Eight.

THE LANGUAGE OF MOUNTAINS IS RAIN.

I dribble my soccer ball along a busy shopping mall in downtown Tokyo. No flashy retailing hot spot, this the shops are all in decline, selling pan-scrubbers in bulk, blouses of thirty summers ago, flimsy exercise aids. Light clots with jellyfish from ancient seas. How or when I won possession of the soccer ball, I cannot say, but here it is a curse, not a blessing, because the enemy goalposts could be hidden anywhere in Japan. If I pick up the ball, the referee will cut off my hands with rusty shears. If I lose the ball to the enemy, I will be spat at by schoolchildren and bitten by dogs until the day I die. But players are chosen, they do not choose. I must find the enemy goalposts and blast the ball home. Familiar faces eddy by in the stream of shoppers a Kagoshima music shopkeeper, my father's secretary, Genji the barber, snipping with finger-scissors but I know that one lapse in concentration is all an enemy player needs to rob the ball. The mall descends into a swampy fog and the air cools. Jellyfish fall from the air and die. I wade through their clear bodies, kneeing the ball along in draining slurps. I know the enemy are tracking me on radar units obtained from Nazi Germany, so why do they let me penetrate so deep into their territory? Here comes Claude Debussy, walking on the swamp-surface in snowshoes. 'In possession, Monsieur Miyake? Fantastique! Fantastique!' He stage-whispers: 'I bring a classified message from your great-uncle. One of our team has turned traitor! Trust nobody, not even me!'

'Buntaro?'

'Machiko-san?'

Shooting Star was abandoned years ago. Tatty posters hang by single pins. I bolt the door behind me a wise precaution, I see, as enemy players unmask themselves and gather on the pavement. The derelict state of the shop is why the enemy chose to hide their goalposts in my capsule. I push the ball behind the counter, and face the problem of the stairway, which is nine times higher than I imagined it. I boot the ball up, but it rebounds back. Meanwhile the enemy batter-ram the window with a wooden statue of the god of laughter the glass bends, but does not yet break. I grip the ball between my feet, and amphibian-wriggle my way up, step by step. I am nearly at the top when I hear glass smashing. If I wriggle any faster the ball will slip and bounce down to the enemy. The enemy roar traffic news the top step the enemy boom upward I jam the doorlatch with pool cues.

My capsule is a gloomy warehouse, empty except for building rubble.

Ahead is my glory the enemy goal.

Mr Ikeda screams in my ear: 'What have you done?'

I turn to face my father. 'I came to score the goal.'

'This is our goal, not the enemy goal! Traitor! You showed them the way!'

The pool cues snap and splinter.

An ogre shakes my knee with one hand and grips the steering wheel with the other. 'You were dreaming, son. Mumbling, you were.' He is a sad ogre. I gaze at my surroundings, clueless. Amulets from temples and shrines festoon the cab of a truck. Ogre's pool-ball eyes aim in different directions. 'Who knows what you were mumbling? Not me. You made no sense at all.' All at once Eiji Miyake and the last seven weeks come back to me. 'No sense in any language ever recorded, that is,' continues Ogre, whose name is Honda, I think, but it is too late to check now. I feel a weird lightness. I met my father this morning. I feel loss, I feel victory, but most of all I feel free. And now, in a perfect reversal of the way I imagined things, I am headed to Miyazaki to see my mother for the first time in six years. At less than 5 kph. Four lanes of traffic, crawling at slug-speed. The dashboard clock blinks 16.47. I have been asleep for over three hours, but still have a hefty overdraft at the bank of sleep. If Suga's mailman virus works the way he boasted, Kozue Yamaya's file has already spread to every e-mail contact on every address book of every e-mail contact on every address book, etc., for ninety-nine generations. That adds up to... more computers than there are in Japan, I guess. Way, way beyond the ability of anyone to cover it up. It is out of my hands now, anyway. 'Going nowhere fast past Hadano, we are,' says Ogre. 'Traffic news says a milk-rig overturned ten clicks downstream.' Urban Tokyo has unfolded into zones and charted rice-fields. 'On a fine day,' says Ogre, 'you can see Mount Fuji over to the right.' Drizzle fills the known world. Rain stars go nova on the windscreen, wipered away every ninth beat. Radio burbles. Tyres hiss on the wet Tomei expressway. A minibus of kids from a school for disabled children overtakes on the inside. They wave. Ogre flashes his headlights and the kids go wild. Ogre chuckles. 'Who knows what makes kids tick? Not me. Alien species, kids.' Line after line of hothouses troop by. I feel I should stoke the conversation to pay for my fare, but when I start a sentence a yawn splits my face in two. 'Do you have any kids?'

