The Emperor of Any Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

Then he sees the dust on the shoulders of the bottle, the clean space on the shelf where the bottle sat, outlined in dust. Everything covered in dust. And dust . . . he knows what dust is.
    Give it to her. Go on. Let it go. You can do it.
    But he can’t.
    Slowly he places the bottle back on the shelf.
    He leaves the room, closes the door behind him, and stands at the top of the stairs. Then he turns one-eighty and heads to his room. He lies down on his bed and closes his eyes. He thinks of Lexie Jane standing out there on the lawn waiting. Waiting for one sec. He’s not sure how long it is before he hears the lawn mower fire up again.

Evan sits in his bed, the book open in his lap propped against his raised knees. It is late, raining again. There is distant thunder, sheet lightning. His window is open and a sheen of raindrops paints the windowsill. A breeze stirs the curtains and wanders around the room checking out his stuff, riffling paper on his desk, the feathers on a dream catcher, the right bottom corner of a poster of the Three Stooges. A breeze cool enough to make him glad of a summer-weight duvet.
    He hadn’t noticed at first, but there is a title embossed on the back of the book as well. The gold letters in kanji must be the Japanese for the title on the front. And if he opens the book that way up, sure enough there is a title page in Japanese, and then the body of the book in reverse order to the English translation. Which is how Japanese is read, he guesses, right to left.
    He pages through the reproduced photographs of the original manuscript, tiny kanji characters, written in pencil and pen — the “monograph,” as it’s identified in the acknowledgments. Then he flips to the English translation. Two translators are acknowledged in the book’s front matter, a professor and a graduate student, as if this thing were an archaeological specimen. Something dug up and dusted off and handled with white gloves and a magnifying glass.
    For some reason he is full of trepidation.
    Why me,
he thinks. Why does he suddenly have a grandfather with a mysterious past? What was it Leo had written in the letter: something about the “ambiguous and disturbing conclusion.” There was something in the prologue, too. He flips back, finds the paragraph . . . yeah, here it is: “Griff could not have known the content of these writings.”
    What was that supposed to mean?
    And then he recalls that look on his father’s face, the last night, as if he was trying to recall something, a lost memory.
    There’s something wrong with the picture.
    Evan leans back and closes his eyes for a moment. The memory of his father’s words has spooked him. The whole thing spooks him. How does a book like this float up onto the shore of 123 Any Place, a perfectly ordinary island in the perfectly ordinary sea of Don Mills?

    My name is Isamu Ōshiro. I was born in Okinawa but left for Saipan in 1938, when I was just sixteen. There was work there harvesting sugarcane, and no father to slap me for reading too much and for being a dreamer. I wanted to be a mechanic and soon found work fixing cars and trucks. But you know all that, Hisako. I only mention it in case this book falls into the hands of a stranger. Your name and address are plainly displayed on the book’s cover, for it is into your hands that I wish it to be delivered, into your arms that I wish myself to be delivered. How I wish to share with you my most intimate thoughts. Trust that I hold many sweet memories of you in my heart.
    I think too much, I talk too much — have you not told me many times? But there is precious little paper for my yammering. Ah, the miracle of these pages! You will have to wait to find out how the paper came to me along with the implement to write down my adventure. Patience.
    You know everything about me until the day I boarded the troop carrier for Tinian, and after that, nothing. There was no time for letters. Everything happened so fast. So I will