The Fourth Night - Tenryūkyō

“This was back in spring two years ago, on the Iida Line.”

Tanabe was the fourth to speak.

He was the oldest among us, about two years older than Nakai. The year Hasegawa disappeared, Tanabe had already graduated college, and was a member of a theater company started by one of his friends.

Outwardly he was fearless, but he also had his sensitive side.

Takeda and Nakai often swung by his boarding house for drunken carousing. I’d shown up a fair few times too when they invited me. The year after Hasegawa disappeared, Tanabe steadily got busier with work and theater, and eventually I stopped seeing him at conversation school.

After the theater company broke up several years later, he’d worked in Tokyo for a few years before going home to Toyohashi to work at his family’s furniture store.

What follows is Tanabe’s story.

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My aunt lives with her husband in Ina.

She’d been hounding me to come visit, so I stopped by on a business trip. I had my colleagues go back first by car, while I stayed the night at my aunt’s place. The next was all sorts of busy too, what with having lunch with my cousin and her family, and by the time I got to Inashi Station to go back to Toyohashi, dusk had already fallen.

Apparently this was when all the high schoolers went home, and both carriages on the train were packed.

Through the window I could see Komagatake and the rest of the Central Alps, snow still lingering on the peaks. With each stop at a station the number of passengers dwindled, until at last I was able to plop down in a booth seat. The Central Alps were on the other side of the train, so from my window I saw endless acres of open farmland and the Southern Alps standing out in sharp relief against the setting sun.

Before too long my interest was piqued by the conversation between the pair sitting in the booth across from me. One of them was a hick of a high schooler with a red muffler wrapped around her neck and a small Snoopy plush dangling from her backpack. The other was a middle aged monk, his head shaved, clad all in black and carrying a leather traveling bag. At his feet there was a flat, cloth-wrapped package. The two had been chumming it up since I saw them on the platform at Inashi Station, and I assumed them to be a local monk and one of his parishioners.

Unexpectedly the girl called out to me. “Where’re you headed?”

“I’m going to Toyohashi.”

“Really? All the way to the end of the line?”

I looked over to see her leaning towards me, an almost pleading look in her eyes. The monk smiled faintly and turned away. “There’s a long way to go yet.”

Now that I had entered the conversation, the girl looked somewhat relieved. Maybe she’d actually been feeling trapped by the monk.

Just then the train hit a curve and entered the shadow of the mountains. The inside of the train became dark, as if we were passing through the bottom of a pool of water. The monk cast a sharp glance my way, almost like a glare.

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The light of the setting sun pierced through the windows as we left the shadow, shining on the girl and the monk. The girl put her face on the armrest, her cheeks puffing out like a futon drying in the sun. In contrast, the monk’s face was red as a salamander resting on a riverbed.

The girl was a second year at a high school in Ina. From her perspective, the idea of being rattled around on a train for another few hours probably sounded like pure torture.

“Are you one of those train geeks?” she asked.

But you didn’t need to be a train geek to take trips like this. “When you’re on the move, you can just zone out and forget about everything,” I explained.

“So you’ve got, like, issues and stuff?”

“I have my share of problems, you could say.”

“Huh.”

“Don’t you have problems of your own?”

The girl giggled. “I don’t know. I do have a lot on my plate.”

Her smile wormed its way straight into my heart.

We continued to talk across the aisle. Outside the windows, gently sloping terraced fields and the first blooms of red-blossomed plum trees and glinting amber-colored tile rooftops sped by. It put me in a pleasant mood, like basking in the sunshine on a farmhouse porch.

The entire time the monk hadn’t said a word. He sat by the window with a bulky travel-size book of train timetables laid on his lap, looking like he was brooding about something. I wondered where the girl was going. We were already an hour out of Ina.

“Pretty long commute you’ve got.”

“I know, right?” the girl complained, looking down and squeezing the Snoopy plush. “It’s so not cash money. I usually study on the train, but I’m just not feeling it today.”

The train came to a halt at a tiny station.

A blast of cold air came rushing in when the door slid open, and a stillness wrapped around us, like we were frozen in time.

The girl got off the armrest and twisted around towards the window. She’d taken off the red muffler, exposing the back of her graceful neck. Stretching her arm out she pointed out the window.

“There’s a shop over there. See it?”

When I leaned over, the monk turned to look too.

Past the ticket barrier was a small plaza, and beyond that was a line of older buildings. Among those buildings was the shop she was talking about, sporting a faded billboard that said “Yamazaki Bakery”. Out front there was an ice cream freezer and a vending machine. The gloom under its eaves reminded me of twilight; I could almost smell the mildewy dirt floor inside. The rain shutters on the second floor were shut for some reason, and onions were strung up from the roof like prayer beads. It was a common sight out in the country, these stores on the verge of going out of business.

Looking out the window the girl said, “I see it every day, so it started to get my attention. Like why is it always so dark in there, and why don’t I see anyone there, and why are the rain shutters always closed? Once something gets my attention, I just can’t stop looking. The more I look at it, the weirder it gets. You know what I mean, right? Like is it just me?”

For me the view out the window was uncommon, but the girl saw it every day. But just because it was an everyday occurrence, didn’t mean it was ordinary. Maybe seeing something every day made the strange things stand out even more. I had to admit that you really couldn’t judge a book by its cover. This girl was more of a dreamer than she appeared.

“If it bothers you, why don’t you get off the train and see?”

“I had a dream that I got off here, once,” she said, continuing to prattle on. “I have a lot of those dreams, where I visit places that I see on the train. They’re so realistic, like sometimes I start to believe that I really went there, I’ll see some place going by and I’ll be like, ‘I was there last week!’ and then after a while I’ll kind of wake up and be like, oh wait, that was a dream, and...sorry, this is kind of weird.”

“So you’ve never actually been there for real?”

The girl looked at me seriously and answered, “Probably not.”

