Improbable Midnight Errands in a Starless City

Improbable Midnight Errands in a Starless City

Atsuhiro Yoshida

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An excerpt from Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida

The clock struck 1:00 A.M.

It must have been wound a little faster than the others, as the timepiece that Mitsuki was carrying sounded ahead of the countless others kept in the warehouse.

A few moments later, a deluge of tones, some low and heavy, some dry and clear, competed to announce the coming of the hour.

The warehouse, easily large enough to hold two small airplanes, was filled with near endless rows of shelves and drawers, its walls lined with clocks and paintings and calendars and tapestries and the like until there was little room for anything else.

Those shelves and drawers were filled with all sorts of knick-knacks, items of every size and shape imaginable that told the story of everyday lives in Japan for the past three hundred years.

You could find practically anything in here.

For example, if one of the directors told her that he wanted a travel trunk from the Taisho era, all she had to do was find it within the limits of this building and promptly deliver it to the set prior to shooting.

Mitsuki was what was known as a procurer, and she had been working at this large film company on the outskirts of Tokyo for almost five years.

The wall clock that she was presently carrying was for a 9:00 A.M. shoot. There were several other items that she had to prepare as well, most of which could be found inside the warehouse. The timepiece that she had unearthed was a perfect fit for the director’s requirement for something classical and with gravitas. Carrying it carefully with both hands, she traced her steps back to the assistant director in the waiting room. While everyone called it a waiting room, it was simply a small area to store props that the film crew intended to use in an upcoming shoot, not a place for actors to wait before entering the set.

Mitsuki would have preferred to work on large-scale stage sets. She had always longed for a job where she could make life-size sets that looked exactly like the real thing, to actually create an entire corner of a fictional town. But the very moment she set foot into the prop warehouse on her first day of training, she had fallen instantly in love.

The warehouse was a gigantic box crammed with every kind of object one might think of, and Mitsuki had been fascinated by small miscellaneous things ever since she was a young girl.

She remembered being particularly obsessed with old medicine chests, their lids opening to reveal bags and bottles printed with all sorts of colorful symbols and small lettering. Bandages, antiseptics, eye drops, plasters, ointments—to a child’s eye, each one had looked unique and special.

That same fascination blossomed in her heart all over again upon discovering the warehouse, to the point that she felt like letting out an excited squeal. The past itself was preserved amid the miscellany of objects here. For Mitsuki, the prop warehouse was nothing short of a time capsule encompassing a full three hundred years, and each time she stepped inside, she was overcome with an elation as if setting out on a new little adventure. Then came the added fun of seeking out the best items to meet the directors’ requests—tasks that she relished as though engrossed in a child’s game.

The only problem was that Mitsuki herself wasn’t compatible with time. Or, strictly speaking, she always found herself out of step with clocks, like the one that she was currently holding in her arms.

Clocks were her natural enemy, and the reason for that was simple enough. Her internal body clock and the laidback personality that it had imparted her with were constantly at odds with the endlessly harrying—as she saw it—clocks of the modern world. And so she often found herself bristling at the deadlines that the directors gave her.

With a dull tone, one more clock, somewhere deep in the warehouse, struck 1:00 A.M.

It was probably the slowest one in the whole collection. That one’s me, isn’t it? The slowest clock of them all.

With a deep breath, she tightened her grip on the antique timepiece cradled in her arms.

“See you tomorrow,” Mitsuki said after handing the wall clock to the assistant director, Mizushima.

She was about to call it a day when Mizushima held her back. “Actually, there’s one more thing.”

“This is everything on the list you gave me, though?”

“There’s a new addition. And we’ll need ’em by nine o’clock. A bunch of fresh loquats.”

“Loquats?”

“Yeah, loquats. The fruit. Not kumquats. Loquats.”

“I know what you meant . . . ”

So she said, but in truth, Mitsuki had never purchased a loquat before. At the very least, she had never had to procure one for work, and she didn’t recall ever having bought one personally from a greengrocer or a supermarket.

She had eaten one once, she remembered that, but the specifics—where exactly she had eaten it, what it tasted like—eluded her.

That was one of the consequences of working at a job like hers—always having to look back on her life so far, to reflect on the experiences its journey had given her and those it hadn’t.

Pressure cookers, for example. Silk hats. Unicycles.

