BOOK ONE

1.

ARE YOU POOR?

If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don’t ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that’s all you need to know.

I remember telling this to someone once. I can’t remember who it was, but she really went off on me. Come on, though. What if you have one window, but it’s huge, with a garden view or something? You know, like one of those really nice big windows. How could that mean you’re poor?

But as far as I’m concerned, no one who’s ever been poor could think like that. A garden view? A nice big window? Who has a garden, though? And what the hell could make a window nice?

For poor people, window size isn’t even a concept. Nobody has a view. A window is just a blurry pane of glass hidden behind cramped plywood shelves. Who knows if the thing even opens. It’s a greasy rectangle by the broken exhaust fan that your family’s never used and never will.

You only know what it means to be poor, or have the right to talk about it, if you’ve been there yourself. Maybe you’re poor now. Maybe you were poor in the past. I’m both. I was born poor, and I’m still poor.

What got me thinking about all of this again was the girl sitting across from me. The Yamanote Line was weirdly empty for a summer day. Everyone kept to themselves, staring at their phones or reading paperbacks.

The girl must have been eight, maybe ten. On her left was a young guy with a bag of sports gear at his feet, and to her right was a pair of older girls wearing headbands with big black ribbons. She looked alone.

This kid was way too skinny. Her dark skin made the patches of psoriasis even harder to overlook. Gray shorts, legs as skinny as the arms poking from her turquoise tank top. Her lips were tight and her shoulders were stiff—she reminded me of myself as a kid. That got me thinking about what it means to be poor.

I looked at the stretched neck of her tank top and her faded sneakers, which must have started off as white. How awful would it be if she opened her mouth and all of her teeth were rotten. I realized that she had no bag. No backpack, no handbag, no purse. Does she have her money and her ticket in her pocket? I had no idea how girls her age dressed when they had to take the train, but the fact that she had nothing with her left me worried.

I had the urge to get up from my seat and go say something to her, something no one else would understand, like the little notes you write down in a corner of your notebook knowing that no one else could read them. But what could I say? Maybe something about that coarse-looking hair of hers, stuck in place, or maybe her skin. Your psoriasis will clear up when you’re older. Don’t let it get to you. What if I asked her about her windows? I never had the kind of windows you could see out of. Do you?

I checked my watch. Noon on the dot. The train rolled through the languid summer heat. From the overhead speaker, a muffled voice announced that the next stop would be Kanda. At the station, the doors opened with a sound like something being punctured, and a drunk old man staggered onto the train. The passengers around him backed away instinctively. He let out a low moan. His gray beard, fraying like steel wool, hung in a tangled mass over the buttons of his punished uniform. He clutched a badly beaten clear umbrella in one hand and reached up for a strap with the other but stumbled when he missed. The door closed, and the train pushed off. When I looked back, the girl was gone.

Setting foot in Tokyo Station, I stopped short at the sight of all the people. Where were they coming from? Where were they going? It looked more like some strange competition than a crowd. I had the lonely feeling that I was the only one around who didn’t know the rules. Gripping the strap of my tote bag for dear life, I tried to breathe.

My first visit to Tokyo Station was ten years earlier, the summer I turned twenty. It was a day like today, when you can never wipe off all the sweat.

I showed up lugging maybe ten books by my favorite authors, which I could easily have shipped ahead with the rest of my belongings, like any normal person, but insisted on keeping with me at all times, as if they kept me safe, carrying them inside this stupidly heavy-duty giant backpack that I stared at forever and finally bought at a used clothing store when I was in high school (and still use on occasion). That was 1998. Ten years now. I seriously doubt at twenty that I saw myself, in my vague dreams for the future, still being in Tokyo at thirty. No one reads my work (my blog, collecting dust in a corner of the internet, gets one or two visitors on a good day), and none of it has made it into print. Forget about readers, I barely have friends. I’m still in the same apartment with the slanted, peeling walls and the same overbearing afternoon sun, surviving off the same minimum wage job, working full time for not a whole lot more than 100,000 yen a month, and still writing and writing, with no idea of whether it’s ever going to get me anywhere. My life was like a dusty shelf in an old bookstore, where every volume was exactly where it had been for ages, the only discernible change being that my body has aged another ten years.

