The Other Side of the Closet (Part 3 - FINAL)

This is the third part of the story, part one of which you can read here and part two is here.

The Other Side of the Closet (Part 3)

Ian Martin

Aya hid beneath a wide-brimmed sunhat and peered furtively over the tops of her dark glasses as I approached. She looked down the main road in both directions, then grabbed my arm and dragged me down a side street.

The sun was too bright and my vision blurred with the impact of every footstep I took, but I eventually managed to form words.

“Where are we going?”

“You stink of alcohol enough as it is, so it’s best if you keep your mouth shut,” came her terse reply.

As we threaded our way through the quiet, mostly deserted streets she would occasionally stop and consult a small, hand-drawn map. After a while I realized that we were quite near the apartment. I was just about to ask her again when she stopped outside a house.

“Here, suck on this for a while so she can’t smell your breath.”

Aya handed me a pack of mints. I took a few out and popped them in my mouth as she knocked on the door.

A lady in her 50s answered. Aya took off her hat and glasses, and smiled warmly.

“Hello, my name’s Aya Kitagawa and this is my friend Shunsuke Machida. I spoke to you on the phone earlier.”

“Oh yes, from the university. Please come in.”

We took our shoes off and the lady led us into the living room. She served us tea and Aya made some polite remarks about the weather. The TV was on in the background -- the kind of show where minor celebrities try out various recipes and dutifully pronounce each one delicious -- but all my attention was absorbed by the photograph beside it on the cabinet. A teenage girl in a school uniform smiled shyly at the camera; she was a couple of years younger but there was no question about her identity. It was Chiyo.

The lady noticed me looking and broke off.

“Yes, that’s her. She was in the second grade of high school then. Never really liked having her photo taken.”

She smiled sadly.

After we left, Aya was silent for a while. She felt bad about lying to Chiyo’s mother and so did I. Despite the dated sounding name she used, Chiyo spoke in a modern dialect, and presumably she had some connection to the apartment she was haunting, so over the past couple of weeks Aya had painstakingly searched out information on every suicide in the last ten years within a couple of kilometers of the apartment. Next she had narrowed them down to the most likely cases, then finally to this house. Then after last night's failure, she had called and told the lady that we were students, which I suppose was still kind of true in her case, and that we were collecting research on social problems among Japanese youth.

The mother had been so keen to help. Her husband was always away, working in Hokkaido, and she was obviously desperately lonely with only the TV to keep her company. She had shown us all the photos that she had of her daughter, and told us in loving detail about her life. How she had once eaten washing up detergent as a child, how she had played Cinderella in a class play when she was ten, how she had driven her parents to distraction with her terrible grades in mathematics, and how proud they had been when she had passed her university entrance exams.

What she still didn’t know, and what still tortured her, was why, at the age of nineteen, her daughter had jumped from the top of the main campus building and killed herself.

It was a short, solemn walk to the apartment and as the ugly yellow building appeared round the corner, Aya said goodbye and headed for the station. She didn’t know what to do with what we’d just discovered any more than I did.

Back inside the apartment I sat at the kitchen table, facing the closet, and waited.

Time went by, one hour moved into the next, but nothing happened. Maybe Aya had scared Chiyo off after the showdown last night. No, not Chiyo. I knew her real name now.

Nevertheless, as the sun began to set and the natural light began to dim, the closet door opened slightly and an eye peeked out from behind.

“Wh- what do you want?”

Her voice was small, with a slight tremble.

“I think we need to talk,” I said, adding with what I hoped was a friendly smile, “I’ve been waiting for you all afternoon.”

She moved into the kitchen but didn’t sit down.

“Just because I’m dead, doesn’t mean I don’t have a life,” she replied haughtily.

I wasn’t sure if she was joking so I didn’t laugh, but she’d pricked my curiosity. Of course there was another place she went when she wasn’t here. Keiichi had hinted at that before.

“What’s it like in there?” I gestured at the closet, “You know, on the other side.”

