The bar was in a tall building in the Akasaka District and, from the thirteenth floor, its wide, glass wall gave a panoramic view of Tokyo’s lights in the growing darkness.
Kayda Matsushita’s Junko Shimada business suit was, in the soft light falling from the discrete light fittings, an indeterminate colour.
In a jazz bar in Tokyo she could only order a Cutty Sark on the rocks – she had, like everyone else in the country, read too many Haruki Murakami novels to do anything else. Her old school friend opposite nursed something more flamboyant.
‘You always seemed,’ her friend said, pausing to find the word, ‘so … traditional.’ She picked absently at the bowl of pistachios between them.
‘Yes, my grandfather had his leg blown off by the Americans. They bombed his ship and he lost his leg. And my mother, for all her revolutionary zeal, trained originally as a kimono dyer. So, yes, it all filters down.’
Kayda paused. ‘But this isn’t the medieval world of Murasaki Shikibu.’ She waved her elegant hand indicating the bar, the lights below, the twenty-first century.
‘No, certainly – but there are still monks it seems.’
‘Yes, there are still monks,’ Kayda replied, her face indecipherable.
‘So, it’s what – six months now? How do you feel about it all? Is it really worth it?’
‘I feel – thoroughly amazed.’
Dhiraja
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