In the morning it was on every channel.
Mom had the kitchen television on when I came out, just after half past four, with the sound low, the way she always has it. She was standing at the counter in her work fleece with a cup of tea she wasn’t drinking, watching a helicopter shot of Ofuna station. The bicycle parking under the deck was a dark gap with police tape around it. The stairs down from the deck were buried in bicycles, a solid slope of them from top to bottom, and in the river below, men in orange waders were standing up to their waists. Then the picture cut to street cameras: bicycles lying in the roads all over Ofuna, on crossings and against shop shutters, a kilometer from the station, with nobody near them.
NINE DEAD AT OFUNA STATION, said the caption.
“An unexplained incident,” the newsreader was saying. “That is the term Kanagawa Prefectural Police used in a statement released early this morning. Police have asked the public not to speculate.”
The public was speculating.
On the next channel there was a professor in a bow tie explaining that a mass of bicycles could not move by itself. On the channel after that there was a panel of comedians who had been booked for a cooking show and were trying, with serious faces, to talk about something else. The word on all of them, on the captions and the crawling text at the bottom of the screen and in the mouths of the people they stopped in the street, was kaiju.
“They’ve got footage,” said Mom, without turning around.
They had a lot of footage. Everyone at Ofuna station had a phone, and everyone had been filming, and every channel had a different clip of the same thing. You could see the crab in all of them, clear as anything, dark and huge and made of bicycles, tearing up the racks. You could see people running. You could hear the car alarm.
Then, in every clip, at the moment I came over the racks, there she was.
A girl in red and white, small, with pale pink hair down to her waist and light coming off her like a lamp, swinging an iron staff at a thing made of bicycles. Some of the clips were shaky and some were sharp. In the sharpest one she looked straight up at the crab, and you could see her face, and her mouth open.
The same clip played four times while I stood there.
It was a girl’s face. It wasn’t mine. Nobody in the world would have looked at it and thought of me.
“Who is she?” Mom said. “Is that a person? Is she a real person?”
“I don’t know.”
I got myself a bowl of rice and sat down with my back to the screen. My hands were steady. I kept looking at them anyway.
* * *
The interview was on the eight o’clock news.
A reporter had found a woman on the deck at Ofuna with a small boy, maybe five, in a yellow raincoat. The woman was explaining, in a shaking voice, that they had been coming back from her sister’s, and the boy was holding her hand and looking at the camera.
“And what did you see?” the reporter asked the boy, bending down with the microphone.
The boy thought about it.
“A miko,” he said, as if it was obvious. “It was a miko. A little one. Red and white. Like at the shrine.”
By the time I got to school it was trending.
By lunchtime it was everywhere, on every phone in every hand in the corridor, and it wasn’t a miko anymore. It was Miko-chan. #MikoChan, with a little drawing somebody had done overnight of a girl in red and white with a halo of light around her and a stick, cute and round-eyed, like a mascot for a bank.
I hated it.
I hated it in a way that surprised me. I wasn’t a shrine maiden. I was a sixteen-year-old boy in a school uniform, sitting at the back of the classroom with a sweatband on his wrist, and the whole of Japan had given me a name you’d give a little girl. In every clip, next to the crab, next to the bicycles and the people running, that was what I looked like. A small girl, the size of a fifth-grader, on her own. Miko-chan. As if I’d come down to help out at the New Year stall.
Underneath the hating there was something else, smaller.
I didn’t look at it.
* * *
“My bike’s in the river,” said Shun.
He’d been at school before me for once, sitting on his desk with his phone, and he turned it around to show me a photo somebody had posted of the bicycle parking: the empty racks, and the deck stairs buried under a slope of bicycles, all tangled into each other.
“Your bike?”
“It was in there. It’s gone. They’re saying it was part of the thing.” He scrolled. “That’s mine. Look. I think that’s mine. That blue bit.”
It was a blue mudguard sticking out of the middle of the heap. It could have been anyone’s.
“The one you fixed,” said Shun. “The chain. You fixed it on Monday. Three days.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.” He turned the phone back around and looked at it. “My mom says I’m not allowed to go to the station on my own anymore. She’s going to drive me. I’m sixteen.”