I checked my watch again. Quarter past twelve. Since I had shown up a solid fifteen minutes early, I leaned against one of the thick stone pillars, cool against my back, and did some people-watching. Through the endless stream of voices and sounds, I watched a family rushing from the right side of my field of vision to the left, dragging what looked like all of their belongings. I saw a mother leading a little boy by the hand, an oversized water bottle hanging at his waist. A baby was screaming and young couples wearing makeup scuffled by, flashing their white teeth.

I pulled my phone out of my bag. No texts or calls from Makiko. They must have gotten on the Shinkansen from Osaka on schedule and should be arriving at Tokyo Station in five minutes. The plan was to meet up here, by the north exit of the Marunouchi Line. I’d mailed them a map so they’d know where to go, but now I was worried, and checked the date on my phone. August 20th. No issue there. The plan was to meet outside the north exit of the Marunouchi Line in Tokyo Station on August 20th—today—at 12:30 P.M.

Dear Journal,

Okay. So I’ve been eating eggs for my whole life. But today I learned that women have ova, as in oval, which literally means egg. How is it possible I knew about sperm first? That doesn’t seem fair. Anyway, that was my big discovery for the day. I’ve tried the library at school a couple of times, but they make it so hard to check out books, not like they have a great selection anyway. Plus, it’s small and kind of dark. If you sit at one of the desks and try to read, someone’s always trying to see what you’re reading. That’s why I started going to an actual library. That way I can use the computer. Plus, being at school drains me. It’s stupid. It’s all stupid. But it’s stupid to write it’s stupid. At least everything at school just kind of happens. That’s not at all how things work at home. They’re like two different worlds. Writing is the best. You can do it anywhere, as long as you have a pen and paper. It’s free, too. And you can write whatever you want. How sweet is that. I was just thinking about the different ways to say you hate something. You can call it disgusting, repellent, revolting. I looked up disgusting in the dictionary. The dis part means undo, and the gust part means taste. I guess that makes sense.

—Midoriko

Makiko, the one visiting me today from Osaka, is my older sister. She’s thirty-nine and has a twelve-year-old daughter named Midoriko. She raised the girl herself.

For a few years after I turned eighteen, I lived with them in an apartment back in Osaka, when Midoriko was just a baby. Makiko and her husband had split up while she was pregnant, and as a single mother she was strapped for cash and needed help around the house. Rather than have me constantly running back and forth, we figured it’d be easier if I just lived there. Midoriko never met her dad, at least not that I’ve heard of. I don’t think she knows anything about him.

I still don’t really know why Makiko and her husband separated. I remember having lots of conversations with Makiko about her ex and whether they should get divorced, and I remember it was bad, but now I can’t remember how it happened. Makiko’s ex came from Tokyo, where he grew up. He moved to Osaka for work. They hadn’t been together very long when Makiko got pregnant. One thing I kind of remember is the way he called Makiko baby. Nobody talked like that in Osaka. They only said that in the movies.

We grew up on the third floor of a little apartment building near the ocean. Just two rooms, one more cramped than the other, no wall or anything between them. Izakaya on the ground floor. You could almost see the ocean. I remember going down to the water and staring at the leaden waves collapsing on the breakwater, retreating only to attack again. The whole town was ripe with salt and haunted by the action of the tides. At night it filled with boisterous drunk men. I remember seeing people crouched over by the side of the road, behind the buildings. Fistfights and screaming matches were an everyday occurrence. One time somebody even threw a bicycle in front of me. The stray dogs were always having pups, and as soon as the pups were big enough, they had pups of their own. We only lived there for a couple of years. Around the time I entered elementary school, my father left, and the three of us had to move in with my grandmother, who lived in public housing.

I only knew my father for those seven years. Even as a kid, though, I could tell he was a little man. He had the body of a schoolboy. He never worked. Just lay around the house, day and night. Komi—my mom’s mom—despised my father for putting her daughter through so much. She used to call him The Moleman behind his back. He was always wearing the same stained tank top and long johns and lounging on his futon, a permanent fixture of the room. He never turned off the TV, even when the rest of us were sleeping. Tabloid magazines and empty cans surrounded him. He smoked all day, stinking up the whole apartment, and ashed into a can. He couldn’t be bothered to sit up and would even use a little mirror to see behind him rather than turn around. Sometimes he cracked jokes, when he was in a decent mood, but he was fundamentally a man of little words. I can’t recall a single time he played with us or took us somewhere. If something ticked him off when we were sleeping or watching TV, he’d scream at us, and when he got drunk, he lost his temper and beat mom. Once he got going, he’d find some reason to slap around me and my sister, too. Deep down, we were all afraid of him.

