Only, Kit had stopped listening.

Water tumbled from the long lip of the artificial fall onto carefully placed rocks below, watched only by a duck, Kit, and a homeless couple, both of whom had stripped to the waist before washing themselves in its pool. At Kit’s side, Kate O’Mally slept off a hangover that would have felled a man half her age, while Kit gripped her phone in trembling fingers, already thumbing its Off button.

Six months. Late December.

“Oh fuck,” Kit said, vomiting udon noodles, green tea, and alcohol onto the paving at his feet. As Pat’s words finally managed what Yoshi’s death had been unable to achieve, make Kit face what had really happened.

I’m not sure if this is going to reach you. I hope so. There are some things I really should have told you at the time… When she’d written that, the inhabitants of Middle Morton had already burned their famous bonfire. In Tokyo, the kouyou season was over, each day’s news no longer ending with an update on the autumn foliage. And Mary O’Mally, the only person he’d ever really loved, was preparing to kill herself.

Kit tried to remember the date of its postmark, thought about it some more and realised he could. He could also remember the day her card arrived. It was the day he fucked Namiko and the day he went to pray at the Meiji Jingu Shrine. Although it began as the day he woke to discover Yoshi had gone for a walk.

CHAPTER 22 — Flashback to Winter

The dampness in Pirate Mary’s storeroom was made worse by a broken window, which let rain dribble down the inside of one wall. Yoshi said she liked the cold, that everyone from Hokkaido liked the cold.

Kit often wondered if that was true.

The sunken bath had been given a little room of its own near the stairs, but everything else on the third floor was stripped back to bare walls and rafters, so that any footsteps across the floor could be heard clearly in the bar below.

A long bench, an expensive black leather and steel punishment rack, and something that looked like medieval stocks comprised its only furniture. All three had arrived with Yoshi and never been used, at least not during the years that Kit had known her.

A hook in the ceiling, a coil of rope, carefully boiled to silk-like softness, and a twelve-foot length of bamboo, made up the three items that Yoshi still used. The bamboo pole was the most versatile, being utilised in more ways than Kit would have thought possible.

It had been five weeks since Yoshi had even looked at a potter’s wheel. She’d served behind the bar at Pirate Mary’s, talked ceramics to first year students at the Tokyo Design School, and cooked impossibly complicated dishes involving three kinds of eel and two types of noodle. She took to walking in the Meiji gardens to watch crimson leaves fall from the winter trees. When that failed, she tracked Kit down at the bar, where he was mending a beer pump, and told him she wanted tying.

That was the deal. She always asked, Kit wasn’t expected to volunteer. Like most such deals it was unspoken and possibly entirely unconscious.

“You know,” said Yoshi, as she stripped off her yukata. “All I want is an empty mind…” She looked for a second as if she was about to ask, Is that so unreasonable?

She began to relax the moment the ropes began to constrict her body. Her eyes glazed and turned inwards and the tightness around her eyes smoothed away. Kit needed a hit to reach anything approaching that state. Even then, Kit doubted if what he extracted from the dragon came close to the utter serenity Yoshi seemed to find.

“Thank you,” she said, when the final knot was tied.

“Shhh…” Kit touched his finger to her lips.

Yoshi smiled.

Her needs had little to do with masochism and even less to do with sex, at least in any way Kit understood those terms. Edo rope bondage was Yoshi’s way of reaching clarity and if Yoshi lacked clarity…Well, for Yoshi, work was what made life worth living.

She was still smiling as he went back to mending his pump. An hour and a half later, about ten minutes after Kit unbound her, the sound of Yoshi’s wheel could be heard as it spun steadily. An hour after that Kit decided he might as well take himself for a walk.

“Nouveau-san…” The post boy held out one white gloved hand and bowed slightly. The dark blue uniform he wore already looked familiar, though the firm he represented was new. A dozen stories had already run about the fall in standards now that Japan’s post office was privately run. To Kit the service seemed immaculate.

Barely noticing the boy’s bow, Kit took the card and flipped it over, his thoughts already on which of a dozen tasks he needed to do first. And then Kit saw the writing, read Mary’s message before realising he’d even done so, and everything else ceased to matter.

About the baby, wrote Mary. I lied.

Usually it was No Neck who wanted Kit’s help getting drunk. This time round, Mary’s postcard still clutched in one hand, Kit went in search of the other man. Although, in Kit’s defence, he really did think he just needed to talk.

No Neck was doing what he usually did on Tuesday afternoons…handing out highly inaccurate flyers to any tourist stupid enough to think Roppongi was a place worth visiting in daylight.

“Doing okay?” No Neck asked three Swedish backpackers.

Glancing round, they saw a shaven-headed man with a tattooed ring of barbed wire around one naked bicep. In the hot days of summer No Neck wore a tank top to show off his abs. In winter, he added a waistcoat to the mix. If one got close enough, which was not necessarily a good idea, it was possible to see frayed stitches across the back, where a three-part patch had once announced his nomad status within Australia’s Rebel MC.

“Here,” said No Neck, thrusting out one hand.

All new girls, said his latest flyer. Highly trained & highly professional. Which was code for, Have danced before/not sex workers. Both these statements were open to argument, but were included to convince the local police that Bernie’s Bar was clean, tourist friendly, and not going to give them trouble.

“Filthy,” said No Neck to the backpackers. “Absolutely filthy. You guys been to Bangkok?”

All three nodded.

“Infinitely dirtier,” No Neck said. “Show this at the door for a twenty percent reduction.”

They took a flyer each.

“Not quite fun for all the family,” he told an American couple, “but not far off. A bit like burlesque, only the Japanese version…”

Taking a flyer, the man gave it to his wife. A hundred paces down the road, the woman handed the flyer back to her husband, who dumped it into a bin.

“Can’t win them all,” said Kit.

The deal was that No Neck got 500 yen for each tourist who arrived at Bernie’s Bar clutching a flyer. If he got arrested, then someone he met on the street sub-contracted the work, the club had never seen him and certainly hadn’t employed him. It was a convenient fiction.

“Want a drink?”

No Neck glanced from the flyers in his hand towards the entrance to Kaballero Kantina, which happened to be just across the street. Beer money or free beer? If Kit had been feeling less upset it would probably have been funny.

“Come on,” he said. It was enough.

Stuffing the rest of the flyers into his sleeveless jacket, No Neck wrapped one heavy arm around Kit’s shoulders and waded into the traffic.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” said No Neck. “You get your best friend’s girlfriend pregnant, freak out when she tells you, and blame your friend when her psycho ma comes calling?”

Kit nodded.

“What I don’t understand,” No Neck said, taking a pull at his bottle, “is why your ex-friend had nothing to say about this.”