She pulled out a chair and slumped down in it, her face suddenly seeming quite childlike beneath the old-fashioned hairstyle and delicately applied makeup.

“Meetings,” she spat, “Loads of meetings. You don’t have any idea how boring it is.”

A thousand more questions suddenly jumped to mind but I had to force myself to stay focused. I shifted in my chair and fixed my eyes on her.

“Why do you keep coming back here, Saki?”

She looked back at me, stunned, for a few moments. The corner of her mouth flickered, as if she was trying to smile, but her eyes were filled with the most unimaginable sadness. I waited for tears to come, but she fought them back with all her strength.

“Saki...” she tried to laugh, but it came out as an unhappy, strangled, choking sound, “I remember now.”

"The bus was always late," Saki said, her voice unsteady, "I always had to wait."

I remembered the sight of the bright yellow apartment building as I was walking home, and the smell of frying vegetables that sometimes wafted from the kitchen as I was passing the bus stop outside. Saki went to the sideboard and picked up a knife as she continued talking.

"There were always the nicest smells coming from this apartment..."

I eyed the knife warily, but she just went straight to the fridge and started gathering up vegetables and fruit.

"We're supposed to put all this behind us when we go in there," she gestured to the closet, "but those smells, waiting for the bus on a chilly winter's day, were the one thing I couldn't forget."

"So you had to come back."

She nodded and started chopping the grapes and celery.

Saki talked about the other side only in the vaguest terms because she herself didn't really understand it. The dead do all their thinking and planning in terms longer than we can imagine, but she still had one foot in the world of the living and whatever I asked her about, she would always eventually turn the topic back to food.

With the knife and the vegetables in her hands, she had regained a little of her composure and I started to see why Keiichi found comfort in her. Saki's mother had vividly described what a gentle child she had been, and listening to her talk I could see what her mother had meant.

I asked what she was going to do now. She looked at the half-finished salad.

"Now you've made me remember, it doesn't feel the same coming back here. There are too many things I can't do: I can't even eat this stupid salad."

Saki put down the knife and stood up.

"Are you going to be alright?" I asked.

"I'll get used to it," she replied, and walked back towards the closet.

As she turned her back, I thought of her mother again and the question that had been nagging at my mind came blurting out of my mouth.

"Why did you kill yourself?"

Saki gave this a moment's thought and then replied, sadly, "It seemed so important at the time."

She opened the closet door and left.

A bit before midnight Keiichi came home. He saw the unfinished salad, saw me still sitting at the kitchen table, and went into his room without speaking.

A little while afterwards, I went back my own room. As I lay on my futon, staring at the ceiling, my phone buzzed. A message from Keiichi.

-She's gone, hasn't she?

I thought about how I could explain everything using just the tiny screen of my phone, but there was no way.

-Yes.

And that was that.

The next couple of months were pretty bleak. For a few days Keiichi and I just went about our lives, barely speaking, and then one day he too was gone.

A few more days and all his things followed him. I heard from a friend that he'd gone back to his family's place in Sendai, leaving Aya and I behind like a bad memory. The estate agents panicked a bit and even knocked another few thousand off the rent to persuade me to stay. Paying it all on my own was still difficult though, so I found myself working just a little bit harder and looking into full-time job vacancies just a bit more seriously. I was surprised to find that the harder I worked, the more I found myself enjoying it, but something still didn't feel right. I'd expected to feel guilty for betraying Keiichi, but without knowing why, whenever I thought of him I just found myself getting angry.

One day a paycheck from a big advertising job came through. I went to a club to celebrate and got talking to a girl called Yuka. I told her that I often got mixed up between Yukas, Yukis and Yukos; she laughed and said that was cute.

We exchanged phone numbers and left seperately. As I walked home the next morning I wondered whether she'd have gone home with me if I'd asked, but what was the point? I hadn't asked.

The old man in the first floor apartment was there as usual. He didn't say anything this time. Just looked at me and shook his head as if to say, "Stupid boy."

