped grocery store. There’s a small woven basket by the gas pump to place money in when the storefront is closed.
When Shou reaches the other side of the village he slows down and stops outside the entrance to the local shrine, moss-covered statues and a tori gate in desperate need of repainting greeting him. Out here the houses grow thin again while the grass grows tall along the shrine path that crawls up the mountainside, between pines and fallen trees.
Driving through the village took him less than ten minutes. Shou can hear nothing out here, except for the rain and the engine idling. All the world is water.
“Well,” Shou says to himself, squinting through the raindrops chasing each other across the front of his helmet. “No wonder he left, I s’pose.”
When he left Seasoning City that morning, he assumed he’d be able to rent a room somewhere close by—Myōri-machi is only fifteen minutes and should have lodgings. Shou hadn’t thought much about the people living here, and how he would go about trying to gather the information he wanted; he’d figured he’d knock on doors and ask, if nothing else. That was still his best option, but seeing all the abandoned houses along the roads made it a very unattractive one.
Not feeling like driving aimlessly for who knows how many more hours, he tries to turn the bike around a bit further down the road to drive back through the village to the town he passed on the way here. It’s cold, and he’s getting hungry again. The road in front of him curves gently along the subtle decline of the mountainside, glistening silver from the rain; a river of asphalt stretching out ahead of him between the trees.
He almost misses the crooked mail box that stands guard a bit further down the road, and the dilapidated stone wall that slithers along the edges of it. When he passes, there’s a slight movement somewhere between those trees, and Shou thinks he can see a slim shape move further into the shadows and disappear.
Shou squints through the curtain of rain, but there’s nothing there when he looks a second time.
-
The first thing that strikes him about the woman that opens the door is that she’s very old.
There’s something almost paper-like about her. Wrinkles are etched into the skin around her eyes and mouth like delicate embroidery, and her long grey hair is pulled into a braid that almost reaches her waist.
“’Evening,” he says, attempting to recall what common courtesy is like. “I don’t mean to disturb, but I was driving by and noticed the sign saying you’ve got a free room for hire.”
Bird-like eyes stare up at him. Shou puts both hands in the pockets of his leather jacket.
“I can come back tomorrow if you like.”
Shou had almost missed the hand-painted sign, faded from years of exposure to the elements. It’s not late enough to be called an improper hour, but the overcast sky makes it seem darker and later than it is. Besides, he has some prejudiced notions of country people going to bed earlier than city folks.
She peers up at him silently with knitted brows, and Shou realises what he must look like then—strange and foreign, red hair and pale eyes, driving around in the middle of nowhere.
“I don’t expect visitors at this time of the year,” she tells him bluntly. “The room hasn’t been prepared.”
“That’s not a problem,” he replies, “I can clean it myself in the morning. As long as there’s a roof over my head I’ll manage.”
His father had always been apt at using the various ways people could be manipulated by politeness and big words. Shou preferred to bludgeon them with honesty.
“If you don’t want me to stay here, I’ll find somewhere else,” he says, shrugging with his hands in his pockets. “But I’ve got family business in these parts, so I’m not leaving anytime soon.”
The rain has let up but not stopped, and Shou’s sneakers have long since become soaked and soggy like an old sponge.
The old woman in the doorway blinks, probably taken aback by his tone.
“If you have family here, it’s safest to stay with them.”
“Sorry, but that’s gonna be hard. He died three weeks ago, and he didn’t live here for decades before he croaked.”
He’s about to ask what could possibly be dangerous out here, but she arches her eyebrows and leans forward slightly.
“What did you say your name was, boy?”
“Shou. Suzuki Shou. Nice to meet’cha."
He bows slightly, mostly because he suspects that if he offered her his hand she wouldn’t take it. When he looks at her again her expression hasn’t changed.
“I’m Moriyama Satsuki. Nice to meet you, Shou-kun. The room is on the second floor; there’s a back entrance if you’d prefer to use that,” she said, in a tone of voice that suggested she greatly preferred that Shou do. “The rent is 8000 yen per night. If you plan on staying longer it might be lowered.”
“Shouldn’t that be raised?”
“Most people don’t stay for more than two nights.”
She shuffles back into the dimly lit house; from the porch, Shou can see a well-worn carpet in the cramped hallway, paintings and tapestries covering the walls, and various brick-a-brack stacked on pallets and tables. He can see the stairs leading to the second floor, flanked by a cherry wood banister.
The rain has receded into a drizzle. Shou smiles, and hoists his backpack further up on his shoulder.