More often than not, she was completely ignorant about the items that one director or another expected her to provide. She had lived a full twenty-seven years, and still she understood nothing whatsoever about them.

It was the same for loquats. She didn’t know whether they were even available in early summer.

“I did look into it a bit myself,” Mizushima said, as if reading her thoughts. “This is just based on what I read online, but they’re still in season, just barely. There has to be somewhere that still has them this time of year.”

“Oh, I see.” The next moment, Mitsuki’s voice picked up. “But in Tokyo?”

Mizushima flashed her a forced grin. When he smiled like that, it inevitably meant that the road ahead was going to be a bumpy one. In short, his expression just now anticipated difficulties in sourcing loquats.

“Besides, think about the time,” Mitsuki added, her shoulders slumping.

“Right, yeah. There won’t be a whole lot of greengrocers open at this hour. I’d suggest having a look in the all-night supermarkets, but there seems to be fewer and fewer of them around these days.”

Mitsuki responded with a silent nod. When society and the economy were booming, all-night shops popped up all over the place. And just as Mizushima had said, their numbers had fallen dramatically in recent years.

“Yep,” the assistant director whispered, as though his words were meant not for Mitsuki, but for himself. “Nights in Tokyo are starting to feel awful lonely lately.”

Matsui sipped at his can of coffee while waiting for his shift to start in the office’s half-lit break room.

The cab company where he worked was called Blackbird, specializing in serving customers from evening through to early morning. The cars were dark blue in tint, almost black, and the drivers wore similarly colored uniforms. Being a small company, Blackbird only had a limited fleet of vehicles, with most of its business coming from advance bookings. Recently, however, the number of such customers had been on a steady decline, forcing the fleet to turn to picking up customers on the street. And so tonight, Matsui found himself stuffing the blank reservation list into his pocket when he let out a sudden sneeze.

Maybe someone was badmouthing him around town? But even if so, it wasn’t like there was anything he could do about it. Yes, if someone was criticizing him behind his back this late at night, it could only be a customer. He couldn’t think of anyone else who would bother to go to all that effort. He had hit his fifties while still a bachelor, he had been born and raised in Tokyo, which meant that he had no other hometown he might return to, and being an only child whose parents had died young, he had spent a lifetime away from anything even resembling family.

He was, he remarked to himself, a boring man.

When asked by a colleague why he had become a taxi driver, he could answer only that he had just sort of wound up in the role.

But there was at least one small twist of fate that had guided him down this path.

As a child, he had stumbled upon a picture book titled The Car is the Color of the Sky at the local library. The main character was a taxi driver called Mr. Matsui, who sometimes picked up strange passengers like bears and foxes. He remembered positively devouring the book, all the while imagining how fun it would be to have such a job.

Whenever he closed the cover after reading the book, he would stare at the picture of Mr. Matsui in his light blue cab.

This, he thought to himself, was what he would one day become.

And so he did. Over the past thirty years, he had moved from one company to the next, each time changing the color of his vehicle.

But he still hadn’t come across a sky-blue taxi.

After leaving the break room, he made his way to the garage and his parked car—not a bright blue, but a deep one, almost black. The garage was roofless, exposed to the wind, and when he looked up, he could take in the sky and a yellow banana-shaped moon. The stars were barely visible. The usual dreary Tokyo night scene.

Hmm? At that moment, his gaze passing between his vehicle and the night sky, he suddenly realized something.

“So they are the same color, huh?” he mumbled.

Then, all of a sudden, his cellphone began to ring.

He quickly pulled the device from his pocket and glanced down at the screen.

Beneath the cold anonymity of the eleven-digit number was a name—Mitsuki Sawatari.

Looks like Matsui is my only choice, Mitsuki thought with a sigh.

She felt bad having to call on him again like this. How many times now had she turned to him for help, unable to find what she needed for herself?

She hastened to lower the phone and end the call, when her eyes fell on faint glimmer reflecting from her left ring finger.

“Oh . . . ” sounded her voice weakly.

The ring had been a gift from Koichi.

Just three days ago, she had finally been able to meet her boyfriend Koichi on her first day off in longer than she could remember.

“I’m sorry,” she had said. “I didn’t have any free time this week.” “I’ve been so busy.” “Sorry again.” “Next week, I promise.”

For the past month, every time he called asking to meet, she had ended up turning him down. It was true that things had been hectic at the studio, but there was another reason for these constant postponements.