'No kids, not me. Me and marriage, never in the stars. Many truckers have girls in every port. Say they do, anyway. But me?' Ogre has a story, but it would be rude to probe. 'Cigarette?' Ogre offers me a box of Cabin, and I am about to light up when I remember. 'Sorry, I promised a friend I'd give up.' So I light Ogre's and try to smoke my craving. Traffic nudges. Ogre inhales, leans over the giant steering wheel, and taps ash. 'Was your age, once, believe it or not. Got a job at Showa-Shell driving ginormous tankers. How ginormous? Ginormous. Freight division had its own on-site training programme those babies are not your regular engine boxes, you get me? Dormitories were ex-barracks, outside Yamagata. Bleak spot, it was, sleet and frost even in March. Fourteen guys, all sharing one long corridor, small partitions for privacy, get the picture?' I rub my eyes. We overtake the kids in their minibus. They press their faces against the glass and do zoo faces. I think of drowning men in submarines. 'Now, I never sleepwalked in my life. Ever. Until my first night in Yamagata. Not just walking doing things. So, say I dream of walking around my home town: I sleepwalk down the corridor saying, "Afternoon. Nice weather. Afternoon." If I dream of being a famous artist, then we wake up to find toothpaste smeared on the mirrors. Harmless, it was. I always cleaned up my mess. A laugh, us trainees thought. They never woke me up everyone knows the rule, "Never wake a sleepwalker", although nobody really knows why.' The radio whips and spikes. Ogre tries to retune it. 'I learned why the worst sixty seconds of my life. One moment, I am strolling around a shady market on a hot day in China. The next moment, two guys are sitting on me, shouting two others are grabbing a hand each two others grappling my fingers loose. What was I holding? A cleaver. Taken it from the canteen, I had. Lethal, fuck-off cleaver, the sort you chop up frozen carcasses with. Walked from partition to partition, waking up my co-trainees by tapping them on the side of their heads.' On the road ahead, ambulance lights pulse in the slow dusk. A silver container truck lies on its side. Its cabin is crushed and shredded. A car is being winched on to a pick-up. Traffic controllers wave three lanes into one. They have glowing batons and fluorescent flak jackets. Others hose the road. Ogre strokes an amulet. 'Rock solid, you believe the world is. Then everything jolts and shocks, and it all melts away.' Traffic crawls through a coned bottleneck, and Ogre gropes for his box of Cabin. 'Got a lighter?' I light one for him, wondering if the story is over. 'My dream. Baking hot day in China, it was. I was parched. I came across a watermelon market. Sweet snow watermelons. Would have sold my soul for one, I would. My mother whispered in my ear: "Be careful, son! They'll try to sell you rotten fruit!" Something half buried in the dust catches my eye a dagger, the sort archaeologists dig up. Walked from stall to stall, tapping watermelons with its blade. From the sound quality, I judged if the flesh was rotten or firm. I knew: the first good fruit I came to, I would whack in half, and eat it, there and then.' We clear the bottleneck and Ogre begins to climb through the gears. 'Medication stops the sleepwalking. Out cold, I am. But it goes on my licence, so union jobs and hazardous cargo are out. And a wife? And kids? Too afraid of what I might do to them one night, if it starts up again. So you see...' Ogre inhales all life from his cigarette. 'Be very careful what you dream.'

'Scientists call it the Ai Imajo Effect.' Her voice is so clear she could be in the next room. 'The brightest minds in psychology have given this mystery their best shot, but results are still inconclusive. Why, oh why, whenever I fix a meal for a man, does he jump on the next truck out of Tokyo?'

I was not expecting a joke. 'I tried calling this morning.'

'It would be handy to blame my mood swings on my old friend diabetes, but really I have to blame my old friend me.'

