Chapter 2―The Scholars (Part 5)

Shiraishi put her elbows on the counter and rested her head in her hands.

Waiting around while Ikeuchi was in Kyoto confronting the mystery of The Tropics made her feel positively useless. There must be some conjecture she could work on by herself. Flipping through her notes she reviewed all that she had learned thus far.

Chiyo had said that the Desert Palace lay on the other side of the Doldrums. What made her so sure? She must have some secret, some remembered figment which she had concealed from the other Scholars. She had nearly put the puzzle together, but there was one more piece she was missing. Enter Shiraishi: with her help, Chiyo had discovered the Witch of the Full Moon, and the last piece of her puzzle―

But who was the Witch of the Full Moon?

As she frowned down at the notebook her uncle’s voice broke in on her thoughts.

“Something the matter?”

She looked up and realized that her uncle had been tapping her right with his index finger between the eyes.

“You keep glaring like that, you’ll scare away all the customers. Try to relax, will you?”

Replacing the scowl with an unconvincing smile, Shiraishi asked, “Have you ever heard of the Witch of the Full Moon.”

“What’s that about?”

“I don’t know! That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Full moon…maybe it’s got something to do with Princess Kaguya?.”

“But Princess Kaguya isn’t a witch.”

“She’s a little like one. She’s got a wicked side.”

Shiraishi had never actually read the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, but she was familiar with the story, that it was described by Murasaki Shikibu as “the ancestor of all tales”. Come to think of it, the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter was itself a rather curious story. Who Princess Kaguya was, why she descended to Earth, why she left―mysteries, unanswered questions all.

“You didn’t like Princess Kaguya?”

“Couldn’t love her more.”

“But you called her wicked.”

“Let’s just say I’m drawn to people who don’t let you get too close.”

Pretty smooth deflection there, thought Shiraishi.

A little past noon on Sunday Shiraishi was having a late lunch at Café Merry when her phone rang. It was Ikeuchi. Had he made a discovery?

“What’s going on, Ikeuchi?”

“I do apologize for disturbing you.”

“Oh, I’m not busy. I’m just having lunch.”

Presumably Ikeuchi could hear the sounds of the café in the background: murmurs of conversation, the scraping of silverware, the classical music playing on the speakers. She listened carefully and detected a faint sound, maybe a radio: was Ikeuchi in a taxi?

“Where are you right now?” His voice sounded oddly strained.

“At Café Merry, having a toast set,” she told him. “Why?”

“You see, I spotted someone in Kyoto who looks very much like you.”

“I’m pretty sure this is Yūrakuchō,” chuckled Shiraishi. “Maybe my desire to visit Kyoto spawned a doppelganger.”

“I must have been mistaken then.”

“I guess so.”

“My sincerest apologies for the confusion.”

There was a long pause.

Something’s definitely going on, Shiraishi thought.

“Is everything okay, Mr. Ikeuchi?”

“Nothing to worry yourself about,” he replied. “So much has happened that I’m struggling to wrap my mind around it all. Once I have returned there will be a mountain of things for us to discuss.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Your patience will be rewarded.”

It had been a herky-jerky conversation, not what she expected from Ikeuchi at all. Resting her head back in her hands she thought.

I, and I alone, possess the real version of The Tropics.

Chiyo’s voice rang in her ears, awash with certainty. Shiraishi imagined her at the prow of a ship, surging over the waves, her sparkling eyes fixed on the horizon. It was a magnificent image.

She wondered if Ikeuchi would find Chiyo in Kyoto.

◯

In the afternoon on the following day, a Monday, Shiraishi visited Jimbōchō. Yasukuni Avenue was bathed in a gentle light, and even the people walking down the street seemed to be in a buoyant mood.

Used book stores lined the thoroughfare; some had placed rolling carts in front, packed from end to end with books, while others had entrances flanked by towers of books stacked so high that they threatened to topple over, as if rather than than buildings of wood and stone they were alcoves carved out of the books. Occasionally she would stop and peruse the windows, where she saw imposing edifices erected from the collected works of Kunikida Doppo and Ozaki Kōyō.

In elementary school Shiraishi had imagined that each time she turned a page and read the words, a new world came into existence. Yet once she had turned the final page and shut the cover, that world was no more. Yes, a book was nothing but a bundle of pages with words printed on them, that fact was quite plain to her: and yet often she marvelled at how magical that plain thing could be.

How many worlds waited to be discovered within the walls of Jimbōchō? One had only to enter any of these shops and turn the cover of any of the books which waited within to step into an altered flow of time. From thin air burst forth a river of words, from which sprang forth new lands, new trees, new lives, an entire new world. Open another book: there you would find an entirely different world together. A boundless jungle of book-worlds proliferated across the face of the earth.

