The Nish’s Story
1
‘All right,’ said Schlomo, ‘let us try it again.’
‘What have we learned from this?’ asked Cosgrove.
‘I learned that what we’re being shown isn’t necessarily accurate,’ said the Nish. ‘—Or that it’s misleading, anyway.’
‘Is it possible that…’ Cosgrove gulped. ‘Forgive me, please, for saying this, I know you really like her, but is it possible that you misjudged Hildy Wildermann’s personality?’
‘No,’ said the Nish, firmly, somewhat angrily. ‘That is not so. We did not see everything. We did not see the mechanics of it all. We need to see this from the viewpoints of everybody involved.’
‘Well, that is what we have, were given,’ said Schlomo. ‘Lucky us. Yes, I want to discover what is the issue with Hildy Wildermann and also what role if any that strange waiter had.’
‘Why the waiter? What’s wrong with the waiter?’
‘He was very, very strange, if you did not see it.’
‘That doesn’t mean he’s in any way involved.’
‘Padre Hermosa thought him, called him, maybe misperceived him as, that Decapitator God being.’
‘That still doesn’t mean…’
‘Okay,’ said Cosgrove, piqued, raising a hand, stepping between them, her green dress swishing around her thighs. ‘Stop. Commander Contrarian, that’s what you’re being, Nish. Schlomo’s right here. We’re not exactly time-limited.’
‘Well,’ said the Nish in a huffy, officious manner redolent with feigned bruised dignity, ‘I think we also might want to try to go into a future time and check to see what proper authorities are…’
‘I’m afraid that’s impossible at the very present time,’ said Cosgrove.
The Nish sighed. ‘Then,’ she said, ‘at what nascent future point most immediately following the very present time will we be able to do that?’
‘We have to run through each iteration of these existences,’ said Schlomo. ‘It is what Miss Henderson tells us. We should not doubt Miss Henderson’s help, I do not think—not at least as long as the repeating second week of this September gives us these new chances.’
‘So,’ said Cosgrove, ‘you’re saying that, without knowing what her motivations are, we should keep taking advantage of Miss Henderson’s temporal largesse until and unless something goes obviously wrong?’ She laid her finger and thumb in the form of an L on her chin. ‘Was this ever in any doubt? Nish, did you ever suggest stopping and going home and doing this normally?’
‘I did not,’ said the Nish. ‘But when you put it that way, it sounds almost like you’re characterising us as running from the situation, delaying having to deal with it, by taking this course.’
‘No.’ Cosgrove shook her head. ‘No. No. That’s stupid. I’m not trying to say that at all; in fact if we went back and did this ‘normally’ I think we would probably get in a lot of trouble.’
‘Why?’ asked Schlomo.
‘Mainly because of Reveka Metawi’s actions, honestly.’
Schlomo groaned. ‘That woman,’ he said. ‘All right.’ He put his hands on his hips. ‘We open the door of the past again.’
‘God has favoured me,’ said Victoriano Santana. ‘That is why I am availed of this power of the Ten Kings and Four Grandsires.’
‘God has chosen me,’ said G.T. Schuster-Slatt. ‘He’s calling, telling me to lead the lost children out of Hellfire and into the land of milk and honey, to play them the sweet songs unto the Lord.’
‘God is with me,’ said Reveka Metawi. ‘Whatsoever shall happen I will not perish, for he is as cloud by day and flame by night, protecting me so that I may ride the whirlwind.’
‘God has told me,’ said Fatima Sharif. ‘I am to, one day, obliterate the West.’
‘God will not abandon me,’ said Hildy Wildermann. ‘He will take me up above the throng and I shall sit in the quire of angels sing hail and hosanna in the highest.’
‘God likes me,’ said Benny Hayward. ‘And the reason is…—’
‘God has given me over,’ said Salvador Hermosa. ‘He has given me over to the powers of the night and of darkness, and I do not know what I did to deserve it, as the great winged one comes in roaring from all sides.’
2
In the late 1980s, a unique set of conditions in Japan fuelled a massive wave of economic growth, which in turn fuelled speculation, because people never learn.
Nishizaki Kyosuke was seventy-nine years old when the Japanese asset price bubble began to form in 1986. Born in a satoyama area north of Tokyo in Meiji 40 (1907), he grew up secluded from the world at large. Poleboats, foot, and sometimes rickshaw were the main means of transport. In his childhood it was not so much a big deal for a drunk to collapse in the middle of the road and simply wake up there the next morning, because on these roads there were no motorcars, and people walking would be careful not to step on anything that they shouldn’t. There was some electricity, but extending only to lighting, so that heating, cooling, cooking, washing, and so on were all done in the traditional ways. It was in many ways a very good life, with the spectre of widespread beriberi pretty much the only thing not to like about it.
Kyosuke’s father was Nishizaki Tadamichi. Tadamichi was a farmer of several types of root vegetable, some native and some introduced from the Occident—carrots, onions, cabbages, radishes, horseradishes, taros, and other things of such kind. He was the main source of this type of food in the area, and generally got good business, especially in the late summer and autumn months. Kyosuke’s mother, Nishizaki Yuki (born Takano Yuki), was a midwife.
When Kyosuke was sixteen years old he contracted polio and very nearly died; by the time he was twenty he was able to walk, albeit with leg braces. This was how he was able to avoid active service in the war that was to come in ten years. A year after regaining the ability to walk, Kyosuke married a woman of the ancient Taira clan, Hatakeyama Aki by name. Marrying up was a big deal, and it took quite a bit of deliberation for Aki to even agree to take the Nishizaki name. As it happened, Kyosuke moved to Kagoshima to live with his wife’s family, of which he would in a few years (Aki’s father Hatakeyama Terukatsu was very ill and would soon be dead).
The first child was Nishizaki Yoshiyori, born in Showa 5 (1930). In this same year Kyosuke got a job as manager of a Kagoshima fish market called Matsuba. Why the old man who owned the market thought he was qualified he had no idea, but early in Showa 8 the old man retired and left the entire operation to the Nishizaki family.
Then Kyosuke got an idea. An awful idea. Kyosuke got a monopolising, awful idea!
‘Say, Aki…it’d be kind of nice to have a larger operation, wouldn’t it? Diversify.’
‘Like a small zaibatsu?’
‘Yes! That’s exactly what I was thinking!’
And so Matsuba bought a greengrocer’s and a streetcar line, going into some debt but becoming the Matsuba Group for its trouble. Then there was the whole hassle of incorporation and legal status and dealing with other zaibatsus…
Luckily, one of those other zaibatsus, a holding group called Hitokage, started haemorrhaging money and companies late in Showa 11, one year before war with China broke out. Matsuba snapped up some factories and transit companies and a mine out in Korea. It was at this time that people actually began referring to it as a zaibatsu.
Kyosuke at this point still worked in the old fish market with his wife and six-year-old son, who was just learning to price and to carry boxes and such. He was also becoming heavily into the way of the gods—not State Shinto, but folk Shinto, the, er, the…he avoided saying this in these militarised times, but…you know, the real kind of Shinto. The Nishizaki family had been Soto Zen Buddhist for at least three hundred years and his interest in Shinto was a little strange, but religion in Japan being what it was, nobody really cared, especially as the family was miraculously able to avoid involvement in World War II and its attendant ideological conflagrations almost entirely.