And I was stupid, I realised. I was angry at Keiichi because he'd taken the easy option. The option of doing what was comfortable and what was easy. The option of disengaging from his life. He'd behaved like me, wasting his life, and so he was stupid too. He and I had always been too similar, and I wanted to tell someone that I wasn't going to make that mistake anymore.

I picked up my phone and after a couple of rings Aya's voice answered.

"Shunsuke? What are you doing up at this time? That's not like you."

Her usual edge of sarcasm was there, but she seemed happy to hear from me. It was always like that with her. She could be sharp, even cruel sometimes, but when she was happy you could always tell. You just had to work a bit.

"Listen, there's something I want to tell you..."

End.

The Other Side of the Closet (PART 2)

This is the second part of the story, part one of which you can read here.

The Other Side of the Closet (Part 2)

Ian Martin

Getting rid of the ghost, of course, wasn't straightforward. While Aya flung herself into research about exorcism, Keiichi started stocking up the fridge with all kinds of foodstuffs that neither he nor I would have ever known how to cook. After a few days we started seeing signs of the ghost again.

  It started with salads. Simple Caesar salad gave way to taramosalata with sliced cucumber and carrots, and then more complex cooked dishes such as bouillabaisse or ricotta cheese cannelloni started to appear. She seemed to prefer Mediterranean cuisine. For a week or so she worked like this, carefully avoiding us when we were at home, and going on her culinary excursions while we were out. We'd come home and find them left on the sideboard, and Keiichi soon got into the habit of taking them to work with him for lunch. Then, one night we met her again.

From the street I could smell gently simmering vegetables and spices drifting from the open kitchen window and when I entered the apartment, sure enough I found her there, cooking and talking to Keiichi. She was wearing the same old-fashioned kimono, and seemed to be making another pasta dish. Her hairstyle was also quite dated, like something from the late Meiji period, but she spoke like a normal, modern Japanese girl. As she heard me come in, she suddenly stopped speaking and spun round. There was a moment where it looked like she might run back into the closet, but Keiichi quickly spoke up.

"It's okay," he reassured her, before turning to me, "She's not doing any harm."

She continued looking at me, not with Aya's cold glare but with something far more fragile and vulnerable. I didn't know what to say so I just let out an annoyed grunt and stomped off into my room. I put on some music so that I wouldn't have to listen to whatever idiotic conversation they were having. It was typical of Keiichi to find a ghost in our apartment and immediately start making friends with her. No, not "her", "it", I corrected myself. The ghost was an "it".

Later that evening my phone buzzed and there was a message from Keiichi asking if he could come in. I opened the door and he was there in the kitchen, alone with two plates of spaghetti in arrabiata sauce on the table in front of him.

"Just knock if you want to come in." I told him, and then went back to slumping grumpily on my futon.

He offered me one of the plates but I refused, so he put it on the floor near my pillow and started tucking into his own food.

"She says they call her Chiyo over on the other side, but she doesn't think that's her real name," he explained. "The clothes, the hair, the name, they're not really hers. Apparently the dead are pretty conservative when it comes to fashion."

"Why are you telling me this?" I snapped back. I couldn't see how he had accepted this creature, this thing, so easily into our lives.

"Don't you think that's kind of sad though? She doesn't remember anything about her life, not even her real name. She doesn't even know how she died."

I could see what he was doing. He was trying to engage my sympathy. No longer just an "it", the ghost now had a name and feelings. I wasn't going to let myself get sucked into this, and I had to somehow make Keiichi understand how stupid he was being.

"Come on, Keiichi, think about this for a moment. What about Aya? Even she agrees with me!"

He looked away from me when I said this and his voice dropped, losing confidence.

"I don't know what Aya thinks. I never really know."

Aya let her feelings known clearly enough the next evening when she showed up at our apartment with a priest in tow.

"This is Father Moran. He has a lot of experience with exorcisms," she explained.

