Tears and Falling Wick Flowers

Some people do not leave at once after they die.

Morikawa Mitsu had always believed that. Otherwise she could not explain why she so often saw, in dreams, things that had not yet happened, nor why, so long after Todo Teisei's death, she still caught his shadow in the unguarded gestures of other people.

It was Yokohama in the early years of Showa.

The newspapers were full of news about the queen of sweet songs, Kirishima Kumiko, saying that she had come south and arrived at the port, and that admirers had packed the Imperial Opera House shoulder to shoulder. When Morikawa Mitsu came out of the detective office, she happened upon the commotion. Kumiko stood on the steps in a pale lilac kimono, smiling, the whole of her seeming like a petal lifted up in soft light. The crowd surged forward, and a young man was jostled out, stumbling hard enough to strike his forehead on the curb. Morikawa Mitsu bent to help him up. Holding his brow, he grinned through the pain and said he was fine, but when he raised his eyes to her, he suddenly went still.

"Have we met somewhere before?"

His name was Takashiro Kageomi, the postman assigned to that district. He was a little over twenty, with bright features, shabby clothes, and a smile touched by the reckless innocence of someone who had not seen much of the world. Morikawa Mitsu shook her head and said no, then turned to leave. And yet in that instant, her heart gave a sudden heavy thud.

That night, she dreamed.

In the dream, a black car broke through the barrier by the quay and plunged with its passenger into the harbor. By the time the constables arrived, the car door was half open, river water pouring in wrapped in fog. Kirishima Kumiko floated there in the water like a flower ruined by soaking. Standing among the onlookers was Takashiro Kageomi. In his hand he held a string of white pearls, and his face was blank with bewilderment and fear.

Morikawa Mitsu woke from the dream with cold sweat soaking her back.

She had never taken such dreams for coincidences. Least of all because, outside the opera house that day, the string of pearls at Kirishima Kumiko's throat had plainly been just such a necklace. She spent two days looking into Takashiro Kageomi's background. A postman. Poor. Warm-hearted. Recently hospitalized after a broken engagement. And the day he was admitted to the hospital happened to be the very day Todo Teisei had died.

There is no such thing as that much coincidence in this world.

Todo Teisei was the person Morikawa Mitsu would never forget for as long as she lived. He seemed gentle, but in truth he was stubborn and deep-hearted, and when she had been most isolated and helpless, he had refused to let go even while unconscious. Yet he had died before her eyes in the end, leaving behind not even one proper farewell. Morikawa Mitsu often felt that if he truly had any lingering attachment, it would be her he could not release.

So she began approaching Takashiro Kageomi on purpose.

She wrote letters to herself, folding blank pages into envelopes only so she could wait for him to bring them to her door on his bicycle. She made excuses to ask him to repair a broken hanging lamp, then watched him stand sweating atop a high stool, twisting in a lightbulb while solemnly misusing idioms. She asked whether he liked Kirishima Kumiko, and Takashiro Kageomi answered with the earnestness of a boy that he had not known the singer at all at first, but had happened to hear one of her records and at once felt the voice was very familiar, as if he had heard it in a previous life.

As he said it, he unconsciously lifted his right hand and touched the bridge of his nose.

Morikawa Mitsu felt her heart jolt.

Whenever Todo Teisei was nervous, or thinking hard, or had something to say and could not decide whether to say it, he always made that same gesture.

The familiarity came too suddenly, driving straight into her heart almost like a knife. When she followed Takashiro Kageomi into a Western goods shop at the corner, she saw in the window an old-fashioned Western clock. That clock had once stood in the office where Todo Teisei had liked to linger most before his death. Old clock, old gesture, old expression, all of it emerging in scattered pieces from different places, as if someone had deliberately taken the dead man apart into countless fragments and was slowly placing them back before her eyes.

A few days later, Kirishima Kumiko arranged a fan event at the Paramount. Takashiro Kageomi went too, as excited as a child. At the drawing, his number was called, and he bounded up to the stage grinning from ear to ear, a red box in his arms. Morikawa Mitsu also happened to draw another prize. Takashiro Kageomi opened his box on the spot.

Inside was a pearl necklace.

The very one from her dream.

For a moment Morikawa Mitsu felt disoriented. So the necklace was not a murder weapon after all, but merely a prize. She was almost ready to believe she had guessed in the wrong direction. But after the event ended that night, she still spotted another man at the corner of the street. He was in his forties, solidly built, blocking Kirishima Kumiko beside her car and arguing with her in a lowered voice. Kumiko's face had gone pale. At last she took a stack of banknotes from her handbag and thrust it into his hand. The instant Takashiro Kageomi saw it, he rushed forward and shouted that no one was allowed to bully Miss Kirishima. The middle-aged man, startled, could only leave in ill temper.

