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The first four rules of effective espionage are simple and Nakime writes them down using some cobalamin pills dissolved in vinegar as a homemade invisible ink, meaning they will only appear if viewed under ultraviolet light and any busybody interlopers will otherwise simply wonder why the Vice Principal keeps a blank if slightly sticky notepaper in her skirt pocket:
One: Assume nothing
Two: Trust your instincts
Three: Vary your patterns of behavior while keeping within your cover story
Four: Have fun and be yourself
This fourth rule is simply guesswork, for now, but it will likely be revealed to Nakime in the next chapter of a paperback spy novel she borrowed last week from the Kimetsu Town Public Library. She dedicates ten minutes every morning to rehearsals.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She rinses off the prosthetic right eye she wears and winks while rolling the eye back in its socket. Perhaps a patch like a pirate’s would enhance her mystique. “I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about, Principal Amane.”
Each night over her canned gyudon dinners Nakime has also been watching reruns of that old black-and-white show The Samurai to jot down hypotheticals: in this or that situation, what would a brave clever detective like Akikusa Shintaro do? Then she thinks up an answer. She creates flashcards to teach herself both the Japanese and international radiotelephony spelling alphabets, deciding they will be useful for instances wherein she needs to call the corporate office from school to give a report — today for lunch the cafeteria will be serving our physical education teacher’s favorite food; this means it is his weakness; the dish is Sierra Alpha Lima Mike Oscar November simmered with Delta Alpha India Kilo Oscar November — and she acquires a thumbnail-sized voice recorder she conceals down the meager frontage of her blouses. This is the place where Nakime guesses a professional lady superspy would carry it but also where it tends to pick up feedback noises like the scratchy lace on her camisole or the notes of her biwa as she plays it, arpeggios and pitch sequences and the opening riffs from Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation" or Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” if all else fails as a distraction. The biwa is a secondhand item she found at a rummage sale years ago for a mere six thousand yen because at the time it had been missing a fret, two pegs, a silk string and the gilding around its crescent-moon rosettes, all of which Nakime improvised from spare parts or hobby shop materials in fixing it, while a more recent crack through the biwa’s paulownia-wood body has been mended using metal clamps and some resin glue. The only things she had not lied about to Chairman Ubuyashiki during her interview with him were her hobbies and her name.
“Should I intercept the letters our chemistry teacher writes to the pizza delivery girl? They may contain important information. I could make friends with the messenger-crows by feeding them toasted corn.” Nakime strikes her biwa’s first string, listens, adjusts a lateral peg and plays the string again. She nods. “Understood. Thank you. Is Mr. Muzan’s lucky number twelve, this week, or six?”
Less successful thus far have been her attempts at learning kana code for transmitting secret messages, after finding International Morse code too difficult. She practices mostly by watching videos on YouTube and also by having Kaigaku lock her into the corporate office’s janitorial closet so she can decipher messages he taps against its door. Only one other person on Mr. Muzan’s staff actually knows anything about codes or keyed communications, however, and on the afternoon of October 31st shortly after four o’clock — the commotion of water balloon-fighting out in the schoolyard finally stopped a half-hour ago — Nakime is in her office when she hears a knocking at its door. It is an intentional alteration of slower, then quicker beats, methodical and emphatic and as punctilious as the motion an iaido master uses to imitate flicking an enemy’s blood off his sword.
Are – you – alone?
Nakime pauses. With her knuckles she taps out an answer against the desk.
Yes. Her fist stops. Hello – Secretary.
The door opens. Secretary Kokushibo bows his way through it.
He holds a white clamshell takeout container with a spot of grease staining its bottom. He seems to have left his shoes behind in the high school’s getabako but has evidently not been able to find any slippers that fit his feet, since he has walked down the hall to Nakime’s first-floor office wearing his socks. They are black and purple in a hexagonal pattern.
“Miss Otogawa,” he says, as a greeting. “Do you eat katsu curry?”
“Only on occasion.”
“Would this be considered an occasion?”
Nakime puts aside the student activity application she is reading. All over his black suit coat, his black tie and black pants there is a spattering dampness, as if someone has spritzed him at point-blank range with a garden hose, whereas the paper meal voucher sticking out from his breast pocket is entirely dry. A single scrap of what looks like an exploded orange water balloon is caught in his hair.
“I don’t believe so,” she says.
“I see.” He cracks open the takeout container. A steamy plume flavored with the scents of panko-crusted fried chicken and a rich curry roux billows up to fog his sunglasses. “May I?”
