Tokyo Zero | Page 7

remarkable people I was about to meet were framed by these walls, and supported by a
carpet that was as out of place as a gray carpet in a gray room can be.
There were three people in the room and they would be part of my team for the next
several months. What I liked most about my meeting with them was that they all sighed

when I came in the room because they knew that they had to take care of me and because
of the fact that I existed. And people who wanted to kill and to die and who had already
taken the apocalypse into themselves still thought like this... that was what impressed me.
The first one to catch my eye was the fat one, as always. They sometimes have a very
furtive look about them: skulking in shadows, swimming like all the fish in the shoal.
They think. Unusually fat people are superb. Thin idiots and fascists and so forth can pass
a whole life lubricated by the fat of the fat. The fat are allowed to be jovial about it or
excel in some functional area of life, quietly.
The fat one was (eventually) Yosuke Kawabata, In addition to being fat he was a little
hairy, a little tall, and somewhat speckled with objects of varying vintage and lifespan
and color that made his facial movements seem daring, a little dangerous (especially if
you were dressed in something nice when he made them.)
He had been alone when it had happened. He had taken the small alto sax that he had
worked rather hard for down under the bridge near the river to play his haunting noises.
He had never even considered playing the sax back in the paper thin apartment building
that his parents lived in with him. That would be like shitting in the living room.
He walked the five minutes to the enormous train bridge that brutally ignored the fairly
wide and fast flowing river. He took his place, the least damp, least ratted, and pulled out
his sax to make the noises of the various emergency services (for he was new at this
game)
He began by just amplifying his breath and all the random trends that passed through his
fairly random mind. Toots and hollers like those of a large game bird. Then he
remembered this thing he had heard of: music, and tried to approximate that. Joggers
passed by him with an almost perceptible relief in their step when they saw him:glad that
no-one was being hurt up there in the shadowy nook under the bridge.
Then, across the water, he saw something. It haunted the step of an old man dressed in a
kimono. The old man looked over his shoulder all the time. Yosuke's eye was fixed on
the old man. The old man made a gesture in the air, like shooing away a bird. Then he fell
to the ground with a scream. Yosuke knew that it would take at least fifteen minutes for
him to get across the river and help the man, so he just sat and watched. When his watch
got to about thirteen minutes and the old man was still alive it did indeed become
necessary to stop looking at his watch.
Several hours later, after the body had been removed, Yosuke went home. He left his sax
at the bottom of the river. He would no longer dedicate his life to making, but to
searching. He was determined to see what the old man had seen but live to tell the world.
That would be his performance. He would teach the world the nature of final things. And,
sarcasm aside, the sax just wouldn't cut it.
Next in the room was a thin girl with a boyish haircut that spoke of enforced cleansing.
Her eyes were unusually deep set for a Japanese person. She looked at me out of the

corner of her eye, even though doing so involved twisting her body slightly.
Honda introduced us: she was Junko Watanabe. I was dragging my bag in and bowing.
There was no air conditioning in the room, the house, the street, except that big building,
but it was cooler now. I was among my people.
For her, the moment of apocalypse came when she was at university. She was walking
down the street to a class with a group of girls who looked a lot like she did and one who
didn't. She was fully in tune with them and the tune they were making was the sound of
talking talking about talking.
The one girl was discussing her future. Her name was Remi, after the brandy because her
parents wanted her to have an international name. It was almost pronounced Lemmy,