One day, when I came home from school, he wasn’t there.

It was the same apartment, cramped and gloomy, dirty clothes on the floor, but without him, everything was different. I took a breath and went into the middle of the room. I tried using my voice. At first I was quiet, as if my voice was new to me, but then I let myself go and started saying whatever came to mind. There was no one else around. No one could stop me. Then I started moving, dancing. The more I used my arms and legs the lighter they felt. I could feel strength welling up inside of me. The layer of dust on top of the TV, the dirty dishes piled in the sink, the stickers all over the cupboard doors, the wood of the post where we had carved our heights. I saw these things every day, but now they gleamed, as if sprinkled with magic dust.

That scared me, because I knew the feeling couldn’t last. Things would go back to the way they were. My father must have stepped out for a change, but he’d be coming back. I dumped my bookbag on the floor and took my usual seat in the corner and tried to breathe.

But he never came back. Not the next day or the day after that. Before long, strange men started showing up, and when they did, my mom chased them off. Then we started pretending to be out, but the next morning always found a pile of cigarette butts outside the front door. That went on for a while. Then one day, about a month after my father went missing—my mom finally dragged his futon, sheets and all, into the bathroom and stuffed it in the tub we hadn’t used since the igniter busted. Crammed into that mildewy little space, and heavy with the smell of sweat and nicotine, my father’s futon looked filthier than humanly possible. After staring at it for a while, my mom kicked the thing with everything she had. A month after that, my mom shook us awake in the middle of the night, saying, Up, up, up. We couldn’t see her face, but we knew she was serious. We got in a taxi and never saw that place again.

I had no idea why we were running, or where we were heading that time of night. Not even a guess. After a while, I tried to ask her what was going on, without pressing her, but I knew that my father was off-limits. I couldn’t get an answer out of her. It seemed like we were driving through the dark forever, but finally we came to Komi’s house, way on the other side of town, but still less than an hour away by train. Komi was the best.

I got carsick in the taxi. Mom emptied her makeup bag and held it up for me to vomit in, but nothing really came out. I wiped the spittle off of my face with the back of my hand. Mom rubbed my back, but all I could think about was my bookbag. It had everything I needed for Tuesday’s classes, my notebooks, my stickers. Under them all, inside my sketchbook, I’d packed the picture of a castle that I spent days working on and finished the night before. My recorder was stuffed into the side pouch. My lunch pouch was dangling off the side. My new pencil case that had my favorite pencils and markers and scent balls and erasers. And my pink hat. I loved my bookbag. At night I kept it next to my futon, and whenever I left the house, I gripped the straps tight. It was everything to me. My bag was like a private room I could take with me wherever I went.

But I had left it when we ran out of the house. We raced into the dark, without my favorite sweatshirt, or my doll, or my books, or my bowl. I figured we were never going back. And that meant I would never have my bag again, or set my pencil case in its spot on the edge of the heated tea table and practice writing, or sit there and sharpen my pencils, or sit against the scratchy wall and read. It felt weird to think those things, like a part of my brain had fallen asleep. I couldn’t find the power to move my hands and feet. I asked myself if this was really me. I mean, the real me would be waking up soon, and would walk to school, and have another normal day. The me who closed her eyes to go to sleep would never have imagined that a couple of hours later, I’d leave everything behind and jump into a taxi with my mom and Makiko and be running through the night, never to return. When I stared into the dark outside the window, it felt like that version of me, who had never seen this coming, was still asleep, under the covers. When I woke up the next morning and realized that I wasn’t there, what would I do? Thinking about this brought me down. I nuzzled my shoulder into Makiko’s arm. I was getting really sleepy. With my eyelids almost closed, I could see green digits glowing in the dark. The farther we got from home, the higher the number got, without making a sound.

We ran off and started a new life, living with Komi, but it didn’t last long.

My mom died when I was thirteen. Komi died two years later.

