Chapter 2

The muddy bank of the Arakawa smelled of dead fish and wet concrete.

Tomoya came back to life choking. His whole chest heaved, and a gush of brown river water burst out of his mouth and nose. Something heavy was pressing down hard on his breastbone, again and again, in a steady, desperate rhythm. Through stinging, blurred eyes he made out the shape of an older man kneeling over him, both hands locked together on his chest. The man had stopped pressing and was now leaning in, his face only inches away, lips pursed, clearly about to start mouth-to-mouth.

'Oi! Get off!' Tomoya croaked. His throat felt as if it had been scraped with sandpaper. He shoved the man's shoulders with both hands, rolled onto his side and spat a mouthful of gritty water onto the gravel.

He stayed there on his hands and knees for a long moment, shaking all over. It was already warm, the sticky warmth of an August dawn, but he couldn't stop his teeth from chattering. Shock, he supposed. His white shirt was plastered to his body, heavy with river water and streaked with mud. A thin mist hung low over the water and drifted across the riverside baseball pitches, and through it cut the glare of a car's headlights. The car was parked on the dirt track along the top of the embankment, and in its light Tomoya could see a small group of people gathered around him: a couple of early-morning joggers in running gear, an old man walking a shiba dog, and two fishermen with rods still in their hands.

'Thank God,' the man who had been kneeling over him said, sitting back heavily on his heels. 'Thank God. I honestly thought you were gone, lad.'

Tomoya wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling hand and squinted up at him.

The man was in his mid-fifties, wearing a many-pocketed fishing waistcoat over a polo shirt and a battered canvas bucket hat. His glasses were thick and spotted with water. The face underneath, round, creased and kind, was one Tomoya knew. His brain, still sluggish from the water and from whatever had happened under that bridge, groped for the name.

Then it came to him. Jonathan's. The family restaurant on Route 17, where Tomoya had worked the night shift two years ago, grilling hamburg steaks and refilling the drinks bar for taxi drivers and students at three in the morning. This was the manager. The man who had insisted, to the horror of his more traditional staff, that everyone call him by his first name instead of his surname.

'Mr Eichiro?' Tomoya mumbled.

The man's eyes widened behind his glasses. He leaned closer, peering. 'Tomoya? Hisa Tomoya? Is that really you?' He let out a breathless laugh. 'Good grief. What happened? Did you fall off the bridge? You're lucky I come down here early to put my lines out, you know. Another ten minutes and…' He didn't finish the sentence.

Tomoya looked up. Through the mist, the bridge stretched away above them, a long, grey band of steel and concrete. The memory hit him all at once, like a wave knocking him flat: the frozen raindrop, the half-burnt wing, the eyes full of galaxies, the white light exploding inside his head.

He looked down at his hands. They looked the same as always. Scarred knuckles, a callus at the base of each finger from gripping steel bars on the building site. But something felt different. It wasn't in his body. It was in the way the world itself seemed to sit around him, as if a radio had been switched on in another room and he couldn't quite hear it yet.

He would have to be careful. If he said a single word about angels, devils or time standing still, he would end up in a psychiatric ward before lunch.

The joggers were murmuring to each other. One of them had his mobile phone out and was saying something about calling an ambulance. Tomoya caught Eichiro's sleeve and pulled him a little closer.

'I didn't fall, Mr Eichiro,' he said quietly, so that only the older man could hear. He let his voice sound as tired and defeated as he could manage, and he didn't have to try very hard. 'I jumped.'

Eichiro went very still. The relief drained out of his face, and something raw and pained took its place.

'Why?' he whispered. 'Why on earth would you do something like that?'

Tomoya stared at the mud between his hands. 'I'm just tired,' he said. 'Really tired. I've got three jobs and I've still got nothing. Doesn't matter how hard I work, I'm still just a part-timer. No contract, no bonus, nothing. The money's rubbish. I've got no future. I just… got fed up with all of it.'

It was a simple story, the sort of thing anyone would believe from a nineteen-year-old. And a few hours ago, every word of it had been true.

Eichiro's grip tightened on his shoulder. For a moment he didn't say anything at all. Then he turned round and raised his voice to the little crowd.