From that moment, Morikawa Mitsu knew that the real danger was not Takashiro Kageomi, but that unidentified man.

She and Takashiro Kageomi followed the matter until they finally learned that his name was Togo Akito, and that he had come to Yokohama from Tokyo on the same day as Kirishima Kumiko, as though he had followed her all the way there. The moment he heard it, Takashiro Kageomi swore he would secretly protect his idol. Two days later, he ended up brawling with Togo Akito at a street corner and the pair of them were hauled off to the police station. When Morikawa Mitsu came with the bail money to get him out, he was still grinning and saying that calling her "madam" made people trust them more easily. She was so irritated she wanted to curse him out, and then, at the very instant she turned away, she suddenly remembered the date from the dream.

That dusk was supposed to be the moment Kirishima Kumiko met with disaster.

She hurried to the harbor, but she was still too late. The quay was unnaturally quiet. Only a black automobile stood there at a slant by the roadside. The next morning, the constables pulled the car from the harbor. Kirishima Kumiko herself, however, was nowhere to be found.

Dead, fled, vanished, no one could say.

Yokohama's newspapers erupted over it, and old stories from before Kirishima Kumiko's rise to fame were dug up one after another. Some said she had once made her living in the pleasure quarters of Tokyo. Some said Togo Akito had been one of her former patrons. The rumors rose layer after layer like floodwater, blurring truth and falsehood alike. It was also at this time that Takashiro Kageomi resigned from his work as a postman. He said he would soon be leaving Yokohama to begin a new life somewhere else.

Hearing that, Morikawa Mitsu felt a sudden hollow open in her chest.

What frightened her was not simply parting, but the thought that if Takashiro Kageomi left, then the last trace Todo Teisei had left in this world might dissolve with him.

The turn came on a night when the power went out.

That evening the whole street was suddenly plunged into darkness. Morikawa Mitsu lit a candle and was carrying the candlestick back into the parlor when she saw Takashiro Kageomi standing by the window. He turned and spoke to her.

But the voice was not Takashiro Kageomi's.

"A-Mitsu. It's me."

The candle flame flickered softly and lit that face. The face was still Takashiro Kageomi's, but the expression had changed completely. In those eyes lay a tenderness and exhaustion she knew too well, as though the person before her had finally seen her again across the long distance of life and death. Morikawa Mitsu's hand shook. Candle wax dripped onto the back of her finger and she felt nothing. She only stared at him and asked again and again whether this was a dream.

He shook his head and said he was Todo Teisei.

He told her that at the moment of his death, his soul had been unable to return to his own body, and in his panic it had slipped by mistake into Takashiro Kageomi's dying flesh in the next hospital room. Most days he could only remain there like a wisp of smoke, curled into a tiny corner near Takashiro Kageomi's heart, able only now and then, through familiar people and objects, to nudge the other man's movements or feelings for a fleeting instant. Only at moments like this one, with the aid of blackout and candlelight, could he barely rise to the surface long enough to truly speak with her.

Morikawa Mitsu cried too hard to get out a single whole sentence.

She threw herself into his arms and said that even if she had to live in darkness all her life, she did not want him to disappear again. Todo Teisei only gathered her lightly into his embrace, his voice low as a sigh. He said that light entered everywhere: sunlight, lamplight, even the neon of the street. Little by little, it would force him back into the corner of that other body. But he would not submit to it. He would keep struggling, keep contending with the other soul inside that body, and try to win himself one day out of that shell, back into being himself again.

"When that day comes," he asked softly, his forehead touching hers, "if your choice is still me, then shall we begin again?"

Morikawa Mitsu nodded through tears and said she would wait.

At that very moment, the current returned through the whole street.

Every lamp in the parlor burst alight at once. Todo Teisei seemed to be yanked backward by some invisible hand. Standing before her there was only Takashiro Kageomi once more. The young man looked utterly bewildered, with no idea why he had been holding her, or why his own eyes were filled with tears. But Morikawa Mitsu knew better than anyone that it had not been an illusion, nor a dream. A dead man truly had come back to her through another person's body and said to her the last, heaviest vow he had to give.

After that, she passed beneath the detective office almost every day and lifted her head to look up at the window facing the street on the second floor.

One evening, the silhouette of a man suddenly appeared behind the window. The figure was at once familiar and strange, like a remnant blown out of a former life and back into this one. Morikawa Mitsu stood in the street hardly daring to breathe. She did not know whether it was Takashiro Kageomi after all, or Todo Teisei finally freed of restraint.

She knew only that her teeth were trembling, and yet her tears had already fallen first.

So it turned out that the thing which wounds most deeply in a lifetime is never the fact of death or separation.

It is seeing you clearly and still not knowing whether I ought to walk toward you, or stay where I am and wait.