Once it was just the two of us, Makiko and I worked like crazy. The only thing saving us from living on the street was the 80,000 yen that Komi hid behind the family altar. I remember almost nothing from the period between the start of middle school, when Mom found out she had breast cancer, and high school, when lung cancer took Komi. I was too busy working. One thing I remember is lying to the factory about my age every vacation, spring, summer and winter, all three years of middle school. The soldering irons hanging from the ceiling, and the hiss of sparks. Huge heaps of folded cardboard boxes. Most of what I remember from back then is from the bar. A little place run by a friend of my mom. Mom worked a couple of jobs during the day and worked at this bar at night. Makiko was in high school then and started there before me, washing dishes. Pretty soon I started working in the kitchen, serving sake and bar food while Mom kept the customers company. Makiko picked up a second job at a yakiniku restaurant and worked as hard as she could. She was only making 600 yen an hour, but in her best month, she managed to make 120,000 yen (which made her something of a legend in that place). For a few years after high school, they put her on the payroll, where she stayed until the place shut down. Then she got pregnant with Midoriko, and went from one job to the next, but after all these years, at thirty-nine, she still works at a bar five nights a week, living pretty much the same life as our mom. Another single mother, working herself to death.

It was almost fifteen minutes past the time we were supposed to meet, but Makiko and Midoriko still hadn’t shown. I tried calling but Makiko wouldn’t pick up or even text me back. Were they lost? Five minutes later, when I was just about to try her again, I heard a text come in.

How do I get out? I’m on the platform.

I checked the arrivals display, found the train that I was pretty sure the two of them had taken out of Osaka, bought a platform ticket at the machine, went through the gates, then headed up the escalator. Up by the tracks, the August heat was like a steam bath. I was already sweating. After weaving through the people waiting for the next train and lined up at the kiosks, I finally found Midoriko and Makiko on a bench by the end of the platform.

Hey! yelled Makiko. Look at you.

She smiled when she saw me, and I couldn’t help but smile back. Midoriko, sitting beside her, was easily twice as big as I remembered her. I couldn’t believe how much she’d grown.

Midoriko! I blurted out. Where did these legs come from? Wow.

Hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, Midoriko was wearing a plain navy crewneck t-shirt and a pair of shorts. It could have been that she was slouching—but her legs looked way too long. I slapped her on the knee. She looked at me, embarrassed, but her mother cut in.

I know, it’s unbelievable, I can’t believe how big she’s getting.

Midoriko looked annoyed and turned away. She grabbed the backpack that was on the bench beside her and hugged it in her lap. Makiko looked at me with this pained expression and shrugged. That said it all.

Midoriko had not spoken to her mother in over half a year.

I had no idea why. One day, Makiko said something to her, and she didn’t answer. That was it. At first she thought Midoriko was depressed, but that didn’t seem to be the case. She had a healthy appetite, went to school, and talked like normal with her friends and teachers. Just not with her mom. It didn’t seem like anything else was wrong. She just refused to talk at home. On purpose. Makiko had tried to figure out what was going on, treading carefully, but it was no use. Midoriko wouldn’t give her any hints.

We aren’t talking. Just paper for everything.

Not long after it started, Makiko called me, exasperated, and told me what was going on.

Paper?

Yeah. Pen and paper. Not talking. I mean, I still talk, but Midoriko writes me her responses. It’s been like that for maybe a month now.

A month?

A whole month.

Every day?

At first, I didn’t know what to do. I asked her a million questions but couldn’t figure it out. Something happened, obviously, but she won’t tell me what. Even when I yell at her, not a word. It’s a pain in my ass, but apparently she talks to everybody at school like normal . . . I bet it’s one of those things where kids blame everything on their parents. It’s a phase. It can’t last forever. It’s fine, it’s totally fine.

Makiko laughed into the phone, trying to sound cheerful. But now it had been half a year. This was the way things were, and there were no signs of them changing.

Dear Journal,

Today in health class we talked about menarche. So basically, your first period. Pretty much everyone else has already had theirs, but that’s what we talked about, how it works and what’s happening in your body that makes you bleed. Then they told us about pads and showed us what the womb looks like. Lately, when other girls go to the bathroom, the ones who’ve had their period cling together and talk about things only they understand. Like they know the rest of us are listening and want for us to hear them. There must be plenty of girls who haven’t had their period yet, but I feel like I’m the only one left.

I wonder what it feels like. I hear it hurts pretty bad, but that’s not even the worst part. Once it starts, it keeps happening, for decades. How does that ever feel normal? I know Jun got hers. She told me. But it’s weird how everyone knows I haven’t. I mean, it’s not like everyone goes around telling people when it happens. It’s not like everyone waves around their little kits for all to see when they go to the bathroom. How can everyone just tell like that?

