Clue hunting in Japan: Looking properly in the wrong places.
Episode 1
By the time the book hits him, Kaito already knows something is wrong.
It strikes his shoulder and lands with a thud on the polished floorboards beside the neat row of shoes. The pages settle open at number thirty-seven and thirty-eight.
He picks up Practical Methods for Simple Lives, Volume 1.
Leaving his backpack in the entry, he steps into the living room. Books are everywhere—stacked, scattered, closed or open.
Grandpa sits on the floor, arms crossed. “Of course I don’t remember which one.”
“He has over five thousand books,” Rin says. “They’re in every room.”
“We just need to persevere,” Hiroshi says. Kaito’s father holds several books in one hand and rubs the top of his head with the other.
“What we need is a system.” Naoko bends to straighten a jumble of paperbacks at her feet.
“Ah…hello,” Kaito says. “I’m back.”
Four heads turn.
“Welcome home son,” Naoko says.
“When did you land back in Japan?” Rin asks. “I’d almost forgotten I had a brother.”
“Great,” Hiroshi says. “You’re just what we need.” He turns toward Grandpa. “He’ll find it in no time.”
“Find what?”
“Grandpa’s crypto key,” Rin says.
“He wrote it,” she adds. “On a page. In a book.”
She lets out a dismissive huff. “Somewhere in his library.”
“And he can’t remember which book,” Hiroshi says.
“It obviously made sense at the time,” Naoko says.
“To him,” Rin says.
Episode 2
At 12:26am Kaito stops pretending he can sleep and struggles out of the twisted bedclothes. His body is convinced it is somewhere else entirely.
He makes his way through the sleeping house to Grandpa’s library. The light from the small lamp is soft and the shadows deep, as though they’ve been there longer than anything else.
Books are scattered everywhere. Stacks that began with an intention now lost, compete for space with systems that almost existed but are now abandoned.
Kaito pauses in the doorway. He scans the room, not even sure where to start. When did Grandpa collect this many books?
Slowly, he starts creating neat piles in one corner.
He takes one book from the end of a shelf. Flips through it. Finds nothing, not even the slightest pen mark. Returns it. Selects the next in line.
A rhythm settles in. Pick. Flip. Return.
Somewhere in the distance, a train rumbles. The thin metallic vibration is steady, certain of where it’s headed.
He pauses, the sound taking him back to the places he had passed through; the joy of coming and going. For a moment, he expects to be somewhere other than Japan.
The train passes. The memories remain.
With a gentle shake of his shoulders, he searches the next book.
On page sixty-seven of On Seasonal Storage, he finds a shopping list: sake, miso, perilla leaf. He sets the book aside. It feels like a start; a promise of a system. Of sorts.
Three novels contain numbers jotted in the margins. Each one is too short. He counts them again. They’re still too short.
Probably phone numbers.
In Collected Essays on Silence, he finds a neatly scribed line:
The neighbour waters his garden more than his thinking.
Kaito rubs his thumb over the characters. He closes the book. At least that one seems settled.
He continues.
More numbers. None long enough to be a crypto key.
Is one possibly a bank account?
A date, circled twice.
A list of bus times and routes that no longer exist.
A name, crossed out.
His fingers begin to move faster. Pages are turned too quickly. He slows, as if the books might object.
The stacks grow.
By 4:37am he thinks that setting aside books with annotations is probably a waste of effort.
By 4:42am, he is certain that it is.
At 5:04am, in The Proper Use of Margins, he discovers:
You like systems. This is not one.
He looks around the room at the shelves and the books and the stacks on the floor. That much, at least, seems accurate.
He puts the book back, sits down on the floor, leans against the wall. On a low shelf he notices a book jutting out. He pulls out On Keeping Records and starts to read.
The room lightens slowly. A narrow line of sunlight reaches the edge of the shelves, then slips between the books.
By the time the rays reach the floor, Kaito is asleep. The book lays open across his face, as if continuing without him.
Episode 3
Thud. Swish. Tap. Shuffle.
The noise wakes Kaito. For a moment he can’t remember where he is.
A spine hits wood. Slides. Settles.
He sits up.
Grandpa is moving books from one shelf to another.
“What are you doing, Grandpa?” Rin stands in the doorway. “Now we’ll have to start again.”
“My books are out of order.” He doesn’t stop.
Hiroshi walks in, waving sheets of paper covered with graphs. “I’ve worked out a system through statistical calculations.”
“That looks rather complicated.” Naoko appears behind him. “Breakfast is nearly ready.”
“I’ve calculated the confidence level.” Hiroshi beams. “There’s a regression chart. With different colours for the various genres. Categories for non-fiction.”
“Ah, dad…”
“See, this models the relationship between the variables,” Hiroshi says. “To make a prediction where the key might be.”
“But that’s just numbers,” Kaito says. “It doesn’t tell us which book or where it is.”
“How does it work without a list of the books?” Rin asks.
Hiroshi pauses.
“Oh…”
He looks at the sheets.
“I’ll think of another way.” He brightens.