'No way, Ai, I was-'

'Shut up. No. It was my fault.'

'But-'

'Accept my apology or the friendship is off. Me of all people lecturing you on how to behave towards your mother.'

'You were right. My mother called me from Miyazaki. Last night.'

'Sachiko said. Good, but being right is no excuse for being preachy. Anyway. I'm on my piano stool, varnishing my toenails. So where are you, absconder?'

'Being eaten alive by mosquitoes outside a trucker's cafe called Okachan's.'

'There are ten thousand trucker's cafes called Okachan's.'

'This one is between, uh, nowhere and... nowhere.'

'Must be Gifu.'

'I think it is, actually. One truck driver dropped me off here, after calling his mate called Monkfish to pick me up when he passes by on his way to Fukuoka. Before me, he has a fist-fight with a crooked gas station attendant who made improper suggestions about his wife.'

'Pray he wins unconcussed. Poor Miyake stuck in a Nikkatsu trucker film.'

'This is not the fastest way to Kyushu, but it is the cheapest. I have news.'

'What?'

'Put your nail varnish down. I don't want you to stain your piano stool.'

'What is it?'

'For the last nine years I grew up in the quietest village on the quietest island in the quietest prefecture in Japan. Nothing happened. Kids say that everywhere, but on Yakushima it really is true. Since I saw you last, everything that never happened, happened. It was the weirdest day I ever lived through. And when I tell you who I met this morning-'

'It sounds as if I should call you back. Give me the number.'

'Eiji!' She perches on the high windowsill, hugging her knees. Bamboo shadows sway and shoo on the tatami and faded fusuma. 'Eiji! Come quickly!' I get up and walk to the window. Dental-floss cobwebs. From the window of my grandmother's house I see Ueno park, but everyone has gone home. But there is Anju, kneeling before an ancient shipwreck of a cedar. I climb out. Anju's kite of sunlight is tangled in the highest branches. It shines dark gold. Anju is in despair. 'Look! My kite is caught!' I kneel down with her seeing her in tears is unbearable and try to cheer her up. 'Why don't you set it free? You're fantastic at climbing trees!' Anju airs her recently acquired sigh. 'Diabetes, genius, remember?' She points down her legs are a pin-cushion of syringes, drips and torture instruments. 'Set it free for me, Eiji.' So I begin climbing my fingers claw at the reptile bark. Sheep bray in a far valley. I find a pair of my discarded socks, dirty beyond redemption. After a lifetime dark rises, winds swirl, crows come looking for soft places. I am afraid the sunlit kite will rip and shred before I can get to it. Where in this storm of leaves can it be? Minutes later I find him on the top branch. A man still without a face. 'Why are you climbing my tree?' he asks. 'I was looking for my sister's kite,' I explain. He frowns. 'Chasing kites is more important than taking care of your own sister?' Suddenly I realize I have left Anju alone for how many days? in our grandmother's house without thinking about food or water. Who will open her canned dinner? My concern is heightened when I see how tumbledown the place is now shrubs grow out of the eaves, and one harsh winter would topple the house. Has it really been nine years? The lockless knob twizzles uselessly when I knock the entire door frame falls inward. Cat shadows slide behind rafters. In my capsule is my guitar case. And in the guitar case is Anju. She cannot open the escape hatches from the inside, and she is running out of air I hear her knocking helplessly, I scramble, scrabble, but the locks are so rusty-

