‘No kids, not me. Me and marriage, never in the stars. Many truckers have girls in every port. Say they do, anyway. But me?’ Ogre has a story, but it would be rude to probe. ‘Cigarette?’ Ogre offers me a box of Cabin, and I am about to light up when I remember. ‘Sorry, I promised a friend I’d give up.’ So I light Ogre’s and try to smoke my craving. Traffic nudges. Ogre inhales, leans over the giant steering wheel, and taps ash. ‘Was your age, once, believe it or not. Got a job at Showa-Shell driving ginormous tankers. How ginormous? Ginormous. Freight division had its own on-site training programme – those babies are not your regular engine boxes, you get me? Dormitories were ex-barracks, outside Yamagata. Bleak spot, it was, sleet and frost even in March. Fourteen guys, all sharing one long corridor, small partitions for privacy, get the picture?’ I rub my eyes. We overtake the kids in their minibus. They press their faces against the glass and do zoo faces. I think of drowning men in submarines. ‘Now, I never sleepwalked in my life. Ever. Until my first night in Yamagata. Not just walking – doing things. So, say I dream of walking around my home town: I sleepwalk down the corridor saying, “Afternoon. Nice weather. Afternoon.” If I dream of being a famous artist, then we wake up to find toothpaste smeared on the mirrors. Harmless, it was. I always cleaned up my mess. A laugh, us trainees thought. They never woke me up – everyone knows the rule, “Never wake a sleepwalker”, although nobody really knows why.’ The radio whips and spikes. Ogre tries to retune it. ‘I learned why – the worst sixty seconds of my life. One moment, I am strolling around a shady market on a hot day in China. The next moment, two guys are sitting on me, shouting – two others are grabbing a hand each – two others grappling my fingers loose. What was I holding? A cleaver. Taken it from the canteen, I had. Lethal, fuck-off cleaver, the sort you chop up frozen carcasses with. Walked from partition to partition, waking up my co-trainees by tapping them on the side of their heads.’ On the road ahead, ambulance lights pulse in the slow dusk. A silver container truck lies on its side. Its cabin is crushed and shredded. A car is being winched on to a pick-up. Traffic controllers wave three lanes into one. They have glowing batons and fluorescent flak jackets. Others hose the road. Ogre strokes an amulet. ‘Rock solid, you believe the world is. Then everything jolts and shocks, and it all melts away.’ Traffic crawls through a coned bottleneck, and Ogre gropes for his box of Cabin. ‘Got a lighter?’ I light one for him, wondering if the story is over. ‘My dream. Baking hot day in China, it was. I was parched. I came across a watermelon market. Sweet snow watermelons. Would have sold my soul for one, I would. My mother whispered in my ear: “Be careful, son! They’ll try to sell you rotten fruit!” Something half buried in the dust catches my eye – a dagger, the sort archaeologists dig up. Walked from stall to stall, tapping watermelons with its blade. From the sound quality, I judged if the flesh was rotten or firm. I knew: the first good fruit I came to, I would whack in half, and eat it, there and then.’ We clear the bottleneck and Ogre begins to climb through the gears. ‘Medication stops the sleepwalking. Out cold, I am. But it goes on my licence, so union jobs and hazardous cargo are out. And a wife? And kids? Too afraid of what I might do to them one night, if it starts up again. So you see . . .’ Ogre inhales all life from his cigarette. ‘Be very careful what you dream.’
‘Scientists call it the Ai Imajo Effect.’ Her voice is so clear she could be in the next room. ‘The brightest minds in psychology have given this mystery their best shot, but results are still inconclusive. Why, oh why, whenever I fix a meal for a man, does he jump on the next truck out of Tokyo?’
I was not expecting a joke. ‘I tried calling this morning.’
‘It would be handy to blame my mood swings on my old friend diabetes, but really I have to blame my old friend me.’
‘No way, Ai, I was—’
‘Shut up. No. It was my fault.’
‘But—’
‘Accept my apology or the friendship is off. Me – of all people – lecturing you on how to behave towards your mother.’
‘You were right. My mother called me from Miyazaki. Last night.’
‘Sachiko said. Good, but being right is no excuse for being preachy. Anyway. I’m on my piano stool, varnishing my toenails. So where are you, absconder?’
‘Being eaten alive by mosquitoes outside a trucker’s café called Okachan’s.’
‘There are ten thousand trucker’s cafés called Okachan’s.’
‘This one is between, uh, nowhere and . . . nowhere.’
‘Must be Gifu.’
‘I think it is, actually. One truck driver dropped me off here, after calling his mate – called Monkfish – to pick me up when he passes by on his way to Fukuoka. Before me, he has a fist-fight with a crooked gas station attendant who made improper suggestions about his wife.’
‘Pray he wins unconcussed. Poor Miyake – stuck in a Nikkatsu trucker film.’
‘This is not the fastest way to Kyushu, but it is the cheapest. I have news.’
‘What?’
‘Put your nail varnish down. I don’t want you to stain your piano stool.’
‘What is it?’
