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  But this time Charlotte didn’t smile. Charlotte screamed.

  The moment her fingers touched the dagger, she let out such a bone-chilling shriek that Hiroshi almost let go. He didn’t, but since she went limp the next instant and tumbled forward, he couldn’t stop her from slipping and falling into the water.

  He didn’t let go of her for even a second. He was seized by the terrible thought that the dagger might have been wired up to a current to protect it from being stolen. He yanked Charlotte out of the water, back onto the paving stones. She was shivering all over and her rib cage was heaving up and down like a bellows. But if the knife had been wired—and would that even work, Hiroshi wondered, since it was made of stone?—then he would have felt it, too, wouldn’t he? He would have felt the shock as well, since he was holding on to her.

  “Charlotte,” he whispered. Scared, he shook her. “Say something! What is it?”

  People were beginning to appear, startled by Charlotte’s scream. They formed a circle around the children, bent down, and asked what had happened, why she had screamed like that.

  “She fell in the water,” Hiroshi answered helplessly. Then he added, “She slipped.”

  At last Yumiko turned up, and since she was practically immune to panic, things settled down very quickly.

  “We can’t leave you alone for five minutes, can we?” she said in a cheerful tone, and, producing a small towel from her bag, she dried Charlotte off as best she could.

  Charlotte came round enough to be able to speak. “I want to go home,” she whispered.

  “We wouldn’t do anything else,” Yumiko said briskly. “You can’t run around town like that, wet as you are.”

  It was an abrupt end to the day’s trip. Luckily, a bus came along straightaway, since Charlotte was shivering violently and her teeth were chattering. There were plenty of free seats, but Yumiko had to spread out the towel before Charlotte could sit down. Yumiko didn’t let the incident spoil her enjoyment of the day. She chattered away merrily about her childhood in this part of the city and all the times she and the neighborhood children had soaked one another with water from fountains, boating lakes, and rainwater barrels. She seemed not even to notice Hiroshi wasn’t in the least bit interested, or that Charlotte was just staring blankly into space.

  Then a woman boarded the bus who must have been an old acquaintance, since Yumiko called out a loud “Hello!” Maybe they had dunked one another in water as children. In any case, they started chatting away quite literally like long-lost friends and simply tuned Hiroshi and Charlotte out. At last. Hiroshi had hardly been able to contain his impatience.

  He leaned over to Charlotte and asked softly, “What’s wrong?”

  It was a moment he would remember for the rest of his life. How she turned to face him; how she looked at him with eyes like windows to infinity, like the mouths of bottomless wells, like black holes. How, when she spoke, her voice sent goose bumps up and down his spine. She said, “It was so unbelievably old!”

  What? Hiroshi wanted to ask. The knife? But he couldn’t say a word. The sound of her voice had frozen every muscle in his body.

  Charlotte didn’t say another word all the rest of the way home. She just stared blankly ahead, letting them lead her by the hand. When they got back home, Hiroshi told her, “We’re flying to Minamata tomorrow. For a week.”

  Charlotte nodded, but it didn’t look as though she had really understood. Hiroshi watched as she and Yumiko walked through the main gate, then he went home himself. He had the nagging feeling he had done something wrong, though he couldn’t for the life of him think what it might have been.

  The next day they had to get up hideously early to catch their flight to Minamata. They were flying to see his grandparents, which Hiroshi wasn’t looking forward to, and to celebrate the Bon festival, which he didn’t really care about. What he liked was the flight itself.

  But he didn’t like getting up and getting dressed when he still fuzzy with sleep, or leaving the apartment block in the dead silence of the night as the streetlamps shone yellow above them. He could hardly believe there were cars driving around at that hour, even if there were only a few. Perhaps they were going to the airport as well. And he had never seen the metro so empty.

  When at last they had boarded their flight, Hiroshi noticed for the first time that there was a section of the plane with larger seats than the rest, wider seats with more space around them, and that it was curtained off from the other passengers before takeoff.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “First class,” said his mother.

  Their seats were quite close to the front, so Hiroshi could peer through a gap in the curtains and see the passengers up there being served larger trays with better food.

  “That’s how rich people travel,” his mother explained. “First class is much, much more expensive than what we pay. For the same flight—just think about it—and it’s not as if they arrive any quicker than the rest of us. It’s sheer stupidity!” She shook her head in disapproval. “It’s just because they’re snobs. They can’t bear the idea of sitting next to normal people for two hours.”

  At ten o’clock they landed in Kagoshima. From there they took the train to Minamata, where his grandparents were waiting for them at the station. Hiroshi was still so elated by the flight—by the sight of the huge clouds piled up around them and the tiny landscape down below—that he hardly noticed the obligatory greeting ritual, the kisses, and the talk of how much he had grown. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this time around.