Coming out of the war, somehow the Matsuba Group, which at the time of the atom bombings was only twelve years old, had become one of the biggest remaining zaibatsus in the country, and certainly the biggest one not based in Kanto or Kansai. At this point the Nishizaki-Hatakeyama family basically owned Kagoshima and the surrounding parts of Kyushu. This was one of Japan’s warm, almost subtropical areas, and watching the crates of Matsuba Group property come rolling into the big warehouses and product of various kinds go rolling out again, Nishizaki Kyosuke and his wife and children (he had four now, Yoshiyori and three girls) felt like how the old landlords of the Caribbean must watching over their fields—minus the slave labour, which the Matsuba Group had avoided using even when it had been available in the form of captured continental Asians and prisoners of war.
The other big zaibatsus and their ilk did not like Nishizaki Kyosuke very much.
Douglas MacArthur ruled Japan in those days. Times were lean. The Matsuba Group sold off some of the old streetcar lines and even one of the trains. Showa 20 of course was one of the most disastrous years in Japanese history, but even to Showa 26 and 27 Matsuba was struggling to stay above water.
At this same time Nishizaki Yoshiyori, a dreamy and somewhat flaky young man who did not share his father’s firmness and acumen but who was probably an objectively better human being, was beginning to cast around for a wife. There was a miko, equally romantic but arguably more grounded, at a shrine near Kagoshima, a shrine of small gods dedicated to the sea. Her name was Kuga Shion. She came from a good family, which was important to the somewhat hypocritical self-made man Kyosuke. And so in Showa 29 they wed, and in Showa 30 had twin children, a girl and a boy, yclept Nishizaki Haruka and Nishizaki Keisaburo. Three years later there was another daughter, Sayoko.
By now, the Nishizaki family was very prominent, and the senior male line—Kyosuke, Yoshiyori, and now Keisaburo—divided time between Kagoshima and Kobe, which was where a lot of the important business stuff happened. The Showa Thirties were the beginning of the Japanese economic miracle. Nishizaki Kyosuke fancied himself at the forefront of that miracle, one of the great financial sorcerers of the modern world, and this fancy was entirely justified.
The Matsuba Group mutated into a primarily holding and investing company, similar to Berkshire Hathaway if not quite as huge or prominent. In Showa 44 Kyosuke decided that it might be for the best to stop using era dates and begin using Western dates for business purposes—thus, at the end of that year, Matsuba officially switched from 31 December Showa 44 to 1 January 1970. In the next few years it began to enter continental Asia and Africa.
Most of Matsuba’s actual product had stopped being industrial in the fifties and sixties; it was now primarily a financial, secondarily an agricultural conglomerate. Kyosuke and Yoshiyori—the latter of whom was by now being groomed to take over fairly soon—had some dealings with Monsanto that didn’t go too well. By the time the speculation bubble of the eighties started, Matsuba was using Monsanto as a cautionary tale about being evil for human resources to tell corrupt management.
At the time the bubble formed in 1986, Kyosuke had been retired and Yoshiyori in charge of the zaibatsu for about seven years. Haruka and Keisaburo each had one son, respectively called Teinosuke and Yosukichi, and Sayoko had two daughters and a son, called Chizuru, Shosetsuin, and Yukio. Haruka’s husband was named Tatsuo, Keisaburo’s wife Sachiko, and Sayoko’s husband Hideki; all had taken the Nishizaki name upon marriage.
In the nineties, the disasters came.
3
When Nishizaki Shosetsuin was twelve years old, the great earthquake in Kobe killed her uncle Keisaburo and cousins Teinosuke and Yosukichi. Her aunt Haruka lost her left arm, her uncle Tatsuo’s lungs were scorched and scoured, and her aunt Sachiko went into a vegetative state. The Kobe headquarters of the Matsuba Group suffered severe structural damage and had to be closed for almost a year. The zaibatsus were already suffering in the middle of the Lost Decade after Japan’s various bubbles burst in 1991, and all the things that Yoshiyori was able to come up with were stopgap measures at best.
On 30 January 1996 Nishizaki Yoshiyori resigned in shame, went to his seaside mansion outside Kagoshima, said hello to the maids, ascended the staircase to his room, and blew his brains out. He was sixty-five years old. Three days later his ailing eighty-eight-year-old father stopped eating and drinking. Ten days after this Kyosuke was dead. And so Yoshiyori’s son-in-law, Shosetsuin’s father, Nishizaki Hideki (born Sato Hideki), became President and CEO of a ruined zaibatsu with a very uncertain future. He was thirty-eight years old and had not exactly been prepared for this, as the assumed successor had always been his now-dead brother-in-law Keisaburo.
Nishizaki Shosetsuin turned thirteen in May of 1996. She was in middle school, making friends, doing well, taking them over to her big fancy house to play. Because of this, and because she was smart and outspoken, she was well-liked and had her own power and influence, albeit mainly limited to her school.
Hideki had a problem with her.
‘You wanted to see me, father?’ Nishizaki Shosetsuin, age fourteen and seven months, tapped on the door to her father’s office. It was a large room, so large and oddly proportioned that even measuring it in tatami would be a futile exercise.
‘Come in,’ said a grave voice.
Shosetsuin went in, into her father’s presence. Nishizaki Hideki was not a very involved father at the best of times. He was sepulchral and mathematical, bearing no resemblance to his charismatic and careerist grandfather and less than none to his romantic and ultimately tragic father. He spent his days scribbling away at ledgers and typing madly on personal computers, striving in vain to make numbers add up that may have come close to adding up in a magical world where base thirty-seven was in common use. Massive books lay open on his desk. He sat behind it, framed against a large window, his mouth a grim line and his eyes languidly half-opened. A white streak zigzagged through his black hair.
‘Father,’ said Shosetsuin.
‘Shosetsuin,’ said Hideki. ‘I am not pleased with you.’
‘Why…why not?’
‘Because of your behaviour recently, and the temperament that you appear to be developing. You keep the external trappings and fripperies of our familial, corporate, and national culture but have no conception of the qualities that ought to lie within.’
‘How do you mean, father?’
‘You speak your mind too quickly, make too much use of the family wealth—which as you should know by now is far from secure—to do favours for and give gifts to friends who please you, and lack the subtle and nuanced outlook that ought to be characteristic of a young woman of good raising!’
‘Father, I…I have subtlety and nuance. And magnanimity is…’
‘I’m not considering this as a question of magnanimity, Shosetsuin! I’m considering it as a question of profligacy, and traits very likely to get you into severe trouble—to get this family and its companies into severe trouble! Shosetsuin, you say far too much on the whole, have a very coarse filter between thought and word, and have yet to learn to train your thought to deal with shades of grey.’ Shosetsuin was feeling really bad about herself by this point and hung her head low, her knees quaking, but her father kept on. ‘You have no appreciation for the difficulties of maintaining a graceful social existence in times like these! Your behaviour is unsuited to a person born into privilege, even if that privilege was built within living memory.’
‘Father, I understand the unique obligations of a member of the Nishizaki family. I know that I need to familiarise myself with the way that the Matsuba Group operates and…’
‘It’s more than that, Shosetsuin! The Matsuba Group may not exist when you reach the age of majority in five years. If the Matsuba Group is to survive, skills and personality traits beyond a mere head for money, which you have already even if you do not show it, will be required, not just from me but from everybody in this family! Do you understand me, Shosetsuin?’
