Chapter 2―The Scholars (Part 1)

“You don’t need novels to get by,” began Shiraishi. She’d devoured all sorts of novels in college days, but after graduation it was all she could do to keep up with all of the work-related reading she needed to do. There was a mountain of practical books that needed reading, so she rolled up her sleeves and got to work. And somewhere along the way, as she busied herself vacuuming up this mound of practical information, she lost the habit of reading for pleasure.

“You don’t need novels to get by,” she repeated. “But is that really true, I wonder?”

◯

She didn’t pick up a novel again until a combination of circumstances led to her quitting her job. She went back home to Koishikawa to mope around for a little while; it wasn’t until last autumn that she’d found herself a new job. Her uncle ran a model train shop in Yūrakuchō, and as her first step towards rejoining the world at large she began helping out at the store.

It was located underground, in an out-of-the-way corner where people seldom passed by. Sometimes the shop was so still that it felt like an oversized model itself. Shiraishi would scowl at the monstrously thick catalogue, not moving from her chair.

After about two months of this, she felt a sudden urge to pick up novels again; during her lunch break she sojourned to the Sanseido and bought a paperback, Asada Jirō’s Prison Hotel Vol. 1.

Hardly a soul came in that whole afternoon, which she spent engrossed in the book, but somewhere nearly the halfway point she put it down and began to circle the store like a migratory bird. Was reading always like this? she wondered to herself. It had been so long since she had picked up a novel that the sheer pleasure of it was overwhelming. She felt like an old jalopy groaning to life for the first time in years.

Evening was falling over Yūrakuchō as she hurried beneath the railroad tracks towards Sanseido where she bought the remaining three volumes. She read them standing in line for yuzu ramen beneath the Tokyo Kotsu Kaikan complex; she read them at home; she read them the next day minding the shop, and that night, and by evening the following day she had finished the whole series. There’s nothing more left to read, she realized, and spurred by that emptiness she rushed back to Sanseido―and so the cycle began anew.

“I’ve read so much since then, it’s like I’ve been trying to make up for all those years I wasn’t reading,” said Shiraishi. “I read when I’m at work, I read while I’m having a bite at the underground diners, I read on my way home. I even read at the dinner table. As long as I’ve got a story in front of me to read I’m happy. Sure, maybe you can get by just fine without novels. But isn’t it just amazing that there are so many interesting books in the world that you’ll never be able to read them all? Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t humanity just incredible? That’s what goes through my mind when I think about novels.”

One day at the very beginning of November, she found herself resting her chin on her hands, engrossed in Robinson Crusoe. As her eyes took in the words, she found herself transported from that quiet underground shop to another world―covered in dense forests smothered in stifling heat, broad leaves pelted by fat viscid raindrops, quavering like the gills of some creature unknown to science. She passed through the trees and found herself in a cozy cave, a fire crackling in a little hearth. She imagined herself eating strips of goat meat and dried grapes and turtle’s eggs, and weaving supple twigs into a basket, and sowing the fields after the rains were over, and in this way passing the days. So engrossed was she in this tropical daydream that at first she didn’t hear the voice calling to her.

“Excuse me. Um, hello?”

Her head jerked up to see a man in a suit standing in front of her, patiently holding out a set of two N scale cement haulers. He was a regular she’d seen a few times before, and as she rang him up she felt her face flushing red.

“Robinson Crusoe!” he commented when noticed her book on the counter.

“I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.”

“It’s a good book,” replied the man.

That was how she met Ikeuchi.

◯

Ikeuchi worked at a furniture import firm on the fifth floor of the same building. He looked to be about 30, always wore the same black-ish suit and always carried a black notebook sandwiched beneath his arm. Every time Shiraishi saw him he called to mind a proud, haggard crow taking shelter from the rain. Based on the tally which she secretly kept on a Hakone Tozan Railway calendar, he came in at precisely midday twice a week, on Wednesday and Friday.

As time went by they began to chat.

“What kind of work do you do?” Shiraishi asked him.

“If you must know, I’m a smuggler.”

“I see,” nodded Shiraishi.

After a beat, Ikeuchi’s expression turned serious.