Why? Because Koichi had asked for her ring size. Her ring finger, he had specified—though he had never once mentioned the word engagement.

But he was always like that. Mitsuki could hardly stand it.

Though Koichi was three years her junior, she would have liked to say she didn’t feel the age gap—but in fact, the opposite was true. He had a natural little brother personality, and he was constantly demanding her attention or else begging for her help. Once, he had even told her upfront: “I want you to take care of me in life.”

“What’s the problem?” Aiko, a close friend of hers had asked her. “He sounds adorable.”

But perhaps because she had lost her father at a young age, Mitsuki would have sooner had a partner willing to indulge her, not the other way around.

“Then why don’t you break up with him?”

Given what Mitsuki wanted for herself, Aiko’s suggestion was no doubt the right one. Yet Mitsuki was touched by Koichi’s dedication and single-mindedness—even if that devotion wasn’t meant for her.

“One of the crows,” he began all of a sudden during their rendezvous.

He arrived at the restaurant on the top floor of a hotel in Shinjuku ten minutes late. Throughout all their years together, they had never been to a place like this before, making it a rare extravagance for the both of them. With the expansive night view outside the window, it felt like they were dining beyond the limits of the sky.

“One of the crows, it made a bookshelf.”

Mitsuki was unable to make heads or tails of this bizarre statement—but playing the role of a wise older sister, she did her best to coax out what he wanted to say.

“A bookshelf?” she repeated.

“The old crow was collecting books, you see.”

“Oh? Where?”

“On its bookshelf. It brought a piece of plywood or something to the top of an oak tree and built a shelf there. I was observing it the whole time. It started arranging all these books and magazines that it must have taken from people’s garbage. Seriously, it was one smart little guy.”

Koichi was a subcontractor brought into the Crow Control Initiative set up by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Environment Bureau. Or rather, that was his self-proclaimed role. His real job was delivering newspapers. Making his rounds during the early hours of the morning, he had developed a pronounced curiosity with crows, and before long, he took to observing their ecology. While he had no qualifications to his name, the experience and knowledge gleaned from his many years of observation had been well-received by professional scholars, with some even turning to him for his insights and opinions.

There was a park with a large grove near his apartment, a place that served as a roosting area for crows. A train line ran next to the park, and one day, the editor of a free newsletter distributed at the station reached out wanting to interview Koichi. Thanks to that article, Koichi earned a reputation as the city’s resident Crow Professor. Mitsuki had been a student back then, working part time as the editor’s assistant, and as such, she had accompanied him during the interview, later pulling an all-nighter to write the clumsy article detailing the Crow Professor’s many observations.

That was how she first met Koichi. And so the two of them had been dating for a good many years.

However, as far as she was concerned, their relationship had barely changed since their student days. Koichi may have gone to the trouble of dressing up in a fancy suit and booking a table at a restaurant in a luxury hotel, but he had completely forgotten the purpose of the dinner, going on and on and on about a crow building a bookshelf. It was no different to that rambling, incoherent interview.

“Hey, you know . . . ” Mitsuki interrupted, stopping him once the meal was over and the waiter brought out dessert. “Didn’t you have something you wanted to say to me?

There had been no real forewarning as such, but after being asked her ring size and with Koichi inviting her to an expensive restaurant, there could only be one possible explanation.

“Ah, right.” He rummaged through the inner pocket of his jacket, presenting her with a red box tied with a white ribbon. “I almost forgot.”

That was all.

Mitsuki knew perfectly well what it was, but having lost all patience with him, she asked bluntly: “What is it?”

She proceeded to tear off the ribbon, opening the lid as if it was no more than a box of caramels. “What’s this?” she asked again, yanking the ring out and jamming it on her left ring finger. Then, as if only joking, she tried to pull it off.

The ring, however, wouldn’t budge.

Huh? Tilting her head in an effort to keep Koichi from noticing, she applied even more force—but no, it was firmly stuck. She had meant to remove it right away, and even had her next words already planned out. “I can’t accept this unless you explain to me exactly what it is.”

But if it wouldn’t come off, she could hardly say anything like that.

Try as she might to remove it, the ring was fixed in place, clinging to her finger like a thing alive.

Mitsuki was standing next to a supermarket’s neon sign, lips curled in a pout, when Matsui arrived to pick her up. The taxi’s Reserved sign stood out brightly in the murky dark.

