One Early this morning, several hours before my arrest, I was woken by an earth tremor. I mention the incident not to suggest that there was a connection – that somehow the fault lines in my life came crashing together in the form of a couple of policemen – for in Tokyo we have a quake like this every month or so, sometimes more, and this morning’s was nothing special. I am simply relating the sequence of events as it happened. It has been an unusual day and I would hate to forget anything. I was between the covers of my futon, in a deep sleep. I awoke to hear my clothes hangers hitting the sides of the wardrobe. Plates in the kitchen rattled and the floor creaked. The rocking made me nauseous but despite that, I hadn’t realized why I was moving. It was only when, from outside, the familiar sound reached my ears that I understood. A tinny voice croaked in the wind from far away. I sat up in the dark, shivering. Since Lily’s death and Teiji’s disappearance, I have become nervous about many things. I pulled the wardrobe door open and crept beneath the clattering coat hangers. I put on my cycling helmet, reached for the torch that I keep taped to the wall, and crouched in the corner. I shone the light around to check that my whistle and bottle of earthquake water were with me. They were. A cockroach ran across my bare leg and settled on the floor, beside me. ‘Go away,’ I whispered. ‘Get out. Do you hear me? I don’t want you here.’ The cockroach’s black feelers shifted slightly in my direction. Then it shimmered away and disappeared through an invisible crack in the wall. It was some moments before I realized that the cupboard was still. The earthquake had stopped. The night was quiet. I crawled back into the warmth of my futon but couldn’t sleep. I knew now I was not alone in my flat. I pulled my pillow under my face and curled up on my side. I have many tricks to deal with the problems of ghosts and insomnia. One of them is to test my Japanese. I took the word for earthquake, jishin, and tried to think of words with the same pronunciation but different characters. Putting together ji, meaning self, and shin, which means trust, produces confidence. With other written characters an earthquake can become an hour hand, a magnetic needle, or be simply oneself, myself. Here I ran out of ideas. There must be more words but I could think of none. I would normally be able to count seven or eight words before dropping off, but this morning my game wasn’t working. I tried another strategy. I imagined Teiji was behind me, circling me with his twiggish arms, rocking me to sleep, as he had done in the happy days when we slept together like spoons. We both loved earthquakes then, as much as we loved thunderstorms and typhoons. I felt comforted by the memory and I may have dozed off for half an hour or so. When I awoke again, the room was light. I folded my futon and kicked it into the cupboard. I grabbed a packet of instant noodles for my lunch and drank a quick cup of tea. At seven o’clock, I set off for work feeling no more tired, no worse than I have felt for the last few weeks. I expected a normal day at my office. The police came for me in the afternoon. I was at my desk working on a translation of a new design of bicycle pump. I was concentrating hard and didn’t notice the arrival of my visitors. The work was not particularly difficult – my job is to translate tedious technical documents and I do it very well – but it took my mind off recent, disastrous events. I became aware that my colleagues had stopped working and were looking in the direction of the door. I raised my head. Two policemen stood in the entrance. I wasn’t surprised. I’m sure no one was. My co-workers looked from the police to me and back again. To be arrested in the middle of the office, in front of an unsupportive audience, was a degradation I didn’t want. I leapt from my seat hoping to pre-empt the police officers’ strike. ‘It’s for me,’ I muttered. ‘I think they just want to ask some more questions. No big deal.’ And before I could cross the room, ‘Ms Fly? We’re taking you to the police station for questioning in connection with the disappearance of Lily Bridges. Bring your alien registration card.’ I stood before the two dark blue uniforms and tried to edge them toward the door. ‘It’s in my pocket. I never go anywhere without it. But I’ve already answered a lot of questions. I can’t imagine I have anything else to tell you.’ ‘There are new developments. We’d like you to come with us down to the car.’ I was nervous. There was only one potential development that I could think of, but I didn’t dare ask my question. Had they found the missing parts of Lily’s body? By now the disparate pieces may have been washed ashore with the tide, or caught in nets by the night fishermen. Perhaps the police had been able to put her back together again and make an official identification. That would be a formality. According to the newspapers, the police knew they’d found Lily. Nothing has been the same in the office since that morning a couple of weeks ago when someone brought in the Daily Yomiuri and passed it quietly from desk to desk until, by the afternoon, it had reached mine. The headline announced: ‘Woman’s torso recovered from Tokyo Bay. Believed to be missing British bartender Lily Bridges.’ And no one would look at me after that, not properly. I don’t know whether they thought I was a murderer or whether the whole horror of Lily’s death had left them too embarrassed to talk to me. The police led me out of the room – as if I didn’t know the way – and down to the car on the street. I didn’t look up. I knew my colleagues were watching from the window but there was no need to wave them goodbye. I shouldn’t think we’ll meet again. I shall miss one of them, my friend, Natsuko. She wanted to believe in me, but the headline was too much even for her and she has deserted me. My own reaction to the news story was that Lily wouldn’t have approved of the wording, brief though it was. She was a bartender only in Japan. At home in Hull she had been a nurse. She was a fine nurse, as I discovered on our hike in Yamanashi-ken, when I slipped and fell on the mountainside. She led me down and bandaged my ankle with such efficient compassion that I almost cried. But in the bar she was clumsy and meek. Her voice was so high and whiny it made people want to jump behind the bar and get their own drinks. The bar job was only intended to be temporary. But now Lily’s dead and I’m in a police station. It is my first brush with the Japanese legal system, apart from a few avuncular questions when Lily first disappeared. I’m not sure what they want from me this time, but it seems serious. I am sitting on a bench in a corridor. The men who brought me here have gone away and there are two policemen fussing around nearby. An old fat one and a young thin one. The fat one is persuading the thin one to speak English to me to find out whether or not I can speak Japanese. I have not bothered to tell them that my Japanese is fluent, that indeed I am a professional translator. It is a fact they should know, if they know anything at all. They have reached an agreement. The thin one faces me. ‘Hello. I’m going to be the interpreter.’ His English is slow, hesitant. ‘Hello.’ ‘Could you please tell me your full name?’ ‘It’s on my alien registration card. I gave it to someone before.’ This information is imparted to the other officer, in Japanese. The reply comes back in Japanese, then English. ‘It’s not my job to know what happened to your alien registration card. Your full name.’ ‘Lucy Fly.’ The fat one knits his brow. ‘Rooshy Furai,’ I say, making an effort to be cooperative. When the police questioned me before, my friend Bob warned that I should try to act normal, although it goes against my nature, and I will be as obliging as I can. ‘I’m thirty-four years old.’ He doesn’t respond ‘I was born in the year of the snake, in fact.’ ‘And you work in Tokyo, in Shibuya,’ the old, fat policeman says in Japanese. When it’s relayed into English, I reply, ‘That’s right.’ ‘Company name?’ Again, I wait for the translation before I answer, ‘Sasagawa.’ ‘You’re an editor there?’ My young, thin friend obediently conveys this to me. ‘A translator. Japanese to English.’ I expect the coin to drop but it doesn’t. ‘How long have you worked there?’ ‘About four years.’ ‘So you speak Japanese.’ The interpreter says, ‘So you speak Japanese.’ ‘Yes,’ I say. Wake up, I think. ‘Yes, she does.’ The policeman looks at me. It is a suspicious, unfriendly look that I feel I have not deserved. Not yet. ‘Pera pera,’ I say. Fluently. ‘You didn’t say so.’ ‘I wasn’t asked.’ The interpreter leaves, in something of a huff. I am glad to be rid of him. I didn’t think much of his accent. I’m left with the old, fat man. My captor shows me to a chair in a small room. He sits opposite me and looks everywhere but at my face. I’m not complaining. Why should he have to look at my face? Lucy is not an oil painting, as everyone who has seen her knows. When I am comfortably seated, though, he forces his eyes upon my face only to find that now he can’t let go. There’s something about my eyes, I know this. ‘I want you to tell me about the night Lily Bridges-san disappeared.’ ‘Do we know which night she disappeared?’ ‘The night after which she was never seen again. As far as we know, you were the last person she spoke to.’ ‘I’ve already told you about that.’ ‘I’d like you to tell me again.’ ‘I was in my flat. The doorbell rang. I answered it. It was Lily. We spoke for a minute or so and she left.’ ‘And?’ ‘I went back inside.’ ‘After that?’ ‘Nothing. I don’t remember. I was bringing my washing in when Lily called. I probably returned to doing that.’ ‘One of your neighbours saw you on the walkway outside your front door, speaking to Bridges-san.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Then presumably he or she saw what I just told you.’ He stares at me. Like a teacher waiting patiently for a child’s confession, knowing it will come. ‘OK. I went after her about five minutes later. There was something I’d forgotten to tell her.’ ‘So you spoke to her again?’ ‘No, I didn’t find her.’ ‘You assumed she was going to the station?’ ‘Yes. I don’t know where else she could have gone. I don’t believe she knew my area of Tokyo well.’ ‘The route from your apartment to the station is fairly straightforward, is it not? And the streets are well lit at night.’ ‘That’s true, but I didn’t find her. I don’t know where she went.’ ‘Would you tell me the nature of the conversation you had at your front door?’ I shake my head. ‘You don’t remember it?’ ‘I remember it.’ ‘Then please share it with me.’ ‘No.’ ‘Your neighbour reported that you were angry. You shouted at Bridges-san.’ ‘I don’t shout.’ ‘You weren’t angry?’ ‘I was angry.’ ‘Your neighbour said that you appeared to be carrying something, a bundle of some kind.’ I snort. ‘Who is this neighbour? Miss Marple?’ I know very well that it was my vacuuming neighbour from next door. She has always struck me as having a fertile imagination. She vacuums aggressively for hours every day and sometimes in the middle of the night. There must be some wild ideas inside her head. Besides, she is my only immediate neighbour. There are just two flats above the petrol station and one is mine. I suppose it’s a pity we never became friends, but it’s too late now. His face is blank. ‘I was carrying nothing. Nothing at all.’ He stares at me. ‘Think carefully. Please.’ I think hard, to be polite, but I am feeling tired. ‘As I told you, I was bringing my washing in. It’s possible that when I answered the door, I was holding some item of clothing. But still, I am not so absent-minded that I could have gone after Lily with something in my hands. And if I had found myself running down the street with a pair of knickers in my grasp, I would remember.’ ‘I wonder what it could be that your neighbour saw.’ ‘My hands were empty.’ ‘Bridges-san was a close friend of yours.’ I pause. ‘Yes.’ ‘Tell me about your friendship.’ ‘No.’ ‘Lily was your best friend, wasn’t she?’ ‘She became a close friend. I didn’t know her very long.’ ‘Other friends?’ ‘Mine or hers?’ ‘Yours.’ I am not going to tell him of Teiji, my friend above all friends. ‘Natsuko. She’s my colleague. Bob. He’s American. I met him in the dentist’s waiting room. I taught him how to say “a dull nagging pain” in Japanese. He’s an English teacher so he can’t really speak Japanese. And Mrs Yamamoto. She ran the string quartet I used to play in. Mrs Ide and Mrs Katoh too. Second violin and viola.’ ‘Did Lily Bridges know these people?’ ‘Only Natsuko and Bob. Mrs Yamamoto died before Lily came to Japan. She never met Mrs Ide and Mrs Katoh.’ ‘Why did Lily Bridges come to Japan? What is your understanding of her intentions?’ ‘She liked Hello Kitty.’ He looks up, suspicious. ‘I don’t know why she came.’ I do know. I’m not going to tell him about Andy, her boyfriend, and how he followed her and planted bugging devices in her handbag and beat up the window cleaner for climbing up his ladder to the bedroom window while Lily was changing her top, as if he could have known she was there. I will not tell him that she came to Japan secretly, giving up a job she loved, to escape from that boyfriend. I won’t tell him because he already knows. I told the police before. So did Bob. He stands and opens the door to let another one in. Now there are two. I squint to read the kanji on their name badges. The old one is called Kameyama (turtle mountain) and the new one is Oguchi (small mouth). Oguchi is young, with soft, hairless arms and the stoop of a teenager who has grown too quickly. He sits a little further back than Kameyama and looks worried. Kameyama leaves the room saying that he will be back soon. Oguchi plays with the left knee of his trousers. His fingers are long and bony, like his nose which he reaches to scratch. His eyes dart all around the