‘A ghost! A ghost,’ shouts the child at her side, pointing up at me.
I feign a smile and, as she quietens the child, I make my apologies and quickly get off the train, escaping from the woman and the child.
Bag in hand, I walk from the station to the Imperial Hotel. Tall buildings line both sides of the street, as dark and as thick as the pine woods this morning. But now, as I look at the passing buildings, I realise my vision is strange again; I am seeing sets of translucent, spinning, turning gears and wheels. This is not the first time this has happened, and it is always the same: the number of gears and wheels gradually increases until they block out half my field of vision. It only lasts a few moments but, when they disappear, the gears and wheels are replaced by an excruciating, searing headache. My eye doctor blamed cigarettes, or the amount I smoke, but I didn’t believe him. All I can do now is to use only my left eye, which is thankfully always fine. But as I stumble towards the hotel with one eye closed, I can still see the gears and wheels behind the lid of my right eye.
By the time I enter the Imperial, the gears and wheels are gone, but the headache is here now. I check in as quickly as I can and head upstairs to the room. I walk down a deserted corridor and go into my room. I sit down at the desk in the window and close both eyes now, massaging my temples. Immediately, I start to feel a little better, but then there is a banging on the door, and a bellboy brings in my bag with my hat and coat. He hangs the hat and coat from a hook on the wall and then leaves. I glance up at the hat and the coat hanging on the wall; they look like my own standing figure. Worse, I remember my brother-in-law had been wearing a raincoat when he threw himself in front of the train. I jump up from the desk, throw the hat and the coat into a corner of the room, and go into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. I catch my reflection in the mirror above the sink and recoil; I can see only the bones of my skull. I step back from the mirror, out of the bathroom, out of the room, and into the corridor. The corridor is still deserted but looks like that of a prison. I walk down the corridor to the landing at the top of the stairs. In a corner stands a tall lamp, its green shade reflecting in the glass fittings. The light gives me a peaceful sensation, at last, and I sit down in one of the chairs on the landing. I take out a cigarette from my pocket and am about to light it when I notice something dangling over the back of the nearby sofa: a raincoat. Quickly, I get up from the chair and go back down the corridor to the door of my room. I steel myself, I open the door, I step inside, avoid the bathroom and its mirror, and sit down at the desk in the window. The seat is an armchair done in a reptilian green Moroccan leather. But at least my headache seems to be subsiding, so I open my bag, take out the sheaf of manuscript paper, dip my pen in the ink and try to get it moving, to work on the story I have been writing. But the pen will hardly move at all and, if and when it does, it just keeps writing the same word over and over again: ‘Ghost … Ghost … Ghost … Ghost …’
I can’t bear it, can’t bear anything, especially myself, myself in this room. I am sure I can hear the scratching of rats in the walls, hear the beating of wings in other rooms. I need some fresh air. I get up from the desk, pick up my hat and coat from the corner, put them on and leave the room. The corridor is still as depressing as a prison. I walk down the stairs to the lobby. A man in a raincoat is arguing with a bellboy. I ignore them and go out through the hotel doors to the street and start to walk. All the branches and leaves of the park trees along the street have a blackish look again, just like the pine woods by the coast this morning. But each tree has a front and a back, just as we human beings do; I remember the souls in Dante’s Inferno who had been turned into trees and I decide to walk on the other side of the road, across the streetcar line, away from the park, where only buildings edge the street, heading as fast as I can towards the Ginza.
When I reach the Ginza, the sun is already beginning to set, but the shops lining both sides of the streets and the dizzying flow of people only make me more depressed; all the people casually strolling along as if they have never known the existence of sin. I walk on northwards, through the confusion of the day’s fading brightness and the light of the electric lamps. I pass mannequin after mannequin in the windows of the Western tailor shops. A bookstore piled high with magazines and such catches my eye and I cannot resist. I walk in and let my eyes wander upwards over several shelves of books. I pick out one volume
