John Rain 08: Graveyard of Memories Read Online Free PDF

me here. I had to go. I didn’t realize it at that moment—and couldn’t have comprehended it, even if I had—but I was about to begin a decade of life as a fugitive.

chapter
four
    I rode Thanatos to Nishi Nippori, the northeast of the city. Nishi Nippori was boring, blue collar, and unremarkable in every way—the kind of place no one who didn’t live there ever bothered to visit. I had taken an apartment there because it was about the cheapest place I could find that still offered a station on the Yamanote loop line. Between the train and Thanatos, there was nowhere in the city center I couldn’t reach in under a half hour. Something in a slightly more upscale neighborhood wouldn’t have offended me, and better proximity to the Kodokan would have been nice. But even back then, there was something that made me want to stand aloof from the society around me. The war was a significant part of it, but not all. I’d been told in a hundred ways while growing up in Tokyo that I wasn’t welcome, that I didn’t really belong. Maybe keeping the city at a distance was my way of saying, Fine, I don’t want you, either.
    Feeling a little paranoid, I circled the block before arriving at my building, a squat wooden structure surrounded by weeds and skeletal bushes. It offered a view, to use that term loosely, of the Yamanote train tracks below, which were in the process of being expanded to handle Tokyo’s ever-burgeoning population. I parked Thanatos in front and looked down. The tableau, bleached to harsh white by overhead klieg lights, was a forbidding mass of concrete blocks, giant transformers, and steel rails. Beyond it all, more gray buildings and a sky the color of ashes against the neon glow of the city beneath.
    I realized it was lucky I’d taken this place, and not something on the main street among the various shops and restaurants surrounding the station. The decision had been driven entirely by the better rent—everything closer to the station had been more expensive—but now I saw there were tactical advantages here, too. If anyone knew where I lived—and after the Kodokan anything might be possible—it would be much easier for them to ambush me amid the tumult surrounding the train station. Here, they’d have no concealment. I’d have to remember that next time I chose a place.
    I went inside, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and unlocked the door of the six-mat room. Tatami mats are a standard unit of measurement in Japan, and six of them come to about nine feet by twelve. I pushed the door open wide, and flipped on the light switch before going inside. I couldn’t imagine anyone would be waiting for me, but not long ago I couldn’t have imagined anyone tracking me to the Kodokan, either. The room was hot, still, and empty—just a futon in one corner, a desk and chair in another, and a bureau in a third. A kitchen that was really no more than a stove; a bathroom as spacious as what you get on a commercial airliner; a tiny genkan with a worn cabinet for storing shoes. More a bivouac than an apartment, but at the moment I wasn’t sorry I didn’t have much to my name. I hurriedly packed a bag: some clothes; my passport; a toothbrush. A handful of mementos from my childhood—letters from my parents, a few fading photographs, that kind of thing. Tokens and talismans of the past. I don’t know why I grabbed anything that wasn’t strictly practical. Maybe a desire to prevent anyone who searched the place later from uncovering something personal. Maybe a superstitious sense that the past was a kind of anchor that would keep me from drifting over a horizon I was still afraid to cross.
    I headed out, pausing on each riser on the way down to check the stairs below me, sweat trickling down my back. I was used to moving with extreme care in the jungle— pause, look, listen, move; pause, look, listen, move —and there was something incongruous about doing the same thing now on a wooden stairwell. I