Chapter 1―The Silent Reading Club (Part 2)

I took the Chiyoda Line down to Meiji-jingumae station, where my friend was waiting outside the ticket barriers. He worked at the National Diet Library in Nagata-chō; we’d been colleagues in the information systems department.

Exchanging a round of hearty hellos we began walking.

“So where are we headed?” I asked.

“To a café near Omotesandō. Here, take a look at the map.”

“Why do I get the feeling it’s the kind of place that’s too chic for me?”

“It’s all about new experiences, my dear Morimin. It will certainly give you some new ideas for your writing.”

For some reason my friend always referred to me as “Morimin”, like I was some subspecies of Moomin. But it is true that the novelist is in part a creature of whimsy, so I suppose that in a way we are more Moomin than human. Taking into account my writing woes I was particularly so. One ought never forget the carefree ethos of a resident of Moomin Valley.

My friend was fond of wine and a good book, but he was also well known for being something of a social butterfly. Among his improbably eclectic set of acquaintances he counted animation directors, restaurateurs, editors, lawyers; I had no idea how he stumbled into them all. It was by means of this grapevine that my friend had learned of the Silent Reading Club which we were to attend this night.

What was this Silent Reading Club?

“I’ve visited it only once myself,” my friend told me.

It was a club to which one could bring books bearing mysteries to discuss. The nature of the mystery depended on how you interpreted it; for example, my friend brought Kida Junichirō’s Mysteries anthology, while I brought The Thousand and One Nights. It didn’t matter whether you brought a novel or a tome on philosophy or a manga, as long as you saw a mystery in it―and could explain what made it so.

It was forbidden for anyone to solve the mysteries, which I found a particularly interesting concept. No matter how pedestrian you might think a mystery might be, interrupting to offer an explanation was severely frowned upon. On the other hand, you were allowed to talk about other mysteries in the book, or other mysteries which you derived from those mysteries, or even other books which they reminded you of. Such were the rules of the club.

“Why is it called the ‘Silent’ Reading Club?” I asked. “Surely people usually talk at a book club?”

“Maybe because you must be silent in the face of that which you cannot speak.”

“Hey, that’s pretty nifty!”

“Sometimes I surprise myself, Morimin!”

Omotesandō glittered in the night, the trees illuminated by the bright lights of the boutiques which lined the avenue. It was an area which I rarely found reason to visit, even when I lived in Tokyo.

My friend and I had been desk neighbours at the library; his featured a row of books, whose topics ranged from programming to design to photographs of world architecture to efficient ways to run meetings, with his favourites given pride of place. I still fondly remember spotting my own books in his collection.

As we strolled through Omotesandō I thought about this new novel about a phantom book. My friend’s interest seemed piqued when I brought up The Tropics.

“A real shame; it would have been perfect to bring to the Silent Reading Club.”

“But the point is that it vanished without a trace. If I had it with me then there wouldn’t be any mystery.”

“Ah, you’re right. What a dilemma!”

“Exactly.”

“Did you try to look it up at the Diet Library?”

“I couldn’t find it.”

“I guess the library doesn’t have everything. There are plenty of reasons something might not be in there: regional publications, private prints…”

“I suppose so.”

“It’s the strangest story. Thirty-six years is a long time for a human being, but not so long for a book. Even if you can’t find the book itself you’d still expect to be able to find the author, or people who have read it, or some other trace of it. The fact that nothing’s turned up makes it a real headscratcher. I think it’d be perfect to discuss at the Silent Reading Club.”

As we walked through the glitzy Omotesandō Hills we came across the Dior store, whose interior glowed with a dreamlike haze. We turned right at the corner into a narrow alleyway, which led us deeper and deeper into the urban labyrinth, and soon the bustle of Omotesandō gave way to the hush of night.

As we followed the winding alleyway, I saw beautiful women getting their hair done on glass-walled second floor salons, and whiteboards being filled up in secretive subterranean meeting rooms. Through these back streets we wandered, until at last we found ourselves in a quiet residential neighbourhood, and among the houses we spotted the café where the Silent Reading Club would be held.

◯

It was a timeworn two-story house, with vines creeping up the walls around the round windows. In the light which spilled out from the bay window on the first floor, the trees in the garden resembled a deep forest. We passed a few round white tables which were set up in the yard and stopped at the front door. The chalkboard standing by the door said Reserved.

“It’s a charming little place.”

“They always have it here,” replied my friend. “The owner’s the president of the club.”

“It reminds me of a doorway to another world,” I remarked, and together we stepped inside.