I looked over the ticket barrier one more time into the store. Now that she had told me all this it did feel a little odd to me. And when I looked, I thought for a second I saw something move in the darkness over the counter. In the next moment the train started to move off, leaving only the impression that I had seen someone get up wearily there in that gloom.

The tired light of evening speckled the train.

“Where are you getting off?” I inquired, to which the girl replied feistily, “Where do you think I’m getting off?”

There was a certain allure in the look in her eyes. It was like getting a fleeting glimpse of a beautiful fish rising from the river depths to the water’s surface. While I sat there taken aback, the girl looked off into space, before suddenly addressing the monk by the window. “Hey mister, if you don’t guess it soon we’re going to arrive!”

The monk looked up from his timetable. He muttered to himself, looking my way. Surprisingly I saw a vague look of unease on his face.

“You’ve got me, miss. I give up.”

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I wasn’t sure right off the bat what they were talking about.

“Oh, that quick?”

A smile flitted around the girl’s lips, in contrast with the monk’s uncertain expression. They seemed to have been playing some sort of game.

The conductor came up from the rear carriage, walking through the aisle between us up to an old woman accompanying two children who had boarded at the last station. The train had emptied out considerably. Including us three there were only six passengers in the car, and there didn’t seem to be many people in the rear carriage either. Should be about another 30 minutes toTenryūkyō, I thought to myself.

The girl leaned towards me and whispered, “This monk’s a psychic!”

Startled, I looked at the monk, who smiled wryly and shook his head. “No, no, nothing so grand as that.”

“But you can read people’s minds, can’t you?”

“I fear I can’t live up to what you’re expecting of me,” replied the monk, looking at her and chuckling.

On further explanation the monk was younger than he seemed. He had trained as a monk in Kyoto, and was currently serving as the head monk at an impoverished temple in Takatō. He and the girl had only met by chance on the platform in Ina. But the word that the girl had used, “psychic”, bothered me. There was something fishy about him. He claimed that he was going to Toyohashi for a conference, but it seemed odd that he would leave this late in the day from Ina on the Iida Line. Then again I was hardly in any place to criticize him there.

“I used to live in Kyoto myself,” I mentioned, trying to feel him out. “Where did you do your training?”

“Oh, here and there.” He didn’t miss a beat as he sidestepped my question. Inside he was probably annoyed that I’d come along out of nowhere to spoil his fun spouting all sorts of nonsense to this wide-eyed provincial high schooler.

“So what’s the game?”

“I wanted him to guess what station I’m getting off at to see if he can really read minds.”

That explained why the monk had been wordlessly scowling at the timetable all this time. He could blow all the smoke he wanted, but when someone demanded a concrete answer out of him he was stuffed.

“That sounds interesting.”

“No, well…”

“Can you really read minds?”

“Strictly speaking, I don’t ‘read’ them, I ‘see’ into them. For instance—” He pointed out the window. We had passed the Central Alps, and scenes of a provincial town flew by the window: houses and factories, hospitals and schools, all draped in the fading light. “When you look out through the window at the landscape, try putting words to everything you see. All these things that you normally let pass without a second glance: use all the words you have to describe them. It is vital that you press yourself. Throw every word you have at the landscape until the words cease to flow forth. If you do so you will find that your very being becomes exhausted, emptied of words. Your words will not be able to keep up with the scenes that pass before your eyes. When that happens, things will jump out from the scenery into your mind, things that you had not noticed before. Those things are what I ‘see’.”

I was wondering when he’d go off the rails, I thought.

“So we’re looking out the windows, but we’re not. Have I got that right?”

“Well, you could put it that way. But let me add that there’s nothing wrong with that. In order for man to live he must close his eyes to a great many things. Words make us blind. Look out the window, and you will see many things. But though you do not realize it, you are seeing words.”

The girl snickered. “I’ve never felt that way in my life!”

“And that, miss, is how you stay sane.”

I was starting to get irritated. “And what does any of that have to do with mindreading?”

“They are one and the same. We see faces, and we do not. Angry, sad, suspicious; we only see the hackneyed phrases we lay upon them. Tilting at windmills, to use a phrase. But just as the scenery stretches out infinitely, so too does the face of man. If you can look at someone without relying on those words, then naturally you will become able to see things that you could not see before. However this does not mean you will see what you wish to see. Does that make sense?” After unleashing this torrent of words the monk coughed and looked at the girl. “That is why it is not very suited for guessing things.”

“Kinda sounds like an excuse to me.”

“That I cannot help. This is what my seeing entails.”

Right then the flat package by the monk’s feet fell over with a thump. “My my,” said the monk, his movements slow and measured as he stooped over and picked it up, setting it on the seat across from him.

The girl suddenly piped up, “Hey, so what does this guy look like?”

The monk scrutinized my face. “You said you had been to Kyoto, did you not?”

“That’s right,” I nodded. I bet he was going to try to wriggle out of this one by making some ambiguous prediction that you could interpret any way you wanted. So I was completely caught off guard by how definite his next statement was.

“I see a house of night,” the monk intoned, narrowing his cold eyes. “It is the house where lives one who has captured your heart...your visits were always at night. A lover, or perhaps a dear friend. And the memory of that house has clouded your life ever since.”

He smiled wanly. “What do you think?”

I was momentarily thunderstruck. I couldn’t believe it. “Are you...are you talking about Kishida Michio?”

“...I have merely told you what I saw,” the monk replied, his expression serene.

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Kishida Michio was a mezzotint artist whose studio was in Kyoto.

At the time we met, he and I had still been in our twenties. It had been several years since he had returned from his studies abroad, and while the owner of Yanagi Gallery expected great things from him, to the general public he remained unknown. This was long before the Night Train series was released into the world.

He had constructed his studio in a house left to him by his parents on the banks of the Kamo River, but he also worked part-time in a furniture store on Ebisugawa Street. That store was operated by a friend of my father, and so I was a frequent visitor when I was living in Kyoto. That meant that I often saw Kishida. I hadn’t known that he was a copperplate engraver. He didn’t exactly give off the most approachable vibe.

