Prologue

Having finalized plans to attend the Kurama Fire Festival with friends from the English conversation circle I had attended in my college days, I departed Tokyo for Kyoto in late October.

I set out from Tokyo before noon, and arrived in Kyoto at around 2 P.M.

A stroll through downtown brought me from Kyoto Station to Shijō Kawaramachi, where I boarded a bus heading towards Demachiyanagi Station. As the bus crossed the Kamo Bridge, I saw black kites wheeling through the archetypically clear autumn sky.

The ticket gates for the Eizan Railway were already choked with tourists. I was leaning against a column and thinking about how early I had arrived when I heard someone shout from the other side of the crowd, “Ōhashi!” I looked over to see Nakai walking my way and waving.

“You sure are early!”

“So are you, Nakai.”

“I just hate being late. Besides, I wanted to check out the school before we all gathered here.”

“Is it still there?”

“You bet. Really brought back memories.”

The English conversation school is housed in a wooden single-story building, tucked away in a side street off the main road between Demachiyanagi Station and Hyakumanben crossing. Classes with the teacher, a foreigner, would last about an hour. Being located near Kyoto University, most of the students there were undergrads or researchers. I started attending during my second year of college, and Nakai had been in the same class every night. At the time he had been working toward his master’s.

“I got here yesterday with my wife,” he told me. Last night they had stayed at a hotel in Kawaramachi, and this morning his wife had met up with a friend to tour some of the temples before heading back to Tokyo a little early. I had met his wife several times before, having been to their wedding reception as well as the occasional social call to their apartment in Suidobashi.

We stood there shooting the breeze, waiting for the rest of our companions to show up.

“I can’t believe we’re actually getting together,” Nakai ruminated.

“...It’s been ten years, after all.”

It’s hard to say whether these ten years had been long or short. Living in Tokyo, everything that had happened in Kyoto had seemed like a very long time ago. But now that I had come to Kyoto and was talking with Nakai again, it felt like hardly any time had passed at all.

“I’m glad you reached out. I doubt I would ever have come back here otherwise.”

As Nakai made this remark, I saw Takeda emerge at the top of the stairs leading down to the Keihan Line. He was the youngest out of all of us; I had met him when he was still a first year. Seeing us standing here he jogged over, a huge smile on his face.

“Hey guys. It’s been too long!”

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Back when I was enrolled in the English conversation school, Nakai had been the nucleus of our group. He was a welcoming fellow, always inviting people to meals. It was because of him that I had gotten to know people from the other classes. We had all been students, the six of us who had ridden the Eizan line to the Kurama Fire Festival that autumn ten years ago, and Nakai had been our center.

Takeda joined us, and while we caught up with one another, Fujimura showed up. She was the same age as Takeda, and this time around she was the only woman on our trip to Kurama. When she saw us there she laughed out loud.

“It feels like it was just yesterday!”

“That’s funny, for me it feels like it was forever ago,” said Takeda. “But that’s because I’ve changed a lot. I’m a bigger person now.”

“Really?”

“You’ll see, eventually.”

“All right, folks,” announced Sakai. “Let’s head over to the hotel in Kibune.”

Tanabe, the oldest in our group, was going to be late because of work, so we all proceeded through the ticket gates and boarded an Eizan train.

The train moved off through the city, heading north.

As a student, I held a sort of fascination with the Eizan Railway. Running along through the city in the twilight, it looked as if it were bound for Wonderland. Whenever I rode it I always felt as if I was embarking on a long, long journey. As I stared out the window, Fujimura, who was standing next to me, broke in on my thoughts.

“Thanks for calling me, Ōhashi!”

“I’m just glad your number still worked.”

You should come by my gallery when you go back to Tokyo. Don’t you work nearby?”

“Well, I’m not much of a connoisseur.”

“That doesn’t matter. You should come by anyways.”

She looked out the window and fell silent. Perhaps she was thinking back to her student days.