‘I understand,’ said Shosetsuin. ‘But…’ She paused. She had to cage her response tactfully here. ‘I understand, father, but I maintain that my behaviour—the way I relate to my friends, that is, which you have mentioned—does not impinge upon the workings of the family business, and you know that I am entirely aware of what I as a member of this family have to do, have to know…yet I don’t think, father, that me giving presents to my friends or helping people who need help…’ She shrugged. ‘Father, forgive me, but I really do not see the problem with that.’
Hideki sighed, took off his wire-rimmed glasses, folded them carefully, and laid them on his desk. He gazed pensively down at one of his great account books. ‘Again, Shosetsuin,’ he said without looking at her, ‘it’s a question of prodigality. You need to learn to actually manage these things. Do you know how poorly the Matsuba Group is doing?’
‘Actually,’ said Shosetsuin gently, ‘I’ve never used any Matsuba Group money.’
‘What?’
‘Yes. How would I have had access to it anyway?’
‘Then…where the Hell is this money you’re spending coming from? Shosetsuin, you’re fourteen years old and in the past year you have spent nearly three million yen!’
‘First off,’ said Shosetsuin, still as gently as she possibly could, ‘three million yen would be barely statistically significant if it were Matsuba Group money. Second, this family has other accounts.’
‘By which you mean your mother gave it to you,’ said Hideki with a frown. Hideki’s relationship with his wife was better than his relationships with his children, but occasionally it might not seem that way to them. ‘All right. That’s all right.’
‘So everything’s fine, then?’
‘No. Everything’s still not fine. There is still the matter of your often indiscreet and somewhat self-indulgent behaviour in general, in day-to-day life. Lord Buddha and Lady Amaterasu, they know I have tried to teach you tact and social poise, and these things are the entire basis for our culture—the culture that you have to live in, Shosetsuin! At this age a girl in a position of importance should be settling out of her youthful hotheadedness.’
‘Father, I don’t even know what you mean.’
‘Your behaviour is…’ Hideki shook his head. ‘You know what? You should see for yourself, Shosetsuin. Your sister Chizuru cares more about art and fashion and your brother Yukio more about dinosaurs than about this family and its future. Chizuru’s merit is social grace, which you lack; Yukio’s merit is the sort of gee-whiz enthusiasm of a ten-year-old boy, which not being a ten-year-old boy you also lack; your merit is actual nascent competence in what Matsuba does if only you would apply it, which both Chizuru and Yukio lack.’
Shosetsuin idly wondered if her father was going to stop insulting her and her siblings and make whatever point he was trying to make any time soon.
‘And so,’ said Hideki, ‘I want you to see for yourself. I want to show you the insides of Matsuba, a wounded beast that this family has raised from infancy and now stands called to protect.’
Was her father being poetic? The grounded and swamped financier had taught himself poetic thought solely in order to express his sense of duty to the corporation? Shosetsuin felt herself honour-bound to be really quite impressed by this.
That day began her initiation into the great secrets of business.
4
She swept the yard of the shrine fastidiously, a few times pausing her labours to gaze up at the sky. The rays of the hot Kyushu sun beat down on her face, warming and lighting her in her afternoon’s work. A miko—fit after-school job for a sixteen-year-old daughter of a prominent family, so they said. Shosetsuin enjoyed it. She liked the lore and custom of the shrine. Religious mystery made a welcome respite from the brute facts of schooling and the fluxing vagaries of the family business.
The goddess of this shrine was called Sukuna-sama, a small god of medicine and rain. The statue of Sukuna-sama in the haiden was of very old and tarnished wood. The honden was, as was the usual custom, empty except for the small round glinting light of the shrine mirror. Shosetsuin came here when school got out at three o’ clock, and at noon on the weekends. She swept the shrine yard, attended to the zigzag paper tassels and little placards of wood and paper, paid her respect to Sukuna-sama, and went home. Through all this she wore the red skirt and the white jacket, and she carried sakaki and wore flowers and tassels in her short dark hair.
Shosetsuin believed powerfully in Sukuna-sama’s tutelage of the surrounding seacoast and city outskirts. She need not have believed to be welcome in the shrine—the kami she had found to be very welcoming and tolerant beings—but even so…it was something that she enjoyed, a becalmed eye in the typhoon of life as a Nishizaki.
Sukuna-sama had been here from ancient times; Shosetsuin’s family, at least the part of her family that her name came from, had only come in when Kyosuke married a Hatakeyama. The amiable shrine deity had much more right to this place than did the frank-talking teenager who served her. Knowing this, the respect paid to Sukuna-sama was very important to Shosetsuin. Regardless of whether or not the goddess had any real physical presence, she was a restraining bolt on the dysfunction and calamitous finance of the House of Nishizaki.
‘Nishi-chan! Nishi-chan!’
Shosetsuin turned. It was one of her friends from school, Yuri, come to the shrine to see her. ‘Shosetsuin’ was a name of great antiquity and pomp, so much so that it was a little strange[1], and had never been common even among the mediaeval nuns with whom it was typically associated. So, outside her own family, she was almost always called Nishi or Nishi-chan. The ‘Nishi’ in ‘Nishizaki’ meant ‘west’ (the ‘saki’ meant ‘promontory’), so the ‘-chan’ was sometimes necessary to distinguish Nishi the person from Nishi the direction, even among people who would probably have used yobisute for a person in the same situation with a more normal name.
‘Hello, Yuri-chan!’ said Nishi. ‘How are things?’
‘Pretty good.’ Yuri, still in their school summer uniform, must have just got out of one of her clubs. Nishi had a hard time remembering what clubs Yuri was in. Nishi was in the go-home club (or, more accurately, the go-to-the-shrine club), in part because of her religious work and in part because of the mental strain of combined schoolwork and binge-reading of economics and business administration textbooks. The good news was that was Nishi was fast becoming a full-fledged financial prodigy. The bad news was that outside the shrine, the school, and the zaibatsu, Nishi had basically no life at all.
‘I just got out of light music club,’ said Yuri.
‘Oh,’ said Nishi. Light music club. Oh, yes, Tuesday and Wednesday. ‘Where is your guitar, then?’
‘I left my guitar at school,’ said Yuri. ‘I didn’t feel like carrying it all the way home.’
‘But you do it twice a week.’
‘Yeah, I’m kind of tired.’ Yuri flopped down on the steps of the haiden. ‘I think I might be becoming a little ill. I’ve felt weak recently.’
‘Is that why you’re here at the shrine?’
‘Yes. Could you ask Sukuna-sama to help?’
‘You can do it yourself, you know,’ said Nishi, leaning casually on the wall of the haiden and holding her broom the way Fred Astaire used to hold umbrellas. ‘You don’t need me to do it for you.’
‘My family is Christian,’ said Yuri.
‘Really?’
Yuri nodded. ‘It surprises me that you didn’t know that. God might say this and that, but…I don’t think He would get upset over one of the little deities, do you[2]?’
‘Uh…no, but…still, you can pray to Sukuna-sama yourself.’
Yuri sighed. ‘What I am trying to say is that I don’t know how. I know how to pray to God and the saints, but I thought something closer to home might be, uh, might be more…appropriate.’
‘Have you tried sore muscle rub?’ asked Nishi. No answer. ‘…You didn’t even try sore muscle rub yet, did you?’ she asked grimly.