“At the time I was still laboring in obscurity, you see. So I was somewhat dejected,” Kishida told me some time afterward.

Eventually Kishida quit the job, and I no longer saw him in the store.

The next time I saw his face was in Kiyamachi, near the close of the very same year that Hasegawa had disappeared at the Kurama Fire Festival. That night he came ambling into one of my regular bars. This guy looks familiar, I thought to myself, and after exchanging words on some pretext I came to the realization that he was indeed the same Kishida I had known.

We talked idly as we drank. I was feeling down after what had happened to Hasegawa, and Kishida seemed to be in search of someone to talk to. That night was when I learned that he was an engraver.

He mentioned that he’d read about the incident in Kurama in the papers. “I was in Kurama that night too. Right shock it was, when I read about it in the papers later. So they’ve yet to find any clues?”

“They’re all baffled.”

I hadn’t been particularly close to Hasegawa. We had attended different English classes, and the closest our interactions got was some light conversation whenever Nakai would invite us to a gathering. But I’d always felt that she had a mysterious charm about her.

Whenever I talked with her, it felt as though she could see right through me. But she never said anything too forward. She was more reserved, if I had to say, almost like she was concealing a world of night within her. I always liked that about her.

I told all this to Kishida.

“A most intriguing person,” he mused. “She sounds like the type of person who might be spirited away.”

“You’re telling me she was carried off by tengu?”

“Well, she would have been in the right place. And on a festival night, no less.”

“I don’t believe in any of that stuff.”

“Of course, I was simply voicing a hypothesis.”

Still, it seemed to me an ill-considered thing to say.

Hasegawa seemed to have more of a presence now than she had before she disappeared. Her face drifted into my mind, her profile lit by torchlight that night in Kurama. I couldn’t help but think that she was still there, still in that night, even though I knew that was no more than a fantasy.

After discussing the incident in Kurama, I started to talk about my activities in the theater company. I wasn’t the most sociable of people, but with Kishida listening I felt like I could talk about anything. Parts of him resembled Hasegawa in a way. She had also lended a willing ear whenever you needed one, and didn’t talk much about herself.

“What’re you up to?” I inquired.

He told me that he was working on a new series. “That’s why my days have switched places with my nights.”

He had gotten the idea for his series, Night Train, the year after he came back from his studies in England. Believing himself not up to the task, he hadn’t started work on it immediately. Working on other projects to improve his skills, saving up money at work, he waited for the right time to challenge Night Train. And after three years of preparation, he had begun his journey this winter on Night Train. I was very impressed with his meticulous preparation.

Finding kindred spirits in one another, we went barhopping until it was nearly light.

“You should come around my studio sometime,” he said, before making his way home, almost as if he was fleeing the dawn. From that night on, I started to pay regular visits to his home.

I always called on him at night. His house was at the foot of an embankment by the Kamo River, and there was always light leaking out from his windows. He had many other visitors, people spending sleepless nights who had been drawn to the light of his house. These gatherings were called the Kishida Salon.

Kishida Michio enjoyed listening to other people’s stories. An avid listener, you might call him. Whenever I talked to him it felt like he was drawing out words from deep within me. He left his works strewn all over the house, and was willing to talk about them, but he was particularly interested in hearing what other people had to say about them. And whatever your opinion was, he always listened and took it to heart. It seemed to me that all the people who visited the Kishida Salon were drawn there by that gracious quality of his.

The darkness of night that lay outside was an indispensable element of the Kishida Salon. As we talked in the house, it would sometimes feel like we were floating in a world of midnight. All the people there with me felt like old friends with whom I had been reunited by chance in some far off town. I doubt I would have felt the same if I had run into them during the day.

Those had been unhappy days for me, what with the infighting in the theater company and my debts and the friction with my parents, but whenever I thought about the Kishida Salon, the world at that time in my life seemed strangely profound. The aroma of coffee in the living room, the words exchanged in front of engravings, the midnight walks along the Kamo River...though my student days had long been over at that point, it was like stumbling upon an isolated exclave of youth. And it was all thanks to Kishida.

But that was all a long time ago. By the time I boarded that train on the Iida line, Kishida Michio had already been dead for five years.

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Is mindreading really possible?

When I was a child, I read a story about a satori, a mountain apparition. A woodcutter was spending the night in a hut on a mountain, when a satori came to call. The woodcutter thought to himself, What a mess I’m in! only for the satori to reply, “‘What a mess I’m in,’ says you!” Whatever thought came into the woodcutter’s head after that, the satori would immediately guess out loud.

As a kid that story made me shiver, but after thinking about it for a second it really wasn’t so strange. It’s pretty obvious what’s going through a frightened person’s head, and even more so when you’re talking about some hick woodcutter living in a hut. A reasonably sharp person could bluff their way through without much trouble.

But what the monk had said was no bluff.

“Did he get it right?” asked the girl, to which I nodded. When she saw that little movement of my head she looked with amazement at the monk by the window. “Whoa. I knew it was real!”

“If he says I was right, then I suppose it must be so.”

“You know, I kind of thought you were lying. I’m sorry.”

“But I was telling the truth when I said I could see nothing in your face.” An odious little smile came to the monk’s face. “Strange, indeed. I wonder why that is.”

“I bet it’s ‘cause I’m just zoning out and stuff. Like, seriously zoning out. Sometimes my friends get mad at me too. Like, they say I’m daydreaming and stuff. ‘Scuse me for a sec.”

The girl stood up and walked down the passage towards the rear carriage. Perhaps she was going to the toilet.

The monk turned to watch her go. For just a moment, I saw another brief flicker of unease cross his face. Even I could do that kind of mindreading. He eventually turned back around and looked at me with a meaningful glance.

“A strange girl, would you not agree?”

“Her?”

“She interests me, has done so ever since we boarded the train together.”

“Because your little mindreading trick doesn’t work on her?”

The monk snorted. “So you do not believe.”

“Not a bit. I just can’t explain it, that’s all.”

