Ryūnosuke put his palms together. He bowed once more, then opened his eyes. He bent down, picked up the old flowers from the ground and stepped back from the grave. He smiled and said goodbye to Sensei, then turned and walked away from the grave, back down the paths, between the stones, onto the wider avenue.
Two crows were nosily tracing a circle across the thoroughfare, swooping ever lower and lower, arguing ka-ah, ka-ah. Ryūnosuke smiled up at them as he walked, naming them Kanzan and Jittoku, watching them disappear into the leaves of a great Hinoki cypress tree up ahead. Under its branches, Ryūnosuke could see the dim figure of a man. The face and features of the figure were hidden in shadow and twilight, but he seemed to be dressed almost identically in a raincoat, holding a Western umbrella. Ryūnosuke sighed, looked down at the dead flowers in his hand, shook his head and turned back towards the grave; he had forgotten his umbrella. But when Ryūnosuke had retraced his steps to the low hedge which surrounded the grave, he found his umbrella was gone.
Ryūnosuke quickly turned and headed back towards the Hinoki tree. Perhaps somehow – though Ryūnosuke could not think how – that man under the tree had picked up his umbrella and had been waiting to return it to him. But now, as he approached the tree, Ryūnosuke could see the man was gone, too. Only Kanzan and Jittoku remained, hopping back and forth under the branches, laughing at his misfortune – A-hō! A-hō! – knowing full well what was coming next for Ryūnosuke –
A hard, cold rain on the man without an umbrella.
*
Monday morning, Yasukichi Horikawa opened the door to the teachers’ lounge. He was not in the best of tempers; he had had a most unpleasant and unproductive weekend, full of cold, sleeping fitfully, unable to finish the story he had foolishly promised an editor. Typically, the only other teacher in the room was his elder colleague K, the German instructor who had seemingly taken a dislike to Yasukichi on first sight. As always, K was standing with his back to the fire, stealing the heat from the room.
‘Good morning,’ said Yasukichi, as cheerfully as he could, taking out the notes for his first class from his briefcase.
K raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Well, if it isn’t the fashionable young writer who says good morning but not good evening.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Yasukichi. ‘If I have offended you, I’m sorry.’
‘Not offended me, nor even surprised me, just amused me,’ said K. ‘Obviously you do not care to introduce your teaching colleagues to your literary acquaintances, particularly if your “acquaintance” should happen to be an attractive older lady.’
‘Really,’ said Yasukichi. ‘I have no idea what you could mean.’
K snorted, winked and said, ‘On Saturday? At the cinema?’
‘This past Saturday,’ asked Yasukichi. ‘I was not at the cinema.’
‘Really,’ laughed K, approaching Yasukichi. ‘Then that is most strange indeed. And then quite a coincidence, too.’
‘How can it be a coincidence?’
‘Well, on Saturday evening, I could have sworn I saw you there – at the Denki-kan in Asakusa – in the company of an older lady. I was so convinced that I called out to you as we were leaving, but you just stared blankly through me and walked past without a word.’
‘But I wasn’t there,’ said Yasukichi. ‘It wasn’t me, so please don’t say “you”, or that it was a coincidence.’
‘But it really is a coincidence,’ said K. ‘Because the film was the revival of Der Student von Prag. You know the film …?’
‘Yes,’ snapped Yasukichi. ‘I know the film, of course.’
‘Of course,’ smiled K. ‘So then of course you now understand why I say it is quite a coincidence, me watching a film about a doppelgänger, me then seeing you, but it not being you, and so we then can only conclude that I must have seen your doppelgänger.’
‘Or that you were too easily influenced by the film.’
K was now at the table, very close to Yasukichi. He stared at Yasukichi, smiled again and said, ‘Or maybe you were simply embarrassed to be seen in the company of a woman who was very obviously not your fiancée.’
Yasukichi regretted having let his irritation get the better of him. As calmly as he could, he said, ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t there, it wasn’t me. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to be late for class.’
K looked down at the notes in Yasukichi’s hand, and then smiled again: ‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Edgar Allan Poe today.’
‘Now that is a coincidence,’ said Yasukichi with a smile.
‘Perhaps,’ said K. ‘Then again, we all know they seem to let you teach whatever you want. But only you, of course.’
*
In his room in the lodging house in Shioiri, Yokosuka, Ryūnosuke threw down his pen and cursed. He had planned to write a story in a single sitting that night; ‘planned’ because he had no choice if he was to meet the deadline. But it was already gone midnight and all he had scribbled was a dismal, ramshackle chain of words with neither beauty nor point. He lit another cigarette. His mind wandered, searching for targets to blame for his inability to write the story; if only he did not have to teach in the morning, then he could write through the night. But not only had he lessons to teach, there were always so many other demands and requests between the classes: a funeral oration for some