-
The old stairs whine when Shou moves his bags upstairs, dumping them without ceremony by the foot of the bed.
The house is quite small, and the walls in his room tilt, showing the incline of the roof. Shou supposes it was an attic once, but at some point in the last fifty years it was repurposed as an extra room, with pale wallpaper and dark wooden panels. There’s a small, disconnected fridge in the spare room, which surprises him. Tomorrow he’ll buy his own food; he’d intended to drive into the nearest town tonight, but Moriyama said that shops close earlier out here than in the big cities, and offered him some leftover soup.
It used to be her youngest son’s room, Moriyama had said, before he’d gone to high school in Myōri-machi, attended university in Tokyo and gotten married. If Shou turns the lights on he can still see where the posters of this stranger’s teenage years had been pinned, dark shadows on the sun-bleached wallpaper. Ghosts of a childhood Shou has never known.
He unfolds the futon and places it on the floor. There’s a bed but no mattress, and he prefers to sleep on the floor anyway. It feels freer, less constrained; easier to just get up and leave.
It smells musty in the room. Shou walks over to open the window, pulling it hard in its frame when it refuses to budge, until it suddenly shakes loose and something thin and papery falls into his face, making him jump back, thinking of long dead spiders growing stale and dry in the winter. The feel of it brushing his cheek reminds him of a fingernail.
A second later he looks down at the floor in front of the window, and even in the dim light of the single light bulb in the ceiling Shou can tell it isn’t a spider. Or any other animal for that matter: it’s a sprig of dried herbs. He picks it up and rolls the thin, grey leaves between his fingers, inhaling the strangely familiar smell that he nonetheless can’t place. Something sharp and spicy that tickles the back of his throat.
The night breeze carries the scent of forest with it. In the quiet of the countryside, Shou’s ears won’t stop ringing with the bustle and noise of the city he left earlier that day. Seasoning City seems a solid week away in time, even though he only left that morning; as far as space is concerned, it might as well not exist beyond the trees stretching into infinity around Ichioka.
He leaves the window open and lies down on the futon. Exhaustion comes over him as solid as the blanket, as if he’d been too busy to notice until now how his muscles ache. Shou sighs as he feels the sweet pull of his spine stretching out when he lies down.
Tomorrow, he’ll look for answers.
-
Suzuki Shou dreams.
He’s on some level aware that he must be dreaming. He’s not wearing shoes, for a start; the ground is cold beneath his feet, mud seeping between his toes when he walks along the lonely country road. Summer might be here, but there’s still a heavy chill in the air at night; more so up here where the moisture gathers in the air, so thick it feels as if it could become solid.
Shou is wearing nothing except for boxers and a rumpled t-shirt, the same clothes he wore when he tangled himself up in his futon. He should be concerned about it, but no worry sinks in through the cold that’s taken residence in his limbs. There’s something more important at stake, some hook pulling right below his heart that he has no choice but to follow lest his chest is ripped open.
The road stretches out before him, dark and wet with rain and moonlight. Sometimes his vision blurs and he can’t tell the road apart from the sky, as if the Milky Way spilled out across the earth. The thought drifts through his brain, unfocused and unfettered, and he can’t feel the pebbles and gravel digging into his feet when he stops, but he knows they are there.
When Shou lifts his gaze there are no stars in the sky anymore. It’s impossible to tell where the treetops end and void begins, all boundaries erased to make room for a gaping, all-encompassing whole.
He stops when he can see a light flickering about two meters above the ground. In daylight, Shou didn’t spot the iron archway that stretched over the entrance out of the darkness, framing the path that looks as if it had been paved once.
There are footsteps echoing from between the trees. With a sudden sense of urgency, Shou runs the last short distance up to the archway, grinding blood out of his heels as they kiss every sharp stone on the way. There’s a sound of night rushing through the valley, making the trees rustle and whisper around him. Shou’s heart beats red and loud in the night, an urgency with foreign roots and reaching branches growing there.
He squints into the dimness between the trees, but can see nothing. Not even the pathway, Shou realises, not even the trees themselves, because there’s nothing there anymore; no crooked pines or crouching bushes, no shadows moving in a deeper darkness. There’s only the void from between stars that shine no more, leaking further down into the world, rolling in from the mountaintops and singing mouthless songs of praise to itself.
It’s only there in the darkness he can see it. Right in front of his feet, placed horizontally so that it may align with the archway above it and the overgrown stone wall on either side.
A bloodless arm, white like the moonlight it has swallowed.