'It's all right, everyone! He's fine. He's a lad I know, used to work for me. He was down here fishing with me and slipped off the rocks, that's all. Swallowed half the river, but he's breathing.' He waved at the jogger with the phone. 'No need for that, honestly. I'll take him to get checked over myself. Thank you, though. Thank you for stopping.'

The crowd hesitated, then began to drift away, the joggers picking up their pace again, the old man tugging his dog along the path. Tomoya looked at Eichiro in surprise.

'If the ambulance comes, the police come with it,' Eichiro said under his breath. 'And then there'll be forms and questions and some officer writing your name in a notebook. You don't need that right now.' He pointed a stern finger at Tomoya's face. 'But if you start running a temperature, or you can't stop coughing, you're seeing a doctor. Near-drowning can catch up with you hours later. I mean it.'

'Okay,' Tomoya said. 'Thank you.'

'Don't thank me. Come on. You're coming home with me.'

Tomoya didn't argue. Eichiro hauled him to his feet, pulled a fishing towel out of his tackle box, draped it round his shoulders and steered him up the slope towards the car, a silver Toyota Crown that must have been ten years old but was kept immaculately clean.

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Inside, the car smelled of air freshener and tobacco. Eichiro turned the heater up full, even though it was summer, and warm air roared against Tomoya's soaked trousers. He sat in the passenger seat with the towel wrapped around him and stared out of the window as the car bumped along the embankment track and turned onto the road back towards the city.

Neither of them spoke. The only sound was the hum of the engine and the steady click of the indicator as Eichiro waited at a junction.

Tomoya glanced across at him.

I've got to help this boy. He's far too bright to end up like this. I'll ask about the job at the hotel. We've got that opening.

Tomoya jerked his head round. 'Sorry, what did you say?'

Eichiro kept his eyes on the road, his brow creasing. 'Hmm? I didn't say anything, lad. I thought you could do with a bit of quiet, so I've kept my mouth shut.'

Tomoya blinked. 'Oh. Right. Sorry. My ears are still ringing from the water.'

He swallowed hard and turned back to the window, his heart suddenly pounding.

It worked. The thing on the bridge hadn't been lying, and he hadn't been hallucinating. He had just heard exactly what Eichiro was thinking.

He had to be sure. He waited until they stopped at the next red light, then turned and looked directly at the side of Eichiro's face. He focused on it the way he used to focus on an exam paper, shutting out the sound of the engine, the air from the heater, the ache in his chest, everything except the man beside him.

At once, a voice spoke in the centre of his head. It was Eichiro's voice, unmistakably, but with a faint echo around it, as though it were coming from the far end of a long corridor.

I hope that heater's warm enough. He looks like a ghost. I'll make him a coffee when we get in. Speaking of coffee… damn it. What am I going to do about Café Lumina? Tanaka's running the place into the ground. We're losing money every single week and I've no idea how to stop it.

The light turned green. Tomoya looked away, back out of the window, so that Eichiro wouldn't see the faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

The thoughts had come through loud and perfectly clear. He could hear the kindness in them, the real, uncomplicated worry of a decent man. But he'd heard something else, too. A business that was failing. A partner called Tanaka. A problem Eichiro didn't know how to solve.

He'd been awake for barely twenty minutes, and he'd already learned something nobody had told him.

Information was power. And Tomoya, who had been starving for most of his life, suddenly felt very hungry indeed.

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Eichiro lived in Sakura Ward, a few minutes' drive from the river, in a quiet street of older houses with tiled roofs and little gardens full of potted plants. His own house was a traditional single-storey wooden building with a sliding front door, a narrow veranda along one side and a small garden with a persimmon tree. It was roomy, far roomier than anywhere Tomoya had lived since his grandfather died, but it felt very empty. The shoe cupboard in the entrance held only one man's shoes. In the living room, a single cushion sat at the low table.

After a long, scalding shower, Tomoya pulled on a pair of Eichiro's old tracksuit bottoms and a baggy T-shirt advertising a fishing tackle shop in Chiba, and padded into the living room. Eichiro was sitting at the low table with two steaming mugs in front of him.

'It's only instant,' he said, sliding one across. 'Nothing fancy.'

Tomoya sat down cross-legged and wrapped both hands around the mug. He took a sip. It was Nescafé, cheap and slightly bitter, and somehow it was the best thing he had ever tasted. Perhaps it was because he'd nearly died. Perhaps it was because nobody had made him a cup of anything in a very long time.