'And I woke up and it was all a dream!' Monkfish glows in the dashboard lights, all skin and string vest. Croaked laughter, one two three. He has the rubberiest lips any human being had, ever. I am in another truck crossing rainy hyperspace. A road sign flies by at light speed Meishin expressway O O tsu exit 9 km tsu exit 9 km. The dashboard clock glows 21.09. 'Funny things, dreams,' says Monkfish. 'Did Honda tell you his sleepwalking story? Load of crap. Fact is, ladies find him repulsive. Plain and simple. Dreams. I read up on 'em. Nobody really knows what dreams are. Your scientists, they disagree. One camp says your hippocampus shuffles through memories in your brain's left side. Then your brain's right side cobbles together tall stories to link the images.' Monkfish does not expect me to say anything back he would be having this conversation with the Zizzi Hikaru doll if I were not here. Kyoto exit 18 km Kyoto exit 18 km. 'More like scriptwriting than dreaming. Whatever.' A hairy fly strolls across the windscreen. 'Ever tell you my dream story? We all have one. I was your age. I was in love. Or maybe mentally ill. Same difference. Whatever. She Kirara, her name was was one of those pampered daughters-in-a-box. We went to the same swimming club. I had quite a body in my day. Daddy was the fascist mastermind of some evil organization. What was it? Oh yeah, the Ministry of Education. Which put Kirara way above my class. Made no difference. I was obsessed. I copied out a love poem from a book at school. I got a kiss! I still have this goaty appeal to the fairer sex, and Kirara succumbed. We started going out in my cousin's car for sessions at the reservoir. Counted the stars. Counted her birthmarks. Never knew bliss like that, never will again. But then her father got wind of our dalliance. I was not prince material for her princess. Whatever. One word from Daddy and she dropped me like a scabby corpse. Even changed swimming club. For Kirara, I was just an entree to be nibbled, but to me, she was the entire menu at the restaurant of love. Well, I was distraught. Insane. I sent her more poems. Kirara ignored them. I stopped sleeping, eating, thinking. I decided to prove my devotion by killing myself. I planned to hike out to the Sea of Trees at the foot of Mount Fuji and overdose on sleeping pills. Hardly original, I know, but I was eighteen and my uncle had a forest cabin out there. The morning I left, I posted a letter to Kirara saying that as I couldn't live without her love I had no choice but to die, and describing where I would perform the deed not much point dying for love if nobody notices, is there? Took the first train out, got off at a quiet country station and started hiking. The weather grew uncertain, but me, never. I was never so sure about a decision in my life. I found my uncle's cabin, and walked past it until I came to a glade. This was the place, I decided. And guess what I see, up in the air.'

'Uh... a bird?'

'Kirara! My beloved with a noose around her neck! Feet doing the clockwise-anti-clockwise biz. What a sight! Bloated, shitted, crows and maggots already at work.'

'That is...'

'So ghastly that I woke up, still on the early train to Mount Fuji. Talk about a revelation! I got off at the next station, caught the next train back home. I found my suicide note, unread and unopened, on my doormat, Return to Sender Return to Sender scrawled across the front in blood-red pen. Kirara or her father returned it without even reading it. Did I feel stupid? Then she went off to university, and...' Monkfish slows to let a truck pass. The driver waves. 'Saw Kirara again, years later. At Kansai airport, from a distance. Flash husband, gold jangly things, brat in a pushchair. Guess what flashed through my head?' scrawled across the front in blood-red pen. Kirara or her father returned it without even reading it. Did I feel stupid? Then she went off to university, and...' Monkfish slows to let a truck pass. The driver waves. 'Saw Kirara again, years later. At Kansai airport, from a distance. Flash husband, gold jangly things, brat in a pushchair. Guess what flashed through my head?'

'Jealousy?'

'Nothing. I felt not one thing. I was ready to hang myself for her, but I never even loved her. Not really. Only thought I did.' We enter a tunnel of echoes and air. 'Stories like that need morals. This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.'