I was wondering about the men in menarche. Turns out it’s the same as the men in menstruation. It means month, which comes from moon, and has to do with women and their monthly cycle. Moon has all kinds of meanings. In addition to being the thing orbiting the earth, it can involve time, or tides, like the ebb and flow of the ocean. So, menarche has absolutely nothing to do with men. So why spell it that way? What happened to the o?

—Midoriko

When we started walking, I realized just how tall Midoriko was getting. She was still shorter than me, but her legs were clearly longer. I joked about how tall she was, but she just rolled her eyes and started walking behind us. Makiko was so skinny. I mean, her arms were like sticks. Her old brown overnight bag looked way too heavy. I kept reaching out to grab it, saying I got it, Makiko, but she just said, I’m okay, I’m okay, and wouldn’t let me have it.

As far as I knew, this was Makiko’s third time in Tokyo. Overstimulated, she kept on saying stuff like Look at all the people, or This place is huge, or All the girls have the tiniest faces. When she almost ran somebody over, she apologized, Sorry, sorry, sorry, way too loud. I was preoccupied with making sure Midoriko was still behind us, and I engaged with Makiko just enough to sound like I was listening—but the thing that really got me was her face.

Makiko looked old.

Everyone looks older as the years go by, but that’s not what I mean. She wasn’t even forty, but if she told you I just turned fifty-three, you’d wish her happy birthday. She didn’t look older. She literally looked old.

Makiko had never been curvy, but her arms and legs and hips looked way skinnier than the Makiko I knew. I guess it could have been her clothes. She wore a t-shirt she could have stolen off a girl in her mid-twenties, a pair of low-rise skinny jeans, and chunky pink mules, two inches at least. I guess she was one of those people you see a lot these days who looked young from behind, but the second that she turned around . . . Fashion faux pas aside, her face and body were way smaller than they should have been, and her skin looked a little pale. Her fake teeth were noticeably yellow, and the metal made her gums look black. Her faded perm had thinned so much that you could see the perspiration on her scalp. She was wearing way too much foundation. It made her face look washed out and more wrinkly than it was. When she laughed, the sinews of her neck popped out. Her sunken eyes called attention to their sockets.

She reminded me of Mom. I couldn’t tell if it was just in the way that daughters start to look like their mothers over time, or if the things that happened to Mom’s body were happening to her now, too. I can’t tell you how many times I almost asked her, Hey, how are you feeling? Are you doing okay? but I always held off, not wanting to make her any more self-conscious. The weird part was, she had a ton of energy. She was used to her dynamic with Midoriko and talked to her like everything was okay, one-sided as it was. She gabbed away, so upbeat that it almost got to me.

Maki, I asked, how long do you have off?

Three days, including today.

That’s it?

We can stay tonight and tomorrow, but we’ve got to leave the next day, so I can get to work that night.

Has it been busy or what?

I wish. Makiko groaned. A lot of the other spots are shutting down.

Makiko was a hostess, but that can mean all kinds of different things. Some good, some not so good. Osaka is rife with drinking spots, but an address is enough to tell you what you should expect, in terms of clientele and atmosphere and hostesses.

She worked in Shobashi, the neighborhood the three of us worked in for years after we ran off that night and started our new life with Komi. There was absolutely nothing glamorous about Shobashi. Just rows of tired buildings, crooked and brown with age.

You can drink at a standing bar. You can get cheap noodles. You can sit down with a strong cup of coffee. Or you can find some company and spend your free time in one of the rundown inns more like a love shack than a love hotel. You can drink at Yakiniku restaurants that are long and narrow, shaped like trains, or at absurdly smoky Motsuyaki restaurants, by pharmacies whose jumbo signs for DIABETES and HEMORRHOIDS make them fit right in. No breathing room between the buildings, which means unagi restaurants rubbing shoulders with telephone clubs, and realtors sharing walls with sex shops. Busy electric signage and pachinko parlors waving banners. Seal-engraving businesses whose owners never bothered coming in. Video arcades that looked anything but fun.

Aside from the people coming in and out or simply walking by, you’ll find people slumped down motionless under the payphones, women who looked well into their sixties promising dances for 2,000 yen, and no shortage of vagrants and drunks, but you’ll also find the whole of Osaka. Shobashi comes alive at night. From appearances, it’s a dump. And from sundown to sunup, on the third floor of a building throbbing with karaoke reverb, you’ll find the bar where Makiko works, five nights a week, from seven until midnight.