  Dr. Suzuki joined them for dinner. He had been treating Aunt Kumiko for years and was practically one of the family by now. He drank a great deal of sake and never tired of telling anyone who would listen how wonderful it was that Aunt Kumiko had lasted so long, especially given how serious her poisoning was. Hiroshi huddled in his chair and concentrated on his food as the doctor talked and talked. He didn’t want to hear any of it. He couldn’t see anything wonderful about being sick for a whole lifetime, lying in bed incontinent, and screaming as though tormented by a thousand demons. He shuddered at the thought that such a thing could even happen, that the smallest particles of matter in existence could do that to a human being. That Aunt Kumiko was the way she was because she had liked to eat fish so much, and there had been just a few more atoms of mercury in the fish than was good for her. Just a few of the wrong atoms in the wrong place could cause convulsions and make a person forget everything she had ever known. Could there be anything more dreadful? And there was nothing anyone could do about it. Atoms were too small even to see. He had read a great deal about it. You could inhale mercury without even noticing. And that wasn’t the only atom that could be dangerous; there was a whole zoo of them—cadmium, plutonium, arsenic, sodium, chlorine, and many more.

  The next day he swallowed his fears and went to Aunt Kumiko’s room. She wasn’t screaming any longer; she was just lying there, and as he stepped closer to her bed she did something she hadn’t done for a very long time. She turned her head as though she wanted to look at him. But her gaze wandered away; perhaps it had just been a chance movement. Hiroshi stayed until the feeling of revulsion had passed, and he began to feel sorry for her.

  Afterward, he crept out of the house and roamed the neighborhood, looking for the places where he had played on holiday as a little boy. The town had changed so much that he couldn’t find most of the spots, and the ones he did find were no longer any good for games. A little stream where he and another boy had built a dam with mud from the bank had been filled in, and a supermarket stood right where it had been. It was a sad sight.

  He thought of Charlotte and how she had screamed at the shrine. At that moment she had sounded the way Aunt Kumiko used to, just as terrified. Hiroshi used to feel his aunt was looking into a pit full of demons. That was how she had screamed, too. Hiroshi would have liked to have known what it meant. W
hat Charlotte had seen when she had touched the obsidian dagger. Perhaps it wasn’t even possible to explain something like that to another human being. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t said anything. He was momentarily gripped with fear that Charlotte might end up like Aunt Kumiko. But he quickly thought of something else.

  Over the next few days they were all very busy with the festival of the dead. As always, Hiroshi got the job of writing signs displaying the names of all the ancestors, the dead forebears they would remember. Plates were set out on every free surface in the house, and the women stood in the kitchen making dish after dish of all the treats the dead family members had liked best when they were alive—as far as anyone really remembered such things. Then they set the food out on the plates to welcome the spirits when they came. The whole house smelled of good things to eat, and they told a lot of stories, including quite a few Hiroshi had never heard before.

  Then they went out to the street festival and watched the dances, which were meant to put the ancestor spirits in a good mood. On the last evening they went down to the river with everyone else and set little paper boats on the water with lanterns in them, then watched as the glimmering lights twirled and swirled together into one vast, twinkling pattern. It drifted slowly away and eventually vanished in the distance; tradition had it that this would help the wandering souls find their way back to the underworld.

  Hiroshi tried to come up with a rough estimate of just how densely populated the underworld must be if it really did contain all the souls of all the human beings who had ever lived. The numbers he arrived at made him feel quite dizzy. Had anyone ever considered what might happen if those souls decided not to stay in the underworld any longer? What if one day the underworld were to fill up? But as far as he could see, nobody truly believed anymore that the souls of the dead were really there with them at the Bon festival. It was just a tradition, a chance for the family to get together.

  “It’s good that you’re staying on a few days longer this time,” Grandpa said the next morning.

  Mother explained that there hadn’t really been any choice.

  “Oh, yes,” Grandma chimed in. “Everything’s always booked solid right around the Bon festival. “All of Japan is traveling.”

  Everybody agreed it had been a good idea to stay on a few extra days. Hiroshi was the only one who couldn’t wait to get back home, and he bit his lip rather than say anything of the kind.

  By the time they got home, Charlotte was no longer there. Ambassador Malroux had been called away quite suddenly, they learned, and the whole family had simply packed their bags from one day to the next and left.

  One day before. They had missed one another by the narrowest of margins.

  Hiroshi stood there thunderstruck as his mother told him the news from the embassy. The previous ambassador, Bernard Beaucour, would be back next week. Jean-Arnaud Malroux had simply been standing in for him while he was ill. Charlotte was gone. And she hadn’t even written him a good-bye letter.

  “Now you see,” Hiroshi’s mother said with bitter satisfaction. “You were only ever a toy for her. That’s what rich people are like.”

  Hiroshi told himself Charlotte wouldn’t even have been able to write him a letter, since she didn’t know how to write Japanese. He told himself that was the only reason, that it had just been a matter of bad luck. But it eventually dawned on him that Charlotte could have written him a letter in English. She had lived in India; of course she knew English. And she knew Hiroshi studied English in school, that he watched films in English, that even if he couldn’t speak English very well, he could certainly read it.