'Thanks, Mr Eichiro. This is really good.'

Eichiro sighed and rubbed his eyes under his glasses. He had changed out of his fishing gear into a crisp short-sleeved shirt, but he looked as though he hadn't slept. 'Right,' he said gently. 'Talk to me, Tomoya. Properly, this time. Why were you on that bridge?'

Tomoya leant forward and rested his elbows on his knees. He'd been thinking about what to say in the shower, and he knew the best lie was one that was mostly true.

'It's like I said on the riverbank,' he began. 'Everything's just… rubbish at the moment. I've got no family. None. No girlfriend. I haven't got a single person I'd call a proper friend. And I'm skint. Every month I pay the rent, I pay the bills, and then I'm eating cup noodles for three weeks until the next pay day.' He shrugged, staring into his coffee. 'I just couldn't see the point any more. You know? What's the point of getting up every morning just to get shouted at by customers for seven hundred yen an hour?'

As he spoke, he turned his attention onto Eichiro and held it there.

Poor lad. He's been completely on his own since his grandfather passed away. It's heartbreaking. Nineteen years old and carrying all that by himself.

Eichiro's eyes had gone watery. He blinked hard and brushed a knuckle against his cheek. 'I'd no idea it was that bad,' he said. 'I'm sorry, Tomoya. Really, I am.' He shook his head. 'There was a programme on NHK last month, about the working poor. People working full-time hours and still not making enough to live on. I watched it and thought, that's half the young people I've ever employed.' He gave a heavy sigh. 'The whole country talks about the economy recovering. The Nikkei's up, the big companies are making record profits, and nobody's bothered to ask who's actually doing the work.'

Tomoya nodded, keeping his face grateful and a little lost. Inside, he was fascinated. He'd spent his whole life watching adults say one thing and mean another: landlords, teachers, the men from the loan companies with their soft voices and hard eyes. But Eichiro's thoughts matched his words almost exactly. There was nothing hidden underneath. He was simply a kind man.

It was strange to realise how rare that was.

'Now, listen to me,' Eichiro said, sitting up straighter, his voice firming. 'You know I left Jonathan's last year? I went back into hotels. That's where I started, you know, before the restaurant chain poached me. Twenty years in banqueting. Anyway, an old colleague got me back in, and now I'm a manager in food and beverage at the Grand Imperial in Marunouchi.'

Tomoya knew the name. Everyone did. It was one of the grand old hotels around Tokyo Station, a stone's throw from the Imperial Palace gardens and a short walk from the bank headquarters of Ōtemachi and the brokerages of Kabutochō. Presidents and prime ministers stayed there. Company chairmen held their shareholder receptions in its ballrooms.

'I'm going to talk to Personnel today,' Eichiro went on. 'I know for a fact we've got a girl leaving next week. She's expecting a baby. I can get you in. Not part-time. A proper staff position. Monthly salary, bonus twice a year, social insurance, pension, the lot.'

Tomoya let his eyes widen. 'Wait. Seriously? You'd do that for me?'

'Of course I would. You were the best worker I ever had on nights. Never late, never complained, and you were the only one who could do the stock-take without me having to do it again afterwards.' Eichiro hesitated, then went on. 'And to be honest… you should stay here. This house is far too big for one old man. It was my father's place, so there's no mortgage. You wouldn't have to pay rent. Just help me keep it tidy, put the rubbish out on the right days so the neighbourhood association doesn't tell me off, and we'll call it even.'

Tomoya let out a slow breath.

Free rent. A permanent job at one of the most prestigious hotels in Tokyo, surrounded by some of the richest and most powerful men in the country. He couldn't have designed a better starting point if he'd tried.

'I don't know what to say, Mr Eichiro,' he said, and allowed a small wobble into his voice. 'Thank you. Honestly. I won't let you down.'

Eichiro smiled, and the smile reached all the way to his eyes.

He just needs someone to give him a chance, he thought. I'm glad it was me who found him.

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By mid-morning, Eichiro had left for the hotel, and Tomoya didn't waste a minute.

His cheap prepaid mobile had been in his trouser pocket when he went into the river, and it was dead for good. So his first stop was a green NTT payphone outside the convenience store by Kita-Urawa Station. He bought a thousand-yen phone card at the counter, slotted it into the machine and dialled the number for the care home in Kita Ward where Kasumi's mother lived.