He scrolled again, and stopped on the sharp clip, the one where she looks up. He stared at it.
“Look at her, though.”
I didn’t. I looked at the desk.
“She looks scared,” said Shun.
He got out his pen and his math book. He started drawing in the margin, quickly, without looking up. A girl in wide sleeves, standing on a crab.
* * *
In homeroom our teacher came in and didn’t take the register.
He was a quiet man who taught Japanese and wore the same gray cardigan every day, and he stood at the front of the room for a while with his hands on the desk, looking at us. Two of the girls in the front row were crying. A boy at the back had an uncle who worked at the station.
“I’d like to show you something,” he said finally. “I’ve been asked to do a disaster lesson. I don’t really know what that means after last night. But I’ve been asked.”
He pulled down the screen and played a video.
It was from 2011, from the big earthquake up north. Someone had filmed a harbor from a hill in the minutes after the shaking stopped. The sea was going out. It went out past the end of the harbor wall and kept going. The boats on their moorings tipped over onto their sides in the mud, and the bottom of the harbor came up into the light, black and shining. On the sea wall a few people had stopped to look.
One man had climbed down onto the mud to get a better view.
Our teacher stopped the video there.
“When the sea goes out,” he said, “you don’t go and look. You run. You don’t go back for anything. You go uphill, as fast as you can, and you keep going.” He looked at us. “Nobody could have predicted what happened last night. But there are some things we can know about, and prepare for. That’s all I mean by it.”
He turned the screen off. Then he did take the register, and his voice cracked once, on a name, and he didn’t stop.
I looked at the man on the mud for as long as the image stayed on the board.
* * *
Mom came home early on Friday.
She does the early shift on Fridays too, five until two, and she usually goes for a coffee with the women from the bakery counter afterward and comes home about four. On Friday she was back by half past two. She was sitting at the kitchen table in her coat when I got in from school, not doing anything. The television was on with the sound low, and she had her back to it.
“Mom?”
“Mr. Takeda,” she said. “One of the nine. He came in every Thursday for the horse mackerel. Every Thursday for six years. He liked it filleted for him, but not too much, because he liked to do the last bit himself.” She turned her cup around on the table. “His wife’s in the hospital. That’s why he did the shopping.”
I didn’t know what to say. I sat down at the table across from her.
“He’d have been going home,” Mom said. “Thursday night. With the fish.”
She got up then and started making dinner, early, at three in the afternoon. She washed the rice and put it on, took fish out of the fridge and started on it with the knife. She didn’t look at the television once. She didn’t talk anymore.
Later, after dinner, I went to look for my old phone charger, the one with the long cable. The hall closet has a top shelf where all the boxes go, old shoeboxes full of cables and instruction books and things nobody has looked at in years. I stood on a chair and reached for a shoebox at the back.
“Not that one,” said Mom.
She was standing in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel. She came over and reached past me, and took down a different box from beside it, and handed it to me.
“Cables are in that one.”
The charger was in it. I put the other box back where it had been, at the back of the shelf, and didn’t ask, and she went back into the kitchen.
* * *
Kohaku had kept her promise.
She told me on Friday night, in my room, with the door shut and the light off, so I wouldn’t have to look at her while she said it.
She didn’t take long. She was sitting on my windowsill with the streetlight behind her so she was just a shape, a small dark cat with her ears up, and she told it in a light, chatty voice.
“There’s a door,” she said. “At the bottom of the sea, out past Enoshima, a long way down. The Lady shut it, a long time ago. She shut it, and it stayed shut, mostly. Every so often it cracks. When it cracks, things come up through it.”
“Things like last night.”
“Things like last night. The ones from below.” She licked a paw. “The Lady called them the Unshaped.”
“What are they?”
“Under the bay the ground is two pieces, pushing on each other, and where they meet there’s a crack that goes down further than anything goes. At the bottom of it there’s dark. Not night. The dark from before anything had a shape. It’s cold, and it has nothing to be.” Her tail came around over her paws. “When the ground shakes, the door shakes, and a little of the dark gets out. Up here it can’t stay nothing. So it borrows a body.”