There are some seats at the bar and a few box seats, which are just wrap-around sofas. Fifteen customers, and the place is packed. In one night, you’d have to really try to spend more than 10,000 yen. No one says it, but everyone knows that guests cover whatever their hostess orders, to pad their nightly sales. Since a hostess can’t get shitfaced with her customers, she’s supposed to stick to oolong tea. A tiny can for 300 yen. To cut corners, the bar makes their own brew, then chills it in the fridge and serves it up in empty oolong cans. When the hostess brings it to the table, she comes out with a look on her face that says, I opened it in the kitchen right now. Once she’s full of tea, she’ll say, I’m hungry, and ask her customer to order little sausages, or fried eggs, or some sardines, or fried chicken, stuff that sounds like the side dishes in a bento box, not something you’d want to snack on while sipping whisky. After that, it’s time for karaoke, 100 yen a song. And all the hostesses sing, young or old, whether they can carry a tune or not. Even when the customers sing their hearts out, pushing their waterlogged and salt-clogged bodies to the limit, they usually go home spending less than 5,000 yen.

The owner of Makiko’s bar was a short and heavy lady in her mid-fifties. Really nice, the one time that I met her. Her hair was dyed or bleached, more yellow than blonde, and gathered in a fat bun on her crown. Makiko told me how during her interview, this lady had asked her the funniest question, pinching a Hope cigarette between her chubby fingers.

You know what Chanel is?

The brand, right? answered Makiko.

Yeah, she said, blowing smoke out through her nostrils. You like Chanel?

She pointed her jaw at the wall, where a pair of Chanel scarves hung like posters, under Plexiglas, lit up in a yellow spotlight.

Honestly, the lady said, narrowing her eyes, I love the stuff to death.

So that’s why you called the shop Chanel, said Makiko, admiring the noble scarves.

Yeah. Women dream of Chanel. It’s expensive stuff, though. Check out these earrings. She tilted her round chin to show Makiko an ear. Despite the flattering lighting, the earring looked like it was decades old, but in its dull gold, Makiko recognized the telltale logo. She had seen it all over the bar. On the towels by the bathroom sink, on the thick paper coasters, and on the stickers slapped all over the glass door of the phonebooth in the corner. It was on their business cards, their welcome mat, and all the glasses. Apparently, everything was counterfeit, amassed over a long series of visits to the street vendors of Tsuruhashi and Minami. Even Makiko, who knew nothing about Chanel, could tell this was a bunch of crap, but this woman was seriously devoted to her collection. At the very least, the barrettes and earrings that she wore every day were the real deal. She splurged on them to commemorate the opening of the bar. It wasn’t really Chanel she loved, so much as the sound of the word and the shape of the logo. One time, when a young girl at the bar asked, Where was Coco Chanel from? the lady answered America, as if anyone who was white had to be American.

How’s Coco? I asked Makiko.

She’s fine, never better. The shop’s another story, though.

A little after two, we made it back to Minowa, the closest station to my place. Stopping along the way for a 210-yen bowl of noodles, we braved the heat and walked the ten minutes home, while the cries of cicadas smeared the atmosphere.

You came from here to meet us? Makiko asked.

No, I had something else I had to do, I was already near the station. I’m just over this hill.

Who needs a gym when you’ve got a hill like this?

At first the two of us felt good enough to chat and laugh, but the heat soon got the better of us, and we stopped talking. The incessant spray of the cicadas clogged our ears, and the sunlight pinched our skin. The roof tiles and the trees and the manhole covers hummed with white-hot summer light, but the brighter it got, the darker everything appeared. By the time we made it to my apartment, the three of us were soaked in sweat.

We made it.

Makiko sighed, and Midoriko crouched down by the potted plant at the building entrance and leaned in to get a better look at it. Then she pulled a notebook from her fanny pack and wrote [Whose plant is this?]. Her writing was oddly thick, pushed hard into the paper, like something etched in stone. It made me think of her when she was just a baby—when all she did was breathe, so tiny that she didn’t seem real. It felt impossible to me back then that she would ever feed herself or write things on her own.

I don’t know. It has to be somebody’s. My room’s on the second floor. See that window? Upstairs and on the left.

Single file, we went up the iron stairwell scabbed with rust.

It’s not exactly spacious, but come on in.

Hey, this is nice.

Makiko stepped out of her mules and practically skipped her way inside.

Look at this apartment. Lucky you!