After a while she addressed me again. “So, what made you think of calling us all again?”

“That’s a good question.”

“Any reason in particular?”

“Not really. I just thought it was about time.”

“...That’s fair. I think you’re right.” Fujimura nodded and looked back out the window.

Ten years ago, six friends from the English conversation school went to see the Kurama Fire Festival. That night, one of those friends disappeared.

If you look in the newspapers of the time, you’ll find a small article with little substance. The authorities came up empty handed, and no clues were ever found. It was as if she had vanished into thin air. At the time of her disappearance, Hasegawa had been a second year, just like me.

A thought suddenly occurred to me. Maybe I called everyone here, because she is calling me. As the train continued ever deeper into the mountains I looked out the window, and fancied that somewhere in the darkness among the pine trees by the track stood the disappeared Hasegawa.

My thoughts turned back to the art gallery I had visited earlier.

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I had arrived at Kyoto Station in the afternoon, but with time to kill before the meetup I left Shijō and took a walk through the shopping district.

The Jidai Festival was tomorrow, so the streets on this autumn weekend were filled with tourists, foreign and domestic. To avoid the crowds on the main thoroughfare I turned down a side street and headed north up Takakura Street. From down in this urban canyon I looked up and saw the serene, unclouded autumn sky, and reminisced about how I had looked up at the very same sky back when I was a student.

I was walking along when my attention was drawn to a woman walking in front of me. There was something transcendent about her. Her posture was erect, and her black hair glimmered under the autumn sunlight. I felt like I had seen her before, though I didn’t know when or where.

As I tried to figure out why she was so familiar, the woman walked into a shop on Takakura Street. I caught a fleeting glimpse of her face, and realized that she looked exactly like Hasegawa.

“It can’t be her,” I thought, but my heart thudded in my chest and my pace quickened to a half-run.

The shop was a cramped art gallery, and the copper signboard out front pronounced it to be Yanagi Gallery. The display in the window was covered in bronze-colored cloth, and on top of it was a plate that said, “Kishida Michio - Solo Exhibition”, alongside a single copperplate engraving. There was something strangely enthralling about the engraving. On the far side of a grove of trees, the blazing lights of a train made their way through the pitch-black night. A lone woman stood looking at the train, her right hand raised as if she was calling out to it. Her back was turned to the viewer, so that I couldn’t see her face. It was entitled Night Train——Kurama.

I opened the glass door and entered the gallery.

The confines of the long gallery were dim, and the faint odor of burning incense drifted in the air. The mezzotints hanging on the milk-white walls were all darkly colored, like rectangular windows bored into the wall that opened out onto a world of night. The thick glass doors insulated the interior from the hustle and bustle of the streets outside, and the gallery was stifled in an almost otherworldly silence.

The woman was nowhere to be seen.

As I stood there, bewildered, a man in a suit emerged from the shadow of the partition at the back of the gallery. Though he looked to be only in his late 30’s, I assumed he was the proprietor of the gallery.

“Welcome.”

“Did a woman just come in here?”

The owner eyed me warily. “...Not that I am aware.”

I must have been mistaken, I thought to myself. My apprehension at coming back to the Kurama Fire Festival after ten years must be making me see things that weren’t there. I had called everyone here to the festival as a way of making a clean break, but somehow I just couldn’t seem to shake the conviction that somewhere out there, Hasegawa was still alive.

I was too self-conscious to just leave, and there was still some time before the meetup, so I decided to stay and look at the engravings. In an unflappable tone the young proprietor explained everything from the technique of mezzotint to the life of Kishida Michio, the artist.

Kishida had dropped out of art school in Tokyo, and after apprenticing in England and polishing his own skills, he had returned to Japan and set up a studio in Kyoto, his hometown. That would have meant that he would have been living in Kyōto while I was a student in Tokyo. But he had died in the spring seven years ago, and the ownership of his works had passed to the Yanagi Gallery, which he had previously associated with.