“I apologize. That was a joke.”

Shiraishi was nonplussed when he told her what he really did. He seemed much more suited to the life of an itinerant philosopher, or a writer who spent his nights working on avant-garde novels. Then again, she had never actually met a philosopher or a novelist.

Ikeuchi invited her to view the showroom, but it seemed like a swanky kind of boutique, and she never did go inside. And at any rate, she would see him at the model store on his regular two visits a week.

Ikeuchi had two hobbies: trains, and reading.

“There’s nothing quite like taking a trip by train. You can take in the view from the window, or simply enjoy reading a book,” he said. “The fun never ends.”

He was quite well-read. It seemed to Shiraishi that whenever she brought up a book in conversation, whether it was one she had recently read or planned to read, Ikeuchi had without exception read it already. There was no point in competing about it, she told herself, but perhaps it was only human nature that it stung a little.

“I’m really impressed by how much you’ve read.”

“I have always loved reading. It is almost unconscious.”

“But you must be very busy.”

“I suppose I am, but you can always find snatches of time here and there.”

Once on her way home she had seen Ikeuchi in the long underground tunnel that leads to Hibiya Station. He was carrying his bag in his left hand and balancing an open book in his right, striding singlemindedly down that bland, crowded corridor. And with the same hand in which he held the book he managed to turn the pages rapidly as he went.

“He’ll hurt himself!” she thought, anxiously watching him go, and yet he made it through the crowds unscathed, that curious bibliophile. With his plain black suit coupled with his robotic manner he resembled a Ninomiya Kinjirō statue, updated for the 21st century.

There was another thing about him which piqued her interest.

Tucked among the clinics and travel agencies which lined that same underground quarter where Shiraishi worked was an old-fashioned coffee shop known as Café Merry. At 2 she would step out to take her lunch break there, enjoying a stale sandwich with lukewarm coffee and lazily flipping through a book.

Late in November she spotted Ikeuchi there. If that had been all it would hardly have been remarkable. It was the people with whom he shared the table that drew her attention: a portly older man wearing a beret, a boney young college student, and a lady in her fifties whose rings sparkled as she lifted her coffee cup to her mouth. The nicknames Shiraishi gave them were perhaps not the most inspired: Beretman and Boney and Madame.

It certainly didn’t look like a business meeting, or a family gathering. They were all so unlike in age and appearance that she could not imagine what linked them all together.

In between sips of coffee the group was having a lively debate over a large sheet of paper which was spread out on the table. Ikeuchi had a notebook open in his lap, scribbling things down as he nodded along to whatever Beretman was saying, while Boney listened sourly and made occasional interjections of his own. Madame alone said nothing, her eyelids drooping listlessly behind her tinted glasses.

Have I stumbled upon some kind of criminal conspiracy? Shiraishi wondered.

It was then that Ikeuchi noticed her curious gaze and smiled at her. Seeing Madame look her way as well she quickly ducked her eyes back to the book, wondering if she had seen something she was not meant to see.

◯

It was December, and Ikeuchi remained just as punctual in his visits as ever.

Not once had that mysterious meeting come up in their conversations, and Shiraishi began to feel a little silly for having let her imagination run so wild. She had been reading so much as of late that what she called her Story Sense must have been getting a little overactive.

The area around Yūrakuchō Station was starting to get into the Christmas mood, but all was still down in the underground hobby shop, as though the season was passing it by. Shiraishi rather liked the calm. Ikeuchi would show up on schedule, strike up a conversation in that composed train conductor’s voice of his, and return to his office precisely at the end of his lunch break.

The only issue was the owner of the shop.

Her uncle was on the gruff side, and considered something of a crank by the rest of the family. Not being very far apart in age, they had always got along well, but somehow he had got it into his head that Ikeuchi was there to court his niece, who in her turn was not opposed to his advances. And so whenever the appointed times drew near her uncle would shuffle out of the store, which mortified Shiraishi to no end. Ikeuchi was simply a well-run train making a scheduled stop at the station which Shiraishi just happened to staff: how could a locomotive and a station attendant possibly fall in love?

That Wednesday her uncle began to make his way toward the door as he always did.