Keiichi looked at them both glumly. Father Moran was an older middle-aged white man, wearing a black shirt and white priest’s collar under a grey sweater. When Aya had said she was researching exorcism, my image had been of a Buddhist monk burning incense, reading religious texts and noisily shaking his staff. Looking at Father Moran, however, a thought struck me and I couldn’t hold back a smile.

Aya had a very strict sense of style and tended to view all things European as inherently superior to their Japanese equivalent. To her, Father Moran had obviously seemed the most chic way of dealing with the ghost. I grinned at him and tried out a few creaky greetings in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and lastly German, but he replied in Japanese.

"I intend to get directly to the point. Ghosts do not belong among us. They linger here for many reasons, but it all comes down to one thing:” he stated, with businesslike certainty, “an unwillingness to let go of this world and move on to the next.”

The ceremony itself was pretty similar to how I’d imagined a Buddhist one would be. There was no incense but Father Moran gave each of us a candle to hold. He lit them one by one and Keiichi glared at him as the priest reached into his pocket and used the last candle to light a cigarette. He took a few puffs and started to read from a book that could have been the Bible or could have been Harry Potter for all I could tell.

Time went by. None of us moved and there was no sound except for Father Moran’s monotone voice, reciting the words from his book.

After a while there was a noise, then movement. The closet door creaked open a crack, then a little more. Slowly fingers, then a lock of hair, then an eye ppoked round the corner. The priest kept on speaking, quickening the pace of his words. Chiyo’s head was now peering around the edge of the closet door, clearly confused about what was going on.

She stepped out into the kitchen, a look of panic in her eyes. Something seemed to be happening to her, but her body kept on moving towards the centre of the kitchen.

“Come on, let’s stop this,” exclaimed Keiichi. “She’s obviously terrified!”

Father Moran upped the pace of his chanting once more. Chiyo dropped to her knees, clasped her hands over her ears and screamed.

All the lights in the room shattered.

In the darkness, the body of the ghost was tinged with a pale blue glow. She continued to scream, clutching at her face and shaking her head furiously from side to side.

The priest, Father Moran, continued reading from his book. I stole a glance at him and could see small beads of sweat collecting on his brow. In my hands the candle I was holding flickered erratically.

“That’s enough! I can’t do this!” shouted Keiichi, throwing down his candle, “Look at what this is doing to her. It isn’t right!”

My candle flickered again and a saucepan suddenly flew across the kitchen, clattering into the wall on the other side of the room. Then more pieces of kitchenware followed: a frying pan, a wooden spoon, a pot, a coffee mug, a bowl. A plate hurtled towards us and struck Father Moran, shattering against his head and knocking him to the floor.

Keiichi continued pleading, this time at the ghost, Chiyo, begging her to stop. Pots and plates continued hurtling around the room though, apparently at random. Chiyo looked up at Keiichi, her face blank, uncomprehending. She cast her glance across me and then her eyes met Aya's.

Aya returned Chiyo's gaze unflinchingly and the two of them remained locked in that position. I’d been on the receiving end of some of Aya’s stares in the past so I could sympathise with what Chiyo must be going through. Sure enough, the kitchenware gradually stopped moving. Keiichi and I watched in silence as Chiyo started to tremble slightly and what looked like tears began to well in her eyes.

Suddenly, Chiyo stamped her foot in anger and frustration, then ran back through the closet door.

Aya helped Father Moran back up, apologising and asking if he needed anything for his head. He said he was fine but would be grateful if he could borrow her lighter. Keiichi ignored them as they left and Aya threw a vicious glance at the back of his head before slamming the door shut behind her.

Keiichi went to the closet and swung it open. There was nothing inside of course, except for the things we were storing there. He took out the dustpan and brush and started sweeping up the broken glass of the shattered light bulbs. After a while he flung down the dustpan.

“Shunsuke, let’s get a drink.”

An old college friend of ours, Takao, was deejaying at a cafe near Akasaka-Mitsuke that night. I still did the occasional job designing flyers for him so I was able to get us on the guest list. At first Keiichi grumbled about just wanting to go to a nearby izakaya, but once we got inside he started to lighten up.