As he asks this question Kokushibo comes over to stand beside a blue plastic chair placed in front of Nakime’s desk. The chair is designed to hold elementary school students and for occupational safety reasons Nakime has arranged it above a hole Inosuke Hashbira recently tunneled up into her office in his efforts to evade Giyu Tomioka. The madcap little creature had popped his masked head out from this hole, stared at Nakime, then gone away again digging scuffle-scuffle beneath the concrete subfloor; turn left, not right, please, she spoke into the tunnel after him, or you’ll get yourself caught between the water pipes. Punched through her office’s outer wall — currently concealed behind a poster that reads The Kimetsu Academy Philosophy: Respect Every Student’s Individuality Equally — there is a second, smaller hole, made yesterday by the tanegashima musket with which Kyojuro Rengoku was giving his high school first-years an outdoor lesson about the Battle of Nagashino and touched the gun’s lighted match-cord to its powder-pan before getting it properly aimed. On Nakime’s windowsill sits a pink-topped moon cactus cultivated by Kanae Kocho’s botany students, placed beside the corked jar where she files parental complaints received about Sanemi Shinazugawa’s classroom management methods or Obanai Iguro’s employment of a punishment first used by the Persians and Carthaginians before the Roman Empire adopted it with such effective and eternal consequences. A top drawer in her desk contains contraband such as candy, party whistles, pocket knives, and any mortar-shell fireworks she has managed to confiscate from Tengen Uzui, whose pet mice regularly attempt to pick the drawer’s lock, and when Mr. Muzan at last takes control of this three-ring-circus establishment Nakime has decided she will advocate for why its teachers ought to keep their jobs.
They are clowns, she will report, but they are devoted. There is nothing they would not do for their students. Surely some use can be made from that.
You can get rid of that snow-witch Amane whenever it pleases you, though. I won't object.
Or she will attempt to tell Mr. Muzan something of this sort, anyway. The scenarios that take place within Nakime’s imagination always seem to occur in miniature, like the elaborate scenes constructed inside a child’s dollhouse or a toy castle, so their particular details are often difficult to guess. Whenever she used to spread her long black hair around her shoulders as a girl and make-believe she was the daughter of a queen Nakime could never decide just what kind of queen she would choose for a mother.
“Please take a seat, Secretary,” Nakime says. Addressing him as “Kokushibo” in private conversation is still a bit too silly for her to countenance: the characters for black, and death, the character for eyes. It would be similar to calling a colleague Mr. Rambo or Assistant Director Ghostface. “I don’t mind.”
“Thank you.”
With a sovereign austerity Secretary Black Death folds his way down onto the tiny blue chair. Its steel screws creak beneath his weight. The disposable chopsticks in his pocket are snapped apart after being shucked from their paper wrapper and he twists off his damp suit jacket to swing it over the chair’s back, then he sits for a contemplative moment in his white shirtsleeves and those black suspenders he wears in place of a belt because a belt could, presumably, be more readily used for strangulation purposes by an assassin. The rumors about him once killing a man with his bare hands are almost certainly fictitious, or at least exaggerated, whereas Nakime figures the stories about his master swordsmanship and his prior service with the United States Special Forces are mildly more credible. It would somewhat explain why he is familiar with a coded telecommunications method most often used nowadays for radio navigation by helicopter aviators, as well as why Kaigaku once lost fifteen hundred yen betting him he could not toss an apple in the air and cut it into six pieces before it hit the ground. As the emergency contact within his confidential personal files he has listed a man named Yoriichi Tsugikuni and indicated additionally that this man is his twin brother.
Nakime stares at the takeout container in his hand. Beneath the chicken and the curry she can also discern the strong commingled scents of ginger, honey, garam masala, and maybe a signature quirk of apple.
“That smells like our cafeteria’s katsu curry.”
Kokushibo takes a mouthful of the piping-hot chicken without blowing on it to cool it off. “It is.”
“It was our prize this year for the academy’s Halloween Pumpkin Battle.” Nakime glances over to confirm he has fully closed her door. “Ordinarily students win a visit to the Ubuyashiki mansion, but I’m told it’s been undergoing renovations.”
“Yes.” His voice is of a baritonal color that in kabuki theater might get him cast as the jitsugoto, the discerning serious hero, or perhaps the villainous jitsuaku, who is the hero’s diametric opposite as well as his equal and therefore both more fearsome and more tragic. In his desk at the corporate office he keeps the board and pieces for igo but is so proficient at it that playing against him is generally considered a waste of time. “I am aware.”