“The world is full of mysterious folk. It is good to be suspicious,” he grinned. “And as I say it, that girl is one of those mysterious folk.”

“She looks like a normal high schooler to me.”

“Is that really what you think?”

There was no denying that for a high schooler from the sticks, she had a lot of pluck. She was downright fearless facing up with two itinerant, potentially shady middle-aged men. She didn’t seem like your average hick.

Broodingly the monk said, “I feel as if I’ve met that girl somewhere before.”

“Doesn’t sound like too farfetched if you’re local.”

“I am no local.”

“Didn’t you say you were the head of some temple in Takatō?”

“I am not a real monk.”

I’d had my suspicions, but even so I was surprised at getting such an open confession. Yet he seemed to think nothing of having admitted this to me. He turned his eyes to the window and muttered, “We are nearly two hours out of Ina. Where is that child going?”

“Beats me. You can ask her yourself.” Feeling out of sorts, I averted my eyes and looked out the window to the left.

The train was passing along the top of a plateau, and below I saw country towns sinking into the indigo twilight. In between the lights flickering on one by one I caught glimpses of the Tenryū River glinting dully. It was only a little further to Tenryūkyō Station. After passing through the tourist-friendly boating areas and hot springs, we would enter the most rugged, inaccessible section of the Iida Line. In less than an hour we would be overtaken by night.

The girl didn’t come back from the bathroom.

Before long the Tenryū River floodplain lay outside the window. My gaze wandered the landscape, before coming to rest on a single cherry tree on the opposite bank of the river. Its blooms appeared to be floating in the twilight, almost as though its very petals were shedding light. But my eyes were glued to it. Unlike the rest of the scenery streaming across the window, that blooming cherry tree stayed rooted to the exact same spot, unmoving. I let out a gasp.

Behind me, the monk recited in a sing-song voice, “In my dream I saw the spring wind gently shaking blossoms from a tree—”

I had heard that poem before.

When I turned around the monk had kicked off his sandals and was sitting cross-legged, his body sagged against the window. He seemed to have tired of keeping up the monk charade. There was a small bottle of whisky in his hand.

“It was a long time ago, when I was in Kyoto,” he finally said. “I was an insomniac at the time, but there was a man who was very kind to me. Strange fellow, by the name of Kishida Michio.”

A mocking grin came to his face.

“I was at the salon too. Don’t you remember yet?”

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All sorts of people came and went at the Kishida Salon.

There was no need to make an appointment, nor were there fixed visiting days. Sometimes Kishida would be out on one of his “nocturnal adventures”, but he never locked the door. Visitors would just sip coffee and wait for his return. It sounded careless, but to my knowledge there had never been any trouble of any sort.

It was awkward at first whenever I ran into other visitors while Kishida was out, but in no time at all we’d be chatting like old buddies. I ran into art college students, a lady who ran a secondhand goods store in Ichijoji, and even a researcher who had come all the way from Europe. The owner of Yanagi Gallery in Shijō was close to my age, and we soon hit it off. He lived behind Shōkokuji, near my apartment, and after talking until the break of dawn we’d often walk off towards home together.

But there was one man among the visitors to the Kishida Salon who I just could not bring myself to like. His name was Saeki.

“I am a spirit medium,” he proclaimed, chuckling flippantly, the first time we met in the studio. I didn’t like him from the very first moment we laid eyes on each other. He had been wearing a flashy open-collared shirt, and his hair and stubble were unkempt. Any time he spoke of what he did for a living, it was always some fishy swindler’s tale. According to Yanagi, he was a lackey for some cult operating out of Hida, and was involved in an attempt to take over some unaffiliated temple.

“You should be cautious of him,” Yanagi warned me.

After we had run into each other several times, Saeki asked me straight out, “You don’t like me, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

He chortled. “I like honest people. I’m honest myself, you see.”

The monk with whom I was sharing a train car was that very same Saeki.

I felt like a kid who had just learned the secret behind a magic trick. He hadn’t read my mind at all, because he had known me in Kyoto. But there was no shame either in not having noticed it was him earlier. He hadn’t crossed my mind once since I left Kyoto, and anyone would look like a stranger with their head shaved, wearing a monk’s robes. Now that I knew that the monk before me was really Saeki, I recognized that flippant smirk on his face.

At the time, I hadn’t known that he was suffering from insomnia. He was always so jovial. But it was a facetious joviality that got on your nerves. His patter was very swift. And as you might expect from someone who claimed to be a spirit medium, he seemed to know a lot about religions and their histories, if only superficially so. That piqued Kishida’s interest, so whenever Saeki showed his face around there, the conversation often turned to the history of Buddhism and talk of enlightenment.

I remembered that he had spoken of something called the makyō.

Some college student had claimed it was impossible to see the truth of the world with our eyes, and that it was the role of the artist to peel away that which obscures our sight and reveal the glimpses of the true world—something like that, anyways. But Saeki sneered, “That’s merely makyō.”

Makyō is a false enlightenment experienced by novice monks.

Saeki told us that there was a story in the Konjaku Monogatari, about the priest Sanshu and his meeting with a tenguon Mount Ibuki.

Long ago, there lived a virtuous monk named Sanshu on Mount Ibuki. He chanted the sutras with all his heart, praying to be reborn into Paradise. One day, he heard a voice from heaven saying, “Unto you I shall bestow guidance to Paradise.” Filled with joy and gratitude, he chanted the sutras and waited, until in the western sky appeared the goddess Kannon, shining brilliantly, who took his hand and led him into the sky. Thus he departed for Paradise, but seven days later, he was found tied to the top of a tall cedar tree, chanting sutras. His disciples tried to help him down, but he shouted, “Why do you interfere in my passage to Paradise!” He had been deceived by a tengu. His disciples brought him back and cared for him, but he remained delirious, and three days later drew his last breath.

“If you ask me, artists are no different from that monk,” laughed Saeki.

Saeki didn’t recognize the worth of Kishida’s work, much less my own. He prided himself about not letting himself get tricked by anything. I didn’t get why Kishida would be friendly with a guy like that, and I told him so on a few occasions.