“It’s like being back at university, isn’t it?” Keiichi said as we entered the room. He was right. We'd fallen in with an arty crowd pretty early on and had spent a lot of time at places like this, listening to bossa nova or 1960s French pop, and watching stylishly dressed girls doing performance art. I looked around. Sure enough, in the corner of the room there were two girls doing finger painting on a huge piece of board. It looked like a picture of two giraffes kissing, but it didn't matter what it was; the girls seemed to be enjoying themselves.

"What's going on with you and that ghost?" I asked as I returned with our beers. Keiichi sighed.

"You think I'm crazy for getting so attached to Chiyo, right? I know that."

It had been at a party like this that we'd met Aya for the first time. She was majoring in French and she'd translated the lyrics of Francoise Hardy songs for us.

"I think you're crazy for making Aya so angry."

"Come on, Shunsuke, you hate Aya."

"Only 'cos she hates me, and that's not the point. She's your girlfriend."

Keiichi fell silent for a moment and tapped his fingers on the table. He took a small sip of his beer, and then a larger one. Eventually he spoke up.

"You don't know what it's like. You just go through life at your own pace and do whatever you please, but I just get work pile up on top of more work."

"I understa..." I started to say, but he cut me off, raising his voice slightly.

"And 'cos I'm the new boy, I get to be the butt of all the jokes when we're drinking with clients. They made me drink beer out of a shoe."

I started to laugh.

"Shut up, Shunsuke. Aya just makes it all worse. She's always there at the back of my mind, expecting me to work myself to death, pushing me to do more of everything. I can't deal with it anymore!"

We drank in silence for a while after that and I realised that Keiichi really didn't understand Aya at all. Sure, she hated me for being lazy and unreliable, but it wasn't because of work. She was studying for her masters at the moment, as well as juggling two jobs and practicing for her golf tournaments. What Aya cared about was making sure no moment in her life was wasted, and yet here was Keiichi thinking about leaving her for a dead girl.

After a while Keiichi took a taxi home, muttering something about work the next day. I stayed until morning and staggered home, drunk, early the next day. The old man on the first floor was sitting in his window, listening to the radio as usual. He cast a suspicious glare at me.

"Any more noise like last night and I'll call the police, understand?"

I was woken up by my phone just after midday, with my hangover raging. My head pounding and my mouth feeling like a cat had died in it while I was asleep, I answered.

"Shunsuke, get up and meet me outside Doutor in twenty minutes."

Aya hung up.

To be continued...

The Other Side of the Closet (PART 1)

I recently rediscovered this old short story I wrote a couple of years ago and since it seems unlikely that anyone is ever going to publish it and since I so rarely update this blog, I decided to kill two birds with one stone, knocked up a few illustrations and decided to dump it on here. There will be three parts in total and I'll post each of the next two episodes up when I have time to draw some suitable pictures to accompany them. Anyway, here's the first bit.

The Other Side of the Closet

Ian Martin

"They must be crazy!" Keiichi cried, grinning, as we stepped out of the stairwell into the bright, clear spring sunshine.

I nodded solemnly and tried to stop myself from smiling.

"He talked so long I thought he was never going to stop, eh Shunsuke!"

Keiichi looked as if he was about to start dancing as he launched into an imitation of the old man's voice.

"...really the best value. Remember the location, right by the bus stop and only five minutes from Yotsuya Station..."

Keiichi had always been good at imitations and he had the estate agent's voice down perfectly; the slow, precise enunciation of each word that made him sound like an NHK Radio education broadcast, and the slightly weary hint of desperation that was all the estate agent's own.

"...all the space you could need. Two bedrooms, large dining room and kitchen combo, lots of closet space, even a spare one in the kitchen..."

The old man had seemed very proud of the extra closet and had spent a good while longer than necessary talking us through all the uses we could put it to.

In fact, the whole meeting had been quite frustrating. We'd sat there for more than an hour, nodding solemnly and politely, trying not to laugh, trying not to cry out, trying not to scream with delight.