“Were you aware of it when you initially joined the event today as a competitor?”
“No.”
The jagged locks of his hair remind Nakime of the zigzag paper shide attached to sacred objects and the tangled mass of it shifts as he lowers his head. He does not remove the clouded sunglasses. One evening while Mr. Muzan was giving a speech in Chiyoda City regarding the dismal state of their country’s education system there had been an inebriated spectator who clambered up onto the outdoor podium, hollering heckler nonsense; Kokushibo had run through the crowd, hurdled over a three-railed pedestrian barricade, sprung atop the podium platform in a single stupendous leap, bent his knees and flipped the hapless man across his shoulders in a perfect kata-guruma throw like he was tossing a bale of rice straw. It knocked off his sunglasses and the lenses were crushed, causing him to blink rapidly, wincingly against the police car strobe lights and the camera flashbulbs, so later Nakime stepped forward holding a pair of new sunglasses she finessed from a nearby arcade’s claw machine. There were tiny purple rhinestone embellishments around their frames but Kokushibo had bowed without complaint to let Nakime slip them on his face.
He begins jabbing at the fried egg folded over his rice. Its runny yolk is cooked sunny-side-up and Nakime offers him a paper napkin from her lunch bag.
“How were you able to participate in the game as a non-student?” she asks.
He uses the napkin to wipe his mouth. “Kaigaku supplied me with the chocolate and water balloons necessary for entry.”
“And where is Kaigaku now?”
“I will find that out shortly.”
“Did you speak with any of the other schoolchildren while you were here?”
Kokushibo must nod, given that his mouth is full. Nakime folds her hands into her lap.
“I'm afraid I’ll have to make a general announcement reminding everyone about our procedure for reporting unfamiliar persons on the campus. It’s for security. There’s a deviant somewhere in this neighborhood who collects the undergarments of teenage girls.” Thus far Nakime has not encountered this bottom-dwelling reprobate, nor has she met the young man at Sagiriyama Station chronically incapable of keeping his trousers belted, but she has conversed briefly with that crystal-eyed boy of nineteen or twenty who usually sets up his folding table on a curb near the bus stop Nakime uses. One side of this boy's business card identifies him as an expert in reiki healing, palmistry, dream analysis, soulmate matchmaking and cryptocurrency trading while the card’s other side makes him available for bookings as a puppeteer and magician at children’s birthday parties. “If an individual like that ever snuck into the school I’d have to beat him unconscious with a dictionary.”
“I would recommend a fire extinguisher. It’s heavier.” Kokushibo drops his blank gaze to notice the hole tunneled under his chair. “Have you been assigned a shift on the academy’s night watch yet?”
“Only once. I wasn’t able to access Amane’s computer. I learned one of our students has been sneaking into his classroom at night and needed to escort him home.” This is a condensed account, omitting the fact that after Rui Ayaki explained how he likes the peace and quiet Nakime allowed the mildly unsettling but gently-dispositioned boy to sit in her office for another twenty minutes while he demonstrated various string-figure tricks such as the star and the orb weaver’s web. “Then I let myself be distracted a second time by that solipsistic caterpillar who haunts a vase in our biology laboratory.”
“What did it want with you this time?”
“He was hoping to debate whether Euro-American modes of pictorial representation adopted during the Meiji period corrupted Japanese art or expanded its boundaries. When I told him I preferred a painting by Kuroda Seiki to one by Yokoyama Taikan he threw a rancid tuna sandwich at me.”
Kokushibo’s attention has flickered next to the motivational poster on Nakime’s wall but at this statement he returns his eyes to her. “That was poor etiquette.”
“It was better than hearing the old-man ghost who crawls around in the hallways complain about his rheumatism.” Next time, Nakime determines, she will zap them both with an electric flyswatter before she exorcises them. “But I admit it wasn’t a productive night.”
Kokushibo continues studying her from some castellated stronghold position far behind his impassive expression. Why on earth had no students come to report him? In the black suit and sunglasses he resembles a contracted hitman, or those pictures of secret government operatives supposedly dedicated to hunting extraterrestrials. Mercy me. The only adolescent in this entire academy whom Nakime would trust to safeguard anything of more importance than a health class flour-baby is Hakuji Soyama, who has a good head and a righteous heart despite his temperamental tendency to get hot under the collar that is positioned between these two physiological points of moral guidance. Nakime herself left school at seventeen to work ironing linens in the laundry room of a hotel — she would work later waiting tables, cleaning houses, while from ten o’clock to midnight she sang for tips at whatever venues would accept her; the managers said she had a gloomy face, perhaps a thing to be expected from a girl whose given name contained the characters for cry and woman — but she is fairly certain she still possessed some basic common sense.