But Kishida only chuckled calmly. “You run into all sorts out there,” he said. “And if you listen to what he says, he’s always got a point.”

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Saeki held out the bottle of whisky. “Odd coincidence, running into each other on a train. Almost like Kishida’s guiding us from the other side.”

“I never thought I’d see you again.”

“You mean you were hoping you’d never see me again, no?”

“The thought of you never even crossed my mind.” I took a swig of cheap whisky. Maybe Kishida really was guiding us.

I didn’t believe in spirits, and Saeki was probably the same. But there was no logical reason for him to have tailed me onto the Iida Line. Call it a coincidence, or guidance from the dearly departed, those were just two names for the same thing.

I handed back the whisky bottle. My eye fell on the cloth-wrapped package on the seat across from Saeki.

A sudden thought sprang to mind: wasn’t that one of Kishida’s works?

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I remember it well, because it happened the spring Kishida died.

It was late at night when I called at Kishida’s house. Both the studio and the living room blazed with light, and the aroma of coffee drifted all the way to the front entrance, yet inside all was quiet. It was like being on a ghost ship, where the crew and the passengers had all vanished.

Kishida must have gone out on one of his nighttime strolls.

I sat on the couch, drinking cold, stale coffee and staring out at the garden. It was hardly kept at all, and the vegetation was so overgrown it was practically a jungle. I had started to doze off when I suddenly jolted awake. I felt like I had heard something.

The sound seemed to have come from a small inner room. The room was a little space about 4½ tatami in size, at the end of a corridor facing the garden. Kishida called it the darkroom, and as the name implied the windows had all been plastered over so that no light could get in. I knew that he sometimes shut himself in there when he was deep in thought. Maybe he was in there now. But that seemed odd. Kishida only ever shut himself in there after his visitors had gone home.

I walked to the room to find the door slightly open. The light from the living room didn’t reach inside, and all I saw through the crack was darkness. I strained my ears but heard nothing.

“Kishida, are you in there?” I called out just to make sure, but no reply came.

I returned to the living room and sat down on the sofa once more. For some reason I was agitated. Convinced that some unknown person was sitting in the darkroom, I kept my ears pricked. All was silent. What was this dread I was feeling? When the clock on the wall struck two the sound nearly made my heart jump out of my throat. Unable to bear being in that house alone any longer, I went out to the Kamo River. Kishida was probably walking along the riverbank.

I walked up the stone stairs from the residential street to where the embankments stretched out from both sides of the road. It was the witching hour, and few cars passed by. Darkened houses lined the bank on the opposite shore over the black expanse of the Kamo River, and far beyond them rose the silhouettes of the Higashiyama mountains.

I headed north along the embankment.

This night continued on forever—or so it felt.

All over the world, in far flung cities and towns, millions and millions of people were dreaming, enveloped by the same night through which I was wandering at this very moment. This obvious fact seemed to me now very profound. I had never felt night so strongly as when I was attending the Kishida Salon. This was the vastness of the world of night which Kishida had shown me.

A cherry tree stood on the bank of the Kamo River, its petals in full bloom, and underneath it sat two men. One was Kishida, and the other was Saeki.

When I saw those two, the unease I had felt in Kishida’s house and that feeling of the vastness of night both disappeared. In its place my heart burst with jealousy. I wanted to ask what he was doing taking a stroll at night with Saeki. What does Saeki know? I’m the only one who truly understands your loneliness! I was surprised at myself at the ardor of my envy. What irritated me the most was how Saeki had seen through me to that jealousy. He smirked as I approached them.

Kishida looked over and called, “Hey!” waving his skinny arm.

“I didn’t know the cherry trees were blooming at night now,” I said, sitting next to Kishida. “I waited at your house, but you were taking too long to come back.”

“I’m sorry about that. I was just enthralled by the cherry blossoms.”

“Pretty, aren’t they, Tanabe?” said Saeki. “Even a blackguard like me feels cleansed.”

White petals fluttered through the air, blown by the chilly nighttime spring breeze.

Looking up at the resplendent boughs, Kishida murmured, “In my dream I saw the spring wind shaking blossoms from a tree—”¹

“What’s that?” interrupted Saeki, but Kishida continued on.

“—And even now, though I’m awake, there’s still a fluttering in my chest.”

A tanka by Saigyō, explained Kishida, his face just as pale as the cherry blossoms. He looked like he was wasting away. That was because since the previous winter he had been throwing himself into his work with an unusual zeal.

“Do you understand what it means?” asked Kishida. “This is Night Train.”

　　　　　　　◯

The girl returned when we pulled into Tenryūkyō Station.

I was pressing my face into the window on my left, staring at the lights of the hotel on the opposite bank of the river. Only a little light remained in the ultramarine sky, and the reflection of Saeki’s face overlapped my own against the dark landscape.

“We’ll be overtaken by the night soon.”

The moment that thought crossed my mind, I saw the face of a girl in the window. She was as pale and beautiful as a cherry blossom in the night. I felt that I had seen her somewhere before. As I stared, enthralled, she burst into laughter. I jumped and turned around to find the girl standing there.

“Guess who’s back!” she chirped, plopping down into the seat facing me. I stared at her face, dumbfounded. Something about her features seemed to have changed. She looked at Saeki and laughed. “Looks like you’re making yourself at home, huh?”

“Hello again. I thought you’d gotten off without telling me.”

“Of course I wouldn’t do that!”

“How far will you be going?”

“...As far as it takes me,” she answered, giggling.

The train pulled out of Tenryūkyō Station and entered the mountains.

On our left the Tenryūkyō River flowed darkly along the bottom of the valley, white gravel lining the beach on the opposite side. It was difficult to tell where the mountains ended and the sky began. It seemed as if the night grew deeper each time we passed through a tunnel. When we at last came to a halt at a deserted station, we were wrapped up in a silence so deep it felt like the train would never leave the station again. The only ones riding forth on that train car were the three of us, and the crush that had filled the train when we left Ina seemed a very long time ago indeed.