‘No,’ admitted Yuri.
‘Yuri-chan?’
‘Yes?’
‘Try sore muscle rub,’ said Nishi. ‘I can talk to Sukuna-sama for you. You should probably go home.’
‘But I want to spend more time here!’ said Yuri. ‘I never get to hang out with you any more, Nishi-chan!’
Nishi sighed. Well, wasn’t that the truth…
The truth was, the Matsuba Group (ostensibly) needed Nishizaki Shosetsuin. Nishizaki Hideki was a good and dutiful man, but a plodding man, quite possibly the stupidest president any major zaibatsu had ever had. The only reason why he had not yet run Matsuba entirely into the ground was that, in his desperation to hide his incredibly poor judgment from the prying eyes of his peers and immediate subordinates, Hideki would occasionally, purely by the law of averages, hit on a way to cover his tracks that also happened to actually be sound business policy.
It was not that Hideki was an unintelligent man, simply that he lived in a mindscape governed by what Schlomo Toph might have described as Chelm-logic. He was good at playing the part of the firm, powerful captain of industry and distant paterfamilias; the ability to maintain this act was perhaps his only real genius. But deep down inside Nishizaki Hideki was not only the sort of man who would have considered carrying the shammes around on a table a good idea, but the sort of man who might have been the one to propose it in the first place.
Investing in a small independent publisher in Aizuwakamatsu devoted solely to reprinting the one-hundred-and-six-volume epic novel Nanso Satomi Hakkenden[3]? What could possibly go wrong?
Giving money to some speculator in ‘rice futures’ claiming to know what he was talking about because he was Balinese (despite the fact that his name was Li Xianwu)? What could possibly go wrong?
These were two of the more egregious things that Hideki had done in three and a half years in charge of the Matsuba Group. The necessity of Shosetsuin lay in the fact that she was, putting it simply, a financial genius. Hideki’s idiocy only extended to business policy; otherwise a perceptive man, he recognised his daughter’s brilliance, hence why he put such an insane amount of pressure on her. He was very much of the ‘pressure produces diamonds’ school of thought (as opposed to ‘pressure makes rubbish easier to store’).
Shosetsuin had resolved in the early days to never break, for the good of her family; but once or twice she cracked a little. There was a boy called Hajime in her homeroom class in high school. He was nice enough and sometimes Shosetsuin would take shelter from the rain at his house, which was rather nearer the school than hers. On one of these days Shosetsuin was unable to get Keynesian market policies out of her head. It was not that she disliked Keynes, but she did not see his relevance to the Matsuba Group’s own special brand of financial woes and she was really tired and stressed by home and school and what was at this point quasi-work. And she hadn’t been to the shrine in way too long—almost two weeks—and the kannushi was bound to be angry with her. And she felt fat and she was cold and just kind of sad about things in general.
And she had sex with Hajime.
And she felt horrible about it afterwards. By the next day this weird vaguely unclean feeling had set in, and when she went to the shrine to apologise to the kannushi and take up service of Sukuna-sama again, she did not know what to think about anything. It was such a horrible feeling. As if she had had something ripped from her, because she had no especial affection or love for Hajime—that was the worst part. The unclean feeling turned into the much more familiar sense of regret.
5
‘It wasn’t trauma, no, but I felt taken advantage of. Hajime wasn’t—isn’t, as far as I know—a bad person. But sex made it a situation from which nothing good could possibly have come. It wasn’t a situation that called for sex, and…well, it made me not want to, ever again if I could avoid it, that crappy feeling…you understand?’
‘I understand, Nish.’
‘Some would say it not very healthy of you having that outlook. I am not one of these people. As long as you do not get in other places in life where that might mess you up, you should…’
‘Yes, I understand. No. No, it turns out I’m actually very gay. And so the whole unpleasant happening was…I think…well, we can just expunge it. The love wasn’t there. Without love nothing is really worth seeing, doing, or eating.’
‘…Eating?’
In the very earliest weeks of 2001, Nishizaki Hideki came to an unorthodox decision for once in his life after looking over some of what his daughter had been doing. In a few months Shosetsuin would be eighteen. Though the age of majority in Japan was technically twenty, eighteen was often considered good enough for most things, and so if Hideki pulled a few strings that Kyosuke and Yoshiyori had put in place before they died, it was entirely possible that Shosetsuin would be able to be considered an adult for his purposes.
Hideki’s purposes were no less than the revitalisation of the whole Matsuba zaibatsu through delegating plenary veto power over all budget and investment decisions to Shosetsuin, who would be given the titles of Executive Vice-President and CFO. Yes. Not exactly the sort of idea that gets one feted in Innovative Business Solutions magazine. When Hideki ran this idea by the other senior management at Matsuba, they asked whether he had thought this through at all, and might Hideki perhaps have lost his mind? When he tried to defend his decision they threatened to have him removed and replaced with his wife. When he pointed out that Sayoko herself would probably not be on board with this they backed down, except for the incumbent Executive Vice-President and CFO, who was still not happy with the idea for obvious reasons.
‘Ikeda,’ said Hideki, ‘I would like to impress upon you the necessity of remaining loyal to the Matsuba Group overall above the demands of your individual career. Your behaviour regarding this issue has been redolent of a personally careerist streak that does not reflect well upon your capacity for future service with this group of companies.’
‘Sir,’ said Ikeda, ‘your father-in-law appointed me to this position when he took over the Matsuba Group in 1980. I have held this post for nearly twenty-one years now. To be asked to step down in favour of your daughter…’ He shook his head.
‘You realise, of course, that this zaibatsu has always been a family enterprise of the House of Nishizaki and universally regarded as such, from the days when zaibatsus were powerful and all-encompassing right down to these economic times.’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘And so you realise that taking on my single competent child to fill this post in such a time of trials for us represents a continuation of Matsuba’s traditions, rather than a break from them.’
‘Sir, your daughter is eighteen. She…’
‘When my esteemed grandfather-in-law, Nishizaki Kyosuke, formed the Matsuba Group by having a fish market buy a greengrocer’s and a streetcar line, he had not yet attained the age of twenty-seven. He appointed my father-in-law, Nishizaki Yoshiyori, to the position that you currently hold a month before the latter turned twenty-five—a position which Yoshiyori held until his father’s retirement a quarter of a century later. You should remember this, considering that you replaced Yoshiyori when he took over this group of companies.’
‘That was different. It was in the post-war and Nishizaki Yoshiyori was a prodigy genius.’
‘As is my daughter. And we are still in the post-war, Ikeda. Time has not yet started to flow backwards and put us before the war again, much as some of the old wise men among us might wish it.’ Talking, convincing, and especially comebacks were among the things that Hideki was actually good at.
Ikeda cast about madly for something to say. All that he could come up with in the end was ‘I understand, sir. I will tender my resignation on Friday.’
In May of that year Nishizaki Shosetsuin graduated high school, turned eighteen, and became Executive Vice-President and CFO of the Matsuba Group of Companies. In her first fortnight she said no to three exceptionally ill-advised investment ideas and approved two large cuts in spending, which unfortunately required Matsuba to sell (read: jettison) a significant portion of its mainland Asia holdings. On 1 June Nishizaki Hideki admitted that he had been behind the bad investment ideas, took an extended leave of absence from Matsuba, and left his daughter with the ill-defined role of ‘kanchou’ (‘skipper’) of the zaibatsu.
