Diane Joplin’s room at the Hakone Ryokan was spotlessly clean. She’d heard that the Japanese were sticklers for cleanliness but this was ridiculous. Every thirty minutes a sphere-shaped autonomous vacuum cleaner would spring to life and glide silently across the tatami mats. There was no way to switch off the cleaning robot, no buttons anywhere on its smooth plastic body. Diane lay on the room’s comfortable futon and watched the cleaner deftly negotiate her suitcase and the other items she had discarded on the floor. The vacuum finished its run and settled back in its corner, its amber standby light blinking intermittently. She’d taken a leisurely bath in hot water pumped in from the ryokan’s hot springs and considered her options. The De Witte woman had explained to her that she had to wash herself before getting in the bath and she had tried hard to see the logic of that but without much success.
She’d have to go back to Boston at some point and deal with the paperwork that had emerged in the wake of her father’s death. She’d later learned from Fouler the answer to the question she was most afraid to ask. What had happened to her father’s body? A few phone calls later Fouler had come back with the answer. Her father had been cremated according to instructions in his will and his ashes had been forwarded to the legal firm that was handling his affairs, at least until Diane signed the papers.
She wondered what she was going to do with her life. The chasm that had been opened up with her father’s passing seemed to have fractured her sense of purpose. Yet in Japan, she felt like she was beginning to breathe a new life. She liked the culture, its improbable juxtaposition of rigid feudal traditions and the extremes of modernity. She would come back here with her father’s ashes, after taking care of things in America, and she just might join a Japanese course at one of the universities in Tokyo. She couldn’t live in the United States anymore, it held one bad memory too many. First her mother had passed away. Now her father had gone to join her, both violently ripped from her world to another place, another dimension. The voices were mostly silent now, leaving behind a strange calm, a calm reinforced by the serenity of this place, the pristine tatamis, the warm wooden floors, the simple Zen-ness of the interior design and the restrained use of color.
Strangely, Fouler had let her hold on to the console. He seemed to understand that somehow she viewed it as some kind of connection to her father. She had told him about what she had found out in cyberspace about the man who created the console and how she would like to pay him a visit. Somehow, she felt this would bring closure to the whole ordeal and she’d be able to return to America and do what she had to do there. Fouler had thought for a moment, his long jaw tightly set in a grimace. Then he had told her that he too had been planning to pay Akio Inoue a visit at the Tokyo Medical University Hospital in Shinjuku and that he would take her with him in the morning.
Diane Joplin thought about all these things till her eyes grew weary and she turned down the bedside lamp and drifted off to sleep. She dreamt of her room in the ryokan, blanketed in darkness, and the shadows from the leafless trees outside dancing on the wooden floors. She saw light reflected from the moonlight on to the surface of the hot spring bath in the enclosed terrace. And wasn’t that the robot vacuum cleaner doing its rounds, lights blinking in the darkness of her dream?
And then she saw the shadow moving purposefully through the room towards her Samsonite. In the pale moonlight the ruddy face was unmistakable. Those English gentleman features, the sandy hair stark against the green and red check dressing gown and the pale hands opening her suitcase and rummaging about inside. Then Diane realized that she was not dreaming and it dawned on her that Mr. De Witte was looking for something in her suitcase. The console? She thanked the voices for telling her to hide it within the folds of her futon. She watched him searching around the room through half-closed eyes. After a few minutes, he had left, giving her a look that wasn’t at all like the kind welcoming look he had given her when she had stepped out of Fouler’s van.
She would have to tell Fouler in the morning that De Mr. De Witte had snuck into her room in the middle of the night looking for the console. But then, what would that do to the family? It was obvious that Fouler was De Witte’s boss. That much she had gleaned at dinner time when they had all sat cross-legged around that exquisite black lacquer table with etchings that looked like samurai frolicking with elaborately-clad geisha. Her legs had started aching after a few minutes and she had tried to change her posture, stretching one leg out but that had quickly become painful too and all the while Dante De Witte watching her through those beautiful eyes of his, smiling. And she had smiled too and started talking to him. Soon the pain was forgotten and they were talking like teenagers over exquisite slivers of sashimi.
Dante De Witte had asked his mother if they could have some sake and she had looked at his father who had absent-mindedly nodded his approval and continued chatting in hushed tones with Fouler. The two agents and the woman they called Seven were nowhere to be seen.
How could one small black piece of electronics cause so much trouble and be responsible for the death of her father, Kenzo Yamamoto and who knew who else? And now that she thought about it, Mr. De Witte seemed to have been very interested in the console, at one point during dinner asking Diane whether she had used it. She had said no, which was a lie but Mr. De Witte had given her this look like he didn’t believe her. And Fouler had looked on bemused, a pink strip of salmon disappearing into his mouth. He seemed to have the look of someone who knew it all and against her better judgment Diane found that she trusted him.
Tomorrow he was taking her to see this Inoue, the man who had created the console. She had asked Fouler how you could talk to someone in a coma and Fouler had smiled and said that there were ways and she would see tomorrow. Yet, Diane already knew that you could talk to the dead because at the Keio Plaza Hotel she had switched on the console out of sheer boredom and that Kenzo Yamamoto, the dead Yakuza, had spoken to her mumbling stuff about a company called Tokyu Nanotechnology Corp..
Diane thought about Mrs. De Witte, the elegant but always silent Japanese woman who was so totally subservient to her husband, just blending into the background like she was part of the furniture. Diane liked her, she had kind mournful eyes, but she promised herself to never let herself become like that. Life was for living even though she figured that Mrs. De Witte may not always have been as quiet as she was. She noticed that even though the Japanese lady barely ever joined in the dinner conversation that she never missed a beat.
If she told on De Witte, what would this do the family? She decided she’d stay quiet unless she absolutely had to. She liked Dante and his mother too much to undermine their father in that way and whatever he was up to, he did not have the console, she did. Diane Joplin was thinking of Kenzo Yamamoto’s console and its creator Akio Inoue when she drifted off to sleep for the second time.