“How?”
“The same way every time. First it catches hold of one real thing, the first one it touches. That’s its knot, where it holds on. Then it takes a shape it’s seen somewhere. Any shape. Then it builds the shape out of whatever’s nearest, as much as it needs. Lots of little things, if that’s what’s there. One big thing, if that’s what’s there. It doesn’t care which.” She looked at me through the dark. “A crab, out of bicycles, holding on by one.”
I thought of the small red bicycle with the ladybug bell, right in the middle of it.
“Then they move,” said Kohaku.
“Move where?”
“Wherever they move. Toward light, mostly. Downhill, like water. They don’t want anything, not the way you mean. A typhoon doesn’t want anything either.” She put her paw down. “Things break where they go. People die where they go. That’s all it is. The bracelet wakes up when the door cracks. It rings, and a girl hears it and comes to find it. That’s what it’s for. To give someone a chance to push them back.”
“A girl.”
“A girl.” Her ears flicked. “There have been six before you.”
The streetlight hummed. A car went past at the bottom of the hill.
“Where are they now?” I said.
“They didn’t come back,” said Kohaku, still in the light, chatty voice. “Any of them. The first one was fourteen. She was a salt-maker’s girl, from down at Koshigoe. She was very brave. They were all very brave, and they didn’t come back, and I sat on the shore and waited for every one of them.”
I stayed where I was on the floor, against the wardrobe. The cuff was warm on my wrist. I looked at it in the dark.
“So it made a mistake,” I said. “This time. It got me instead.”
“It’s never made a mistake,” said Kohaku.
She said it at once, flatly, without any chattiness at all. Then she jumped down off the windowsill and came and curled up on the end of my bed and closed her eyes.
I didn’t ask what she meant.
I stayed on the floor until my legs went numb, and then I got into bed and lay looking at the ceiling, and I didn’t ask.
* * *
That night I dreamed I was standing on a shore.
It wasn’t any shore I knew. The stones under my bare feet were white and round and dry, and they went on in both directions as far as I could see. There was no sun. The sky was a flat pale gray, and the light came from everywhere and nowhere. There was no sea either, or there was, but it was a long way off and made no sound.
A woman was standing a few meters away, looking at me.
She was the most beautiful person I had ever seen.
I knew it all at once, the way you know a bell has been struck before you’ve heard the note. She was tall, much taller than me, with her feet bare on the white stones. Her face was long and strong and brown from the sun, with brows that went straight across and gold eyes set wide under them. One corner of her mouth turned up a little even when the rest of her face was still. I had the strangest feeling I’d seen that face before, somewhere, on someone younger. Her hair was tied back with a plain cord, and the tail of it came down past her waist, silver-white at the crown and pink toward the ends. Not dyed. The pink of the inside of a shell, the exact hair of the girl on every television in Japan. She wasn’t pretty the way girls on posters are pretty. She was beautiful the way the sea is when you come over the top of a hill and there it is.
She was wearing a plain old-fashioned robe with the sleeves pushed up. Her forearms were strong, and her hands were covered in burn scars, old shiny ones with newer ones on top, across the backs of her hands and up between her fingers. They were the hands of a person who had worked with fire for years.
She was looking at the phone in my hand. I hadn’t known I was holding it.
“What is that?” she said. She had a low, rough voice, as if she didn’t use it much. “The little window. You keep looking into it.”
“It’s a phone.”
“A phone.” She tried the word and didn’t like it. “What does it show you?”
“Everything, mostly.”
She thought about that.
“That sounds very tiring,” she said.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She opened her mouth to tell me, and stopped. A small puzzled frown crossed her face.
“I had a name,” she said slowly. “I’m sure I had one. It’s somewhere.”
She looked down at the white stones. Then she gave up and looked at me again, at my face, and then down at my wrist, where the cuff was.
She looked at it. Or at me. I couldn’t tell which.
“It fits you,” she said.
