Keishin took Hana’s hand and shut his eyes, still uncertain about how a song was supposed to whisk them away. He drew a deep breath and let a familiar melody grow inside him.
The winds of the Sky Sea fell silent. A song took their place. A fire engine’s siren wailed along with it. Keishin’s eyelids flew open. The black-and-white painting of a caged bird he had bought at a flea market a year ago stared back at him, hanging from the brick wall of his loft apartment.
Chapter Twenty-two
Rooms
There were afternoons at the pawnshop when business was slow and Hana would lean her elbows on the counter and imagine the world behind the door. She stitched together the snippets of their clients’ lives, creating a patchwork world of gray office buildings filled with people wishing they were somewhere else, overcrowded trains that were not powered by dewdrops, and brightly colored rooms with rows of pachinko machines that ate money. Not once, in all her daydreams, had she conjured a place with ten-foot-tall windows and an assortment of black-and-white paintings displayed over redbrick walls. Or that she would be sharing it with a man such as Keishin. He had chosen, over and over again, to stay at her side, even when, through any lens, no one would have found fault if he had chosen to walk away. “What is this place?”
“Hana?” Keishin jumped. “You’re here.”
“Where else would I be? We are traveling to the Kyoiku Hakubutsukan, remember?”
“But this is my old apartment. I thought you said that we were going to travel to the museum by riding a song.”
“We are. Listen.” Music wafted from a record player beneath the painting of a caged bird. The player’s needle shifted from side to side, finding a woman’s rich and buttery voice in the depths and shallows of the vinyl record’s grooves. The tale of agirl drifting at sea in the night filled the room. “This is your song. We are inside it. I am glad you chose it. It’s beautiful.”
Keishin kneaded the bridge of his nose, sinking into a worn tan leather couch. “I don’t understand.”
“Why I like your song?”
“I don’t understand how we are traveling inside a song and why we are in my apartment.”
“This music playing is the same song that you shared with the kashu, is it not?”
“It is.”
“And this room is where you often listen to it? Perhaps from the exact spot you are sitting in now?”
“With a glass of wine or whiskey after work.”
“Then that is the reason why we are here. This is where the song lives.” Hana sat down on the other end of the couch. “But this is not your apartment. It just looks like it.”
Keishin stood up and ran his hand along the brick wall. “This isn’t real?”
“It is, but it is not your home. This room was created to ferry us to the museum. It is unique to you and your song. My father’s room was very different.”
“What was his room like?”
“It was the pawnshop’s vault,” Hana said. “He always used the birds’ song when we traveled. The vault and all the choices we kept in it were on his mind wherever we went. Unfortunately, sitting in a vault for a whole evening is not very comfortable.”
“The whole evening?”
“The museum is very far away.” Hana fished out her pack of rice cakes from her bag. “Are you hungry?”
—
The rice cakes’ empty wrappings lay over Keishin’s dark wooden coffee table next to a miniature old-fashioned telescope made of brass.
“May I?” Hana gestured to the telescope.
Keishin nodded. “Sure.”
Hana picked up the telescope and looked through it.
“I’m afraid it doesn’t work,” Keishin said. “It’s just for décor.”
“Nothing we keep around us is only for décor, is it? We select and surround ourselves with objects that speak to or for us, whether we are aware of it or not.” Hana set the telescope down, leaving streaks of dust on her fingertips.