Observing the two of us trading swigs of whisky, the girl asked, “So are you guys like, best friends now?”

“Not even close.” I told her about how we had met at the Kishida Salon. When I mentioned how his “mindreading” was a load of bunk, Saeki said, “Hey, come on,” with a tight smile. But the girl didn’t fixate on his scamming ways at all. Rather, she was more intrigued about what a coincidence it was that two acquaintances from Kyoto would have met all the way out here on some local train.

“That’s such a crazy coincidence, right?”

“It’s not a happy one, let me tell you.”

The girl thought for a second before saying, “This Kishida guy was an artist, right?”

“That’s right,” I nodded.

Hearing this the girl pointed at Saeki’s cloth bundle. “Is that one of Kishida’s paintings?”

The smile disappeared from Saeki’s face like water being sucked into sand. His glowering stare was unnerving, but the girl showed no fear whatsoever. I wasn’t sure if she was just stupid, or if she had nerves of steel.

“It is, isn’t it?”

Saeki forced a smile onto his face, rubbing his bald pate. “Looks like I’m not the only mindreader here.”

“I just kind of thought it might be.”

“You’re right, that is one of Kishida’s paintings. He gave it to me before he died. I don’t know the first thing about art, but I respect the way he lived. That’s why I carry it with me.”

“Such friendship!”

“I don’t know if I would call it that. I don’t know if it’s such a nice thing as that.”

What was Saeki doing carrying around one of Kishida’s artworks?

I’d never bought any of Kishida’s works myself. True, I had been penniless, but I also knew that if I had tried to buy anything Kishida would have just given it to me as a gift. Knowing the tribulations he had gone through in order to create his world, I couldn’t just saunter up and ask to buy one of his mezzotints. That was the least I could do to show my devotion to my Kishida. And yet seeing Saeki—the same Saeki who had scoffed at Kishida’s art—carrying around that picture roused my indignation.

Saeki reached out and set the package on his lap. “Want to see?”

The picture that he unveiled was, without a doubt, one of Kishida’s copperplate engravings.

A river flowed along the bottom of a dark valley. Light glittered eerily on the surface of the river, issuing from seemingly nowhere. Two things drew my eye: a white gravel beach on the other side of the river beneath the mountains thrusting into the black sky; and a cherry tree in full bloom, covered in sparkling blossoms. At the foot of the tree stood a lone, faceless woman, raising her right hand as if beckoning to me.

In my dream I saw the spring wind gently shaking the blossoms from a tree—

“This is Tenryūkyō, part of the Night Train series.”

“It’s so mysterious. Like it’s from a dream.”

“All he ever drew was this kind of thing,” Saeki smiled. “He was always touched in the head.”

“So like, is that why you came all the way out here?”

“That is part of it. I wanted to see if the landscape in this picture really exists.” He sounded sincere, and maybe he was.

The girl put her face close to the engraving, poring over it keenly. “There’s a woman here. Who’s she?”

“The girl of his dreams.”

“Girl of his dreams?”

“Kishida drew these pictures so that he could meet her.”

“Don’t just make things up if you don’t know,” I sniffed. “He would never have drawn these for something as shallow as that.”

“You don’t know anything, do you?”

According to Saeki, Kishida had spoken many times about the woman in the picture coming to life. His fascination with that idea had started from an old mezzotint belonging to his master in England, and the ghost story that surrounded it. But Kishida had never talked about anything of the sort to me. I suspected it was just a half-baked story that Saeki had made up to disparage Kishida.

Saeki sneered, “That girl in the picture haunted and killed him. I’ll wager he was happy, too, that he finally got what he wished for.”

We were all reflected in the blackness of the pitch-black window. The girl’s face caught my eye. She was smiling at me from the other side of the window. Her face looked grown up, almost like it belonged to another person entirely.

　　　　　　　◯

It was true that each installment of Night Train depicted an enigmatic woman.

But Kishida didn’t like explaining his own works. I had asked him who the woman was before, but he had never given me an answer.

“I found her in the darkroom.”

He might have said that, once.

Kishida always woke up after sundown and began his work. After laboring until late at night, he would take a nocturnal stroll, or converse with the patrons of the Kishida Salon. However, his visitors were required to leave before daybreak. After the visitors had all gone, Kishida would enter the darkroom and begin to think.

He got all his ideas for Night Train in the darkroom. The room was equipped with an armchair and a side table, as well as a desk with a small sketchbook and a pencil. He would sit there and wait in the darkness, rapidly sketching whatever images appeared to him in the darkness. After that he reviewed his sketches, arranged them together, and finally produced his artworks. Sometimes, even locked in that room, nothing would appear to him at all. Even then he would spend a certain amount of time in there, before leaving and going up to his bedroom on the second floor to sleep, not having glimpsed the sun once. He observed these peculiar working habits strictly, almost monastically.

I had warned him a few times, concerned about his well being.

“Every time I see you your face gets paler!”

“Does it? I’ve never felt better.”

“You really should get some rest.”

“Maybe you’re right. Once I find a good point to stop—”

That point was his own death.

He managed to complete 48 works in Night Train before he died. He had given them all place names, like Onomichi and Okuhida and Tsugaru, but he didn’t actually travel to all of these places. All of his inspiration for each of these locations came from the nocturnal visitors of the Kishida Salon.

I had fond remembrances of the nighttime scenes of the Kishida Salon. The wooden floor of the living room always gleamed with a warm light, and the aroma of coffee drifted through the air. Sometimes Kishida even treated his visitors to his home cooking. As we conversed and looked at his engravings, we would all begin to speak of our own travels. Saeki had been no exception, and neither was I. Our travels had taken us to Ise, Tonami, Nagasaki. Kishida listened eagerly to his visitors’ tales. It was the intertwining of his visitors’ stories and his meditations in the darkroom that brought each work of Night Train to life.

I had gone into the darkroom with Kishida only once.

