Sublime

They all look at me curiously. Can’t imagine many of them have ever seen an Oriental man running down the pre-dawn streets of Athens before.

After the head of the thunder god vanishes into the ocean, I skirt the ridge above my grandmother’s house. No light is on. An autumn morning, when rain is always ten minutes away. I climb. Waterfalls without names, waxy leaves, berries in jade pools. I climb. Boughs sag, ferns fan, roots trip. I climb. I eat peanuts and oranges, to make sure I can

Thus did the Commendatore—or the Idea that had taken his form—meet his end. Tomohiko Amada had sunk back into his deep sleep. Standing next to the Commendatore’s body, Masahiko’s bloody knife in my right hand, I was the only conscious person left in the room. My labored breathing should have been the only sound. Should have been. But something was

My first body. Not the last. Booby-trapped corpses left in the jungle to rot. Zipped-up bags enclosing teenagers with tags on their toes, waiting for transport home. Villages of the dead that you’d smell before they came into view. And later: called to the morgue by my father’s old colleagues to identify a naked woman on the slab. She had your card

‘From top left,’ began Nagare, tucking the tray under his arm, ‘Miyajima oysters, simmered Kurama-style, miso-glazed baked butterburs with millet cake, bracken and bamboo shoot stew, chargrilled moroko, breast of Kyoto-reared chicken with a wasabi dressing, and vinegared Wakasa mackerel wrapped in pickled Shogoin turnip. In the bottom right you hav

Beckett still puts his big hand on the top of my head when we’re in parking lots like he’s afraid I’m going to run directly into traffic. I’m twenty-six years old.