My friend introduced me to the proprietor, a man with an ink-black beard, and after we had said our hellos we looked around the café. The space was divided into a number of wooden-floored rooms. There were perhaps twenty people attending the club that night, ourselves included. Here I saw a pair engaged in earnest discourse, there a larger group of five. There was a wide diversity of ages, from college students to the elderly, though as you might expect there were no children. I was reminded of the house parties you so often see in American movies. You were allowed to join any group, and leave for another as you desired―so long as you obeyed the precept to leave others’ mysteries unsolved.

We joined a group where a white-haired fellow was talking about Okatamoto Kidō’s ghost stories, which turned into a discussion on Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors which morphed into a conversation about the Hyakumonogatari. Thinking that this was the perfect segue, I decided to bring up the Thousand and One Nights.

“You may already all know of this…” I began.

Some of the most popular tales in the Arabian Nights―Sindbad the Sailor, Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves―were in fact not part of the original collection. Rather, they slipped in during the 18th century and after, as the Nights was making its way into the west. Sindbad originates as an entirely separate work, and while Aladdin and Ali Baba are so called “orphan tales”. Thus by swallowing up these tales of unknown provenance did the Thousand and One Nights slowly grow into the repertoire which we know today.

My somewhat hastily prepared trivia kicked off another round of discussion, moving from the Voynich Manuscript to The Manuscript Found in Saragossa―an odd, wide-ranging fantastique from the turn of the 19th century written by the Pole Jan Potocki―which perhaps outdid even the Nights in the complex nesting of its many stories. Potocki was quite an eccentric who, at the end of his life, was convinced that he had turned into a werewolf and committed suicide with a silver bullet.

If I were to write down everything that was said there would be no end.

After about an hour I visited the bathroom. As I was coming back I paused at the foot of the stairs. I found myself strangely drawn to them. The wooden handrails possessed a dull sheen; there was a small round window at the landing where the stairs curved to the right, onwards and upwards to the unlit second floor. Also at the landing was a little table, with a lamp which glowed with a muddy light through the red glass shade. A hefty golden rope stretched across the wide mouth of the stairway, which I took to mean that the second floor was off limits.

I stood there for a little while, straining my ears. No sound came from the lightless second floor, and yet I was all but certain that there must be someone up there. What if there is another eerie book club being held up there right now? It is from flights of fantasy like these that stories are born.

“Is everything alright?” said a voice behind me.

I turned around to find the black-bearded owner standing there.

In my line of work I often find myself daydreaming, just like this, and there is nothing more distressing than to be interrupted in the midst of one of these reveries and asked what I am doing. I imagine it must be how a burglar feels to be accosted by a police officer while casing a neighbourhood.

“That’s a lovely lamp,” I stammered in consternation.

“Ah,” he said, glancing up the stairway. “It’s been there since I was a boy.”

“Did you grow up in this house?”

His parents left it to him 10 years earlier, he told me, and he had since transformed it into a cafe. In addition to this private book club, he also rented it out for magazine and TV shoots, as well as many other events which he planned himself.

“It’s not quite a historic building, but it’s been around for nearly seventy years. I remodeled it extensively for the café, of course, but this staircase has remained mostly untouched. I was afraid of it when I was a kid. Afraid of that strange lamp, and of how dark it was on the second floor.”

“Yeah, I can imagine how it’d be scary as a kid.”

“I was a real ‘fraidycat, I was.”

With his burly frame and his hirsute face he resembled a bear on an expedition to the South Pole. I could scarcely imagine him as a child.

“Do you know what a mimishippō is?” he asked out of nowhere.

“A mimishippō?”

“It’s a spirit from a picture book.”

“Can’t say I’ve heard of it.”

“I believe my younger sister borrowed it from the library when we were young. It was about a spirit which visits a hut in the woods. I don’t know what shape it took, or what it really was; in any case it was a very frightening story. My sister kept pestering me to read it to her, and it so happened that our mother had gone out that day. It was so scary that I couldn’t bring myself to read til the end: I snapped it shut and shoved it behind the sofa. We just sat there in utter silence, but as we did we started to hear noises from the second floor. It took all my courage to drag myself to the foot of the stairs. Evening had fallen, and it was pitch black up there. I imagined the mimishippō, pacing back and forth, back and forth; we were convinced that any moment now it would come down the stairs, and so we stayed there, completely petrified, until our mother came home.”

I felt like I had experienced something similar before.

“Of course there was no one up there,” chuckled the owner. “I never did learn how Mimishippō ends. I never picked that book up again.”

“You’ve never thought of reading it again?”