Or maybe not, considering how Nakime also left school at seventeen because she was listed as the new wife on somebody's family registration sheet and at age twenty, twenty-two, twenty-five had known clearly where all the rent and grocery money she earned was going but never said anything about it. Hiding the credit cards and scissoring up the racetrack betting tickets had not been much wiser, as an alternative tactic, since she similarly lacked both the reflexes and range of peripheral vision needed to avoid the stinging-swift slaps these actions usually provoked.
What would a professional lady superspy have done? Something else, surely. Dodged those blows like the sequence from an action film or a daytime television drama; defended herself expertly using some impromptu weapon such as a kitchen spatula, or something heavier. How would a porcelain mebina-doll woman like Amane Ubuyashiki have conducted herself? A nonsensical question. Amane Ubuyashiki is married to a man who dresses her in mulberry silk and necklaces of genuine ocean pearls, a man who gifts her with bottles of perfume made from centifolia roses or wisteria. He probably kisses her on the hand when they are alone together.
Nakime stands up from behind her desk to get a better look at that piece of orange water balloon caught in Secretary Kokushibo’s hair.
“Who were you fighting against? Your opponent seems to have at least made things interesting.”
“Some sort of undisciplined mountebank. I would’ve just hit him in the carotid sinus but water balloons were the only allowable means of attack.” Kokushibo mixes together the curry and potatoes with his rice and egg. “The three boys I was assisting referred to him as their art teacher.”
“That would be Tengen Uzui, I believe.”
“Your dynamite bomber?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” He sucks sharply at a piece of gristle caught behind his upper left canine tooth. “Provide me with his address and I’ll dispose of him discreetly at your earliest convenience — I can also dispose of him overtly and in style. I’ll defer to your preference.”
Embarrassment prickles the skin of Nakime’s neck. The first time she ever heard Uzui blast a hole through the wall she had been snooping around the empty teacher’s room and presumed there was some kind of horrific wartime attack in progress. She called Secretary Kokushibo from her cell phone while shuffling downstairs to make an announcement over the intercom system: Should she pull the fire alarm? Should she initiate the drilled procedures for an earthquake? What if the building collapsed before the students could evacuate? How many ambulances should she ask for in anticipation of the necessary triage? Assess the situation, Kokushibo had answered, a screech of skidding tires and the roar of a six-cylinder engine suggesting he was in the car performing a highly precise and technically legal but extremely dangerous turn. Where was the explosion? How large was its blast radius? Have the police been alerted? But then Nakime encountered Nezuko Kamado and Makomo, copying hairstyles from a Nicola magazine in one of the classrooms, and they explained how hysterical she was being.
“But wait, Miss Otogawa! You have such nice hair,” Nezuko said, holding out a set of decorative pins. “Will you let us do it for you, please? Oh — I’m sorry. Are you on the phone with somebody?”
“Ah. Yes. Girls, this is my —” then Nakime the Professional Lady Superspy contemplated who women in blazer-dresses with graduate degrees typically called on the telephone “— lifestyle coach.”
“— And remember what we discussed about the importance of perspective,” she heard Kokushibo say over his phone’s bluetooth speaker, with an instant and fathomless sincerity. A truck horn blared somewhere in his background as his tires skidded through another turn. “Problems are often reduced in size if you can remind yourself that you are one small part of mankind’s long history. I will send you an invoice for today’s session by email.”
Nakime set the phone back against her ear. “Thank you. I'm sorry to have troubled you.”
“You have not troubled me. Goodb — ”
But Kokushibo had never said that before, not ever, as the conclusion to a conversation between them, so Nakime instinctively hung up on him a few seconds too soon. Nezuko and Makomo shoved her into a chair as they cooed like happy pigeons over her hair’s length and shine: Which brand of conditioner do you buy, Miss Otogawa? Do you use a hair dryer or are you a towel-dry woman? Do rosemary oil and apple cider vinegar really work as treatments? The magazine says so. What’s your favorite flower?
And a professional lady superspy would have lied, obviously. A lady superspy would not have been sitting there in the first place getting her hair gussied up into some flummery arrangement the magazine's pages called a French Lolita. Nakime, meanwhile, had not been able to think of a lie fast enough, and therefore she told the truth, recalling the way she would sneak through unlatched gates into other people’s ornamental gardens as a little girl in Nagasaki City to cut down branches weighted with heavy, drooping trusses of the pale sweet-scented flowers whose shapes were like cremation urns.
