“Oh yeah?” The woman raised an eyebrow.
“Three . . . no, two gold pieces?”
“You said three.”
“All right, you drive a hard bargain, madam. Three it is.”
“Done.”
Gozaemon smiled. He handed the old woman three gold pieces, then knelt down to pick up the cat, who promptly bit him on the hand. But Gozaemon ignored the pain. He swooped down on his real target, the expensive bowl the cat had been drinking from.
“Oi,” the woman said sharply. “What you doing?”
“Oh, just taking the cat’s bowl.”
“Why?”
“The cat will need it.”
“I’ll give you another one.” And she went inside her shop, coming out with a cheap old thing. She wiped it on her apron, leaving a brown smear.
“But surely the cat will miss its own, ah, special bowl.”
“That cat will drink from anything. Besides, you can’t have that bowl. It’s worth 300 gold pieces.”
Gozaemon was shocked, but did his best to hide it.
“Three hundred gold pieces? That’s an awfully expensive bowl to let a cat drink from.”
“Yes, but it helps me sell mangy cats for three gold pieces a pop.”
The old woman gave a sly grin.’
Ohashi let the end of his story fall perfectly. He bowed low to his audience and smiled. He wiped the perspiration from his brow. It had been a flawless rendition of ‘Neko no sara’ – ‘The Cat’s Dish’.
His audience let out a meow.
Ohashi got up from his filthy cushion and walked towards the calico cat. It had been sitting silently all the while. The only audience member today, watching upright with its paws down in front – the same stance as Ohashi’s, when he had performed his tale. He gave the cat a little scratch behind the ear.
‘Now, let’s get you something to eat.’
They left the meeting room of the abandoned capsule hotel and walked through the decaying corridors to where Ohashi slept. It was dark in the old hotel, but Ohashi had been squatting here so long he could navigate through the place with his eyes closed. The cat, similarly, had no problems. The dark also helped hide some of the hotel’s more disagreeable elements: the fungi that grew on the walls, the rotten floorboards, the peeling wallpaper and the ghoulish faces on the old Kirin beer advertisement posters, smiling faces torn to shreds, curling away slowly over time.
It had been the cat that first led Ohashi to the empty hotel ten months ago, when he’d been lost in the city, looking for somewhere to sleep. Ohashi had been shivering under a bridge on a freezing night when the little cat had licked him on the hand, looked him in the eye and then walked on a few paces before stopping to wait for the old man to follow. The hotel had closed many years ago, and no one had bothered with it since. Another victim of the burst bubble economy – too much supply and not enough demand. If he’d told the story to anyone, they wouldn’t have believed him, but the cat had saved his life.
Now, the cat and Ohashi walked through rows of empty capsules: tiny sleeping pods stacked one on top of the other. Each was like a truncated coffin, with a small curtain to pull across at bedtime to cover the entrance. Drunk salarymen of more decadent times would’ve slept here after missing their last trains home. But now the capsules were unused – all except one.
Ohashi ducked inside his capsule to turn on a small battery-powered lamp. Surrounded by empty spaces, he’d decorated the inside of his little pod with old photos, carefully curated to remind him of better times. The photos depicted a younger, slimmer Ohashi, performing rakugo dressed in a stylish kimono, signing autographs, greeting fans, appearing on television, meeting famous people – from the days when he’d been able to fill theatres and hang out with movie stars and artists. From the days before.
He kept his old family photos in a copy of No Longer Human by Dazai Osamu, and rarely opened the book to look at them anymore. He’d never really liked Dazai Osamu much, anyway.
Kneeling on his futon, he reached inside the capsule and pulled out some canned fish from a shopping bag, popped the ring-pull open, and placed it on the floor for the cat. The cat meowed and nibbled at the fish while Ohashi stroked it idly and flicked through a newspaper.
After eating its fill, the cat watched Ohashi holding the newspaper and staring off into thin air. But the cat wanted his attention. It rubbed its head against Ohashi’s baggy sleeves and trousers, marking him with its scent, a gesture Ohashi understood to mean you’re mine. He dug out a salmon onigiri from the same bag, peeled off the wrapper and chomped at it slowly, washing it down with a cold bottle of wheat tea from the same bag.
‘We’ll go out for a wander in a minute, you and I,’ he said to the cat, speaking between mouthfuls. ‘And then I might meet some friends this evening.’
The cat licked its paw and blinked.
Ohashi slipped out quietly through the window into the back alley – the way he always came in and out of the capsule hotel, the same way the cat had first shown him. He never used the front door, so as not to arouse suspicion from the police, or the nosier inhabitants of the neighbourhood. He let the cat out too. It went roaming by itself during the day, on the hunt for better food than Ohashi could provide.
Ohashi also went out during the day to hunt.
He crossed the road, slipped down an alleyway and pulled the blue tarpaulin off the wooden cart he’d painstakingly made from bits of wood and two old bicycle wheels. He pushed it out onto the main streets, and the wheels made the familiar rattle that accompanied him when he went foraging.
He spent his days scouring the city for cans to recycle. He rummaged in small bins placed next to the hundreds of thousands of vending machines dotted throughout the streets of Tokyo. He would empty each bin, and flatten the aluminium cans with a heavy metal cudgel to fit more in his cart. It had become a mechanical routine, punctuated by the rattling wheels of his cart and the clang clang of the cudgel crushing cans against the pavement. When he’d collected as many as he could, he would smash them down even smaller, pack them up in bags and take them to a weighing station in exchange for money.
The streets had been a maze to him when he’d first begun this life. The endless convenience stores and chain restaurants all blended into one long street, which threaded its way in and out of the skyscrapers of Shinjuku, the clothes shops of Harajuku, through the department stores of Ginza, all the way out to the high-rise apartment blocks that lined Tokyo Bay. Walking the city wasn’t something he’d ever had to do in his old life – he’d always taken taxis, or ridden the subway – but now he had to navigate the entire city on foot, and it had taken him a while to get his bearings.
Tokyo gyrated around him at such a high speed these days. The cars whisked by, the trains zoomed overhead, even the people swarming out of the subways zipped past him as he pushed his cart slowly through the streets. In his old life, he’d been one of those fast movers, unafraid of the pace and pulse of Tokyo. But now, he could no longer board the subways or ride the elevators to the tops of skyscrapers to admire the views. Now these skyscrapers served only as landmarks on the horizon to get his orientation. Those beautiful sunset views of the city from high were a fading memory. When he closed his eyes to picture the city these days, he could only see it from street level.