"Sixty thousand yen! They're out of their minds!"

We high-fived, Keiichi climbed a lamp post to celebrate, and I grabbed and kissed a passing businessman, then waved goodbye to him as he shook me off and hurried onwards.

The apartment was indeed in a beautiful location, on the corner of two tree-lined roads. It was on the second floor with the kitchen window overlooking the street. We'd looked around twice: once to see if we liked it and then a second time so that Keiichi's girlfriend, Aya, could give it her seal of approval. Even she, with her notoriously exacting taste, had only noted two problems.

Firstly, she was not impressed by the old man who seemed to constantly sit in the window of the first floor apartment with the radio tuned to J-Wave. Apparently he had given her a strange look as she was inspecting the building's structure and she thought he might be a pervert. Secondly, the building had been painted bright yellow.

Fortunately, neither of these problems had been enough for her to veto the apartment and within three days of signing the contract, Keiichi and I had moved in.

The two of us had been friends since high school and we'd somehow entered university together as well: him studying sociology and me doing art and design. I always teased him, saying that he'd followed me, but thinking back it was just as likely to have been the other way round. The truth of it was that we often just ended up making the same decisions, and that was probably why we were friends.

After we graduated, however, things began to change almost immediately. A couple of weeks after moving into the new apartment Keiichi started his new job at an advertising company, working late into the night and leaving me alone in the apartment for most of the day. I settled into a habit of sleeping into the afternoon and working on my occasional illustration jobs at night. I was the first to admit that it wasn't the best way to make a living, but it brought in enough money to live, especially with the rent being so cheap.

At the end of the month I got some money from a women's magazine that I'd done some sketches for and decided to celebrate. When there was still no sign of Keiichi by 10:00 p.m., I pulled on my jacket and headed out alone.

Shibuya is the worst place in Tokyo, from the suffocating crush of people as you exit the station to the smell of the sewers that rises up from beneath the pavement. I navigated my way through the crowds, past 109, up the hill and then through a network of seedy streets that led to the club I was heading for.

The lower floor was thick with people shuffling about, dancing self-consciously. No one was talking because the music was too loud, so I moved on to the upstairs bar. I talked to a few girls, casually mentioning that I worked for fashion magazines – a half-truth, admittedly, but not an outright lie – and eventually got talking to a cute girl with dyed brown hair and big eyes. Her name was Yuko or Yuka, or something like that.

She was working in a boutique and had done some modelling, she said, which I took with a pinch of salt. We liked a lot of the same music and movies though, and after we'd both drunk enough to let our inhibitions drop, we took a taxi together back to my place.

Inside I saw Keiichi's shoes and coat on the floor. No matter how serious he became about his job, he was still messy at home. The two of us tiptoed across the kitchen, the girl giggling at the sound of fitful snoring coming from behind Keiichi's door, and entered my room. I slid the door shut and she let me kiss her, which is when we heard the sound from the kitchen.

The harsh cymbal-crash of a saucepan hitting the kitchen floor jolted us from our kiss. At first I thought a local cat might have got into the apartment, but the sound was quickly followed by a human-sounding gasp of annoyance. Next came further sounds of kitchenware being rearranged.

The girl looked at me, her already wide eyes growing to the size of saucers.

"Your roommate?" she whispered.

Keiichi had been sound asleep when we had come back to the apartment, but the sound of his snoring had stopped now. I was slowly edging towards the door of my room when a sharp buzzing sound came from behind me. I swung round to see my mobile phone scampering around over the tatami floor and quickly snatched it up. It was a message from Keiichi:

-Is that you in the kitchen?

I texted him back that it wasn't and asked if it could be Aya. He didn't reply for a while. Meanwhile the girl was tugging at my arm.

"What's that smell?"

She was right. It smelled like frying vegetables. I edged closer to the door again. I could see a crack of light around the doorframe and decided to try edging it open slightly. Just then my phone went again.

-It's not Aya. Shall we both go out there at once?