“Japanese pieris,” Nakime answered.
“That's pretty! Pink or white?” Nezuko asked.
“White.”
Thus Nakime was detained, unable to finish her snooping. Coming into the corporate office that evening she even forgot to remove the pinned-up braids and tiny artificial flowers stuck in her hair, until she realized Kokushibo was actually tipping down his sunglasses to stare at her: another unproductive day, in other words.
“My preference is that you don’t dispose of any teachers just yet. Uzui’s position would be difficult to fill at this time of the academic year,” says Nakime. Kokushibo nods and continues eating his curry. “Which three boys did you assist?”
“One had yellow hair and another apparently doesn’t know how to button a shirt. The third boy wore hanafuda earrings.” Something about this statement makes him pause to study the backs of his wide hands. “They addressed me as Kokkushibou.”
She places a finger behind one ear. “Kakushibou?”
“Kokku,” he repeats precisely, dolorously, “Shibou.”
“You’ve met young Kamado and his squad, then.” Nakime has only spoken at length to Tanjiro Kamado once, so far, while she was overseeing the school’s annual student physicals in order to prepare a falsified report for the Health Ministry. Tanjiro had hit her by accident with one of his juggernaut headbutts and its impact was like a cannonball fired from a field gun; back in her office the poor sensitive child was so distressed by his own remorse that Nakime gave him a caramel candy out of the contraband drawer just to make him pause for breath, and because he came back the next day with a box of matcha cookies from his family’s bakery Nakime was given no time to work any worthwhile fibs into her report. “You were in somewhat greater peril than you might’ve realized. Those individuals you encountered today were the four members of Seedy Style Democracy.”
Secretary Aspiring Cook halts. He lowers his chopsticks.
“That is the band whose debut song you tried to obtain a recording of so Mr. Muzan could use it as leverage — ‘Exploding Skin and the Melancholy of Modern Smell.’”
“It was their second song ‘Past Life Sins,’” Nakime collects a pile of folders off her desk, “but yes. That is Tanjiro Kamado’s band.”
Kokushibo’s eyebrows lift marginally. Nakime tilts her head to one side as if reckoning the proper tune for a string.
Perhaps she is being unfair to the boys, who together in their innocent mischief remind her of those little Three Wise Monkeys carved above the door at Nikko Tosho-gu Shrine. The first instrument Nakime herself ever practiced on at age ten was an acoustic guitar with a broken bridge that she scavenged from somebody’s curbside trash heap, after shaking out the tanezumi rat who was sheltering inside it, and surely this sound had not been much better. The guitar’s unraveling steel strings made her fingers bleed.
“Their music isn’t completely beyond hope,” she allows. “Agatsuma’s pitch on the shamisen is good. So is Uzui’s on the harmonica. Kamado’s voice is suitable for the countertenor techniques and uses of the falsetto register he attempts — he just lacks the breath training needed to achieve proper closure at the lower ranges. And Hashibira’s drumming is,” she must quest about for an adequate descriptor, “enthusiastic. The addition of a keyboardist and an electric guitarist might mellow out their ensemble.” Nakime folds her arms and later, when this moment is replayed on the voice recorder fastened above her left breast, she will hear the distorted noise of her own heart give a few harder beats. “Children ought to be encouraged in their hobbies and passions to the furthest extent practical, even when a lack of talent means they’ll never be the best at it. It’s more important they understand what speaks most strongly to their souls.”
Kokushibo’s brows are still lifted. He has not resumed eating his curry.
“That — ” and his speech stops, almost diffidently, like a lamp’s wick burning out; how odd to hear him falter over his words. “Yes. I suppose so.”
Nakime crosses the office to its filing cabinet. Seeing the labels in its topmost drawer requires the use of a stepping stool and she hoicks up her skirt just above her black-stockinged knees as she ascends this step to put away the folders. Kokushibo does not say anything.
Her aforementioned attempt at recording the songs of Seedy Style Democracy had melted all her cassette player’s magnetic tape and culminated in Nakime spending ten minutes hooked over the side of a dumpster behind the cafeteria, throwing up what felt like everything except her vital organs and her subconsciousness, then a second, worse bout of this sound-poisoning sickness overcame while she was giving an account of the hellish experience to Mr. Muzan. He had thrust a Kibutsuji Fan Club tote bag towards her and commanded her to run, run; Kokushibo followed her into the women’s bathroom so that he could stick a yellow post-it note over the toilet’s automatic flush sensor and lend her an elastic for pulling back her hair. When she eventually lurched from the bathroom he was standing like a sentry outside its door and holding a waxed paper cup of cool water.