“Not at all. How sad and shriveled would my childhood seem, if the mimishippō turned out to be a disappointment? The memory is too important to me. So no, I’ve no interest in finding out how that book ends, and I’ve preserved those stairs and that landing exactly as they appeared when I was a child. It is important to let mysteries simply be.”

At last I understood what the owner was getting at.

“Now I get it. That’s why it’s called the Silent Reading Club.”

He nodded as if gratified that I understood.

“Books are something we interpret, you see? It is we who give the books meaning. Books are subordinate to our lives, and it is the act of reading which gives them purpose in our lives: that is certainly one way to look at it. Very good. But think of it from another perspective. Books exist independently of our lives, on a higher plane: it is they who give us meaning. But in this reading, they must always remain a mystery to us: for if we were ever to unravel their mystery, it would become us who gave meaning to them. It was this which made me wonder: what would happen if we brought together mysteries from books of all shapes and sizes? What if we spoke of them, not as things to be solved, but rather as mysteries for mysteries’ own sake? Would not then arise that mystery, that great clump of mysteries which lies at the heart of the world? Can you not see it, floating over us like a dark moon?”

As he expounded on his pet theory, I could not help but think that this was exactly the kind of person I would expect to lead such an eccentric organization as the Silent Reading Club. Seeing me at a loss for words, he clapped me on the shoulder kindly.

“And that about sums it up. Enjoy yourself.”

Stepping over the rope he took the stairs lightly. After he had gone the second floor remained dark, and silent. Perhaps it was a trick by a tanuki or a kitsune―and yet I knew that I was in the midst of Tokyo.

I walked to the window by the door and gazed at the trees outside. Once more I heard the voices rising and falling, speaking of mysteries.

It was like a scene out of a story.

◯

As I was making my way back to my seat my attention was drawn to another group of five sitting on the upholstered seating in front of the window which looked on the lawn, where a man was in the midst of a passionate discourse on Greek philosophy.

Sounds complicated, I thought to myself, and stopped to listen.

Sitting at the end of a sofa was a woman—petite, probably in her mid-twenties—leaning forward with round eyes full of curiosity as she listened to the man talk. Certainly she seemed charming enough, but what actually drew my attention was the book that was resting in her lap: a little taller than a *bunkobon *paperback, with red and green geometric patterns adorning the cover with the title and author in brutalist font.

It can’t be, I thought.

Eventually she noticed my gaze burning a hole in her, and glanced at me a little oddly. The book shifted in her lap, and as it did I caught a glimpse of its title:

The Tropics, by Sayama Shōichi.

Too astonished for words, I quickly left them and went back to my seat, where I hissed in my friend’s ear, “You’re not going to believe this!”

“What is it, are you in some kind of trouble?”

“I found The Tropics!”

He half-jumped out of his chair.

“You’re kidding me!”

“It’s over there, there’s a woman in that group by the window that has it.”

“I don’t believe it. Your phantom book shows up out of nowhere, just like that?”

“It really is an amazing coincidence.”

“Sounds a little too amazing to me,” he said disbelievingly. “Are you sure you weren’t seeing things?”

“I think I’d better go talk to her.”

“All right, I’ll come with you.”

We said our goodbyes to our group, then approached the group by the window. The man was still waxing poetic about philosophy, but when he saw us coming he stopped.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said, before turning to the woman. “It’s just that book you have there…”

She clutched the volume to her chest warily. “What about it?”

“It’s very important to me.”

“Have you ever read it before?”

“…Yes.”

“Really? The whole thing?”

I felt myself shrinking before the searching gaze of those round eyes. I hadn’t actually reached the end of The Tropics. But deciding that I ought to be truthful, I clarified, “I only got partway through it.”

“Hmm. Really.”

She looked at me silently for a little while longer, and with every second that passed I became more convinced that she was going to turn on her heel and walk out, when all of a sudden she smiled.

“Mind telling me what it’s about?”

Somewhere behind her friendly demeanour I sensed there was a message: you’d better not be full of crap or you’ll be sorry. The man seemed a bit miffed at having his spiel interrupted, but all the same he bade us join them.

I moved a nearby wooden chair over and sat down.

“It’s pretty hard to explain,” I began.

“I know,” she replied.

I recited everything I could remember, while the woman kept staring at me, not moving a muscle, with the slightest of frowns on her face. She’d set the book down on the table, but all the while I was speaking she kept a hand on it. I was a little unnerved, unsure whether she was actually listening to a word I said.