Mori Kenta who had just turned seventy-five was the office custodian for Matsuba headquarters. On 3 June Nishizaki Shosetsuin summoned him into her office.
‘You have worked here for fifty-two years, Kenta-san,’ said Shosetsuin. ‘I want you to sit down right here and explain to me how this corporation works and how I should be handling things.’
Mori Kenta smiled. Since his hiring as janitor in 1949 he had indeed come to intimately know positively everything about the Matsuba Group. He had worked under this girl’s great-grandfather, grandfather, and father. None of them had ever questioned or drawn from the immense amount of knowledge that he had accumulated, and this brilliant girl doing so made him happier than he had been in a long time.
And so he explained. It did not take very long, actually, as Kenta discovered that Shosetsuin had already read up on things quite a lot. ‘…So,’ he said at last, ‘that is pretty much the way things are. Now, ma’am, do you have any concerns?’
‘Well, all that’s…pretty much what I’d expected, honestly,’ said Shosetsuin. ‘There is one thing that bothers me, though. I note, to my chagrin, that we still use the word ‘zaibatsu’ as opposed to ‘keiretsu’, which we were supposed to stop doing after World War II. Do you know if there’s ever been serious discussion of changing this? I think it might help our public perception.’
‘By which you mean it would make us seem a bit less…tyrannical?’ asked Kenta. ‘Predatory? Anti-competitive?’
‘Exactly,’ said Shosetsuin. ‘Who would have the authority to change that name?’
‘Er, the shareholders, or the President, or…’ Kenta shrugged. ‘It’s never really come up. Old Kyosuke-sama wanted that change to be made, but since his death, Hideki-sama has not taken it up.’
Shosetsuin was a little surprised at the forms of address that Kenta was using. They were not disrespectful, but perhaps just a bit unusual. Kenta was a janitor but not only a janitor. He had more experience—and, she was beginning to suspect, more genuine wisdom—than everybody else in the Matsuba Group front offices combined. His files said that, before taking the custodial position at the age of twenty-three, Mori Kenta had, in order, lied about his age to join the great Imperial Japanese Navy, and later on shot down seven American planes at Leyte Gulf; given witness at some of the post-war trials of top Japanese officers and politicians; spent three years training to be a Tendai priest, actually making it through the two months of infamously gruelling and sometimes fatal training on Mt Hiei; and then decided to come to his current position for unclear, barely-comprehensible reasons. It was entirely possible that he wasn’t even a real janitor and he had just hung about the Matsuba offices with a plunger for half a century because he was too awesome for anybody to ask him to leave.
‘I’m changing it to keiretsu,’ said Shosetsuin. ‘First chance I get.’
‘Eh…you know that Matsuba Zaibatsu is not the actual name, right? The actual name is simply Matsuba Group.’
‘I know that. But I want us to stop using the word.’
‘I’m not sure that that falls within what you were taken on to do,’ said Kenta. ‘You are meant to put us back in the black. But you are right. Image is an important part of that. Since we are not officially incorporated as something involving the word ‘zaibatsu’ I would recommend you just starting to use ‘keiretsu’ and probably most other people will.’
‘Then…why didn’t my great-grandfather ever try that?’ asked Shosetsuin in some confusion.
‘Perhaps it slipped his mind,’ said Kenta. He stood up. ‘I should clean toilets now. But if you want some advice, surviving here…get a really good hobby. Kyosuke-sama grew cucumbers and bonsai. Yoshiyori-sama read and wrote poetry. Hideki-sama doesn’t have one and that is part of his—if you promise you will never repeat this to anybody—’
‘I promise. What is it?’
‘Part of his inadequacy. His mind gets frazzled and fried. You need a hobby, Shosetsuin-sama.’
‘I’ve wanted to try guitar…’
‘Music is a good idea,’ said Kenta. ‘Just my advice.’ He went off, plunger over his shoulder, and Shosetsuin settled down into her chair.
6
One day in the first months of 2002, three businessmen from Israel came to Kagoshima to meet with Nishizaki Hideki, the esteemed President and CEO of the Matsuba Group of Companies. They were informed that the President was in Shikoku, on an extended vacation. Did the other people at Matsuba know when he would be back? No, he had taken an indefinite leave. Could they give the Israeli businessmen any indication as to why? It was probably best if they did not. Who was in charge, then? The Executive Vice-President and CFO, Nishizaki Shosetsuin.
The three businessmen asked to see Shosetsuin. Shosetsuin wearily acquiesced.
‘So what is it?’ asked Shosetsuin in English, a language at which she had, of necessity, become very good over the past year.
‘You are very young,’ said one of the Israeli businessmen.
‘Yes. I am. What is it that you want, Mr…?’
‘Levy. Yaakov Levy.’
‘What is it that you want, Mr Levy Yaakov Levy?’
‘We wanted to discuss the investments in the Middle East with the head of this company,’ said Levy. ‘Two years ago, remember? In agricultural products in the Negev Desert?’
‘I didn’t make those investments,’ said Shosetsuin. ‘My name is Nishizaki Shosetsuin; you can call me the Nish. I didn’t make those investments. I’ve only been in charge here for about eight months, during my father’s absence.’
‘Well, er, ‘the Nish’…we wanted to discuss the results of those investments.’
‘What do you mean by ‘results’?’ asked the Nish. ‘Do you mean to say that my father just threw money at something and didn’t attend to it for two years?’
‘Not very much money,’ said Levy, ‘but yes.’
‘Forgive me, but…what did you say this investment was, again?’
‘Sheep, Miss the Nish. Sheep and other such agricultural product in the Negev Desert, investment initially seventy million yen, now valued in one-point-eight million shekels.’
The Nish sighed. She nudged her acoustic guitar under her desk and put her hands behind her head. ‘What sort of profit or loss does this come to?’ she asked.
‘Loss,’ said Levy. One of the other men said something in Hebrew; Levy nodded. ‘Shapiro says thirty-five per cent.’
The Nish brought her fist down on her desk. ‘What sort of investment was this,’ she asked coldly, ‘what made it so unprofitable, and why have you come all the way to Japan over a relatively small amount of money?’
Shapiro emitted a stream of mellifluous Hebrew; Levy listened and nodded. ‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘Shapiro and Avraham only speak Hebrew.’
‘That’s quite all right,’ said the Nish. ‘What did he say?’
‘The investment was in futures for the meat and wool from large flocks of sheep in reclaimed areas of the Negev Desert in southern Israel,’ said Levy. ‘The futures lost value because of a blight that turned some of the sheep cannibalistic and made the flesh of many others inedible.’
‘When you say ‘cannibalistic’,’ said the Nish, ‘do you mean sheep that eat other sheep, or sheep that eat humans?’
‘Sheep that eat other sheep. Even if they had been doing this for some non-disease-related reason nobody in Israel would have bought the meat because any form of carnivorism makes the animal treyf. The flocks in question were the meat flocks, not the wool flocks.’
‘So what happened with the wool flocks?’ asked the Nish, silently wondering whether or not this sort of division of purpose was really considered wise in mainstream husbandry.
‘Nothing. The wool was sold normally. There was nothing wrong with it. That is where most of the one-point-eight million shekels came from. The loss of six hundred and fifty thousand shekels was from the meat that was no good.’
