Kikue had left Himeji at the end of her teenage years to attend university in another part of the country and had subsequently found a job at a company in Osaka. Her family home was on the north side of the castle, so even on her occasional visits back to the city, she’d rarely ventured out to the monorail part of town where her shop now stood.
The shop had once been a makeup salon run by Kikue’s mother. It was the kind of place you often found in shopping arcades in rural towns, where local women came to get cosmetic advice and buy products. In Kikue’s childhood memories, the little salon was always spilling over with middle-aged women.
When her mother told her over the phone that she’d decided to close the salon, Kikue didn’t feel a moment’s hesitation. She didn’t have a lot of savings, but she knew the rent for this shop was ridiculously cheap. If she moved back in with her mother, she calculated, her rent would be lower than it was for her Osaka apartment.
And so Kikue quit her job, redecorated the place—doing as much of the work as she could by herself—and started her own gift shop. She’d had enough of working for companies that were far too big. Kikue wanted to feel on top of everything that was going on around her. And if things didn’t work out? Well, then she’d figure out then and there what to do next.
Still, when Kikue had gone back to the shop for the first time in years and seen that monorail column skewering the place, she half doubted her eyes. “What the . . . ?” she found herself muttering under her breath. It was far more peculiar than she remembered it. To add insult to injury, the building had aged considerably too.
The entire block on which Kikue’s shop stood—a rather dreary strip of stores, including a ramen restaurant and a hair salon, all of which were exactly the same shape and size—was punctuated at regular intervals by monorail columns that poked up from the buildings like tall chimneys. Right there on the other side of the street was a block of slick-looking new apartments with auto-locking doors, but here, it was as if time had ground to a halt.
If you headed west from where the strip of shops ended you came to the Takao Apartments, which contained on one of its lower floors the platforms for the Daishogun Monorail Station. The apartments were no longer occupied and had fallen into ruin. Vines and leaves had grown across the beams, so they looked like the limbs of giant monsters.
If you crossed the road instead, making your way past the convenience store and the apartment blocks under construction, you reached the bank of the Senba River. Here, too, you would find monorail columns and tracks dotting the landscape. In this part of the city, through which the San’yō shinkansen ran, residents had done more or less as they pleased with the monorail tracks—affixing them with signs that read NO ILLEGAL DUMPING, growing morning glories along them, planting herbs and vegetables in the space around, and so on. Doubtless the transformation had happened gradually, over a long stretch of time. It was all a very strange business, and what Kikue found strangest was that growing up, it had never once occurred to her how bizarre those monorail remains were. She supposed there were things that became visible only when you left a place, grew older.
Not long after Kikue moved back to Himeji, an ex-boyfriend of hers from Osaka had taken the day off work and come to visit her, and the pair had strolled along the monorail tracks to the aquarium. Although they’d already broken up, they dawdled that short distance hand in hand.
It had been a cloudy day, Kikue remembered. Her ex had read up online about the monorail before coming and he seemed genuinely excited by its existence, taking a load of photos. When Kikue had asked him that morning where he wanted to visit, he’d said it was the monorail he wanted to see, rather than the castle, which was by far Himeji’s favored tourist attraction.
The disused monorail had a certain popularity among those with a penchant for railways and ruins and so on. Kikue was now used to seeing people coming and going in front of her shop with big cameras slung around their necks. Some even stood outside the window and peered in covetously. She knew instantly that their dreamy gaze was directed not at the carefully curated merchandise on display but at the protruding section in the wall concealing the column. The tracks had been dismantled little by little over the last few decades, but with proper demolition work now finally getting under way, many people wanted to pay the monorail a final visit. It was very possible that in the future, this block containing Kikue’s shop would be knocked down entirely. It was also highly plausible that the real reason behind Kikue’s ex’s visit was a wish to see the monorail while he still had the chance.
With her ex, Kikue visited the aquarium for the first time in decades. The aquarium stood at a height aboveground, and her ex surprised her with the information that its entrance had once been the last station on the monorail line. She’d had no idea.
From a walkway leading to the aquarium, they looked down at the route they’d just walked and the spot where the line of monorail columns broke off for the final time. It was easy to surmise the course that the now-phantom monorail had traced from there to here during the days of its existence. The idea that its destination was still standing while its midway section was gone struck Kikue as kind of sad. The monorail was like the town’s phantom limb. Its loss was felt. It was only