“I’ll be out. Watch the shop.”

“Where are you goin?”

“Errands.”

“What kind of errands?”

“The kind I have to take care of,” he grunted as he left.

“Is the owner well? I haven’t seen him in some time?” asked Ikeuchi when he came in.

“He’s out, somewhere. Not sure for what.”

“Well, as long as he is well.”

Ikeuchi circled around the shop in his usual slow fashion. Shiraishi watched him surreptitiously while pretending to be engrossed in The Count of Monte Cristo. After a little while Ikeuchi took the notebook from beneath his arm and a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket. When she heard the pen scratching on the page she was instantly reminded of that secret meeting, and the way that Ikeuchi had been jotting things down.

“I always see you carrying that notebook around,” she commented.

“Hm?” Ikeuchi mumbled, turning around. He turned his eyes to the notebook again, as if only noticing for the first time that he had been writing something down.

“I never feel quite secure unless I have it with me.”

“Is it for work?”

“No, it’s entirely for personal use. I write down passages from books I’ve read, and thoughts that wander through my head.”

He riffled through the thick book, showing her page after unlined page filled with handwriting so regimented that it looked as though it had been printed. There were what appeared to be timelines and lists of dramatis personae which he had created as he read along. Shiraishi had never read a book in such a fashion before. Whereas Ikeuchi was methodical, Shiraishi was a throw-yourself-in-headfirst kind of reader.

“It looks like you’re preparing for a test,” she observed.

“I find that sometimes taking your time can make things more worth the while. Take Tolstoy’s War and Peace for example, and the impossible task of contending with that vast cast of characters! But create for yourself a list of characters, even only the principal ones, and see for yourself how much simpler it becomes.”

“Icy.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means IC, Mr. Ikeuchi.”

“Ah, I see…icy…”

“Personally, I just push through it before the characters get too tangled up in my head.”

“And that is certainly a valid approach to take. To each their own.”

Ikeuchi began to expound on the joy of re-reading, at every opportunity which presented itself, the excerpts which he carried around in that notebook―passages which he had painstakingly copied down in his own hand, which became almost his own flesh and blood. That which he selected forged him anew, and in writing them down that notebook became a visible artifact of this labour of self-creation. He found great reassurance and comfort in this.

“I become anxious whenever I begin to run out of pages, for that means that I must leave behind all these accumulated words. I never feel so adrift as when I have just switched to a new journal. That’s why I’ve begun to gravitate towards thicker notebooks: bringing out the big guns, so to speak.”

“But wouldn’t that make parting with it harder?”

“Precisely! It’s a dilemma, without question.”

Ikeuchi brushed his hand across the notebook. It was only about half-filled, so it looked like he would be spared that dilemma for a while yet.

“I wish I had your kind of tenacity.”

“I believe, Ms. Shiraishi, that it is also a question of habit. When a mentor first recommended I try it in college I could not be bothered. But once it becomes ingrained it is not at all a burden: quite the opposite. What a pity that I did not heed that advice sooner! How much more self-assured might I be now, if I had started all those years ago?”

“You seem plenty self-assured to me.”

“I assure you, inside I am but a common phony.”

“A phony!”

Shiraishi couldn’t keep herself from giggling at the word. She asked Ikeuchi what had convinced him to begin keeping his notes, to which he replied: “It is rather an unusual tale.”

◯

Five years earlier Ikeuchi had taken a late-autumn pilgrimage to a few temples around Nara. He took a room at a business hotel on the banks of Sarusawa-ike, going around to Kōfukuji and Tōdaiji and Shinyakushiji on foot. He walked around taking in the sights of Kyoto―dried persimmons hanging from the eaves of the houses, dusky sunlight slanting over the embankments, knobbly seed clusters hanging from the branches of the Chinese tallow trees―the woman manning the reception hut at Shinyakushiji was dozing off.

Evening had fallen by the time he arrived back at his hotel. There was a little bookshelf by the souvenir corner in the lobby. You could take what you liked, as long as you replaced it with a book of your own in return. Having just finished a paperback, Ikeuchi put it on the shelf and browsed the rest of the selection. What a wonderful thing it is, to spend an autumn evening with a book you encounter quite by chance during the course of your travels, and it was a volume which had been thrust into the very corner of the shelf which caught Ikeuchi’s eye.