When I closed the door I was surrounded with a darkness so deep I couldn’t see my own hand in front of me. It felt very strange. I was reminded of the Tainai Meguri² in Kiyomizu-dera. I couldn’t even hear Kishida’s breathing, even though he was right beside me.

“You’re still there, right, Kishida?”

“I couldn’t say. Where do you think we are?”

Kishida’s voice sounded like it was coming from far away, and the darkness that engulfed me suddenly felt vast and unbounded.

“This darkness is connected to everything,” Kishida intoned.

　　　　　　　◯

Sitting cross-legged, Saeki stared at the engraving leaned up against the opposing seat and ruminated, “Real oddball, he was.”

“Not arguing there,” I agreed.

“He was trapped by makyō. Nothing anyone said would’ve changed that,” he said wistfully, taking a swig of whisky. His voice had a ring of honesty to it. Maybe, in his own way, Saeki missed those nights in the Kishida Salon.

“Have you ever seen Dawn?” Saeki said unexpectedly.

I looked up, surprised. “You mean the series?”

“Have you seen it?”

“No, never.”

I had heard Kishida mention it before. Dawn was the counterpart to Night Train. Whereas Night Train depicted an endless night, Dawn portrayed a single morning—or so Kishida said. But even Yanagi, the gallery owner, had never laid eyes on it. I was convinced that it was all a product of Kishida’s fevered imagination.

“Have you seen it?”

“No,” answered Saeki. “Relieved?”

I scoffed. He was right about that, at least.

Staring back at the mezzotint, Saeki murmured, “Kishida should have created it, don’t you think? He should never have let himself be held captive by pictures like these.” I detected a hint of emotion in his voice.

The girl got up and sat beside Saeki. Staring at the picture, she pointed at the faceless woman. “Kishida was in love with her, wasn’t he?”

“...I don’t know if you could call that love, miss.”

“It doesn’t matter if she’s inside a picture, love is love!”

“That’s very open-minded of you,” Saeki laughed, looking into her face. “But looking at this picture puts the fear in me. What if this was the picture that took Kishida? Do you know why he titled the series Night Train? He meant the Hyakki Yagyō, the train of demons. All of the women he painted are demons. That’s why they have no face. They’re all monsters born of his makyō, and in the end they crawled out of his pictures and devoured him. And in the end, maybe that’s what he was hoping for.”

After Saeki finished speaking, his eyes turned to the window.

We all listened to the creaking of the coupling between the carriages.

The train ran on through the darkness. Cutting through a grove of trees, it passed by a transformer substation by the side of the river. Soon the lights of houses began to pop up on the other side of the window, and the train arrived at a station at a village nestled in the mountains.

“People really can live anywhere,” Saeki observed.

It felt like it had been days since I boarded this train in Ina. Part of that had been my flashing back to my days in Kyoto, brought on by this most unexpected reunion with Saeki, but another part of it had to do with the changing landscape beyond the window, so different from it had been at the start of the journey. When the train set off again, the twinkling lights of the village were swallowed up once more into the darkness of the night.

Shortly afterwards, I saw a row of wooden buildings that looked like boathouses, lined up in the dark foothills. They protruded out onto the Tenryū River, and lights on the piers shined down on the boats tied up alongside.

The girl asked Saeki, “How do you think he died?”

“He died alone,” Saeki answered. “His heart stopped in the middle of the night. Not unexpected, I should think.”

“Did you feel sorry for him?”

“Hah. Death is the end. That is all there is to it.”

Beside him the girl stared at his face intently.

“What?” he blurted out, disconcerted.

“Is that why you took the picture?”

As soon as he heard those words, Saeki’s face went pale.

“What do you mean, miss?”

“He looked just like he was sleeping, didn’t he?”

“H-hold on…” stammered Saeki.

Not heeding his protests, the girl continued. “You reached out and touched his cheek. Such a soft touch, like the touch of a lover.”

In disbelief, Saeki whispered, “...How did you know?”

　　　　　　　◯

“I warned him, over and over,” said Saeki.

Beginning the autumn of the year before he died, Kishida had thrown himself into his work with unusual fervor. He seemed to have been in a hurry because he had sensed his impending death, but that same frenzied urgency may have only hastened it.

Saeki had worried over Kishida’s health. He felt that Kishida was trapped in a dark room called Night Train. Forget the art. All these people who frequented the Kishida Salon were just a coterie of irresponsible hangers-on, staying around solely to witness Kishida’s ruin.

“How about you just forget about art for a while and go traveling? I’ll look it all up for you. You can see all the places you’ve been drawing in Night Train.” Time and again Saeki had put forth the invitation.

And Kishida had shown some signs of interest. “Yes, perhaps after I complete fifty pieces in this series.”

But that spring night, Saeki had visited Kishida’s house to find the artist slumped on the sofa, his head drooped. He reached out and brushed Kishida’s cheek. He looked as though he was sleeping, but his body was already cold. Saeki realized immediately there was nothing that could be done.

“It felt like the world had ended,” he reflected, rising from his seat and picking up the engraving. “I immediately thought of leaving Kyoto that night. It felt awful leaving Kishida like that, but it’s not like he could feel anything, on account of being dead. I wasn’t gonna let anyone pin this on me, and you all were gonna find him soon enough anyways. I was just about to hightail it outta there when this picture caught my eye. Kishida’d left it on the table. I never gave a crap about his art, but for some reason I just felt like I had to make this one mine. Maybe I just wanted something to remember him by.”

“So you just swiped it, then?”

Saeki looked at the engraving and frowned when I said that. He looked like he was trying to remember something.

“After that...what did I do after that?”

Saeki heard the chiming of the wall clock in the living room. With the engraving on the table in his hands, he froze like a deer in the headlights, straining his ears. After the chiming ceased, the surroundings fell into an even deeper silence than before. Any second now someone might come calling to the Kishida Salon.

*Things will get ugly if someone sees me here—*he was well aware of that, yet his body would not move.