More tunnels, valley bridges, service stations. The truck judders down Chugoku expressway to dawn. A twenty-first-century thirty minutes covers distances of days for noblemen and priests in earlier centuries. Half-rain, half-mist, half-speed windscreen wipers. Shapes get their names back, and names their shapes. Islands in estuaries. Herons fishing. Lavender concrete mixers sealing riverbanks. Bricked-up hillside tunnels. A beer crate depot, unending and uniform as Utopia. I imagine my mother lying awake, hundreds of kilometres ahead, thinking about me. I am still shocked at how I invited myself to Miyazaki. Is she as surprised? Is she as nervous as I am now? Okayama exit Okayama exit. Smoke unravelling from factory stacks. Monkfish hums a tune over and over again. Vehicles rule the highways, not their drivers trucks change drivers as easily as oil. The visits our mother made to Yakushima were torture. Between the time she dumped us and the day Anju drowned she turned up about once a year. Fukuyama exit Fukuyama exit. Flame licking the corner of a mist-field. Land cleared of trees in a week, levelled in a month, asphalted in an afternoon forgotten ever since. Cracked, greened, smothered and uprooted. Lines and wires, sagging and tautening from pole to pole, fingers of speed jamming on a loose-strung guitar. My grandmother refused to see her, so we always stayed at Uncle Pachinko's in Kamiyaku the main port the night before. We always wore our school uniform. Aunt Pachinko took us to the barber's especially. Everybody knew, of course. She took a taxi from the ferryside, even though Uncle Pachinko's house is less than ten minutes on foot. She would be shown into the best room, returning our aunt's small talk with a savage attention to pointless detail. Hiroshima exit Hiroshima exit. Monkfish turns off the wipers. Hoardings advertise a bank that crashed many months back. Mountains, marching back years to the Sea of Japan coast. Non-coloured suburbs of rerun cities. Uncle Tarmac told me years later after a six-pack of beer that Uncle Pachinko made our mother visit, as a condition of the allowance he sent her. He meant well, I guess, but it was wrong to force us together. We answered the questions she asked. Always the same questions, ducking the hazardous topics: What subjects did we like best at school? What subjects did we like least at school? What did we do after school? We spoke in the manner of inspector and inspected. No glimmer of fondness. Tokuyama exit Tokuyama exit. This is where Subaru Tsukiyama, my great-uncle, spent his final weeks in Japan. He would not recognize Yamaguchi prefecture today. A golf-range hacked out of a hill, shrouded in green netting. Micro-figures swing. I re-remember the mailman virus, and wonder if it is still spreading Kozue Yamaya's ugly news. It feels nothing to do with me, now. Visible consequences are iceberg tips: most results of most actions are invisible to the doer. A dirty rag of bleached sky the morning forgets it was raining, as suddenly as a child forgetting a sulk she planned to last years. Anju would have been more chatty with our mother, I think, but she sensed my distrust and she clammed up too. Our mother chain-smoked. Every image I have of her is dim with cigarette smoke. Aunt Pachinko never asked her questions about herself, at least not in front of us, so all we knew was what we overheard behind partitions. Then she took the late afternoon jetfoil back to Kagoshima, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Once, she stayed two days that must have been when Anju saw our mother tempura her ring but the extended visit was never repeated. Yamaguchi exit Yamaguchi exit. A tree moves by itself on a windless hillside. The mountains level out. She was away for Anju's funeral. Gossip, the island blood sport, reported that she flew to Guam for 'work' the day before Anju died, without leaving an emergency telephone number. Other stories did the rounds, too, less sympathetic ones. I armoured myself in three-inch thick indifference towards her. The last time we met and the only time without Anju I was fourteen. It was in Kagoshima, at Uncle Money's old place. Her hair was short and her jewellery was garish. She wore dark glasses. I was there under orders. I guess she was, too. 'You've grown, Eiji,' she said when I shambled into the room and sat down. I was determined to be disagreeable. 'You haven't.' Aunt Money hurriedly said, 'Eiji's rocketed up over the last months. And his music teacher says he's a natural guitar player. Such a pity you didn't bring your guitar, Eiji. Your mother would have loved to have heard you.'

I spoke to the bridge of her glasses. 'A mother? I don't have one of those, Aunt. She died before Anju drowned. I have a father somewhere, but no mother. You know that.'

My mother hid herself with cigarette smoke.

Aunt Money poured tea. 'Your mother has come a long way to see you, and I think you should apologize.' I was ready to stand up and walk out, but my mother beat me to it. She collected her handbag and turned to Aunt Money. 'There really is no need. He said nothing I disagree with. What I disagree with is forcing us to endure these family discussions when there is quite clearly no family and nothing to discuss. I know you act out of niceness, but niceness can leave nastiness for dead when you count the damage. Give my regards to my brother. There is an overnight train for Tokyo in fifty minutes and I intend to be on it.' Maybe the passing years have altered the script a little, but this is the gist of what was said. Maybe I added her dark glasses, too, but I have no memory of my mother's eyes.