'Good morning. My name is Hisa Tomoya,' he said, when the accounts office picked up. 'I've been paying the monthly fees for one of your residents, Mrs Shion. I'm ringing to let you know that I won't be paying them any more. I'm cancelling the standing order at my bank today. From now on, please send all invoices to her daughter, Shion Kasumi. She's the next of kin, and her name's on the admission contract.'

The woman on the other end began to say something about notice periods and talking to the facility director. Tomoya thanked her politely and put the phone down.

He stood there for a moment with his hand still on the receiver.

He thought of Kasumi's mother, sitting in the sunny day room in her cardigan, smiling vaguely at the television, never quite sure who he was when he visited but always pleased to see him anyway. She hadn't done anything to him. None of this was her fault.

But she had a daughter. A daughter who, as of last night, had a rich boyfriend with a black Mercedes and an office in Roppongi Hills. Let him pay.

He pushed the thought away, picked the receiver up again and rang the estate agent who managed Kasumi's student residence. The tenancy was in Kasumi's name; he'd only been paying the rent into the agent's account each month. He told them, just as calmly, that the payments would stop with immediate effect and that they should contact the tenant directly. Then he walked into the bank next door and cancelled both standing orders at the counter.

When he came back out into the white glare of the morning, he felt nothing at all. No triumph, no guilt, no grief. Just a clean, strange emptiness, like a room that has been cleared of furniture. Kasumi wasn't his enemy. She wasn't anything any more. She was a speck in the rear-view mirror, getting smaller.

He had a world to take apart.

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At sixteen, Tomoya had talked the boss of his building subcontractor into paying for his driving licence, so that he could move the site's little flatbed truck around. Two years of reversing it between scaffolding poles and skips had made him a calm, careful driver. Now he went to a Nippon Rent-A-Car branch near Urawa Station, showed his licence, paid for a six-hour hire of a white kei truck, one of those tiny flatbeds that every builder and farmer in Japan seemed to own, and drove it back to his old flat in Minami Ward.

The room smelled of mould, just as it always had. He looked around it and realised there was almost nothing he wanted.

He left the futon, the battered pots, the plywood table and most of his clothes. He took a folder of important papers: his family register extract, his health insurance card, his bank book, his pension booklet. He took his grandfather's old Seiko wristwatch from the drawer. He knelt down, lifted the loose floorboard under the window and took out the biscuit tin where he kept his emergency cash, eighty-three thousand yen in creased notes. Then he went to the little altar in the corner, blew out the candle that had burned down to a stub, and carefully wrapped the three framed photographs in a T-shirt. Those, he would never leave behind.

At the back of the drawer, his fingers brushed against two thick white envelopes. The acceptance letters from the University of Tokyo and Keio. He looked at them for a few seconds, then put them in the folder with the rest.

He left the key on the kitchen counter with a short note for the landlord giving notice and telling him to keep the deposit in place of the month's rent he wouldn't be paying. He walked out and closed the door, and he didn't look back.

He returned the truck, then took the Keihin-Tōhoku Line straight into Tokyo, forty minutes south to Akihabara.

Even on a weekday, the electric town was heaving. Shop fronts blazed with flashing signs for computers, mobile phones, video games and anime figures. Touts in maid costumes handed out flyers for cafés on the corners. Tomoya ignored all of it and went down a side street to one of the second-hand computer shops that crammed the back alleys, its shelves stacked high with old laptops, tangled cables and boxes of cheap memory.

After twenty minutes of poking around, he settled on a used ThinkPad. It was a few years old, one of the last models built before IBM sold its personal computer business to the Chinese firm Lenovo, with a scratched black case and Windows XP. The battery barely lasted an hour and the trackpad stuck, but the shopkeeper swore the network card worked perfectly. It cost thirty-four thousand yen.

That was all Tomoya needed. With an internet connection, he could get at everything that had been locked away from him until now: live share prices on Yahoo! Finance Japan, company news on Nikkei Net, and EDINET, the Financial Services Agency's online database, where every listed company in Japan had to publish its full securities report every year. Its balance sheet, its profit and loss, its debts, its biggest shareholders, its directors and their pay. He had read about EDINET in the newspaper. Now he could finally use it.