He presented this cup to Nakime with both hands and a wordless, hieratic formality, but she was shaking as she reached to accept it and her unsteadiness showered all the water down onto his dry-cleaned shirt.
“Oh.” Nakime covered her face as she bowed. Her ears were ringing. Everything spun. “Forgive me.”
He took back the emptied cup from her.
“I will fill it again,” he said, and he did.
The filing cabinet’s top drawer rumbles shut. Within it Nakime also keeps a pen-and-pencil portrait drawn of her by Zenitsu Agatsuma as his latest unsuccessful bid to get himself removed from the disciplinary committee; the drawing’s composition is reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, or maybe the manga of Junji Ito, and Nakime intends to eventually have this portrait framed on her apartment’s wall beside her extensive collection of music books and classical horror films. A separate drawer within the same filing cabinet contains spare uniforms, unopened packets of underwear, boxes of tampons and sanitary pads, a stash Nakime began adding to the day after she caught Ume Shabana sidling along the wall like a cat burglar and asked the young hoyden what she was up to.
Nakime straightens her skirt as she climbs down from the stepping stool. Kokushibo sits with his face turned away toward the opposite wall in some posture of grave diligence she does not wholly understand.
“In the future, Secretary,” she says, “please contact me to confirm any information Kaigaku shares with you about the academy. Mine may be more accurate.”
“That would’ve been the wiser course of action.” He pauses again, sitting there in his purple-checkered socks with a water balloon fragment stuck in his hair. “I make no excuses for myself. If I had consulted you earlier I wouldn’t have wasted an entire day on this absurd and useless failure.”
“Well. I’ve heard Hinatsuru’s curry is good, at any rate.”
“And you’re certain you don’t want some?”
“I am.”
“Very well.”
He finishes his meal with impeccable table manners but without any further comment or change to his expression. Heat from the steamed rice and blended spices flush his skin slightly around his earlobes, along his throat, as Nakime continues watching him, but the sunglasses remain on his face, and after five more minutes have passed in this votarist silence she takes a wide-toothed comb from her purse.
She walks around to stand behind him.
Nakime pauses once for about ten seconds after lifting up the weighty halm of his hair. Unbound she figures it would fall almost to the length of her own, except that in the rainy season his hair probably teases up into loose curls around his ears and along the nape of his neck. She pauses a second time after running her comb down to his hair’s ends — its texture is at once coarse and soft like hakone grass, and late autumn sunshine from the window gleans a curious reddish shade out of the deeper black— but Kokushibo does not shrug her away.
He does not do anything, in fact, aside from turn his head right or left if Nakime asks him to while she works her comb scrupulously through the tangles. At some point she hears herself softly beginning to sing; whenever she plays her biwa up in the corporate office her music does not appear to disturb his concentration, as he sits reviewing policy proposals or financial reports, and because her voice by itself is naturally a quiet, somewhat smoky contralto Nakime trusts it will be similarly undisruptive. He lays his chopsticks across the edges of the food container in his lap and holds himself perfectly motionless, inside that large body with its large, mute back and its large, slow, heavy-marching and thick-blooded heart. The song she chooses is “Moon Over the Ruined Castle,” possibly because there is something about its mournful august nostalgia that reminds her of him.
And down shone the Moon upon the unsheathed swords, but now where is the brightness of those bygone days?
When she was young Nakime had attempted to make this husky little voice into a more powerful mezzo-soprano through rigorous if rather disorganized training, walking alone through the city — you’re lucky, other girls would say; your mom never nags you about where you’ve been or who you’ve been seeing — to hear how different examples of its architecture echoed back the same sounds. She sang “Falling Rain” to the fountain in Peace Park and the one-legged stone tori where Sanno Shrine used to stand. To the mighty gates at Sofukuji Temple and the double-arched bridge across Nakashima River she sang “The Song of Kites,” “Bride Doll” to the long train tunnel near Genkawa Station or the rooftops of Chinatown. At sunset she turned north while singing “Red Dragonfly” to the three mountaintops of Mitsuyama turning blue far away in the twilight. She crept once into Urakami Cathedral during a thundershower and might have tested “I Am a Child of the Sea” against its high-vaulted interior if she had not wandered into its candleglow side-chapel first and seen the wooden statue: the carving of a woman’s head and uplifted face, a pretty woman, except there was a crack like a tearstain down her left cheek and the wood was scorched black in many places and both the carved woman’s eyes were gone, as if the pain of some unspeakable, sworded grief had caused her to cry them out, then Nakime stepped back out through the cathedral’s doors into the rain. Their upstairs neighbor in the Daikoku District was an elderly woman who listened to opera broadcasts every Saturday evening through a cheap transistor radio and so every Saturday evening Nakime also sat eavesdropping out on the balcony, both arms crossed covetously over her chest in some attempt to encage the music’s soaring notes.
