Ghostwritten by David Mitchell Page A

full of publishers! How extraordinarily kind.”
    “No, it was kind of you. I’m sorry I’m too ignorant to accept your generous offer.”
    “Not at all, not at all. No umbrage taken, I promise you.… It was just a passing …” Mr. Fujimoto looked for the right word, blinking hard, and laughed when he couldn’t find it. “I don’t blame you in the least. You wouldn’t want to end up being like me, would you?” He found that a lot funnier than I did.
    “It’s not my place to say this, but I wouldn’t mind ending up being like you at all. You’ve got a good job. Unforgettable bow ties. A great taste in the world’s finest jazz discs.”
    He stopped smiling for once and gazed out. “The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, it turns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits the ground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only
absolutely
perfect when it’s falling through the air, this way and that, for the briefest time.… I think that only we Japanese can really understand that, don’t you?”
    A van roaring the message
Vote for Shimizu, the only candidate
who really has the guts to fight corruption
screeched past like a drunken batmobile.
Shimizu never betrays, Shimizu never betrays, Shimizu never betrays
.
    Mr. Fujimoto trailed his fingers through the air. “Why do things happen the way they do? Since the gas attack on the subway, watching those pictures on TV, watching the police investigate like a crack squad of blind tortoises, I’ve been trying to understand.… Why do things
happen
at all? What is it that stops the world simply … seizing up?”
    I’m never sure whether Mr. Fujimoto’s questions are questions. “Do you know?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know the answer, no. Sometimes I think it’s the only question, and that all other questions are tributaries that flow into it.” He ran his hand through his thinning hair. “Might the answer be ‘love’?”
    I tried to think, but I kept seeing pictures. I imagined my father—that man who I had imagined was my father—looking out through the rear window of a car. I thought of butterfly knives, and a time once three or four years ago when I was walking out of McDonald’s and a businessman slammed down onto the pavement from a ninth floor window of the same building. He lay three meters away from where I stood. His mouth was gaping open in astonishment. A dark stain was trickling from it, over the pavement, between the bits of broken teeth and glasses.
    I thought about Tomoyo’s eyebrows, her nose, her jokes, her accent. Tomoyo on an airplane to Hong Kong. “I’d rather be too young to have that kind of wisdom.”
    Mr. Fujimoto’s face turned into a smile that hid his eyes. “How wise of you.” He ended up buying an old Johnny Hartman disc with a beautiful version of “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart.”
    A mosquito blundered its way into my ear, suddenly there, loud as an electric blender. I pulled my head away and swatted the little bugger. Mosquito season. I was scraping its fuselage onto a bit of paper when Takeshi’s estranged wife marched in, pushing her sunglasses up into her bountiful hair. She was accompanied by a sharp-dressed man who I immediately sensed was a lawyer. They have a look about them. When Takeshi offered me this job I’dspent a whole evening over at their apartment in Chiyoda, but now apart from the curtest of nods Takeshi’s wife ignored me. The lawyer did not acknowledge my existence.
    “He,”
Takeshi’s wife pronounced the pronoun with the unique bitterness of the ex-wife, “only leases the property, but the stock is worth quite a lot. At least,
he
was always boasting that it is. The real money’s in the hair salons, though. This is just a hobby, really. One of
his
many hobbies.”
    The lawyer demurred.
    They turned to go. Takeshi’s wife looked at me as she was stepping through the door. “You can learn something from this, Satoru.
Never
make a big