‘All right,’ said the Nish. ‘All right. You’ve explained the problems with the investment to my satisfaction. Now why was the investment made in the first place and why do you consider it important enough to come all the way out to Japan over it? For that matter, what do you have to do with the sheep anyway?’
‘We’re futures traders in the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange,’ said Levy. ‘This is what is called an economic ‘indicator transaction’…’
‘This was one of the more boring days of my life. I do wonder if it might not be a better idea to skip most of the time that I was in charge of Matsuba.’—N.S.
‘You said that you let what’s-his-name, Kenta, use your dad’s office?—M.C.
‘Yes.’—N.S.
‘Something tell me a lot of what Levy saying is crap. As in, probably a bad idea to have big flocks out in the Negev anyway. Probably an area more suited for small-scale stuff. Though that may be just your father, Nish, not think things through all the way. Futures market was way too specific. Is it even legitimate?’—S.T.
‘No. It turned out that father got defrauded. Again.’—N.S.
‘Does this have anything to do with why you’re in Israel now?’—M.C.
‘Well, let me show you.’—N.S.
7
‘And hey!’ said Cosgrove. ‘Another thing: you never told me you’d been a shrine maiden.’
‘What?’ said the Nish. ‘Oh, that. Yeah, serving Sukuna-sama was a good thing for me in those days. I kind of miss it sometimes.’
Cosgrove extended a hand. ‘And, you know, I was ordained recently!’
‘Yes. I know.’
‘So…’
‘Yes?’ The Nish raised her eyebrows quizzically.
‘Priestess buddies!’ said Cosgrove, beaming. The Nish smiled and shook her friend’s hand.
‘Well, when you put it that way…’ she said with a chuckle. ‘Yes, Mary. Priestess buddies.’
It was the seventh once again, and the Nish was sitting in a well-appointed pseudo-mansion in a south-western suburb of Jerusalem.
‘Ha-ha-ha!’ a jolly old man was saying. He was not laughing; he was actually SAYING onomatopoeia for laughter. ‘That’s a ridiculous idea. Where did that come from?’
‘The idea that a fat man from Switzerland defrauded my father, or the idea that that specific fat man from Switzerland in question is this Rossini fellow we’re talking about?’ asked the Nish irritably. ‘The idea that a fat man from Switzerland defrauded my father comes from the fact that a fat man from Switzerland defrauded my father.’
‘Oh, undoubtedly,’ said the jolly old man, whose name was Ehud Biton. ‘I don’t think anybody’s denying that.’
‘So what are you denying so strenuously?’
‘Well, that it’s Giorgio Rossini, of course!’
The Nish crossed her legs and smoothed down her short plaid skirt. ‘Mr Biton, you were one of the people in charge of supervising foreign investments in Israeli agricultural products when this whole mess started in 2000, correct?’
Biton nodded. ‘I held that position in the bureaucracy from 1998 to 2004.’
‘So I should expect you to be reasonably familiar with Mr Rossini’s general track record, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what was that track record, Mr Biton?’
Biton rubbed his forehead and took a drink of alcohol. He stood up, picked up a book by Amos Oz, flipped through it, went over to his window, and looked out over the Holy City’s manicured suburbs. The Nish calmly strode out into Biton’s front hall, found her guitar case where she had left it near the door, took out her guitar, and went back into the sitting room.
‘We talked about music once, Mr Biton,’ said the Nish coldly. ‘You didn’t mention Richard Thompson. Do you like Richard Thompson, Mr Biton?’
‘All right!’ said Biton. ‘All right! I’ll talk about Rossini’s history and image already. There’s no need to get dramatic.’
‘It’s wet in here,’ said the Nish.
‘It’s not humid!’ snapped Biton. He shook his head. ‘It’s not humid.’
‘I didn’t say it was humid,’ said the Nish. She rubbed her neck and looked around apprehensively. ‘I said it was wet.’
‘Wet? What is that supposed to mean?’ Biton looked a little annoyed. ‘You seem like there is something wrong. Are you all right?’ The Nish did not answer. ‘We said that we were going to be discussing Rossini and, eh…’
‘It’s so warm and wet…’ said the Nish. ‘And I feel a little ill.’
‘Do you want me to call a doctor?’ Now Biton was just concerned for her.
‘Doctor? No…’ The Nish laughed lightly. ‘I have good medicine here as it is.’ She loped over to the window and looked up at the sky. ‘Good medicine, the medicine from the high heavenly plain, the things that grow in the great field plain, the sweet herbs, the bitter herbs, the things that dwell in the high hills, things rough of fur, things soft of fur, the things that dwell in the blue sea plain, things wide of fin, things narrow of fin, the seaweed of the deep, the seaweed of the shore.’ She laughed again. ‘I’ve got good medicine, Mr Biton.’ She strummed out a few chords of Fairport Convention’s ‘Doctor of Physick’ on her guitar.
‘What is going on?’ asked Cosgrove watching.
‘I think she may talking about her Sukuna-sama,’ said Schlomo. ‘Were you, Nish? You remember?’
The Nish shook her head. ‘I don’t remember this at all,’ she said. ‘I do remember that Mr Biton did eventually give me access to the relevant files on Mr Rossini.’
‘Yeah, who is this Rossini bloke?’ asked Cosgrove. ‘You seem really angry with him about the whole sheep futures fraud.’
‘That’s because he was very likely responsible for the sheep futures fraud,’ said the Nish.
‘You yourself said in 2002 that the fraud comparatively speaking not very much money, somewhat not worth considering,’ Schlomo pointed out. ‘Yet you seem to have been investigating it for seven and a half years.’
‘Yes, well, I had laid it to rest until last summer,’ said the Nish. ‘Then Rossini made a move that seemed liable to implicate me in the fraud. I had to protect myself, my father, the family, the company…’
‘Again,’ said Cosgrove, ‘who is Rossini?’
‘Giorgio Rossini is a Swiss venture capitalist,’ the Nish replied. ‘He was one of the few European businessmen active on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange around the turn of the millennium and he communicated with my father throughout 1999 about the possibility of investing together in Israeli agricultural product. Matsuba isn’t a venture capital group, but it is an investing and holding company, so my father agreed to work out an investing arrangement with three TASE experts named Yaakov Levy, David Shapiro, and Lamech Avraham.’
‘Were Levy, Shapiro, or Avraham ever involved with the actual farming industry?’ asked Cosgrove.
‘This country does not really have large farming industry,’ said Schlomo. ‘True, you can tend flocks in the desert areas and grow food along the shore and in the highlands of Judah. But Israel is not a nation like Brazil or the United States or even India that is known for a large output in that realm.’
‘Yeah,’ said the Nish, ‘and that’s what Rossini tricked father into not knowing.’ By which she meant that Hideki had not known this to begin with and Rossini had simply deliberately neglected to tell him. It would have been absurd to accuse Rossini of tricking Hideki into forgetting something once known. ‘Anyway, Levy, Shapiro, and Avraham tried to warn father about the matter, but he wouldn’t be told.’
‘Is your father stupid or something?’ asked Schlomo.
‘Wh—’ This question took the Nish greatly aback. In neither her own country nor probably in Mary Cosgrove’s would this question be the done sort of thing to ask bluntly. For that matter it probably wasn’t ‘the done sort of thing’ for most Israelis, either. As the Nish and Cosgrove got to know Schlomo better and better it was becoming increasingly clear that he was a sort given over perhaps a bit too much to the service of frank talk. ‘A bit, yes,’ said the Nish at last. ‘My father…yes. Yes, you could say that.’