“My head’s spinning,” murmured Shiraishi, at the same time letting out a little yawn. Ever since she was a child, for some reason she always yawned whenever she pondered things like outer space, or Great Buddha statues, or the Great Wall, or other similarly gargantuan things. And so it was today that her progress along the street was punctuated by a regular series of yawns.

When she arrived at luncheon at the agreed-upon time she found her friend at a table, engrossed in what appeared to be a stack of galley proofs. Exactly what you would expect to find a professional editor doing. In college she had been an assistant at a small publishing house in Jimbōchō, which she joined full time upon graduation.

“Heyo!” they greeted one another.

That telephone conversation they had had just before Shiraishi came down ill had seemed to have considerably piqued her friend’s curiosity about The Tropics, and she had proposed they meet so that she could learn all about it. In between mouthfuls of lunch, Shiraishi filled her in on everything that had happened in the last several months―her acquaintance with Ikeuchi, the process of Salvage, the apartment on Harimazaka, Chiyo’s vanishing, the many theories of the Scholars, the postcard from Kyoto, Ikeuchi’s setting out to find the truth―and as she recounted it all she felt a renewed amazement at how much had happened.

“Wowee!” her friend marvelled. “It’s like a mystery novel!”

“And now all I can do is wait for Ikeuchi to come back and tell me what he found.”

“He must have found something in Kyoto.”

“I really hope so.”

But Monday had brought no tidings from Ikeuchi. So sincere had he been with his promises that Shiraishi was sure he must still be in Kyoto.

“It’s funny,” her friend slowly mused, “The Scholars have been investigating this book for over a year, right? And they didn’t come up with much. But things started moving once you joined at the end of the year. You really might be the key to all this, you know.”

A sentiment, Shiraishi remembered, that Nakatsugawa had also expressed.

“Yeah, right,” she snorted, fanning the air. “So did you manage to dig anything up?”

“Nope, sorry. I don’t think I’ll be much help.”

Her friend had asked a few other editors she knew, but not one of them had heard of Sayama Shōichi or The Tropics. But she had also asked the owner of a bookshop, who told her that he had heard of the book, that someone had come in to ask about it about a year ago: a rare book collector by the name of Nakatsugawa, whose persistent inquiries about it had earned him a degree of infamy in the used book quarter.

“Apparently he never found it.”

“I think that’s the same Nakatsugawa I know,” sighed Shiraishi with a little disappointment. “It definitely sounds like something he’d do.”

“Is he one of the Scholars?”

“Yep.”

“Ah, so that’s what it is.”

According to her friend Nakatsugawa largely kept to himself. He had an office somewhere in Jimbōchō, but no one seemed to know anything about where he had come from. People whispered stories that he had earned a windfall from a life insurance policy upon his wife’s accidental death, or that he was related to the renowned writer Shiba Ryōtarō, or that he was the heir to a seaweed wholesaler: baseless rumours, one and all. Yet for all that had reached her friend’s ears concerning Nakatsugawa, she had heard nothing of The Tropics itself. How strange, that in the greatest used book district in the world, not a single person could tell her a thing about this book.

“So what do you think the secret of The Tropics is, Shiratama?”

Shiraishi’s first name was Tamako, so sometimes her friends would mash it together into Shiratama.

Shiraishi shrugged. “Beats me.”

“You’re just going to let Ikeuchi do all the solving for you?”

“Well, I did have this one idea…”

That idea was the connection with the Thousand and One Nights.

The day she had visited that apartment in Harimazaka, Chiyo had read from the Nights, telling her that it had been the copy of the Nights in her father’s study that had led to her meeting Sayama Shōichi. Nakatsugawa was a connoisseur of the Nights, and that mysterious book seller from which she had acquired The Tropics: Arabia Books.

“I think there’s some kind of link between the two,” she stated.

She’d read a little of the Nights the other day, a version published by Iwanami Shoten, translated first from Arabic by a Frenchman named Mardrus, and then from French into Japanese. It was a gruesome affair―kings lopping off the heads of women by the haremful―but she was entranced by the cleverness and courage of Scheharazade. Once she had finished the Tale of King Shahryār and of His Brother, King Shahzamān, she quickly sped through the Tale of the Merchant and the Ifrīt, but found little to suggest any sort of connection with The Tropics.

“Do you think I’m missing something?”

“Maybe you’ve got it backwards: it’s the Thousand and One Nights that shows up in The Tropics.”