“I’m screwed,” she murmured as she stepped into the vehicle.

“What happened?” Matsui asked, watching her in the rear-view mirror.

“This is the sixth all-night supermarket I’ve been to. At least this time I got to talk to someone who actually knows what’s what when it comes to stocking fruit, but when I asked him if he knew anywhere that would still be selling them, he said I’d be hard pressed to find them anywhere in Tokyo . . . ”

“Fruit, you said?”

Matsui was puzzled as to the problem, but this wasn’t the first time that Mitsuki had called him to help in some bizarre collection task. In that sense, she was one of his few reliable repeat customers.

“Here I am turning to you again, Matsui. I’m sorry. I wanted to find them on my own this time, but I’m not having any luck.”

“And what are you looking for today?”

“Loquats. The fruit. Not kumquats. Loquats . . . Right, speaking of fruits, didn’t you help me run all over Tokyo looking for green apples once, even though they were out of season?”

“Yes, that was a real head-scratcher.” Despite his words, Matsui sounded like someone looking back over a fond memory. “But if even the store clerk thinks there aren’t any to be found, where should I go?” Mitsuki asked.

Matsui started driving. “Well, where do you want to start?”

He glanced at her through the rear-view mirror.

Mitsuki’s eyes were downcast, her eyebrows furrowed as she fidgeted with something on her left hand. “Oh, it just won’t come off,” she murmured with a sigh.

Matsui turned his attention back to the road. “If nowhere in Tokyo has any, maybe we should look outside of Tokyo?”

Leaving the city meant going either north or west. Matsui turned onto one of the main roads and began drawing a mental map as he considered which way to go. The streets were empty tonight. A lone motorcycle overtook them, speeding comfortably past.

“Ah. Can you wait a minute?” Mitsuki took her hand away from the ring, checking the incoming message on her cellphone as she nodded her head. “Uh-huh.”

“What is it?”

“Um, yes . . . ” she paused for a moment to finish reading the message. “Is the main intersection at Sakuradani far from here?”

“No. It will probably take around fifteen minutes to get there.”

“Around fifty meters from the intersection, on the road to Fukagawacho—it says here there’s supposed to be a tree there. According to this, it had loquats on it yesterday.”

“Oh? That’s very precise information.”

Matsui sounded surprised, but he couldn’t have been any more amazed than Mitsuki herself. A few minutes earlier, she had sent Koichi a text message asking if he might know anywhere that she could find loquats. She hadn’t really expected to receive a reply.

You were awake? she hurriedly texted him back.

About to head out on deliveries, came his response.

How did you know about the loquat tree?

Crows like to take the fruits once they’ve ripened.

Ah. Mitsuki was impressed. His knowledge could actually prove useful at times.

Koichi took little interest in anything other than crows. If you were to ask him what interesting experiences life had brought him, no doubt his responses would be about nothing else.

He had lived without worrying about pressure cookers, or silk hats, or unicycles. Mitsuki suspected that he had never so much as tasted a loquat.

But perhaps he was a living example that if you master one specific thing, it can lead you to so many others. Even if he didn’t know the first thing about loquats, crows, it seemed, had nonetheless led him to them.

“Uh-huh,” Mitsuki nodded to herself in realization as the vehicle approached Sakuradani.

“We’re almost there.”

Startled by Matsui’s voice, she pressed her face up against the window to check the roadside trees one by one.

Only then did she realize that she had no idea what a loquat tree even looked like. And it was the middle of the night. The streetlamps provided some illumination, so maybe she could try identifying the fruits from their color? But it would probably be better to step outside and investigate on foot.

“I’ll wait here, then,” Matsui said, pulling over on the side of the road.

Mitsuki stepped outside and started walking, scrutinizing the trees.

But she couldn’t spot what she needed.

She began to doubt whether her memories of loquats—their size, their color—were truly accurate.

If she wasn’t mistaken, they were meant to be light orange.

The ones sold in stores were definitely that color, but maybe they were a different hue while still on the tree? Perhaps they were greener, the color of young grass, only ripening after they had fallen from the branch?

It was certainly possible. And so she set about peering into the trees once more.

At that moment, a flash of orange entered the corner of her vision.

“That’s it!” she exclaimed—when the fruit was obscured behind a dark mass. Whatever it was, she couldn’t help but feel like the thing had snatched the loquat away.