On the way back to Saitama, he got off at Ōmiya and went shopping for clothes. At Uniqlo he bought three plain white button-down shirts at 1,990 yen each. At a second-hand clothing shop near the station's east exit, he spent nearly two hours going through the racks. He ignored anything with a logo or a loud colour and came away with two pairs of well-cut black trousers and a pair of black leather Oxford shoes that someone had barely worn, which he polished at the shop counter with a borrowed cloth until they shone.

If he was going to work among the very rich, he needed to look like he belonged in the background of their lives. Clean, neat and completely forgettable.

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That evening he was sitting at the low table in Eichiro's living room with the ThinkPad humming beside him, plugged by a long blue cable into the Yahoo! BB broadband modem that Eichiro had signed up for at a promotion stall outside the station years ago and had never once used. On the screen was the securities report of Doutor Coffee, the country's biggest chain of cheap coffee shops. Tomoya was halfway through its cost breakdown when he heard the front door slide open.

'I'm home!' Eichiro called, stepping out of his shoes in the entrance with a long, weary groan.

'Welcome back, Mr Eichiro.' Tomoya closed the laptop and got to his feet. 'How was work?'

Eichiro came into the living room, dropped his briefcase on the sofa and arched his back until something cracked. 'Busy, busy, as usual. We had a pharmaceutical company's sales conference in the main ballroom, three hundred people, and the chef decided to have a nervous breakdown over the fish.' He sat down heavily. 'But I've got good news. I spoke to Personnel. It's sorted. The thing is, they've actually got two vacancies at the moment, and they said you can choose.'

Tomoya tilted his head. 'Two?'

'Mm.' Eichiro nodded. 'One's on the front desk. Reception. Checking guests in and out, answering the phones, sorting out their taxis, that kind of thing. The other's a waiter in the Executive Lounge on the top floor. That's where the guests on the club floors go for breakfast and evening drinks. Company presidents, foreign bankers, politicians sometimes.' He pulled a face. 'It's a lot more running about, and some of them can be real pigs. They'll click their fingers at you like you're a dog. But the money's better. There's a lounge allowance on top of your basic pay, and the foreign guests are always trying to slip you tips. You're supposed to hand those in, mind, but between you and me, it all ends up in the staff party fund.'

Tomoya didn't even have to think about it. The front desk was pointless. People at reception wanted their room key and wanted to get away; nobody ever sat down at a check-in counter and talked. But the Executive Lounge? That was where the most powerful men in the country would sit for an hour at a time with a glass of whisky, half-relaxed, talking to each other about the things that mattered.

'I'll take the waiter job,' he said at once.

Eichiro raised his eyebrows. 'You sure? Reception's much easier on the feet.'

'I'm sure.' Tomoya smiled and let himself sound relaxed. 'I'm used to carrying plates and dealing with grumpy customers from Jonathan's, remember? I'm good at keeping out of the way and making sure nobody's glass is ever empty.'

Eichiro chuckled. 'Fair enough. You always were. All right, waiter it is. You start the day after tomorrow. Training first, so don't panic. I'll bring your uniform home.'

'Brilliant.' Tomoya let the conversation settle for a few seconds before he dropped the bait. 'Actually, speaking of drinks. Before Jonathan's, when I was sixteen, I did a few months behind the counter at a Doutor. It was only part-time, but I got really into it. How they buy the beans, what everything costs, how they make their money on a hundred-and-eighty-yen cup of coffee. I've been reading their annual report this afternoon, actually, just out of interest.'

Eichiro froze. His hand, reaching for the TV remote, stopped in mid-air.

Tomoya turned his full attention on him.

Coffee. Oh, for heaven's sake. Café Lumina. The roaster wants paying tomorrow and we're short again. Two hundred thousand short, at least. And Tanaka hasn't answered his phone in two days. If the bank sees another payment bounce…

Eichiro let out a long breath and let his hand fall back into his lap. He looked at Tomoya, and in the lamplight his face seemed ten years older.

'Is that right?' he said slowly. 'You know about the coffee business?'

'A bit, yeah.' Tomoya leant against the frame of the sliding door. 'Why? You look stressed. Is everything all right?'