“Yeah, that’s definitely possible.”

“Anything come to mind?”

“Hmm…” Shiraishi searched her memory. “There’s a palace that might fit the bill.”

“I guess without the book there’s no way to know for sure.” Her friend paused, then looked her dead in the eye. “You read it yourself, right?”

“Yes?”

“…and you’re sure it was The Tropics you read?”

The question made Shiraishi doubt herself. She’d read it a long time ago, and she didn’t have the book with her now. But she’d found other people who had read it just as she had, and even without the book itself their memories were proof enough.

“Would you ever have remembered that book existed if you hadn’t met Ikeuchi?”

“Maybe not.”

“You’re convinced that you read The Tropics because you met the Scholars. Without the book you have to rely on their recollections, just like they have to rely on what you and the others say. What if you’re all just unknowingly leading each other on?”

“Whoa, hold on. That’s kind of creepy, isn’t it?”

“What I’m saying is, what if The Tropics doesn’t exist? What if you all just want that book to exist? The book that you’re all convinced that you’ve read is actually a bunch of completely different books. That’s why all those discrepancies keep popping up when you try to stitch it together into a single version. The Doldrums is just a name to cover up all the contradictions.”

“That can’t…” Shiraishi trailed off.

Her friend grinned.

“That’s just my theory, anyways. Whatcha think?”

◯

After saying goodbye to her friend at the Surugadai-shita intersection, Shiraishi strolled off into the alleyways. It was a warm afternoon, as warm as if spring had already arrived. Only rarely did she meet anyone else wandering the muted backstreets, where she passed stores dealing in art books and record shops and mysterious offices through whose glass doors she could see cardboard boxes piled high and old houses with big red signs that said “FOR RENT”.

She turned the corner at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant and was headed in the direction of Meiji University when all of a sudden she came across an empty lot. Perhaps whatever had previously occupied the space had been razed to make way for a new building. A fence was strung up around it, and the bare walls of the adjacent buildings framed it like a window through which white snow was gliding. It felt as though she were looking into a hole in the world.

As she stood there, her friend’s words echoed through her mind.

What if The Tropics doesn’t exist?

None of them had actually read The Tropics: they were making it up wholesale. The idea was as preposterous as Shinjō’s psycholinguistic poison theory, but it was too compelling to discard offhand. In some sense part of it felt like it must be close to the truth. The five vanishing copies of The Tropics; Salvage and its nemesis, the Doldrums; the Desert Palace and the Witch of the Full Moon who lived there; Chiyo’s parting words; Sayama Shōichi’s whereabouts; the connection with the Thousand and One Nights, the tangled web of theories…as hard as they tried to solve the mystery, it kept puffing up like a ball of cotton candy.

She couldn’t stand just waiting for Ikeuchi to return. I wish I’d gone to Kyoto, too, she thought, and after a moment’s pause she pulled out her phone and called Ikeuchi.

Her throat was dry as she listened to the phone ring. Kyoto was on the other side of the line. She waited, her heart leaping in her chest. But her uncertainty only grew when Ikeuchi didn’t pick up.

“Where are you, Ikeuchi?” she muttered to herself.

“Shiraishi,” said someone behind her.

She cut the call and whirled around.

It was Shinjō, leaning his hopelessly thin frame against the fence of the empty lot. But there was something quite clearly odd about him, for embedded in that haggard face his eyes were glittering.

“Shinjō? You don’t look too hot.”

“I saw you, out on the street. Followed you here,” he said, his tone brooding. “…I see things. Visions.”

“Huh?”

“They seem so real,” he continued faintly, as if he hadn’t heard. “They appear right in front of me, as I walk the streets at night, almost as if they’re stalking me―in parking lots behind family diners, in the sandbox at playgrounds in the parks, in deserted shopping arcades. They hover above the ground, like a second moon. Why do I see them? I thought and I thought, and then it came to me. Remember the psycholinguistic poison I brought up? I think that’s what is creating these illusions.”

“Slow down, Shinjō,” Shiraishi interrupted. “I’m not following you at all.”

The sun hid behind the clouds, throwing the alleyway into an aquatic gloom. Detaching himself from the fence, Shinjō walked slowly towards Shiraishi.

“You’re the Witch of the Full Moon, aren’t you,” he said accusingly..

Shiraishi was stunned.

“Chiyo saw it. That’s how she broke the curse. You’re just another illusion created by The Tropics. You don’t really exist.”

Shiraishi could almost feel the world warping, melting around her.

“What are you talking about? Of course I exist!”

“Now lift the curse. I’ve had enough of these mysteries.”