A crow? Mitsuki braced herself.

It had to be a crow. There was no question about it. Clinging to the branch, an unbelievably huge crow was grabbing the orange fruits one after another.

No, wait a minute.

Just as Mitsuki told herself that there couldn’t possibly be a crow that large, a truck passed by, its headlights illuminating the tree and revealing the identity of the shadowy creature.

It was a person.

Black hair and a black jacket. Not a man, but a woman. “Um,” Mitsuki called out cautiously.

For a brief moment, a chill ran down her spine—but as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could clearly make out a tall, slender woman scrambling further up the tree.

“Um, excuse me? What are you doing up there?”

The woman startled for a moment, but maybe this wasn’t the first time that someone had caught her in the act, as she stared down at Mitsuki and answered without hesitation: “I’m a loquat thief.”

“It’s just around the corner. Why don’t you stop by?”

Hidden inside the woman’s black jacket were magnificent loquats, exactly as Mitsuki had imagined. Naturally, she remained on her guard, but she couldn’t turn her back on this chance. So long as she had Matsui with her, she reasoned, she would be fine—and so she accepted the invitation to drop by the apartment of this self-proclaimed loquat thief.

“Please,” the woman said, and with no more warning than that, pulled out three glasses and poured them all a cup of golden loquat wine.

“Last year’s batch,” the loquat thief said in a mellow voice.

Every year, it seemed, she would climb loquat trees in the middle of the night, harvest the fruits, and turn them into liqueur.

“My brother used to do this all the time,” she explained. She looked over at a frame on the corner of the cupboard—a photo of smiling man, much younger than the woman but almost identical in appearance.

The woman looked back to Mitsuki with a faint smile. “But you’re telling me this bunch will make its way onto the big screen?”

Just one bunch would do, Mitsuki had insisted.

“Alright,” the woman answered readily enough. She seemed amused by Mitsuki’s job title of procurer. “They’ll be the stars of the show, right? They’re already stolen goods, so don’t hold back. Take as many as you want. I might have a little less to make into next year’s wine, but I’ll be able to enjoy looking out for them in a big-name film, right?”

The woman had called herself a loquat thief, and she had indeed taken the fruit without anyone’s permission. But putting aside that one small crime once a year, she was a remarkably earnest, even tireless, individual. She wore a white business shirt beneath her black jacket, and while her makeup was modest, her facial features were those of a traditional Japanese beauty—not that she was one to boast of her own good looks. No, she worked through the night day after day, hardly ever making use of her vacation time.

Tonight was a rare day off, allowing her to take on the mantle of the loquat thief, but she would normally spend these late-night hours in an operator’s room, responding to the incessant barrage of phone calls as they came in.

“It’s always some nameless person on the other end of the line. Young and old, men and women, they call in looking for someone to talk to about their problems, everything from silly life advice to serious life-and-death issues.”

Mitsuki accepted this explanation without further question. After all, it was thanks to that friendly, dependable voice that she had let her guard down even though she had never once met this woman before.

“I’m with the Tokyo No. 3 Consultation Room. If you need anything, give me a call,” the woman said, handing Mitsuki her business card. “I might be able to help with your procurement. And of course, I’m always happy to talk about love affairs or family problems or the like.”

Mitsuki closed her eyes as she savored the complex taste of the loquat wine, its wonderful contrast of sweet and sour. Matsui was still on the job, so he merely tasted it with the tip of his tongue and relished its aroma.

“Hey, Matsui?” Mitsuki asked as she leaned deep into the back seat of the taxi, cradling a handful of loquats on her lap. “I think I’m going to nod off here.”

The loquat wine was having an effect, a sugary drowsiness taking hold of her body.

“I understand. Please, go ahead. I’ll take you back to your apartment.”

“No, don’t do that. If I go to bed, I’ll never be able to wake up. Just keep driving around until dawn, please.”

“Very well,” Matsui answered, watching her through the rear-view mirror.

Mitsuki, her eyes already closed, reached out to the ring glimmering on her left hand, gently stroking its surface with her fingertip as she dozed off. Her face was as innocent as an angel’s.

For Tokyo too, it was time for the briefest moments of shut-eye.

With the city asleep, wrapped in the warm embrace of night, only the loquat fruits stood out, softly reflecting the dim moonlight.