“And what’s this other instrument called? The one— ” and Nakime used her little hands to outline a form with a slender neck and a pendulous, graceful body, the shape of a cremation urn “ — like that?”
“A biwa, do you mean? My, my. Are you some kind of blind monk? If you want to be a proper goze you should learn the shamisen,” the old woman told her. Her father long ago had been a master luthier, a craftsman of stringed instruments. “A biwa has very little resonance. Its body is too shallow — that's why its role in an orchestra is usually rhythmic rather than harmonic.”
“Rhythm is what gives the orchestra's harmony its structure,” Nakime answered. “When you’re building a castle, where do you begin?”
Her comb stops. So does her singing.
Kokushibo remains motionless for several more seconds, until he turns in the chair towards her. Nakime blinks. At some point he has drawn off his sunglasses and his eyes are the same dahlia-black as his hair.
She wonders what brought him into Mr. Muzan’s service, since his story cannot possibly be like her own. One evening she returned home from her double shift at an electronics manufacturing plant to find her savings jar was empty; the bandage tin she used as a jewelry box was gone; missing as well was the tomesode kimono she kept folded between glassine paper sheets, its black silk printed with trusses of tiny pink-white flowers and for which she had paid in nine monthly installments of twelve thousand yen apiece on the chance that somewhere like the Tokyo New National Theater ever invited her to perform, the way they occasionally did in those toy-proportioned scenes of her imagination.
Her biwa, on the other hand, was where it belonged, but because she always kept another thirty thousand yen hidden inside its carrying case for emergencies this case was slit open and the money was likewise gone while the biwa itself was dumped out onto the floor, a new crack opened through its old varnished body. Nakime sat in silence for a while holding it.
“Come here, Nakime. Closer. It’s all right,” her new employer told her, eight weeks after Nakime started a job as his typist. It was so kind of him to hire her, so very kind, she frequently thought, in enormous sweeps of gratitude as she stared piously around at her new little Kimetsu Town apartment, despite the fact that she possessed only a high school equivalency certificate she had studied six months to earn. “I’ve been thinking about a new assignment for you. It requires a particular kind of secrecy — look at me, would you? Yes. Thank you. You have a remarkable face, Nakime. An almost complete lack of emotional responsiveness. It’s wonderfully difficult to interpret.”
He had swirled his coffee, flavored as usual with a thump of caramel syrup. Nakime smoothed down the long bangs over her eyes.
She could not remember ever having a real right eye, since an orbital infection had necessitated its surgical removal when she was about four years old. Ocular implants and artificial eyes were expensive, however, not to mention pointless, given how the eye needed to be replaced every three years or so, but Nakime as a child did not mind this absence, since she could simply hide behind her hair if she wanted to avoid seeing that scary demon in the mirror. The missing eye was also quite convenient for spooking any angry people who caught Nakime snipping down their boughs of white Japanese pieris, less commonly known as pearl flowers; hey, you, girl, they would shout, and Nakime would turn to say, boo.
“I am honored to hear that,” she said. “What assignment do you have for me, Mr. Muzan?”
And if I were a real spy, Nakime tells herself, acting in a real war, maybe our enemies would take me captive. They would attempt to torture a confession from me, or force me to renounce my companions and my commander. Maybe they would dangle me upside-down above the sulfur pits of Mount Unzen, or press my head into a vice, and maybe I am more dramatic than I have always assumed. But if that ever happened I would tell myself: yes, yes, it hurts, but the person I call Kokushibo would be able to endure this. He is too strong to be broken by human trial and mortal frailty. He is a man of perfect martial rectitude and an immovable courage, like a rock.
Then, whatever else might be done to me, and with my soul steadied upon that rock of victory, I would hold my silence. I would go down to the grave keeping my promises.