He advanced towards her, a strange look in his eyes. This was insane: of course she existed! Clearly some kind of madness had taken hold of him, but she doubted telling him to get a grip was going to make any difference. The wise maiden walks away from danger.

She turned and ran, thankful that she was wearing running shoes.

◯

Shiraishi had underestimated two things.

The first was Shinjō’s sheer unathleticism. He was not accustomed to doing much besides reading detective stories―to say nothing of his recurring insomnia―and it showed in his brittle frame. It was much too tall an order for him to keep up with the sprightly Shiraishi as she dashed away, and within the space of a few meters he was hunched over with his hands on his knees, puffing and panting in front of a dated videogame arcade.

The second was her miserable sense of direction. In her haste to escape Shinjō she zigged and she zagged until she had thoroughly misplaced herself in the alleyways of Jimbōchō. “I’ve got to have shaken him,” she thought to herself, granting herself a moment to breathe, only to spot Shinjō dead ahead, dispiritedly hunched over and wheezing. Like an errant caravan lost in the shifting sands, she had gone in a circle around Jimbōchō and ended up right where she had started, behind the stationary Shinjō.

“Oh, crap! He’s going to see me!”

Quickly she ducked into the arcade. A long hallway preceded her, with a row of old arcade cabinets on the left, littered with overflowing ashtrays and discarded coffee cans. At the end of the hallway was a short stairway which led to another room from which she could see yet more flashing lights.

“I think he saw me, there has to be somewhere I can hide!”

She went up the stairs where she found a rather odd space, almost like a loft. From the white tiled walls she suspected that this building had once been a ryōtei or izakaya before its rude repurposing. Navigating the floor was like finding your way through a labyrinth; it was crammed with mahjong cabinets whose casings glinted weirdly in the darkness. A cloud of smoke was accumulating at the low ceiling above a man in a suit, who was sitting at one of the cabinets mashing a cigarette between his teeth.

From the corner of the loft Shiraishi surveyed the entrance, and just as she had feared in came Shinjō, his pale face hovering between the blinking lights.

“Oh god, he looks like a serial killer!” she whispered, making herself small and trying her best not to make a sound.

When she felt the hand touch her arm she almost jumped out of her skin.

“Nakatsugawa!”

“Now you just try and keep a cool head,” he murmured, squatting down beside her. The old man was wearing a beret as was his custom, and in his hands he was carrying a bag of books. He had an office somewhere in Jimbōchō, she remembered now.

“Is he after you?”

“How did you know?”

“When I saw you run in here I saw Shinjō close by, too. He’s been acting funny, accusing me of all sorts of things.”

“What do you think’s wrong with him?”

“Let’s not stick around to find out. Follow me.”

Keeping low to the ground, Nakatsugawa threaded along the game cabinets, cleverly avoiding Shinjō’s line of sight who by this time had come up to the loft. Shinjō scanned the area, then went back down the stairs and sat on a round stool in front of one of the cabinets. By the look of it he didn’t plan on leaving until Shiraishi showed herself.

“Great! How am I supposed to sneak past him?”

But Nakatsugawa didn’t seem the least bit fazed.

“Young lady, I know every nook or cranny in Jimbōchō like the back of my hand. This way.”

He proceeded further into the arcade, where there was a narrow doorway marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Passing through it she found that it led to the rear of the building. Cold, forbidding concrete walls pressed in ahead.

But scarcely had she let herself exhale than Nakatsugawa let out a little cry.

“Goodness, Shinjō’s seen us!”

“Huh? What?”

“Up the stairs, quickly!”

Nakatsugawa fairly pushed her upwards, where they came to yet another door. “Come, this will take us outside!” he exhorted her. But when the door had opened she found herself in such darkness she could hardly see her hand in front of her face. A myriad of smells prickled her nose: paint, dust, mold, old books, coffee, pipe tobacco.

“Hold on a minute, Nakatsugawa. I can’t see a thing…”

“Come, come, we mustn’t let Shinjō catch us here!”

“Aren’t you going a little overboard?”

Groping blindly in front of her, Shiraishi took a step, two steps, and heard the sound of something bulky falling off a shelf.

“Watch yourself. It’s a bit of a squeeze,” said Nakatsugawa nonchalantly, continuing to prod her forward.

“This does lead us outside…right?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“…you’re afraid not?”

She sucked in a breath and stopped where she was.

“This is what’s called a dead end, young lady.”

His words were accompanied by the chilling sound of a bolt sliding into place.

“Make no attempt to resist; I have a knife. Find the sofa and sit down, while I turn on the light. I’ve some superb coffee which you really must try.”