cell but he knows I’m watching him and he doesn’t look at me. He bats a mosquito from his neck. It dances up before his eyes and moves closer and closer to his face. He attempts bravely to ignore it but it is starting to make a fool of him. Then, with more violence than is necessary, he smashes his hands together, wipes the squelch nonchalantly on a white handkerchief. He turns his eyes to the door, waiting hopefully for Kameyama’s return. I notice he is blushing slightly. I think he fancies me. Kameyama is very busy wherever he is and does not reappear for a while. Oguchi bows his head and scribbles something on a notepad. I am left to wonder at my future, and what control I now have. I think of Teiji and how, if he were here with me, I would not care what happened next. But it’s nicer to reflect on the past, and more useful. If I think of what has already happened, I can start to make out how the past became the present, how my friendships turned to nothing, and why I’m here. I picture Teiji sitting opposite me in Oguchi’s chair, taking my hand and stroking the tips of my fingers, caressing them like soft cool water. I shiver at the imagined sensation and that is enough to take me back to Shinjuku, the place where I first saw him. That night I believed he was made of rain and nothing else. I was wandering around central Tokyo. It was soon after Mrs Yamamoto’s string quartet had disbanded and I was now at a loss every Sunday evening. I came to the famous skyscrapers of Nishi-Shinjuku and had every intention of walking straight past. Guidebook writers are enthralled by this Blade Runner setting of futuristic buildings, but to Lucy’s mind they are nothing more than dull hotels, banks, and government offices that happen to be very high and cast long shadows. Exciting if you’re standing on the fifty-second floor, a crick in the neck if you’re on the pavement. It was raining steadily and I was the only person not bothering to use an umbrella. Umbrellas are cumbersome and a menace to the streets with their inhuman span and sharp, dangerous spokes. Lucy’s skin is waterproof and her clothes can always be dried. A young man stood in front of the Keio Plaza Hotel, with streams of umbrella-wielding people passing him on both sides. He was leaning over a puddle, apparently taking photographs of it. Water slid over his hair and face but he seemed not to notice. His camera clicked and he moved fluidly to the other side of the puddle. I stared. He appeared to be made of water and ice. I had never seen a man with such delicate fingers, sharp brittle shoulder-blades, transparent brown eyes. He glinted in the neon dark more sharply than the vast ice sculptures of the Sapporo Festival I had marvelled at when I first came to Japan. He was an exhibit of the Tokyo night and so beautiful that I couldn’t walk past him. I went to his puddle and looked in to see what had captivated him. The reflection of the Keio Plaza Hotel divided the dirty water into two. On one side were shiny windows and lights, on the other, darkness and a couple of cigarette butts floating. To my eyes the stubby ends looked like people jumping from the hotel windows, but he was looking deeper into the puddle than I could see. I took a small step forward so that the tips of my shoes entered the water and were reflected over the hotel. He didn’t look up. He shifted round the puddle with the camera against his eye all the time. Then he shot the picture, including my feet. I kept my position and he lifted his head to look at me. His eyes searched my face as if he couldn’t quite find what he wanted. He put his camera back to his eye and looked at me through the viewfinder, like a child peering through an empty toilet roll tube to see the world in another way. And the camera clicked and flashed. Those were the first pictures he took of me. I have never seen them. The moment was so intimate that I knew it must be followed by an even deeper intimacy. After all, I had flirtatiously invited myself into his photograph. He had led me in and captured me with a single snap. My feet and face were now inside his camera. He had got me inside him and the next step was obvious, though brazen. We may have spoken, but if we did, I don’t remember it. I don’t even remember the point at which I knew where we were going. I believe that we walked together in silence. We could hardly afford a room at the Keio Plaza – no one can – and so we headed to his apartment in Shin-Okubo. It is a walk of about twenty minutes but another part of Tokyo altogether. We left the neon towers and entered backstreet Tokyo. Old houses nestled between small apartment buildings. Narrow