Eichiro rubbed his temples. 'I didn't want to dump my problems on you, lad. Not after the day you've had.' He hesitated. 'But… yes. I've got a little side business. A café called Café Lumina, by the east exit of Ōmiya Station. I opened it about a year ago with an old friend from my hotel days, Tanaka. It was meant to be something nice for my retirement. A bit of extra income.'

'Let me guess,' Tomoya said, his tone sympathetic. 'It's losing money?'

Eichiro gave a hollow laugh. 'Losing money? It's haemorrhaging it. Tanaka runs it day to day. I just put up most of the capital. We set it up as a yūgen kaisha, a small limited company, back before they changed the company law in May. I put in sixty per cent, he put in forty. And he's the representative director, so he deals with the suppliers, the staff, the bank, everything.'

He shook his head.

'And he's making a mess of it. He's buying cheap, stale beans, but charging four hundred and fifty yen a cup, as if we were some smart Italian place in Ginza. There's a Doutor and a Starbucks within a hundred metres of us. Who's going to pay that for bad coffee? Nobody comes in any more. The rent on the unit's three hundred and twenty thousand a month, and every time I ask Tanaka what's going on, he just says it takes time to build a brand.' He sighed. 'I don't know how to fix it without having a huge row with a man I've known for thirty years.'

Tomoya came over and sat down across the table from him. He looked Eichiro straight in the eye and kept his face perfectly calm.

'So he's burning through your money and not answering your calls,' he said. 'Why don't you just get rid of him?'

'It's not that simple.' Eichiro spread his hands. 'He owns forty per cent of the company, Tomoya. I can't just sack him. Under the company rules, anything important, like changing the articles, selling the business or bringing in new money, needs a big majority. With forty per cent, he can block all of it. He's got legal rights.'

'Right. Forty per cent of a shop that's dying,' Tomoya said. His voice was casual, but it had an edge to it now. 'Think about it from his side, Mr Eichiro. How did you pay for the fit-out? The coffee machine, the counter, the deposit on the unit?'

Eichiro frowned. 'My capital, mostly. And a loan from the National Life Finance Corporation, the government lender for small businesses. Five million yen.'

'And whose name is on the personal guarantee for that loan?'

Eichiro opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Tanaka's, he thought. As representative director. The bank insisted.

'Tanaka's,' he said aloud, slowly.

'Then he's not just losing money,' Tomoya said. 'He's terrified. If that shop goes bust, the company's debts don't just disappear. The lender comes after the guarantor. Him, personally. His savings, his house, everything. That's why he isn't answering his phone. He knows it's failing. He's just too proud to admit it to you.'

Eichiro stared at him. 'Where are you going with this?'

Tomoya leant forward, and his eyes gleamed in the lamplight.

'Buy him out,' he said. 'But don't offer him what his forty per cent was worth when you started. It isn't worth that now. It's probably worth less than nothing. Tell him the truth. Tell him the shop's sinking, and that you're not putting in another yen. Tell him that if things don't change by the end of next month, you'll vote to wind the company up.' He paused. 'Let him panic for a day or two. Then offer to take his shares off his hands for a token amount. Ten thousand yen, say. And in exchange, you agree to go to the lender and take over the guarantee yourself, so he walks away clean. He won't be selling you his shares. He'll be buying his way out of a five-million-yen debt. He'll probably thank you for it.'

Eichiro looked at the nineteen-year-old in his old T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, the boy who'd jumped off a bridge not twenty-four hours ago, and who was now sitting at his table talking with the cold, precise calm of a corporate lawyer.

Good God, Eichiro thought, his mind racing. He's right. Tanaka's always been a coward when it comes to money. If he thinks the business is going under with his name on that guarantee, he'll sign anything to get out.

'Tomoya,' he said quietly. 'That's… actually brilliant.' Then his face fell again. 'But if I buy him out, I'm stuck with a failing café all on my own. And another five million on my back. I can't run a hotel restaurant and a coffee shop at the same time.'

Tomoya smiled. It wasn't a warm smile. It was the smile of something that had just spotted its first meal.

'You won't be on your own,' he said softly. 'Get rid of Tanaka. Get a hundred per cent of the company. Then let me have a look at the accounts.' He tapped a finger on the closed laptop. 'I promise you, Mr Eichiro. Give me three months, and you won't be able to get a seat in that place.'