‘For the last nine years I grew up in the quietest village on the quietest island in the quietest prefecture in Japan. Nothing happened. Kids say that everywhere, but on Yakushima it really is true. Since I saw you last, everything that never happened, happened. It was the weirdest day I ever lived through. And when I tell you who I met this morning—’
‘It sounds as if I should call you back. Give me the number.’
‘Eiji!’ She perches on the high windowsill, hugging her knees. Bamboo shadows sway and shoo on the tatami and faded fusuma. ‘Eiji! Come quickly!’ I get up and walk to the window. Dental-floss cobwebs. From the window of my grandmother’s house I see Ueno park, but everyone has gone home. But there is Anju, kneeling before an ancient shipwreck of a cedar. I climb out. Anju’s kite of sunlight is tangled in the highest branches. It shines dark gold. Anju is in despair. ‘Look! My kite is caught!’ I kneel down with her – seeing her in tears is unbearable – and try to cheer her up. ‘Why don’t you set it free? You’re fantastic at climbing trees!’ Anju airs her recently acquired sigh. ‘Diabetes, genius, remember?’ She points down – her legs are a pin-cushion of syringes, drips and torture instruments. ‘Set it free for me, Eiji.’ So I begin climbing – my fingers claw at the reptile bark. Sheep bray in a far valley. I find a pair of my discarded socks, dirty beyond redemption. After a lifetime dark rises, winds swirl, crows come looking for soft places. I am afraid the sunlit kite will rip and shred before I can get to it. Where in this storm of leaves can it be? Minutes later I find him on the top branch. A man still without a face. ‘Why are you climbing my tree?’ he asks. ‘I was looking for my sister’s kite,’ I explain. He frowns. ‘Chasing kites is more important than taking care of your own sister?’ Suddenly I realize I have left Anju alone – for how many days? – in our grandmother’s house without thinking about food or water. Who will open her canned dinner? My concern is heightened when I see how tumbledown the place is now – shrubs grow out of the eaves, and one harsh winter would topple the house. Has it really been nine years? The lockless knob twizzles uselessly – when I knock the entire door frame falls inward. Cat shadows slide behind rafters. In my capsule is my guitar case. And in the guitar case is Anju. She cannot open the escape hatches from the inside, and she is running out of air – I hear her knocking helplessly, I scramble, scrabble, but the locks are so rusty—
‘And I woke up and it was all a dream!’ Monkfish glows in the dashboard lights, all skin and string vest. Croaked laughter, one two three. He has the rubberiest lips any human being had, ever. I am in another truck crossing rainy hyperspace. A road sign flies by at light speed – Meishin expressway
O
tsu exit 9 km
. The dashboard clock glows 21.09. ‘Funny things, dreams,’ says Monkfish. ‘Did Honda tell you his sleepwalking story? Load of crap. Fact is, ladies find him repulsive. Plain and simple. Dreams. I read up on ’em. Nobody really knows what dreams are. Your scientists, they disagree. One camp says your hippocampus shuffles through memories in your brain’s left side. Then your brain’s right side cobbles together tall stories to link the images.’ Monkfish does not expect me to say anything back – he would be having this conversation with the Zizzi Hikaru doll if I were not here.
Kyoto exit 18 km
. ‘More like scriptwriting than dreaming. Whatever.’ A hairy fly strolls across the windscreen. ‘Ever tell you my dream story? We all have one. I was your age. I was in love. Or maybe mentally ill. Same difference. Whatever. She – Kirara, her name was – was one of those pampered daughters-in-a-box. We went to the same swimming club. I had quite a body in my day. Daddy was the fascist mastermind of some evil organization. What was it? Oh yeah, the Ministry of Education. Which put Kirara way above my class. Made no difference. I was obsessed. I copied out a love poem from a book at school. I got a kiss! I still have this goaty appeal to the fairer sex, and Kirara succumbed. We started going out in my cousin’s car for sessions at the reservoir. Counted the stars. Counted her birthmarks. Never knew bliss like that, never will again. But then her father got wind of our dalliance. I was not prince material for her princess. Whatever. One word from Daddy and she dropped me like a scabby corpse. Even changed swimming club. For Kirara, I was just an entrée to be nibbled, but to me, she was the entire menu at the restaurant of love. Well, I was distraught. Insane. I sent her more poems. Kirara ignored them. I stopped sleeping, eating, thinking. I decided to prove my devotion by killing myself. I planned to hike out to the Sea of Trees at the foot of Mount Fuji and overdose on sleeping pills. Hardly original, I know, but I was eighteen and my uncle had a forest cabin out there. The morning I left, I posted a letter to Kirara saying that as I couldn’t live without her love I had no choice but to die, and describing where I would perform the deed – not much point dying for love if nobody notices, is there? Took the first train out, got off at a quiet country station and started hiking. The weather grew uncertain, but me, never. I was never so sure about a decision in my life. I found my uncle’s cabin, and walked past it until I came to a glade. This was the place, I decided. And guess what I see, up in the air.’
‘Uh . . . a bird?’
