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My grandfather talked nonstop in a high-pitched voice all day long. It wasn’t as if he needed me around for conversation, he mostly just talked to himself.
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    N A T S U O K I R I NO
    That is, he repeated the same thing over and again, chattering on and on.
    I suspect he was delighted to share his home with someone as taciturn as myself. I was nothing more than a receptacle for his endless prattle.
    Surely my grandfather found it inconvenient to have a granddaughter suddenly deposited on his doorstep. But there can be little doubt that he was grateful for the allowance my father provided. At the time, my grandfather was living off his pension. From time to time he’d make a little extra cash by doing odd jobs around the neighborhood; he was a sort of resident handyman. But I suspect he hardly had enough to live on.
    What was my grandfather’s occupation? Well, that’s hard to say. When we were children, my mother told us that when Grandfather was young he’d been good at catching watermelon thieves, so he decided to join the police force and be a detective. That’s why I was certain he’d be strict, and I was afraid of him at first. But in fact, the opposite was true. My grandfather had not been a detective. What had he been? Well, that’s what I’ll explain next. It might take some time, so please bear with me.
    “It’s not easy for us to go visit your grandfather, because he’s a police detective,” my mother would say. “He’s very busy. Besides, he’s always got a lot of people around him who have done bad things. But that doesn’t mean your grandfather is bad. No indeed. It often happens that bad people are drawn to good people. Well, for example, people who’ve broken the law will come by your grandfather’s place to apologize and to talk about how they plan to mend their ways. But there’s always someone who’s just bad to the bone. That person might hold a grudge against your grandfather for arresting him, so when he comes to visit he comes for revenge. It would be dangerous for children to be around if that happened.”
    Listening to these stories as if Mother were describing something in a distant land, I’d get excited, imagining a scene from a television crime drama. My grandfathers a police detective! I’d brag about it whenever one of my friends stopped by. But Yuriko never looked very impressed and would always ask Mother why grandfather was a detective. I guess she didn’t think having a detective for a grandfather was particularly thrilling; I have no idea what went on in her head. But my mother’s answer was always the same. “Your grandfather was very good at catching watermelon thieves. His father owned giant fields in Ibaraki Prefecture—that’s where the thieves lurked.”
    I passed the entrance exam to Q High School for Young Women just 2 6
    G R O T E S Q U E
    before my parents and Yuriko set off for Switzerland, so I loaded up a little truck with my futon, desk, school supplies, and clothes and moved from North Shinagawa to my grandfathers apartment in the government housing project. P Ward is in the scruffier part of downtown Tokyo, in the so-called Low City. It’s mostly flat there, with hardly any tall buildings.
    A number of large rivers run through the ward, slicing it into smaller sections. The large levees along the rivers obstruct one’s line of vision. The surrounding buildings are not very high but, because of the levees, they look oppressive. It is in fact a very peculiar area. Just beyond the levees, an immense volume of water flows by at a normally languid pace. Whenever I’d climb the banks of the levees to gaze down into the brownish water of the river below, I’d imagine all the different life-forms swirling around beneath the surface.
    On the day I moved in, my grandfather bought two cream puffs from the local shop. They weren’t the kind you’d get at a bakery, but the kind with the hard puff pastry shell and the custard filling that I hate. I