“There are 48 works in total in the series entitled Night Train.”

The landscapes, created only from blinding white against a backdrop of velvet darkness, brought to mind an neverending night. Each of the works portrayed a lone woman. All of them had neither eyes nor mouth, and their heads were inclined like smooth white mannequins. Onomichi. Ise. Nobeyama. Nara. Aizu. Okuhida. Matsumoto. Nagasaki. Aomori. Tenryūkyō. As I looked at the engravings one by one, I had the strange sensation that they all portrayed the same night, spilling out endlessly.

“Why Night Train?” I murmured.

The proprietor smiled and tilted his head. “Maybe it refers to an ordinary train...or maybe, he was referring to a train of demons, parading through the night.”¹

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The inn where we were staying was on the Kibune River among a row of other inns, a trip of ten minutes up the mountain road in the courtesy car from Kibuneguchi Station. The room was partitioned in two by a sliding screen, filled with the rushing sound of the Kibune River and the familiar scent of tatami. The clamor of Kurama over the mountain didn’t reach us here, and all around us was still.

While we bathed and waited for Tanabe to arrive, drops of rain began to patter down outside. Takeda stuck his head out the window and looked up at the sky.

“They wouldn’t cancel the festival because of rain, would they?”

“I don’t think a little rain would be enough to stop it,” chuckled Nakai, stretched out on the tatami. “I’m pretty sure the torches still burn even in the rain.”

We heard footsteps clomping loudly up the stairs.

“Sorry, sorry!” Tanabe was saying as he entered the room, wearing a full 5 o’clock shadow. He stood in the doorway and looked down at us all. “Well look at you all, kicking back and relaxing. Don’t you know we’re here for a festival?”

With the five of us finally assembled, we gathered around a boar stew, as the rain came down harder and harder. The inn was enveloped by the pounding of the rain on the eaves and the rushing of the stream; the chill of the mountain village seeped through the glass windows and permeated the room.

“It’s really coming down,” I said, pressing my ear to the fogged up glass.

We had a lively time there crowded around the warm pot. I still saw Nakai in Tokyo from time to time, but it had been years since I had seen any of the others. Now we all had our own jobs, our own lives. While we spoke at length about those, none of us touched on the topic of Hasegawa. It was like we were all keeping our sixth member at a distance.

While I absentmindedly listened to the rain, the face of the woman who had gone into the gallery drifted to the front of my mind again. At the time I had been so sure that she was Hasegawa, but now the face was blurred and uncertain in my memory.

“You’re awfully quiet, Ōhashi,” Nakai remarked from across the pot. “Why the long face?”

“This afternoon, I thought I saw Hasegawa—” I blurted out.

The room instantly fell into a startled silence.

“I mean, of course I was just seeing things,” I hastily added. After all, when I followed her into the gallery she was nowhere to be found.

Trying to ease the tension, I started talking about the strange mezzotints I had seen at the gallery. But when I mentioned they were by someone called Kishida Michio, Tanabe looked at me in amazement.

“You went to that gallery? Yanagi Gallery, right?”

“Yeah, that’s what it was called.”

“I went in there too. We must have just missed each other.”

“I didn’t know you were into art galleries, Tanabe.”

“Well, just a little bit.”

Here Tanabe went quiet.

He sounded like he was being evasive, which struck me as odd. I glanced at Takeda and Fujimura, who both looked like they knew something about that artist as well.

But it was Nakai who broke the silence.

“I’ve seen his pictures too. There was one hanging in the hotel lobby when I went to Onomichi.”

“Onomichi?”

“Have you been there? It’s in Hiroshima prefecture.”

“What were you doing there? Were you on vacation?” asked Fujimura.

Nakai chuckled ruefully in reply. “It’s kind of complicated…”

And he began to relate what had happened in Onomichi. The rain continued to fall over the dark mountain village as we listened to his tale.