'You know,' she said, as if she were about to share a secret with me, 'life is pretty damn hard.'
'I know,' I said. And she was right. 'So how would you like to have dinner with me now?'
'Sorry, I'm not hungry. The only thing I want to do right now is turn my head off and go to sleep.'
'I'm not really hungry, either,' I said. 'I just wanted to talk to you. About things.'
In the silence at her end, I could sense her biting her lip and touching her little finger to her eyebrow.
'Not right now,' she said, emphasising each syllable. 'We'll talk later. You have to let me sleep now. Not a lot. Everything will be fine if I can just sleep a little. I'll call you when I wake up. OK?'
'OK,' I said. 'Goodnight.'
'You, too. Goodnight.'
She hesitated a moment. 'Was it some kind of emergency - what you wanted to talk about?'
'No, no emergency,' I said. 'We can talk about it later.'
True, we had plenty of time. Ten thousand years, twenty thousand. I could wait.

YUXAN.

YUXAN

Just then - without warning - I disappeared.
Maybe it was the moonlight, or that midnight music. With each step I took, I felt myself sinking deeper into a quicksand where my identity vanished; it was the same emotion I had in the plane, flying across Egypt. This wasn't me walking in the moonlight. It wasn't me, but a stand-in, fashioned out of plaster. I rubbed my hand against my face. But it wasn't my face. And it wasn't my hand. My heart pounded in my chest, sending the blood coursing through my body at a wild speed. This body was a plaster puppet, a voodoo doll into which a sorcerer had breathed a fleeting life. The glow of real life was missing. My makeshift, phoney muscles were only going through the motions. I was a puppet, to be used in some sacrifice.
So where is the real me? I wondered.
Suddenly, Izumi's voice came out of nowhere. 'The real you has been eaten by cats. While you've been standing here, those hungry cats have devoured you - eaten you all up. All that's left are bones.'

PLEIXADES.

PLEIXADES

Yukiko folded her arms over her chest and looked at me. 'I used to have dreams too, you know. But somewhere along the line they disappeared. Before I met you. I killed them. I crushed them and threw them away. Like some internal organ you no longer need and you rip out of your body. I don’t know whether that was the right thing to do. But it was the only thing I could do at the time... Sometimes I have this dream. The same dream over and over. Someone is carrying something in both hands, and comes up to me and says, ‘Here, you’ve forgotten something.’ I’ve been very happy living with you. I’ve wanted for nothing and never had any complaints. Still, something is chasing me. I wake up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat. I’m being chased by what I threw away. You think you’re the only one being chased, but you’re wrong. You’re not the only one who’s thrown away something, who’s lost something. Do you understand what I’m saying?'

'I think so,' I said.

SENXCHA.

SENXCHA

Yuki closed her eyes. Breathing so lightly, she seemed to be asleep. Her wet bangs were plastered in a clump across her forehead, her skin still tan from last month. But beneath the overcast sky, Yuki looked sickly. I wiped the rain and tears from her face. Rain kept falling silently over the boundless sea. Self-Defense Force submarine-spotting planes groaned past overhead like dragonflies in heat.
Finally, her head still resting on my shoulder, she opened her eyes and looked at me in soft focus. She pulled a Virginia Slim from her hip pocket and lit up. Or tried to repeatedly - she barely had the strength to light a match. No lectures from me about smoking, not this time. Eventually she got it lit and flicked the match away. Then after two drags on the cigarette, she tossed it away too. It continued burning until the rain put it out.
‘Your stomach still hurt?’ I asked.
‘A little.’
‘Let's just stay put a while though. You're not cold?’
‘I'm fine. The rain feels good.’
The fishermen were still transfixed on the Pacific. What was the attraction of fishing? It couldn't be merely catching fish. Was it just one of those acquired tastes? Like sitting out on a rainy beach with a high-strung thirteen-year-old?

MOONXMAN.