* * *
I woke at half past four, when Mom’s alarm went, and lay listening to her fill the kettle.
On Saturday Mio went to work at the salon, and I told Mom I was going to the library, and went to the station instead.
I don’t know what I wanted. I think I wanted to see it in daylight.
The west exit was open again, but the stairs down to the bicycle parking were blocked off with blue sheets and police tape, and the deck above was crowded with people who had come to look. Along the tape, against the railings, there were flowers. There were bunches from the supermarket still in their plastic, and single stems, and cans of coffee, and a jar of candy. Someone had left a carton of milk. Someone had left a small red umbrella, the kind they give out to first-graders.
In among the flowers, taped to the railing, there were drawings.
Most of them were done by children, in felt tip, on paper torn out of school books. Most of them showed the same red-and-white girl with yellow scribbles around her, standing on a lumpy black shape, and the same two words written underneath in careful wobbly letters.
Thank you.
I stood in front of them with my hands in my pockets.
There was a television crew by the ticket gates, and a small crowd around them, and in the middle of the crowd, answering questions with his hands folded in front of him, was the man from the river steps. He’d changed his suit. He looked as if he hadn’t slept since Thursday. The caption on the reporter’s monitor said INSPECTOR NISHIKAWA JUN’ICHI, KANAGAWA PREFECTURAL POLICE.
“We don’t know what it was,” he was saying. “We don’t know where it came from. We’re working with the relevant agencies.”
“And the miko?” said the reporter. “The girl in the light?”
Nishikawa was quiet for a moment.
“She broke that thing’s arm off with a pole, and a woman fell out of it,” he said. “I was holding the woman’s other hand. Whatever she is, she saved that woman’s life, and she tried to save more. If she’s watching, I’d like to thank her.”
“Do you know who she is?”
“No,” said Nishikawa.
He looked out over the crowd while he said it, slowly, the way a policeman looks at a crowd, and his eyes went across my face and on without stopping.
“No idea.”
Somebody bumped my shoulder. A second reporter, a young woman with a microphone, had peeled off from the crew and was working her way along the people at the tape.
“Excuse me. Were you here on Thursday night?”
“No.”
“Do you use this station?”
“Every day.”
“How do you feel about Miko-chan?”
She held the microphone out to me, bright and expectant. Behind her the cameraman lifted his camera.
I looked at the drawings on the railing, at the yellow scribbles and the careful letters.
“I don’t know,” I said, and walked away before the camera could find me, down the other stairs and out around the back of the station, past the gap by the river wall where I’d been sick, which somebody had hosed down.
* * *
That night, after Mom had gone to bed, I went up to the roof on my own. Kohaku was asleep on the end of my bed and didn’t wake.
I said the word to the water tank.
The light came, my hair came down, and I was holding the staff. I didn’t fly anywhere. I stood in the middle of the roof with the town lit up around me and the Kannon white on her hill, and I said my own name out loud.
“I’m Haruto.”
It came out in the clear light voice, from lower down than my voice had come from in years, and it sounded like a lie. It sounded like a girl at a party giving a name she’d made up, so that nobody could find her afterward.
I let the light go and went downstairs and stood in the bathroom with the door shut. I looked at the faucet and said it again, in my own voice.
“I’m Haruto.”
That sounded like a lie too.
That was worse.
I washed my face and didn’t say it a third time.
* * *
On Sunday it rained.
On Sunday night Mom had the news on again while we ate. Mio was home, eating with her phone propped against the soy sauce. They played Thursday’s sharp clip one more time.
“She’s cute,” said Mio, with her mouth full. “Weird stick.”
Then they showed the river at Ofuna, the same stretch below the deck, with a police diving team working in the brown water under floodlights. As we watched, a diver came up beside a small boat with something held in both arms. He passed it up to the men in the boat, and they lifted it out and held it up to the lights.
It was a bicycle.
It was a perfectly ordinary bicycle, a woman’s, with a basket on the front and the river running out of the spokes. Another diver came up behind him with another one. Then another.
Mom picked up the remote and turned the sound down further.