Once she moved to Ebisu and settled into being a wife, Rina found that her college friends had drifted away to other towns, other cities and lives abroad. Soon her peers from the photography group and the journal Exposure spoke to her less and less as she left their world and her husband’s colleagues filled their places. For a time, Rina enjoyed the entertaining; she enjoyed the business parties, the hosting, and excelled at them. But the more people he brought to the apartment her father had purchased for them, the more he used their crystal decanters and entertained at the ebony dining table that was yet another wedding present, the more Rina began to see why Satō had married her.
When Satō wasn’t entertaining his clients and his bosses, he began to stay out late. Often, he crawled into bed after a night of beer in some izakaya, pulling her to him, his skin reeking of nicotine.
Gradually, as she should have foreseen, the things she loved slipped from her life and the imaginative world Rina had built for herself also began to disappear. She stopped looking at the sky and gauging the light meters. She no longer walked through the streets and saw exposures, angles and new projects at each turn. Day by day, the house overwhelmed her. She began to move more slowly, to think slowly.
After a time, her fingerprints, so clear and sure on the surface of her old Canon T90, faded, leaving only faint smudges of oil. Eventually, these too lifted away, until it was as though they had never been. Her collection of lenses glazed over with dust; the bottles in her darkroom crystallised around the tops, stuck fast with granulated chemicals. The baths of solution dried out until only a thin layer of grime remained, and spiders began to make nests in the corners of her room. Satō moved boxes into her darkroom. He used it as a place to store his files, his skis, a broken tennis racket. More items filled the space: Satō’s clothes, old trainers, unwanted gifts from his friends. When Rina peered around the door and looked in she saw other people, another marriage, another life. Inside her darkroom, like film abandoned to the light, Rina vanished.
Near Kaitarō’s apartment was a series of shops. On Saturdays and Sundays, this small alley became a street market. In the winter, the homeless set up shelters there; their lodgings were neat, uniform boxes of plastic sheeting and tarps, but in the spring they were moved on and new stalls for pirated videos, manga comics and Nintendo games filled the plots they had left.
At the far end of this alley was a family business, a photography shop that opened at 8 a.m. every morning and closed in the evenings at 7 p.m. But sometimes, late at night, the security gate remained up above the entranceway and a light could be seen at the back of the shop as Kaitarō Nakamura made his way home through the alleys behind the train station.
‘Evening, Jinsei,’ Kaitarō murmured, as the old man unlocked the front door of the shop and motioned him inside. ‘Thank you for staying up so late.’
Jinsei smiled and nodded. ‘It’s no problem. Thank you for the photographs of my niece. My sister likes them very much.’
‘It was a pleasure.’
The older man offered him a stool. ‘Have you had dinner? My wife has left some chicken yakitori and beer for us if you’re interested.’
‘That is very kind but I don’t want to keep you from your bed.’
‘Busy day?’ Jinsei asked. ‘Is it interesting, this detective work? An important case?’
‘I think so. Challenging.’
Jinsei laughed. ‘I don’t know how you bear it, looking so closely at other people.’
‘They’re not all bad,’ Kaitarō said as Jinsei pulled open the curtain that separated the shop from the stairs to his apartment.
‘Good night, son.’
‘Good night, sir.’
Kaitarō made his way to the darkroom at the back of the store, checking the warning light out of habit to see if anyone was developing. Inside, he breathed in the familiar alkaline scent of the chemicals and removed his camera from his rucksack, ejecting a single roll of film. Then he flicked on the red safety light and beneath the ruby glow began to organise the equipment around him, turning on the tap in the corner for the water baths.
When the chemicals had been measured and set out, Kaitarō switched off the lights and began to unspool the film in his hands, winding it tightly onto the spiral reel, his fingers fluid and skillful. This was the part that he loved, the intimate, tactile nature of photography. Kaitarō’s eyes swiftly grew accustomed to the dark, the deep, rich blackness of it. He loved its silence. He could easily have outsourced this side of his work, but there were times when he liked to do it himself, when he needed to. There was something about bringing an image into focus and burning it onto a page that linked the man he was before, to who he was now in Tokyo.
With a metallic snip of the scissors he cut the film from the cassette and placed the loaded reel into the portable development tank, soaking it first in water to swell the gelatin. Turning on the red light once more he added the developing agent, agitating the tank from side to side in his hands and counting out the seconds, soothed by the familiar timings and rhythm, before tapping it sharply on the table in front of him to dispel any air bubbles. For a few moments he let the film sit, the tiny images within converting to latent silver. Then he drained the tank and added the stop bath, flooding the room with the scent of vinegar. Finally, he applied the fixer and began to agitate the film once more, thinking of all the photographs he had taken that day and how they would look once developed, when invisible silver halide finally transformed into pure black and white.
Once the film was rinsed and dry, Kaitarō selected a clip of five shots and stretched the images over an enlarger. He could see her now, Rina.
The photos were not evidence of any kind – they would not prove anything in court – but already Kaitarō had extracted his loupe from his pocket and was looking closely at the negatives. He knew which one he would print even through the shocking reverse of dark and light.
As he looked at her, picturing her face as it would soon appear, Kaitarō wondered if the lens had truly captured what he had seen as he watched her in the market: Rina in a dark dress pausing before a fruit stall; Rina suddenly smiling and tossing an apple into the air; Rina looking about her and listening, as though at any moment she might turn towards him.
Kaitarō selected the last shot and placed it in the enlarger, turning the dial until he had the size he wanted and the image was in focus. Then he placed the photographic paper on the baseboard and flicked on the white projector light for eight seconds.
Under the red glow of the safety light once more, Kaitarō lowered the slip of paper into a development bath. There was no image yet, but slowly, slowly, it emerged, darkening from the centre into sharp reality. He could see the curve of her cheek, a wisp of her hair as it blew in the wind. He lifted the paper out and transferred it to the stop solution and fixer, washing it next in a pure bath to ensure that the clear black and white of the image would not fade or yellow with time. Then he stood, swirling the picture beneath the water, looking at Rina through the ripples and waves.