MOONXMAN

Walls.
A world completely surrounded by walls.
I shut the book and bid the last thimbleful of Jack Daniels farewell, turning over in my mind the image of a world within walls. I could picture it, with no effort at all. A very high wall, a very large gate. Dead quiet. Me inside. Beyond that, the scene was hazy.
Details of the world seemed to be distinct enough, yet at the same time everything around me was dark and blurred. And from some great obscure distance, a voice was calling.
It was like a scene from a movie, a historical blockbuster. But which? Not El Cid, not Ben Hur, not Spartacus. No, the image had to be something my subconscious dreamed up.
I shook my head to drive the image from my mind. I was so tired.

YEARSXLOST.

YEARSXLOST

Of course, I continue my dreamreading in the evenings. At six o'clock, I push open the door, have supper with the Librarian, then read old dreams.
In the course of an evening, I read four, perhaps five dreams. My fingers nimbly trace out the labyrinthine seams of light as I grow able to invoke the images and echoes with increasing clarity. I do not understand what dreamreading means, nor by what principle it works, but from the reactions of the Librarian I know that that my efforts are succeeding.
My eyes no longer hurt from the glow of the skulls, and I do not tire so readily.
After I am through reading a skull, the Librarian places it on the counter in line with the skulls previously read that night. The next evening, the counter is empty.
'You are making progress,' she says. 'The work goes much faster than I expected.'
'How many skulls are there?'
'A thousand, perhaps two thousand. Do you wish to see them?'
She leads me into the stacks. It is a huge schoolroom with rows of shelves, each shelf stacked with white beast skulls. It is a graveyard. A chill air of the dead hovers silently.
'How many years will it take me to read all these skulls?'
'You need not to read them all,' she says. 'You need to read only as many as you can read.'

DEVILSXDANCING.

DEVILSXDANCING

'I wonder how many copies your book has sold,' Tengo said.
'You mean Air Chrysalis?' Fuka-Eri asked.
'Uh-huh.'
'I don't know,' Fuka-Eri said, lightly creasing her brow. 'A lot.'
Numbers were not important to her, Tengo thought. Her 'a lot' brought to mind clover growing on a broad plane as far as the eye could see. The clover suggested only the idea of 'a lot', but no one could count them all.

FADEXAWAY.

FADEXAWAY

‘All these layers do absolutely nothing for my line of work,’ she said.
‘When you’re out in the snow, you won’t have time to think about that,’ I said.
‘You planning to stay until the heavy snows?’
‘Can’t tell. But I do know it’ll already be starting by the end of October. Better to be prepared. No telling what to expect.’

XUXGAZE.

XUXGAZE

It was then I myself determined, this time as a reality, to kill myself.
We threw ourselves into the sea at *** that night. She untied her sash, saying she had borrowed it from a friend at the café, and left it folded neatly on a rock. I removed my coat and put it in the same spot.
We entered the water together.
She died. I was saved.

KINGSXOF.

KINGSXOF

The room was utterly silent. Now there is the silence you encounter on entering a grand manor. And there is the silence that comes of too few people in too big a space. But this was a different quality of silence altogether. A ponderous, oppressive silence. A silence reminiscent, though it took me a while to put my finger on it, of the silence that hangs around a terminal patient. A silence pregnant with the presentiment of death. The air faintly musty and ominous.
‘Everyone dies,’ said the man softly with downcast eyes. He seemed to have an uncanny purchase on the drift of my thoughts. ‘All of us, whosoever, must die sometime.’
Having said that, the man fell again into a weighty silence. There was only the frantic buzzing of the cicadas outdoors. Bodies scraping out their last dying fury against the ending season.

LOSTXWAYS.

LOSTXWAYS

‘Are you studying?’
‘No,’ I would say with a smile, shutting my book. I would launch into some silly story, miles removed from what I was thinking.
‘Today at school the geography teacher, the one we call the Walrus…’

FLOAXTING.

YOGAXTHEN

FLOAXTING

As he looked up, the sky above seemed to be a fury of boiling white. The snow was now lashing down right on their faces. If they opened their mouths, it lay on their tongues. To be buried in such a drift…it seemed like heaven.
‘Now there’s snow in here,’ she said dreamily. Apparently, she meant that it had melted in a trickle from her neck to her breast. There was nothing anarchic in the falling snow, however: it fell with the steady solemnity of an ordered ritual. He felt his cheeks grow cold, and gradually became aware that his heart was fading within him.

GODXBODY.

EIGHTXNIGHTS

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