I agreed.

I took a couple of deep breaths, got my phone ready and called Keiichi's number. It rang once, then twice; my heart was beating faster. The third ring was the signal and we both threw open the doors to our rooms.

In the kitchen stood a girl in her late teens or early twenties, wearing an old-fashioned looking kimono. Behind her were two gently simmering pots and a frying pan full of vegetables. She spun round in surprise. She stared at Keiichi, then me, then back to Keiichi, then back to me. She dropped the spatula and spoon that she was holding and ran through the door of the kitchen closet.

"Did you see that?" Keiichi sounded shocked, "You saw that too, right?"

I had seen it too. She had run through the door to the closet.

The girl I'd brought home with me had also clearly seen it because she was pulling on her jacket and edging fearfully towards the front door.

"Hey, where are you going?" I called after her, struggling to remember her name, "Just hold on a minute Yuka!"

She finished pulling on her boots, threw me a glance over her shoulder, said, "My name's Yuki," and left.

"So what do we do now?"

I opened the closet and looked around inside. It was empty apart from a bag of rice, a dustpan and brush, and some bottles of household cleaner. Keiichi didn't reply for a while.

"We both saw it. It was a ghost, right? There's no doubt about it, Keiichi: that was a ghost."

I turned back round. Keiichi was sitting at the kitchen table with the frying pan in front of him, deep in thought, eating the fried vegetables.

"Is it safe to eat that? You know, ghost food?"

He nodded, "These are the peppers and aubergine I bought the other day."

I sat down opposite him.

"Seriously though, what do we do now? How do we get rid of it?"

"These are good. You should try some, come on."

"I don't want to try some," I shouted, "I want that ghost gone and Yuka or Yuki or Yuko or whoever she is back in my be..."

I cut myself short as I heard the front door open again. I thought for one horrible moment that Yuki had come back and heard me, but it was worse. It was Aya.

"I get a text in the middle of the night asking me if I'm in your kitchen," she announced wearily, "I rush over here in a panic half expecting to find your dead bodies hanging out of the windows, and what crisis do I find? A ghost has scared off three of Shunsuke's girlfriends. Life is just a never-ending circus attraction with you guys, isn't it? Oh, and Keiichi, be a darling and go pay the taxi driver please."

Keiichi shuffled back into his room to fish out his wallet before heading outside. Aya sat down at the kitchen table, crossed her legs, folded her arms and glared at me in silence. I knew she was quietly blaming me for whatever had happened. In Aya’s world any time something happened to Keiichi, it was always my fault somewhere along the line. When we were students if he missed a class because of a hangover, it was because I was leading him astray. If he was having money problems, it was my fault for setting a bad example. Aya was an intelligent, organized woman with a sharp tongue, and it was hard work being disliked by her. I rode out her silence as best I could until Keiichi returned.

He explained what had happened with the ghost and Aya patiently took in everything he said. He demonstrated the empty closet and proffered the fried vegetables as evidence. Finally he sat himself down again with a shrug and a nervous grin. “So I guess we know why the place was so cheap now. Crazy night, huh?”

“Yes,” I butted in, “but how are we going to get rid of it?”

Keiichi shifted uncomfortably, “Well, let’s think about this. I mean, so far all she’s done is cook...”

“So what? It’s a ghost!” There was something frustrating about Keiichi’s laid-back attitude, and I could feel myself raising my voice. “Surely it must have some other place to go. What about all the other dead people? Why can’t it hang out with them instead of hassling us in the middle of the night?”

A look of annoyance flashed across Keiichi’s face.

“Just because she scared off that precious little girl whose name you can’t even remember, I don’t see why I should...”

I was ready to come back at him when Aya cleared her throat and we both stopped. She reached into her bag for a cigarette and lit it up, looking from one of us to the other. We both looked back at her, our judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one, and waited for the verdict.

She took out her cigarette, wearily blew smoke, and said four words that I never thought I’d hear from her lips.

“I agree with Shunsuke.”

To be continued...