  In the end he had to admit that if Charlotte had really wanted to, she would have been able to leave him some message. But no message came. He would have to live with that.

  “Who knows what all that was about,” his mother said one evening when she was in a philosophical mood.

  All the same, Hiroshi told himself, Charlotte had helped him toward his great idea. If it had been about anything, perhaps it had been about that. He would forget about Charlotte and concentrate completely on his idea so that one day, when he was grown up, he could make it reality. And since in order to do that he would have to have good grades, from that day onward he became a model student.

  TRAVELS

  One day when he was fourteen years old, Hiroshi came home from his after-school cybernetics study group to find a man sitting at the kitchen table. He was a Westerner, a big beefy man, somehow bloated, even ugly. He sat at the table with his legs crossed clumsily, and it looked as though he had been sitting there for some time talking with Mother all the while. And for some reason, Mother’s eyes were damp.

  “Hiroshi,” she said quietly, “this is your father.”

  “For real?” Hiroshi replied, but in fact he knew the moment she said it that it was the truth. In that instant he remembered everything Charlotte had told him about his father—as well as how she had told him, how she had read the feelings from his penknife. In some way he couldn’t explain to himself, he felt as though he had known this man forever even though he had never seen him before in his life.

  All the same, it was a most peculiar situation. How do you behave around a father who you have always thought was dead? What do you do when all of a sudden he’s sitting at the kitchen table, looking like a failed medical experiment?

  Hiroshi shook his hand tentatively and said, “Hello, nice to meet you.” For the first time he wished he had paid even half as much attention in English class as he always did in computer studies, physics, and all the other sciences.

  His father explained in awkward, almost incomprehensible Japanese that he used to speak the language much better, but that unfortunately…

  Then Mother broke in and said, “John, you can speak English to him. So that he finally understands why I always wanted him to learn it well.”

  So to everyone’s relief, John Maynard Leak switched to his native language and told them what had happened in his life.

  Turning to face Hiroshi, he explained that he had eventually recovered from the brain operation, though the doctors had not expected such a thing to be possible. For several years he had been completely helpless and required round-the-clock care. But then a committed physiotherapist had helped him regain enough independence that he could live on his own, well away from the family mansion, and he had hardly anything to do with his family these days. His father had died, and his brothers and sisters had insisted on buying him out so they could carry on the business on their own.

  “I never wanted to have anything to do with the business anyway,” he said, waving his hand dismissively and very nearly knocking a glass of water from the table. “They can worry about all that if they want and play at being billionaires, but I couldn’t care less about any of it. They think they got a good deal, but I have everything I’ll ever need, and if you ask me the deal was all in my favor.”

  He went on to tell them he was still undergoing treatment and on various medications, that he still had to do exercises with his therapist and so on, but despite all that he had been fit enough to travel to Japan. He was visibly proud of this, and when Hiroshi could see how happy his father was to have made it there to be with them, he felt the first spark of affection, felt how this big, clumsy man loved them. Hiroshi realized that the puffy features must be a side effect of the medication he was taking, knew the scars on his scalp were left over from that delicate brain operation. If he looked past all that, though, and made the effort, Hiroshi could recognize the man he knew from the old photographs.

  “And so here I am,” his father continued. He looked at Hiroshi’s mother as though he were about to say something she hadn’t heard yet either. “And I came to ask Hiroshi whether he wants to come to the US to get the best possible education.”

  Mother’s face fell. “What’s wrong with the school he’s at here?”

  Father sho
ok his head gently. “I’m talking about what comes after that. He could go to MIT, to Stanford, to Yale, Caltech.…They’re the best universities in the world.”

  Hiroshi was gasping for air and couldn’t say a word. He felt as though he were standing in front of a door that was swinging wide open to show unimaginable vistas.

  “Why?” his mother asked sharply. “There are some excellent universities in Japan as well, and Hiroshi could certainly get a spot at one of them if he took the trouble.”

  “He certainly could,” his father said soothingly and folded his hands to show he meant no offense. “But look at it this way: I was never able to be there for my son. If I can at least help him go study, then all my money will finally have been good for something.” He leaned forward. “And as I’ve said, I’d like it best of all if you could both join me.”

  Clearly they had already discussed this before Hiroshi came home, because his mother shot straight back, “No! How many times do I have to tell you? Once was quite enough for me.”

  “It won’t be like it was back then. Nothing like it.”

  “I belong here. I didn’t know it then, but I do now.”

  Only then did Hiroshi realize the curious thing about his father’s sudden appearance. “Mother,” he butted in, “how did he find us?”

  Then Hiroshi learned that his father had hired a big international detective agency, and that it hadn’t been hard to track them down. He also learned that the first thing his father had done with the address the agency gave him was to write a long letter. One of the things he had said in the letter was that his father—the man who had wanted to kill Hiroshi before he was even born—was dead. Mother had written a reply, sent him photos of Hiroshi, and told John all about him, about his hobbies and the grades he had been getting in school in the last few years.

  “Why did you never tell me about this?” Hiroshi asked.