It is remarkably difficult to explain a book you have not read in sixteen years to a group of complete strangers, a task compounded by the difficulty I already face in summarizing books due to the very particular way in which I read. The longer I blathered on the sillier I felt. Why had I spent sixteen years searching for this book? Was I just spouting nonsense to a room full of strangers? As I progressed through the book my speech increasingly became peppered with expressions like “Let’s see…” and “I believe…” and “How did it go again…” until at last I ran out of things to say.

“And then? What happened next?” said my friend, prodding my arm.

“That’s the end.”

“What! That can’t be the end, Morimin!”

“I never finished it, remember. Now if I could get my hands on it again…”

I pointed towards the book lying on the table, but no sooner had I reached out my hand than the woman snatched it back and hugged it to her body tightly. What was she so wary of me for? I thought I’d been polite enough; did I really seem that suspicious?

After a brief silence the woman gave a little nod.

“I guess you really did read the book.”

“Of course I did.”

But you don’t know it ends?”

“Like I said, I didn’t get to the end. Now I won’t ask you to give it to me, but maybe you’d consider lending it to me once you’ve finished it? I’d also be willing to pay for it…”

“I’m not selling it.”

“Of course not, I would never insist. But if there’s any way I could convince you to let me read it myself…”

“You really want to read it that badly?” she said. “But you know, it might not turn out to be what you’ve been expecting.”

She was probably right. On many occasions I had revisited books which I had previously regarded as a masterpiece, only to find that the passage of time had rendered them dull and colourless. And sometimes it would also happen that after a little more time had passed, I would revisit the book again and find it restored to its former glory. What was dull can become full of life: one might go so far as to say that books are things which live moment to moment alongside the reader.

“Would you give me the chance?” I asked.

“The truth is, I haven’t finished the book either.”

“I’ll wait for you to finish it, then, as long as it takes.”

The woman looked at me strangely. How shall I express what I saw in those eyes? It felt as though I was a schoolboy again, beneath the distant watchful gaze of a teacher.

I was completely unprepared for what she said next.

“I don’t think I *will *finish it,” she told me.

“I’m fully aware that I have no right to say this, but if you don’t plan on reading it…”

“You don’t know anything,” she said quietly, holding up a finger. “No one has ever finished reading this book.”

◯

In an instant the whispering that had filled the café ebbed away. Even that fellow who had been so miffed at having his lecture on Greek philosophy interrupted was now listening with rapt attention.

I cleared my throat. “What exactly does you mean?”

“Exactly what I said: it’s impossible to reach the end of this book.”

“Can’t you just flip to the back of the book?” interjected my friend. “That way you’ll know how it all ends.”

The woman turned to him frostily.

“Does reading the last page of a book mean that you have read the book? Can you really have read if you have not entered the world contained inside through the first page and emerged through its last?”

“Well…”

“Well?”

“Point taken,” my friend wisely conceded.

“The Tropics is a novel,” I pondered, “and just summarizing it into so-and-so did this-and-that doesn’t really get you anywhere. The most important thing, when it comes to novels, is that you must immerse yourself in it, and experience the world alongside its characters: otherwise the novel cannot truly live. What you mean, then, is that it is impossible to reach the end of The Tropics in that manner, correct?”

Her lips curved into an enigmatic smile.

“You said that you didn’t finish it either?”

“That’s because I lost the book…”

“I know other people who have read The Tropics. But not one of them reached the end.”

“There are other people who’ve read it?”

“Of course there are. There’s a whole society of them. In fact, they’re the ones who told me about The Tropics in the first place, this book of mystery…”

“Book of mystery,” I murmured.

The woman nodded.

“I think you know why I brought this book here. There are mysteries at the heart of the world, and The Tropics is intertwined with those mysteries.”

“It sounds fascinating.”

“Would you like to know more?”

“I’m not sure I could stand it if you stopped now.”

Only then did I notice the black-bearded proprietor standing beside us, pouring the contents of a silver coffeepot into a mug.

“I think I’ll join you folks tonight,” he said, and when he had settled himself into the audience the woman placed the book on the table once more.

“These are the opening words of The Tropics,” she told us. “Speak not of that which concerneth thee not…”

A vision of tropical islands swam into my mind: blinding white sands; dark forbidding jungles; unknown islands floating in a translucent sea. I could almost feel the wind brushing past my cheeks. Yes, this was the same shore on which I had stood that summer sixteen years ago. How my heart thrilled, now that the mystery would at last be revealed, and yet I had a foreboding that the story which was about to unfold was merely the beginning of yet another mystery.

Scheharazade’s words came unbidden to my mind:

“Gladly and as a duty, if the great and courteous King permits.”

◯

Thus she began her tale―and so opens the gateway to The Tropics.