grey streets were lined with tiny shops and bars. Orange lanterns decorated cheap eating houses. Alley cats hissed at dogs that barked from balconies. We passed many puddles but he took no more photographs until we reached his apartment. I can hear the click of his key in the door. Then, in lamplight and with the curtains open, he took one final picture. It was of my naked body. I was kneeling on the bed, leaning back, waiting to become beautiful under his touch. I didn’t mind being looked at through the camera. It had more kindness than a naked eye. A camera can’t blink or sneer, at least not when the picture is taken. It saves its opinion until the film is developed. And then Teiji closed his eyes. He did not open them again until much later and I like to believe it was because the image of my body was framed under each eyelid. He was watching that still image when I crawled on top of his ice body, rocked him back and forth until the ice turned to water and his icicle penis melted inside me. I stayed in my position long after our breathing had slowed, wondering how this had happened so easily. Then I lifted myself off his slender frame, pink and aching inside and outside with something that felt unusually close to joy. Since his eyes were closed and the room was light, I took the opportunity to look around the space to acquaint myself better with this man. The room was like a large cupboard. His clothes hung from the walls, blue and grey jumpers, soft T-shirts, old trousers and a pair of jeans. There was a tie hanging over the curtain rail but it was covered in dust and I could see no shirt that it could be worn with. There was no bookcase, just piles of books stacked high. I could not see the titles. On top of the books were piles of CDs. There was a large begonia in the corner of the room with a pair of swimming goggles entwined among the leaves. There were three or four cameras strewn on the floor, two cardboard boxes full of camera shop envelopes. But there were no photographs on display anywhere. The walls were painted white, a little dirty. Apart from his clothes they were bare. The curtains twitched against them in the night breeze, bluish white. We must have slept, but I don’t remember. In the morning, he took me to the small noodle restaurant where he worked. I learned later that it belonged to his uncle and he would inherit it one day. It wasn’t open yet but we sat behind the scratched wooden counter at the back of the shop and drank tall glasses of iced barley tea. A small fan on the wall behind turned noisily from side to side, blowing cold air down the back of my neck. We didn’t look at each other. Our bodies touched, side by side, and I absorbed his warmth, made it mine. Oguchi is watching me now. He pours me a glass of water and I am grateful for this apparent token of kindness, though for all I know it is a right written into the Japanese constitution. I am hot. I dip my fingers into the glass, smear cold water across my face. He seems to take this as a sign that the ice is broken. ‘You have been in Japan a long time. Nine years?’ Is this part of the official questioning or is he chatting me up? I’m not certain. Surely he should be recording everything I say, to be used in evidence against me. ‘Ten.’ ‘What brought you here?’ This is more like it. I have been asked this question fifty thousand times in ten years. I don’t have an honest answer because there isn’t one, or I am not honest enough to think of it. But I have a few pat answers for when I’m asked. This is a special occasion and so I use all of them. ‘An interest in Japanese culture, I wanted to study the language, I needed to save some money, I wanted to see the world, I wanted to get away from dreary old England, I like tofu.’ I am enjoying this so I ad lib and give him a few more. ‘Chopsticks are lighter than knives and forks and are held in the same hand – you don’t get that metallic taste, the trains are so much better here, both reasonably priced and reliable, sumo wrestlers have beautiful calves although their thighs can be too dimply for my liking. It’s so clever the way you can pay your bills at a convenience store instead of having to wait until the banks are open and then being late for work. The irises are beautiful in May, just as good as the puffy pink cherry blossoms that people go on and on about like they do with geisha who are not so special when you look at them close up because you can see their spots even through all that make-up, schoolgirls on the trains are always laughing, I can’t stand my family.’ I can see he is not sure where to take this. I am a little surprised, and rather impressed, by my fluent collection. I’ll be quiet now. I will not tell Oguchi anything more than he asks for, because everything else I say will lead to Lily. I will have a job convincing the police that I am innocent, but one thing is indisputable. If Lily had never met me, she would be alive now. The facts of Lily’s death, as far as I know at this stage in the interview, are few and easily open to misinterpretation. She had been in Tokyo for several months when one night she disappeared. A few days later the torso of a young woman was fished out of Tokyo Bay, with a couple of unattached but matching limbs, I forget which ones. Although the police were unable to make an official identification because there were no hands and so no fingerprints, it seemed to be widely accepted that the body was Lily’s. As you know, my connection with the event was that she had been seen knocking on the door of my apartment earlier in the evening of her disappearance. My neighbour saw the door open, spotted me in the doorway speaking angrily to Lily, and saw Lily walking away. Then she watched as I followed a few minutes later, carrying a bundle. That is certainly a lie. Why didn’t she say that she saw me tuck a revolver into my shirt after closing the front door? Or that I held a dagger before me as I walked? I have never denied the other facts though I have chosen not to detail the conversation we had at that time. One of the suspects was Lily’s ex-boyfriend, though unless he was using a fake passport and travelling very quickly, it seems that he was back in England with a fool-proof alibi, worse luck for me. On the day in question he was captured on closed-circuit television, entering a chip shop in Goole and asking for cod and chips with a pickled egg for lunch. He fiddled with the hem of his anorak and scratched his ear before reaching into the pocket of his jeans for a couple of pound coins. The other main suspect is the usual Mr X who shows up in dark alleyways at night in every country in the world to remind us, by what he does to a woman’s body, that the definition of a human being includes that which is not human. Without further evidence it is hard to imagine what progress the police could have made. I don’t suppose my friend is going to tell me, until I give him something more about Lily. I remain silent; my thoughts return to Teiji. The morning after our first encounter I awoke early, scribbled my address on a scrap of paper and left it under his camera before we went to the noodle shop. I didn’t write my telephone number. I wanted him to come and find me. The doorbell rang while I was in the shower. A week had passed since our first meeting. I could tell from the sound of the bell – less sudden than usual, a quietly confident ring – that it was Teiji’s soft fingertip pushing the button, so I didn’t bother to pick up a towel. I opened the door more narrowly than usual – even then I knew my neighbour was nosy – and let Teiji slip through. If only I could remember what he said to me. He might have told me I was beautiful, for I’m sure that he did say so sometimes. He may have exclaimed upon finding me so perfectly, nakedly prepared for him. Perhaps I don’t remember what he said that day because perhaps he said nothing. It may have been that we went straight into my room where we fell immediately into lovemaking. And afterwards, with a sheet around me, I looked into his camera while it snapped up my image. We could have done all this without a single word. And yet, if he never spoke, how did I even know that his name was Teiji? But every time I remember Teiji what I am doing is not remembering Lily. It’s all wrong. I still have not introduced Lily, not properly. I have been putting it off, hoping she would walk in of her own accord. But I was wrong. She is already here, you see. She is there in the shadows of the cell’s corners, in the buzzing of the light over my head, the fruit fly at the corner of my vision that may just be a speck in my eye. When I lean forward my hair flops over my left temple and then I know Lily is inside my face. Sometimes I feel I am walking not quite like myself – my steps are shorter, quicker, a scuttle, almost – and so I know she’s got into my legs too. I blink and realize that Kameyama has returned and together he and Oguchi are staring at me. ‘You can’t just sit and gaze into space. You will have to tell me about Bridges-san. It won’t do to sit here all night and not tell me anything. You knew her well. We already know that.’ ‘Yes, I did.’ But not well enough. That is all. Kameyama shouts questions at me, one after another. I close my eyes and ears. I see and hear nothing.