“It seemed quite unremarkable,” he told Shiraishi. “Perhaps a little larger than a bunkobon, with geometric patterns adorning the cover, a simple design from a bygone time. It matched my mood at the time exactly.”

“It sounds like destiny.”

“Exactly. That is exactly what it was.”

After a brief rest in his room, Ikeuchi headed out again, taking the book with him. After having dinner at the shopping district he went to the bar of the Nara Hotel, where over sips of his drink he flipped through the book. What an odd little novel it was, and he kept reading back at the hotel until he was about halfway through it, whereupon he put it next to his pillow and went to sleep. The rest he would read on the bullet train back home.

“But come morning, the book had vanished.”

“Vanished? But how?”

“I cannot say. But clearly it was gone, so that was that, and I resolved that when I had come back to Tokyo I would search for it there. And yet! Scour the used bookstores and the internet as I might, that book I had been reading was nowhere to be found.”

Over the course of his search his recollection of the book began to slip away. It occurred to him one day to buy a notebook and write everything that he could remember, and that was the first of the reading logs which he still kept to this day.

“The strangest story, no?” said Ikeuchi, with another caress of his notebook. “And I have not given up on finding that book yet.”

“It must have been quite an interesting book.”

“It was Sayama Shōichi’s The Tropics.”

A sudden memory came to Shiraishi then, of sitting somewhere on a bench with an open book on her lap.

“I feel like I’ve read that book before…”

Ikeuchi stared at her, his eyes wide.

“You have?”

“Well, I’m not exactly sure.”

“When? How did you come across it?” Ikeuchi demanded, leaning forward in his excitement.

As Shiraishi stared into space, wracking her brain, a recollection came back into her mind.

In her college days she had taken a trip to Kyoto alone. At Demachiyanagi Station she rode the Eizan line and got off at a station known as Yase-hieizanguchi. Golden Week had just ended, the air was cool and fresh, and she could almost feel a vibrant verdant hue seeping into her skin. Someone was playing an ocarina on the riverbank as she crossed a bridge over the Takano.

She was planning to take the cable car up Mt. Hiei, but as she approached the station she came to an abrupt halt. There was an odd structure in the plaza. Superficially it resembled a ramen cart, but the garishly festooned frontage much more reminded her of a curio shop. A scroll depicting a mighty tiger hung from the eaves, while the three wise monkeys perched atop the Persian rug which draped the ostentatious roof, and flashing, whirling pinwheels hurt her eyes. It was such a loud, incoherent display that she wondered whether the caravan had wandered in from another dimension. But judging from the yellow banner with the name of the shop it appeared to be a bookseller of some sort, though she had never heard of a ramen cart that sold books before.

Very hesitantly she walked up to it. The shelf was small but crammed from end to end with books.

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Sure, look as long as you like.”

The mouthwatering scent of curry drifted over from the cup of ramen which the owner was eating. He was sitting on a chair next to the cart, barrel-chested beneath his red short-sleeved shirt, and though he sported a long Robinson Crusoe beard his eyes were twinkling and merry. He looked surprisingly young.

“Is this…a bookstore?”

“That’s right.”

“Abareya? Is that how you pronounce it?”

“It’s Arabia. The kanji means ‘tempestuous night,’” said the shop owner proudly. “Take a gander, I’m sure you’ll find something that intrigues.”

Maybe I’ll get a book to remember my trip by, thought Shiraishi. She ran her eyes along the spines of the many books on the shelf, many of which she had never heard of before.

“I’ve never seen anyone use a cart like this to sell books.”

“It doesn’t pay the bills, I can tell you that. I’m just using it to spread the gospel of reading,” he said, shielding his face from the sun. “My day job is quite different.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m an ozashiki-geinin, a banquet entertainer.”

What a fascinating person.

Shiraishi picked out a book from the shelf, and after paying and thanking him, she bought a ticket at the ropeway station and sat down on a bench, intending to read a little until the car was here.