From the living room he could see into the garden, which was submerged in a viscous darkness; reflected in the glass he saw Kishida slumped on the sofa, and himself holding the mezzotint. Both Kishida and he looked like ghosts. Why was it so quiet? It seemed as if the night went on forever.

A sound came from the end of the corridor.

Saeki knew that the only thing there was the darkroom, with its windows all plastered over. Is that Kishida? Involuntarily the thought came to his head, but he shook it out promptly, feeling jarred. What kind of idiocy was that? Wasn’t that Kishida dead right in front of him?

But stilling his breathing he listened, and indeed he heard the sounds of someone moving inside the darkroom. If someone had seen him there would be trouble later. He had to be certain, now.

He began to creep down the dark hallway towards the darkroom.

“And then—” Saeki whispered, before his voice died.

“And then?” I prompted him, but he didn’t say another word.

The train arrived at a deserted station among the mountains.

Saeki picked up his bag and stood up, pushing aside the girl and walking down the aisle. He seemed to be getting off.

It all seemed very sudden.

“Hey, hold up! Is this where you’re supposed to get off?” I got to my feet and shouted after him.

Saeki turned and faced me, his face a mask. “It was her that killed him—!”

His voice was almost a shriek.

He nearly fell out onto the empty station. The train finally began to move, and his corpse-like face vanished into the darkness of the night.

　　　　　　　◯

I sat down across from the girl.

She was smiling. “There he goes, I guess.”

“Was that where he was planning to get off, do you think?”

“Poor thing.”

I looked at her face under the carriage lights.

The longer I looked, the more it seemed to draw me in. I knew now that she wasn’t just an ordinary high schooler. She was an enigma. Yet I didn’t fear her. On the contrary, a sweet nostalgia was welling up within me.

The girl cast her eyes out the window, staring into the darkness.

“I’ve been to many places, in this dream of the night…”

“What sorts of places?”

“I can go anywhere. There's no place that night doesn't touch.”

I looked out the window, as if she was guiding me.

Where the trees ended I saw the black current of the Tenryū River. The long white beach faced away from the looming black forest behind it.

I saw there a cherry tree in full bloom, its boughs laden with petals. Each one of those petals shed a cold light into the bowels of the night. Beneath the cherry tree stood a woman, her hand raised as if calling to me. It was the very scene that Kishida had depicted in the mezzotint.

“There’s no place that night doesn’t touch,” the girl said, her voice a whisper. “In my dream I saw the spring wind gently shaking blossoms from a tree—”

I took my eyes away from the window and looked at the girl sitting across from me.

In her black hair there was a cherry blossom petal. Beyond her pale, transparent face I saw the face of Kishida. I reached out and plucked away the petal. That was when I understood at last. This girl was a demon that Kishida had met during his sojourn in the makyō.

I thought about what Kishida had said to me in the darkroom.

It would be very rational to believe that the role of the artist is to unveil the hidden, true world in his art. Nothing could be more rational. But I refuse to believe such a rational, elegant explanation. There is no such thing as the true world. I believe that the world is the ungraspable, infinite makyō*. You understand this, Tanabe, I know. If my scenes of night that I draw are* makyō*, then the cherry blossoms that stirred the heart of Saigyō are also* makyō*. We are enclosed in the immeasurable* makyō of night.

All the world’s in perpetual night.

　　　　　　　◯

That spring night, I had gone to visit Kishida’s house.

I left my apartment by Goryō Shrine and walked through the residential streets under cover of night. The night air was cold, the darkness opaque.

The path from my apartment to Kishida’s house was winding; one moment you might be passing by chic residences, the next among dilapidated ruins, and sometimes the odd small garden plot. As I walked along the narrow path my feet suddenly stopped, and I saw cherry blossom petals begin to fall in the illumination of a streetlight.

At that moment I was thinking of leaving Kyoto.

After a series of troubles piling on one after another, my theater company had ceased operations last fall. I started to think there was no point in trying to tough things out anymore. My parents were telling me to come home to Toyohashi. This might be the right time for me to wash my hands and make a clean break of it all. The only reason I was still in Kyoto was Kishida.

Kishida’s house was glowing in the darkness of the night, as it always did. But I didn’t hear a sound.

I entered the living room and found Kishida. He didn’t respond when I called out, or when I shook his shoulder. He was already dead. A cold cup of coffee was sitting on the table. I placed a call for an ambulance, feeling surprisingly calm.

I sat down beside Kishida. He looked as though he were sleeping, and there was even a hint of a smile still on his face. As I looked at his face my mind went through the time I had spent at the Kishida Salon.

“I get it now, you’d already set off on your journey.” Inside my head I started to speak to Kishida.

I don’t have an artistic bone in my body. Maybe I don’t have the right to love your art. But I always looked up to you, even if those long nights only ever brought me to makyō*. I’m going to leave Kyoto now, and I know that whatever the future brings, they’ll never compare to the nights I spent here with you.*

I heard then a noise come from the darkroom at the end of the corridor.

I must have stood up and gone down the hallway to the darkroom, but my memories are blurred after that point. The ambulance must have come, but I don’t remember talking to them. The only thing I can remember clearly is the moment I opened the door to the darkroom and entered that viscous darkness. Small, tender things were fluttering through the darkness. They looked like cherry blossom petals.

Here I suddenly felt how vast was the darkness that enveloped me.

“All the world’s in perpetual night,” a voice whispered to me.

　　　　　　　◯

The train continued to run through the darkness.

I took a petal in my palm and gazed at it.

I realized that I had been in the darkroom ever since that night.

Ever since I had lost Kishida, I had felt that I wasn’t where I belonged. The things I saw with my eyes didn’t reach my spirit. Now I finally understood why that was so. The time I had spent in Tokyo and Toyohashi had only been dreams reflected in the windows as the train rolled on.

We were enclosed in the immeasurable makyō of night.

“This is that darkroom, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. We’ve been together the entire time,” the girl said with a smile.

I sank down deep into the seat and let out a sigh of relief.