‘Kirara! My beloved with a noose around her neck! Feet doing the clockwise-anti-clockwise biz. What a sight! Bloated, shitted, crows and maggots already at work.’
‘That is . . .’
‘So ghastly that I woke up, still on the early train to Mount Fuji. Talk about a revelation! I got off at the next station, caught the next train back home. I found my suicide note, unread and unopened, on my doormat,
Return to Sender
scrawled across the front in blood-red pen. Kirara – or her father – returned it without even reading it. Did I feel stupid? Then she went off to university, and . . .’ Monkfish slows to let a truck pass. The driver waves. ‘Saw Kirara again, years later. At Kansai airport, from a distance. Flash husband, gold jangly things, brat in a pushchair. Guess what flashed through my head?’
‘Jealousy?’
‘Nothing. I felt not – one – thing. I was ready to hang myself for her, but I never even loved her. Not really. Only thought I did.’ We enter a tunnel of echoes and air. ‘Stories like that need morals. This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.’
More tunnels, valley bridges, service stations. The truck judders down Chugoku expressway to dawn. A twenty-first-century thirty minutes covers distances of days for noblemen and priests in earlier centuries. Half-rain, half-mist, half-speed windscreen wipers. Shapes get their names back, and names their shapes. Islands in estuaries. Herons fishing. Lavender concrete mixers sealing riverbanks. Bricked-up hillside tunnels. A beer crate depot, unending and uniform as Utopia. I imagine my mother lying awake, hundreds of kilometres ahead, thinking about me. I am still shocked at how I invited myself to Miyazaki. Is she as surprised? Is she as nervous as I am now?
Okayama exit
. Smoke unravelling from factory stacks. Monkfish hums a tune over and over again. Vehicles rule the highways, not their drivers – trucks change drivers as easily as oil. The visits our mother made to Yakushima were torture. Between the time she dumped us and the day Anju drowned she turned up about once a year.
Fukuyama exit
. Flame licking the corner of a mist-field. Land cleared of trees in a week, levelled in a month, asphalted in an afternoon – forgotten ever since. Cracked, greened, smothered and uprooted. Lines and wires, sagging and tautening from pole to pole, fingers of speed jamming on a loose-strung guitar. My grandmother refused to see her, so we always stayed at Uncle Pachinko’s in Kamiyaku – the main port – the night before. We always wore our school uniform. Aunt Pachinko took us to the barber’s especially. Everybody knew, of course. She took a taxi from the ferryside, even though Uncle Pachinko’s house is less than ten minutes on foot. She would be shown into the best room, returning our aunt’s small talk with a savage attention to pointless detail.
Hiroshima exit
. Monkfish turns off the wipers. Hoardings advertise a bank that crashed many months back. Mountains, marching back years to the Sea of Japan coast. Non-coloured suburbs of rerun cities. Uncle Tarmac told me years later – after a six-pack of beer – that Uncle Pachinko made our mother visit, as a condition of the allowance he sent her. He meant well, I guess, but it was wrong to force us together. We answered the questions she asked. Always the same questions, ducking the hazardous topics: What subjects did we like best at school? What subjects did we like least at school? What did we do after school? We spoke in the manner of inspector and inspected. No glimmer of fondness.
Tokuyama exit
. This is where Subaru Tsukiyama, my great-uncle, spent his final weeks in Japan. He would not recognize Yamaguchi prefecture today. A golf-range hacked out of a hill, shrouded in green netting. Micro-figures swing. I re-remember the mailman virus, and wonder if it is still spreading Kozue Yamaya’s ugly news. It feels nothing to do with me, now. Visible consequences are iceberg tips: most results of most actions are invisible to the doer. A dirty rag of bleached sky – the morning forgets it was raining, as suddenly as a child forgetting a sulk she planned to last years. Anju would have been more chatty with our mother, I think, but she sensed my distrust and she clammed up too. Our mother chain-smoked. Every image I have of her is dim with cigarette smoke. Aunt Pachinko never asked her questions about herself, at least not in front of us, so all we knew was what we overheard behind partitions. Then she took the late afternoon jetfoil back to Kagoshima, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Once, she stayed two days – that must have been when Anju saw our mother tempura her ring – but the extended visit was never repeated.
Yamaguchi exit
. A tree moves by itself on a windless hillside. The mountains level out. She was away for Anju’s funeral. Gossip, the island blood sport, reported that she flew to Guam for ‘work’ the day before Anju died, without leaving an emergency telephone number. Other stories did the rounds, too, less sympathetic ones. I armoured myself in three-inch thick indifference towards her. The last time we met – and the only time without Anju – I was fourteen. It was in Kagoshima, at Uncle Money’s old place. Her hair was short and her jewellery was garish. She wore dark glasses. I was there under orders. I guess she was, too. ‘You’ve grown, Eiji,’ she said when I shambled into the room and sat down. I was determined to be disagreeable. ‘You haven’t.’ Aunt Money hurriedly said, ‘Eiji’s rocketed up over the last months. And his music teacher says he’s a natural guitar player. Such a pity you didn’t bring your guitar, Eiji. Your mother would have loved to have heard you.’