She never got on the cable car. She was so absorbed in The Tropics that she never realized what time it was until the Mt. Eizan cable car had stopped running for the day.

“I see,” nodded Ikeuchi earnestly. “And what happens at the end of the book?”

“How did it go…”

Shiraishi tried her best to remember, but her memory had become quite fuzzy, and all she could dredge up was how the book had begun. Its ending was a complete blank. Perhaps she hadn’t finished it after all.

“I’m sorry I can’t be any help.”

“Not at all. It’s not your fault,” said Ikeuchi. “That is simply The Tropics.”

What does that mean? Shiraishi wondered to herself.

◯

Lunchtime was over, and Ikeuchi went back to his office.

Resting her chin in her hands, Shiraishi pondered The Tropics.

The first image that came to mind was a young man―the protagonist―standing on the shore, groggily watching a train race along the waves as dawn broke on the horizon. He had washed up on this tropical island, shorn of memory. The first person he met there was Sayama Shōichi: that part she remembered distinctly, because of that unexpected appearance of the author’s name. But from that point on she remembered only bits and pieces: the observatory in the jungle, the map of the mysterious archipelago; the gun battery island, the dungeon and the bearded denizen who lurked within…of these things she could recall only fragments, nothing more.

She frowned and let out a frustrated groan.

“Having a bad day?” asked her uncle, sounding slightly concerned.

“No, not really. I’m just thinking.”

“Then can you try to think without scowling like that? You’re scaring me.”

“Right, right, sorry!” She shook The Tropics out of her mind and got back to work. Ikeuchi would visit sooner or later; she’d just ask him about it then.

But Friday rolled around, and then Wednesday, and still Ikeuchi hadn’t showed up at the hobby store. Her uncle went out as he always did, leaving her to wait for Ikeuchi alone. All that waiting started to eat at her. How could Ikeuchi drop all those tantalizing hints and then just leave her hanging like this? Was he intentionally keeping her in suspense? Was this all some saccharine plot? No, no: surely not a human alive would try to court her in such a roundabout fashion.

Before she knew it she was thinking about The Tropics again.

Back at home in Koishikawa she searched through her bookshelves and in her closet, where her entire life was documented, from childhood to present day. She sliced through tape sealing boxes with the words “A CURSE ON WHOEVER OPENS THIS BOX” written in magic marker on the side, and dug through poems and journals which had been written during particularly emotionally cutting periods in her life (the cuts in question made by a knife called angst), but nothing matching the description of The Tropics came up. Had she left it in Kyoto, or maybe thrown it away? But throw-yourself-in-headfirst readers didn’t have the benefit of notes to look back on, so she could only wonder.

Her anxiety lingered past Christmas into the waning days of the year, when Ikeuchi showed up again on a Friday afternoon she had to bite her lip from letting out a gasp.

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” she said. adopting a careful veneer of nonchalance.

“Hello,” he replied with a little nod, approaching the counter and holding out a thin package. “A late Christmas present. I hope you will find it useful.”

It was a daffodil yellow notebook.

With a determined air Ikeuchi continued, “I have a favour to ask of you. Would you join our reading club tomorrow afternoon? I believe you saw us at Café Merry, some time ago…”

“That was a reading club?”

“We call ourselves ‘The Scholars.’”

“The Scholars. Sounds impressive,” commented Shiraishi with a little smile.

Ikeuchi fidgeted bashfully.

“I find it a little over the top myself, but Nakatsugawa, one of our members, insisted on it. It’s the name of a mysterious organization that appears in The Tropics. All four of us have read The Tropics; we began to do some research into it about a year ago. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind discussing the book you read with us.”

“But I barely remember any of it at all.”

“Even the pieces you do remember will be helpful.”

Shiraishi looked down at the golden notebook silently. She thought back to the gathering she had seen at the café: Beretman, Boney, Madame. So that had been a book club dedicated to The Tropics. That would explain why none of them appeared to have anything else in common. She still wasn’t entirely convinced, but at least it didn’t seem like they were trying to swindle her with some wonder . Curiosity welled up inside her. If this was all some scheme to ensnare her, she had to admit she’d fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.

As casually she could, Shiraishi said, “I’ll give it a shot.”