I know nothing about the rules of espionage, nothing, but I hope by now I know about loyalty and I know you are supposed to carry its burden in your heart until the end, the very end, so that someday somewhere somebody, somebody might open their arms to receive you and say, well done.
But this brings Nakime to a logical problem: what need could a man like this same so-called Kokushibo, as majestic and extravagant in his fealties as the doomed warrior from an old ballad, therefore have for a shrewd and thoroughly modern man like this so-called Muzan Kibutsuji, whose truest talent is for making new uses out of things that are second-rate, disposable as second-best?
It is a mystery. If Nakime were a professional lady superspy she would have doubtless figured it out by now, or else decided she is overthinking things, especially because Secretary Kokushibo is also the sort of man whose attempt at camouflage would probably involve holding two branches and stoically pretending he is a shrub.
She puts away the comb in her purse. Kokushibo turns forward again atop the little creaking chair, his fists on his knees and his shoulders set straight.
Without the sunglasses his face appears younger and somehow more effortful in its tranquility, as if it is the result of rigorous practice and a ferocious, sacrosanct discipline rather than any natural inmost calm. It is the face of a man with a real name, Nakime supposes, a real boyhood he apparently shared with a brother whose name means fated one. He puts a hand through his hair to slowly trace the gestures of her comb with his fingers.
“Thank you,” he says. “I'm sorry to have troubled you.”
“You have not troubled me,” she answers.
Then Nakime gives him the slightest shade of a smile, which as expected elicits no smile from him in response. Her office’s door gets slammed open so hard it twangs off the wall's springcoil bumper.
“Nakime!” From the state of Kaigaku’s hair he has evidently crawled through a hedge to get here. “Nakime, you aren’t going to fucking believe what happened with the — oh shit.”
Kokushibo rises to his feet. The sunglasses are settled on his face. He takes up his suit coat hanging off the chair’s back as Kaigaku stands there in an animal trance of terror.
“Tell me,” he pronounces, sweeping into his coat with a cloak-and-dagger flourish, “what makes you believe speaking to Miss Otogawa that way is acceptable? Do you think your positions at this academy make you equals?”
“I — no, but I — ” poor boy; one day the revelation that his foster father loves him is going to strike him like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky, perhaps after a few good thrashings have cured his arrogance “— screw this.”
Kaigaku turns and upon this eloquent pronouncement goes tearing away down the hall at the pace of someone who exits pursued by a bear. Kokushibo in his socked feet springs to chase after him, impossibly light-heeled for such a big man, but as he leaves he batters out something with his fist against Nakime’s desk, her office's door and the wall beyond it. It is a pattern she recognizes as kana code.
Goodbye.
“Goodbye,” she calls. “Don’t run in the hallways.”
His footfalls check their pace. Nakime listens to the sound of them fade.
All will be well with the two of them, she is sure. Kokushibo thinks highly of Kaigaku, of the boy’s potential, and anyway the corporate office’s Punishment Gadget features an array of safety features backed by an extended warranty.
Briefly she cracks open a window to fan out the katsu curry smell. She adjusts the blue chair to put it more squarely over the hole, pours water from the bathroom sink onto the roots of her cactus, then Nakime looks around her office and stands there, thinking, because it comes to her as it often does that she is not a professional lady superspy, or a respectable vice principal with the required graduate credentials, or even a famed biwa player able to perform in the black tomesode kimono of a bride. She is a nobody of no importance with a slightly sticky blank notepaper in her pocket.
If she fails her mission here and is discovered, Kagaya Ubuyashiki will dismiss her. Mr. Muzan, a pragmatic man, will dismiss her too, and if questioned he will say no, no, I do not know this woman. Perhaps Nakime will be charged with fraud, sent to prison, where she could maybe work ironing linens in the laundry facility if she behaves well enough. She will be cast aside, again, and beautiful blessed best-adored Amane Ubuyashiki in her silks and wisteria perfume will simply sniff as she tells her husband, you see? I told you that woman was no good.
But she will not fail, Nakime tells herself. She will do her best, as will Secretary Kokushibo — whoever he truly is — and together they will win a victory for Mr. Muzan, although what honored or humble place they will each be given in this eventual shared victory is yet another scene too small and far-off for Nakime to see its details.
It is possible they do not matter. When one cannot be loved one must at least be useful.
Nakime throws away the food container. She locks her office, and walking out alone into the long sundown she listens to the way the walls of the empty schoolyard echo the quiet yet lucid, bell-clear sound of her singing:
The Moon hangs above the ruins, unchanging. For whom does it shine?
For whom does it shine?
…