Just before we entered the tunnel, I looked up over my shoulder at the
mountain on which the crematorium stood. It was the Kamakura City
Crematorium, so it seemed that most of the dead cremated there would
want to return to houses in Kamakura. Maybe it would be nice to have a
woman as a symbol of all those dead, riding around at night in empty cabs.
But I didn’t believe the story.
“I wouldn’t have thought that a ghost would need to take a cab. Can’t
they go wherever they like, appear anywhere?”
We arrived at Omiya Akifusa’s house soon after we exited the tunnel.
The cloudy four o’clock sky was faintly tinged with peach—a sign that
spring was coming. I hesitated for a moment at the gate of the Omiya
house.
I had only been to visit old Akifusa twice in the eight months since he
had himself become a sort of living ghost. The first time was just after his
stroke. He was some twenty years my senior, a man I respected, a writer
who had been a patron of mine—it was hard for me to see him like that,
ugly and miserable as he had become.
But I knew that if Akifusa ever had a second stroke, it was likely to be
the end. We lived in neighboring towns—Zushi and Kamakura are no more
than a stone’s throw apart, as we say—and the fact that I had neglected to
visit had begun to trouble my conscience. The number of people who had
left this world while I considered visiting them, but somehow never did,
was by no means small. It had happened so often I had come to believe that
this was simply the way life was. I had been thinking of asking Akifusa to
write out something for me on a sheet of hansetsu paper, but the idea had
come to seem pointless. And the same thing had happened to me several
times. Sudden death wasn’t the sort of thing I could treat casually. I was
perfectly aware that I myself might die at any moment—perhaps one night
in a storm—and I did not take good care of myself.