‘So,’ said Cosgrove, delicately or nervously, ‘what happened next with this? What’d Rossini try to do that you had to come to Israel yourself almost a decade after the fact?’
‘I’d rather not…’
‘Oh, come off it, Nish. We’re friends!’ Cosgrove hugged the Nish from behind.
The Nish gulped. ‘If you could just…’ She coughed a little. ‘Mary, get off.’
‘All right, but…’ Cosgrove let go of the Nish and gazed at her with a hurt-puppy expression. ‘Please, Nish? Tell me what went on with Giorgio Rossini. It may very well be important.’
‘All right,’ said the Nish. ‘It begins with Sukuna-sama…’
8
‘This, this is bad,’ Santana said.
‘Indeed,’ said Miss Henderson. ‘Not only is Miss Cosgrove being led astray as she plies Miss Nishizaki for the details of a scarcely important story, Miss Nishizaki is also beginning to take on the paranoid and delusional qualities of the fragmented version of herself that exists in this version of the seventh through tenth days.’
‘I wouldn’t describe her as paranoid. She isn’t afraid of her Sukuna-sama.’
‘I know,’ said a little lean lively man wearing a bad toupee and an old-fashioned wrap-rascal overcoat. ‘That made her a poor candidate. Stendhal Syndrome or Jerusalem Syndrome symptoms rarely appear in people who weren’t unstable anyway. People such as Miss Wildermann make the best candidates, not people such as Miss Nishizaki.’
‘She is a very normal living mind,’ said Miss Henderson. ‘Her sin, the sin of ten years ago, is one of sexual intercourse without proper emotional backing, something immediately regretted, done in a questionable instance, and never revisited. She is a very normal living mind. Her brilliance and her problems exist of course but are not of the mint required or desired for your purposes.’
‘I think we can’t afford to forget the purpose of this exercise, though,’ said Santana. ‘Tell the truth, I ain’t exactly sure what side of this business I fall on these days. For me this is a question of more educating them about the people concerned, less confusing them about the events.’
‘I am sure that the other nine Kings and the Four Grandsires would love for you to say that to their faces,’ said the little man waspishly.
‘Yes, thank you for your input, King Turtle,’ snapped Santana. ‘I don’t care what your motives are as long as they lead to the same actions as mine. To be honest I doubt Schuster-Slatt cares much either.’ He raised his voice. ‘Do you, G.T.?’
Schuster-Slatt, huddled off in a corner, shot Santana a look of anger. ‘I have no idea what is going on and you know that,’ he said. ‘Obviously you’ve caught Mary and the Nish in some kinda oubliette of time.’
‘I prefer to think of it as a super-special supermax cinema life-stravaganza,’ said King Turtle. ‘The Kingfisher was highly enthused at the opportunity to try out the powers of mind that he found himself availed of and that’s the results that we’re seeing here.’
‘That still doesn’t change the fact that we’ve apparently stopped caring about the brutal murders of our friends, Victoriano,’ said Schuster-Slatt. Apparently he had decided not to treat King Turtle as an actual being, and to, whenever King Turtle said anything, reply to Santana as if he had been the one to speak.
‘The murders can be seen as a Grand Guignol,’ said Santana. ‘Almost a sideshow that has fortuitously and without any of us having to do anything popped up as pendant to…’
‘We’re still talking about human lives,’ interrupted Schuster-Slatt. ‘Since when did you become callous?’
Santana stood up, a billowing tower of sudden unbidden anger. He swept over to Schuster-Slatt, the muscles of his forehead working, steel-grey eyebrows roiling like thunderheads. ‘Do you think I’m happy?!’ he shouted.
‘Er…’
‘Do you think I’m happy?’ asked Santana, softly and coldly now. ‘Do you think it makes me happy to do the things that I do? I have standards, G.T. I try, Lord knows I do try, to be polite, efficient, and plan for all these sorts of things that can happen.’
Schuster-Slatt snorted. ‘I guess when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite[4].’
Santana slapped Schuster-Slatt across the face. ‘Upon my honour!’ he said. ‘I am not a killer, G.T. Those barristas and the four in the alleyway, you mean? I don’t know who killed them.’
‘But,’ said Schuster-Slatt, ‘in your role of not even trying to find out…’
‘It’s not our concern!’ snapped King Turtle.
Santana slumped to the floor. ‘G.T.,’ he said. ‘I am sorry about this, O Lord I am sorry. But these things are here, in the world, and escaping isn’t…’
He trailed off. Schuster-Slatt did not know whether scepticism, confusion, mollification, or pity was the proper emotion, or the emotion that Santana wanted him to feel.
That was something occurring out of sequence, on the eleventh of September, 2009. In sequence, three days earlier, the three wayfarers were still trying to dissect the mysteries of the Nish’s involvement, if any, without much success. That ‘if any’ seemed to be a major reason behind their failure; the Nish simply did not seem to have been involved in the murders. It was only because of her known personal affinity for Hildy Wildermann that this was continuing, that they had not yet asked Miss Henderson to put them somewhere else.
The main question was why Hildy Wildermann had gone apeshit on three of her newfound friends and then herself. For this reason it may be advisable to see Hildy’s history next, of course, but this time Schlomo’s advice, which Cosgrove (the de facto leader, for whatever reason) decided to follow, was to follow the Nish until the evening of the tenth, then switch over to the group in the restaurant again to see if more of the murder itself could be divined.
It was strange watching the Nish go about her daily business, much of which involved Cosgrove. When Cosgrove and the Nish went to bed on the night of the eighth, Cosgrove, the Nish, and Schlomo sat out on the rickety barstools and jerry-rigged chairs in the common area of Flat 17, talking and listening to their own sleep-noises (Schlomo both snored very loudly and had excellent hearing, so he could hear himself in the next flat over though neither of the others could).
‘I want a break from this soonish,’ said Cosgrove.
‘Yes, well, what kind of break would be available or to be desired?’ asked Schlomo. ‘Dinner and a movie? Back home to England to see family? What do you expect, Mary? We are wayfaring spirits.’
‘That’s no reason we can’t go see a movie or something,’ said the Nish. ‘And since nobody can see or hear us, we can talk all the way through, Mary!’
Cosgrove burst into a flurry of light tinny laughter. ‘Oh, Nish!’ she said. ‘You and I, we really are two in a million!’
‘I felt a little worried back there,’ said the Nish. ‘Watching myself go mad, I was going a little mad!’
‘Yeah,’ said Schlomo, ‘what was that whole wetness thing? The Sukuna-sama thing? Why? What was that about?’
‘I’m…honestly not sure.’
‘Well, I’ve felt a little on edge, religiously, since I’ve been in Jerusalem,’ said Cosgrove. ‘It can make you a little…neurotic. Feel like pressure, like there’s so much you’re not living up to, so much you’re being called to do. I don’t know about you, though.’
‘Eh,’ said the Nish. She gazed up at the dark ceiling of their flat, where the inverted dome of the overhead light stood out darkened and made bland. ‘Something like that, maybe. I have been thinking about that job I had, after school, at the shrine, a lot more…more than I have for about eight years, really. Since I actually had it. I don’t know if it’s to do with the city or what.’
