Read Nagasaki for Free Online Page A

into darkness as I listened out for the sounds of the last trams, distant traffic, the on-off drone of the cicadas, the harmonious sound of the wind blowing through the bamboo, and then drops of rain as heavy as time.
    *
    While trying to get to sleep facing one way then the other, I couldn’t shake off a persistent thought. That woman, at any point during the hundreds of nights she had spent living close to me, could have got up and stabbed me as I slept. I knew nothing about her past or her inclinations, the reasons that might have led to her putting down roots here, soiling my sheets, drying herself with my towels, crapping in my toilet, and I was furious with her. I had been completely at her mercy, and wondered if it had ever occurred to her that she could bump me off, easy as that, just because, and get away with it? I was reminded of a story by Edogawa Rampo about a man secretly living inside a sofa. Did it end with a murder? I couldn’t remember and, besides, I had been living in an Edogawa novella of my own for several months and I wouldn’t have wished it on anyone. The fact she had not battered me to death probably meant she had been looking for somewhere quiet, lived in and well maintained so that she could be spared too many anxieties in the senseless situation she found herself in, until a time when, perhaps, things might become clearer. She was thereforeneither Madam Death nor Madam Fear. More like Madam Ordinary.
    It was time I got to sleep and, lying on my back with my legs bent, I felt myself drifting off when my thoughts were hijacked again, scuppering my efforts. What if there was another woman hiding somewhere in the house? In the darkness, the absurdity of this idea made me smile, yet I began to imagine that every cupboard contained the ghost of a lost love, as though the woman caught red-handed in my house was the reflection of someone I had fallen for many years before – as a teenager, say – so long ago that I hadn’t recognised her. I resolved to take one of my sleeping tablets. A mock sleep, as heavy and grey as a bloated cloud, got the better of my thoughts. It was a sleep disturbed by tortuous dreams, like a rough sea crossing at night with lightning flashing all around.

 
    A YEAR IN HIDING
     
    Surprised to discover that food was disappearing from his kitchen, a bachelor in his fifties from the south of the city installed a webcam which revealed that an unknown woman was roaming his house while he was out.
    The owner caught the intruder in the act while watching his home from his workplace and alerted the police, believing the woman to be a burglar. Officers apprehended a woman ensconced inside an unused oshiire, where she had rolled out a mat and laid out her belongings.
    ‘I had nowhere to live,’ the unemployed 58-year-old explained. According to the police, she had been secretly sleeping there for almost a year, alternating withtwo other houses where she occasionally spent the night unnoticed.
    I put down the copy of the
Nagasaki Shimbun,
which I never buy. The colleagues who had shown me the article had been kind and respectful. After a pause, they shook their heads as if to say, ‘Well, well, the things that happen.’ It’s fine, I would have liked to say before I skim-read the report: something happened in my life and it’s over, case closed. In reality, nothing was closed and the case was only just getting started, but I didn’t want to give anything anyway. I answered their questions, playing my double role of victim and fleeting celebrity. In return, they teased me to try to cheer me up.
    ‘You sly dog! Funny way of kicking your wife out, Shimura, offloading it onto the police!’
    I smiled at the person who said this, but not too much, so as not to encourage him.
    We got back to work. A typhoon had incubated far away over the China Seas, and there was a good chance it would soon be heading our way. Through force of habit, I clicked to bring mykitchen up on screen. High