Midoriko went straight to the back of the apartment. It was just a little kitchen and a pair of slightly larger rooms. I’d been there for nearly ten years, ever since I moved to the city.

Did you put down the carpeting? What was it before? It wasn’t wood, was it?

No, tatami. But it was stuffy when I got here, so I went with carpet.

Wiping the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand, I turned on the AC and brought it down to 72 degrees. Then I opened the folding tea table propped up against the wall and set down the three drinking glasses that I had I bought down the street for the occasion. Tiny grapes etched on the glass in a light purple. I filled each glass with ice-cold mugicha I made the night before. Makiko and Midoriko gulped it down like it was a race. Makiko leaned back and declared, That’s better! I offered her the beanbag chair that had been sitting in the corner. Midoriko set her backpack in the corner and stood up. She looked around like she was on the moon. My place was nothing special. Small and underfurnished. What seemed to grab her attention was the bookshelves.

You have so many books, said Makiko, like some sort of interpreter.

Not really.

Come on, this whole wall is books. Seriously, how many do you have?

I’ve never counted. A normal number, though.

To Makiko, who had never been a fan of reading, I’m sure it looked like I had tons of books, but I really didn’t.

If you say so.

I do.

It’s kinda crazy how we’re sisters. I couldn’t care less about books. Midoriko reads them all the time, though. Right, Midoriko?

No answer. Midoriko had her eyes glued to the shelves. She was reading every single spine.

Hey, Makiko said, wiping a strand of hair stuck to her cheek behind her ear. I know we just walked in the door, but you think I could take a shower?

Sure. The door for the bath’s on the left. Separate from the toilet.

The whole time Makiko was in the shower, Midoriko gazed at the books. Her back was so sweaty that her navy shirt looked black. I asked her if she wanted to get changed, but after a few seconds she shook her head decisively.

I watched Midoriko browse the shelves, half-listening to the sound of running water. My apartment, so stubbornly familiar, was starting to feel like another place altogether. It felt like picking up a picture you had seen a million times and realizing it had changed entirely, without you ever noticing. I sipped my mugicha and thought about this strange sensation. But I couldn’t figure out the cause of it.

Makiko emerged wearing a t-shirt with a stretched neck and a pair of baggy sweats.

I used one of your towels, she said, patting her hair dry. When I saw her with all her makeup off, I felt a little better. On the platform, I felt like I wasn’t even seeing my own sister. What a relief. I’d thought she was a walking skeleton, but she wasn’t half as skinny as I’d thought. She’d worn the wrong foundation, and way too much of it. No wonder she looked pale. Maybe she hadn’t really changed that much. It’s just that it had been so long since I had seen her. Maybe I overreacted. It had sure been a surprise, but everyone grows old, and I started thinking that maybe she looked her age after all.

Can I dry this somewhere? Where’s your balcony?

I don’t have one.

You don’t have one? Makiko was baffled. Her tone made Midoriko turn around. What kind of apartment doesn’t have a balcony?

This kind, I laughed. There’s a railing outside the window. Don’t fall.

What do you do with your laundry?

We have a space for hanging laundry on the roof. Want to check it out later? Once it cools down a little. Because we’re on a hill, it’s actually a pretty nice view.

Makiko muttered I bet and reached for the remote. She switched on the TV and started flicking through the channels. First a cooking show, then an infomercial, but when she hit the news, the screen erupted. You could tell that something really bad had happened. A reporter wearing a grave expression spoke passionately into the camera, hands clamping a microphone. Behind her was a residential area, astir with paramedics and police and a plastic tarp.

What happened? Makiko asked me.

No idea.

That morning, some guy had stabbed a college girl all over, not far from where she lived in Suginami. Her stomach, her chest, neck and face. The reporter said that she had made it to the hospital in critical condition, and that her lungs had stopped. She went on to explain that an hour after the attack, a man in his mid-twenties turned himself in at the nearby police station and was being questioned. Meanwhile, in a corner of the screen, they showed a recent picture of the girl who had been stabbed and displayed her full name. Behind me, said the reporter, You can’t see it, but there’s quite a bit of blood. She kept turning around. She looked nervous. A stream of police tape fluttered behind her, beyond which onlookers were taking pictures with their phones.

Horrible, Makiko said. Hey, didn’t this just happen?

Yeah, I said.

Two weeks earlier, they had found what seemed to be part of a woman’s body in a trash can at Shinjuku Gyoen. Pretty soon, they figured out it belonged