‘Jerusalem is redolent with the leavings of the world’s religions,’ said Schlomo. ‘I grew up in a little town in Galilee. Northern Israel, you know. So coming here…so concentrated, everything…hard to get used to.’
‘Yes, but it’s mainly the Middle Eastern monotheistic desert religions,’ said the Nish. ‘Maybe it’s because it’s so far removed from Japan. From Buddhism, from Shinto. Maybe it’s the disconnect. The…’
‘Plunging headlong into unfamiliar traditions?’ volunteered Cosgrove.
‘Yes. Exactly.’
‘So you cling, almost, to your Sukuna-sama? Is that what you did? What you have been doing?’ Schlomo raised his eyebrows. ‘A good way to cope, maybe? I did similar. Focussed on the rocks, the hills, where I was from, the sheep, the olives…the things not of the city life.’
‘I think that’s it,’ said the Nish. ‘Because most of my other memories of home focus around my father’s poor decisions, or my troubles with school friends, or the trials and tribulations of my time running Matsuba, the happy memories that I have of the shrine and my place in it are important to me.’
‘I was blessed to have a childhood that I liked a lot,’ said Cosgrove. ‘My family’s well-off but a different kind of well-off to yours, if that makes any sense. East Anglia, you know. Flattest and mildest part of the United Kingdom. Running in the fields…’
‘So you’re not feeling at all on-edge or dissociated in Jerusalem?’ asked the Nish.
‘I beg your pardon? No. –I mean, yes, I am. I just said that I was. The neurosis, the Jerusalem neurosis, feeling uncalled-for…I’ve been feeling it strongly.’
‘Well, I can hear myself snore,’ said Schlomo. ‘How do you think that makes me feel?’
‘I’d imagine much the same as we feel, because we can also hear ourselves snore,’ said the Nish.
9
The ninth was the Nish’s day to hang about and not do anything. It was a Wednesday, not the Thursday that the Nish usually set aside for not doing anything, but Ehud Biton and Yaakov Levy had agreed to meet with her on the tenth and there were no pressing concerns about anything else. So the Nish sat in Flat 17 and practised her guitar and went out for a walk in this Jerusalem neighbourhood.
‘Morning, Miss Nishizaki!’ said Shaul Borik.
‘Good morning,’ she said.
‘Hey,’ said Borik, ‘have you quit smoking recently, if you don’t mind my asking? Because, er, you seem…’
‘I never smoked,’ said the Nish, a little confused. ‘Why? Did you think I did?’
‘Yes, for…’ Borik scratched his neck. ‘For some reason, I…’
‘Well, that’s ironic,’ said the Nish, ‘because I don’t smoke.’
Cosgrove (the invisible watcher Cosgrove, not the Cosgrove who was currently sleeping in and having an…interesting dream about Catherine Tate) noted with some small shock that it had actually been quite sometime since the Nish had shown her characteristic misinterpretation of the concept of irony. Her first impression of the Nish had been a tough goth-punk chick; her second had been more incisive and cut deeper into the woman’s being.
The Nish is an underextended business wunderkind who does not know what the word ‘irony’ means and constantly misuses it. This is pretty much her entire personality that I know of so far, but I suspect that she has some really interesting hidden depths.
All of this was accurate. This was, of course, no longer Cosgrove’s impression of the Nish, as they had become quite good friends and Cosgrove by now knew enough about her that these depths were no longer so hidden. But the fact remained that until a while ago the constant incorrect description of things as ironic had been a huge part of the Nish’s more immediately obvious personality. Had she somehow found time to actually educate herself in the concept of late? Cosgrove doubted this. Then why had she been so stingy with the i-bomb? She did not want to ask, as the Nish had at the last known remove been unaware that her idea of irony was in any way flawed and not especially open to being told so.
Why was this even something that she was thinking about? Why couldn’t she just content herself with pursuing the Nish like a normal lesbian, rather than treating her as some kind of rotating cipher or something? –Wait, was she starting to think about the Nish in that way?!
Cosgrove needed a freaking drink. Preferably fresh milk. Alcohol just made her tired and incontinent.
The Nish went out and took the fresh airs. Jerusalem was getting cooler. It was still warm of course, warm in that special Mediterranean way, moist but somehow not uncomfortable. Perhaps the air from the desert had a moderating, desiccant if you will, influence on the city’s climate. But, yes, it was pleasant. Similar to Kagoshima outside the wet season. Even if nothing else reminded her of home, that did.
On the street, who should she run into but Hildy Wildermann?
‘Oh, hello, Hildy!’
‘Hi, Nish! Fancy seeing you here.’
‘How are you?’
‘Actually,’ said Hildy, chewing on her lower lip, ‘I’m in a bit of a rush. Hustling someplace, you know.’
‘I see,’ said the Nish amusedly. ‘Well, see you later.’
‘Yes, see you!’
‘Hold on,’ said Schlomo. ‘Am I only one thinks we should be following Hildy from here?’
‘Yes, that’s a good idea,’ said Cosgrove. ‘Nish, I think we’ve milked you all we can.’
The Nish grinned as she watched herself walk away from Hildy. ‘‘Milked’ me? That’s an awfully ironic way to put it.’ Yes, there it was…
The next day, Hildy walked into an alleyway taking a shortcut to the restaurant where she was to meet Fatima, Benny, and Padre Hermosa for dinner. Standing in front of her she saw Victoriano Santana.
‘Er…hello, Victoriano,’ said Hildy. ‘What are you doing here? Meeting Benny and Fatima and Father Hermosa?’
‘No,’ said Santana, and watching them Schlomo noticed a bulge in his jacket and pointed it out to Cosgrove and the Nish. ‘I’ve got a present for you. Actually, it’s not a present.’ The bulge in his jacket moved a little and there was a bang, burst of sparks, and curl of smoke.
‘Nani the fuck?!’ blurted the Nish.
Santana walked away into the evening, and Cosgrove, Schlomo, and the Nish had no idea what was going on any more as, clutching her chest wound, Hildy slumped to the ground, bringing down two dustbins and a crate in her fall.
At this point a black fog came down and swirled around and obscured their vision.
‘Wh—what’s happening?’ moaned Cosgrove.
And she looked, and behold, written through the fog in letters of fire, the command:
FIND M.K.O.
MARINA KONSTANTINOVNA OSTROGOVA
MARINA, MARINA, HABEAS CORPUS HIDLY ET SANTANA
And then the next story started.
[1] Like naming a boy born in a Western culture Haggai or Zerubbabel.
[2] It is relatively common for Japanese Christians to characterise God as much more at peace with these things than Christians in many other countries. If the existence of kami is accepted, identification of them with powerful angels or intercessory saints is much more common than identification of them with demons as happened in Europe at the fall of paganism.
[3] Variously translated Eight Dog Chronicles, Tale of Eight Dogs, or Biographies of Eight Dogs, this was the masterwork of the late Tokugawa writer Kyokutei Bakin, who was known for his work in the ‘gesaku’ comedy-drama genre. The work took Kyokutei twenty-eight years to complete, during which time he lost his wife and son and went blind. He dictated the last thirty or so volumes to his daughter-in-law. There was, in the late 1990s, one ten-volume complete printing available, but it was hard to come by and the publisher in which Hideki had invested was such a purist that he insisted on putting it out in exactly one hundred and six volumes ‘as it was intended’. This did not go well.
[4] This is a Churchill quote.
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