Monkfish opens a can of coffee and switches on the radio. The sun switches on, too, as we cross Shimonoseki bridge. I am back on Kyushu. I smile for no reason. A soul returning to a body it gave up for dead, amazed to find that everything still works this is how I feel. Broken fences, wildflower riots, unplotted space. Kyushu is the run-wild underworld of Japan. All myths slithered, galloped or swam from Kyushu. Monkfish remembers I am here. 'As my dear old mum said, every single morning, "Rise early the first hour is a gift from paradise." Whatever. Twenty minutes to Kitakyushu...'

'Mr Aoyama! Please accept my sincerest condolences on, uh, your death.'

Mr Aoyama lowers his binoculars and fiddles with the focusing. He is wearing his JR uniform, but looks much more distinguished than he ever did at Ueno. 'Death is not so bad, Miyake, not when it actually happens. It is like being paid. And I must apologize for accusing you of espionage.'

'Forget it. You were under loads of stress. Obviously.'

Mr Aoyama strokes his upper lip 'I shaved off my moustache.'

'Good move, Station-master. It never suited you, to be honest.'

'One should commemorate major life shifts, I believe.'

'And you don't get much more major than death.'

'Indeed, Miyake.'

'May I ask how I died?'

'You are very much alive! Your body is on the KitakyushuMiyazaki coach. This is only a dream.'

'I never had such an... undreamlike dream before.'

'Dreams of the living can be calibrated by their Dead. Look closely-'

We are flying. Mr Aoyama is flying Superman-freestyle. I have a Zax Omega jetpack strapped to my pack. Below us are pink meringue clouds. Reams of Earth unroll away. 'Another privilege we dead are afforded unlimited freedom to marvel at the majesty of creation.'

'Are you my Dead?'

'I hired you and you hired me.'

'Why has Anju never visited?'

'Quite.' Mr Aoyama checks his watch. 'The matter in hand.'

'Do the dead really, uh, mingle with the living?'

'No big deal.'

'You can really see... everything?' I think of my Zizzi Hikaru sessions.

'If we so choose. But would you bother watching a billion-channel TV? So little warrants attention. Wrongdoers imagine their sordid crimes to be so unique, but if only they knew. No. My purpose in your dream this morning is redemption.'

'Uh... yours or mine?'

'Ours. I treated you poorly at Ueno. Even if you did spit in my teapot.'

'I feel bad about that.'

Mr Aoyama looks through his binoculars. 'Newspapers of two days hence will be bad beyond belief. Look. Redemption approaches.' Mr Aoyama points downward. The clouds part, as in ancient scrolls and I see the secret beach, foot rock and the whalestone. Sitting on the whalestone is a girl, hunched up, miserably alone. Anju, of course. 'Unfinished business, Miyake.'

'I don't understand.'

'You will.'

My jetpack misfires and dies. My mother a face on the jacket of a horror video but already she and the ninth-floor balcony hurtle away into the Tokyo sky. I spin, see a playground flying this way at terminal velocity, and remember that if I don't wake up before I hit the ground I-

I awake with a 'Gaaaghhh!' on the back seat of a coach its doors hiss shut as it lurches forward. I sit up, blinking. Yes, the coach. Monkfish offered to ask around some Kitakyushu truckers for a ride south to Miyazaki, but my mother is expecting me early this afternoon. I don't want to risk being late. An old lady has joined me on the back seat since I fell asleep. She knits, has a face as round and chipped as the moon, and does aromatherapy, I guess, because I can smell... a herb with a name I can't remember. She is sunburned shiny orange. Between us is a basket of persimmons. Not watery Tokyo persimmons these are persimmons from tales. Persimmons worth risking the wrath of enchanters to steal. I drool I have eaten nothing but crap for a day and a half. 'I propose a barter,' says Mrs Persimmon. 'One persimmon for your dream.'

Embarrassing. 'Was I mumbling?'

She keeps her eyes on her stitches. 'I collect dreams.'

So I tell her my dream, leaving out the fact that Anju is my sister. Her knitting needles make the sound of swords clashing on a distant hill. 'I will not be short-changed, young man. What did you omit?' So I admit that Anju is my twin sister. Mrs Persimmon considers. 'When did she leave, this unfortunate?'

'Leave where?'

'This side, of course.'

'This side of...'