Kaito stands and stretches just as Grandpa reaches for a book on the shelf above his head. He ducks, steps back and bumps the tallest stack in the corner.
The top book slides. The stack buckles in the middle. Books spill in all directions like a deck of cards mid-shuffle.
The impact travels. A second pile shudders, wobbles, holds, then surrenders. Books skid across the floor. Others land splayed open, pages bent back.
The last stack doesn’t even wait to be touched.
Dust hangs in the air. No one moves.
Eventually, Kaito picks up Notes on Order and Placement and smooths the pages.
A slip of paper falls out.
“What’s this?”
He holds out a handwritten list of titles.
Grandpa takes it. “Oh, those. I sold them.”
“You did what?” Four voices are united in horror.
“Where?” Kaito asks.
“Why do you have a record of the books you don’t have,” Rin says, “but not the ones you do?”
“These books seem to be perpetually attracted to a state of disorder,” Naoko says.
“Systems,” Hiroshi adds, “are seriously lacking.”
Grandpa ignores them.
“Where did you sell them?” Kaito asks again.
“The second-hand bookshop down the lane from the Myoryuji Temple.”
“When?”
“Quite recent. Last year.”
Silence.
“Kaito,” Naoko says. “Your father and I have work, Rin has university. Can you go there?”
“OK.”
Perhaps the walk will clear his head.
The bookstore owner stares blankly at the list.
“We don’t keep an inventory.” He glances at the overloaded shelves and tiers of boxes lining the aisles. “You’ll have to look.”
Three hours and forty-three minutes later, Kaito is still searching. Dust clings to his hands, coats his clothes. He leaves to buy a drink. Returns and continues.
Two hours and sixteen minutes pass. He has found three:
A History of Minor Repairs
A Catalogue of Everyday Objects
An Introduction to Useful Methods
None of them help.
He returns to the counter. “Do you record sales?”
“Yes.” The owner flips through a ledger, runs his finger down the rows. “I sold Practical Indexing Systems.”
Kaito stiffens. “Do you know who to?”
“If I remember correctly, it was to that neighbour of yours.”
“Which one?”
“The one who is always watering his garden.”
“And The Arrangement of Small Things?” Kaito prompts.
“Sold.”
“To?”
“I’m not sure. A foreigner, perhaps.”
The sound Kaito has been holding back finally escapes, rough and low.
Episode 4
“I’ll sell it to you.”
“Huh!”
“It’s out of print,” Mr Yamashiro says.
“Because nobody wants it.”
“You want it.” Mr Yamashiro looks back at his garden. “Unless you don’t. Then I’ve got tasks to do.”
“How much?”
“10,000 yen.”
“What!”
“Poor manners.” Mr Yamashiro shakes his head. “To be expected of his grandson, I suppose.” He swings the gate closed.
“I’ll go ask,” Kaito says to the polished timber panels.
The family is just sitting down to dinner when Kaito arrives back.
“Look what I bought.” Hiroshi pulls out his phone. “It finds lost things.” He taps the screen. “Findr.ai.”
“Dad, I don’t have the energy right now,” Kaito says. “Mr Yamashiro wants to sell us Practical Indexing Systems.”
“You look tired,” Naoko says. “Sit down and eat.”
“How much?” Rin asks.
“10,000 yen!”
“Blatant robbery,” mutters Grandpa.
“You only have yourself to blame.” Rin leans forward and helps herself from the steaming pot of simmered vegetables. “All those insulting cryptic messages you wrote in every book you lent him.”
Grandpa laughs. “It never stopped him borrowing though.”
“The app maps probable object location using behavioural patterns.” Hiroshi thrusts his phone at Kaito. “It learns spatial habits.”
Kaito looks at the screen.
“It predicts placement likelihood. By building a probability map.” Hiroshi grins. “Very clever.”
Kaito takes the phone, clicks a few times, scrolls rapidly. “It needs the items tagged.” He hands the device back. “Otherwise, it’s guessing.”
“Just like us,” Naoko adds.
“Look, it says there’s 23% likelihood the book is in the living room.” Hiroshi pecks at the screen, one deliberate tap at a time. “Oh, that’s not good.”
Rin leans over. “Now the whole house is a high probability zone.”
“Perhaps I should have bought LocateLogic.” Hiroshi waves his chopsticks in the air.
“What about the 10,000 yen?”
“I’ll give it to you,” Naoko says. “Just in case.”
No one mentions the book sold to a foreigner.
After the meal Kaito heads over to the neighbour’s house.
“You’ve come back,” Hikari says.
“Ah…Yes. I went away and came back. Twice.” Kaito knows he’s stumbling. “I thought you moved to Tokyo.”
“I went away and came back,” she says. “Once.”
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s busy,” she says. “Did you bring cash?”
“Have you got the book?”
The money and the book swap hands. She counts the notes. He opens the book.
A long string of tightly packed numbers and characters run down a margin.
7f3a9c4e8b21d6a0f5c9e3b7a2d4f6e8c1b9a0d3e5f72a4b6d8e0f1a3c5b7
Then he notices the adjoining page. Another one:
3f8a1c5e9d2b7a4c0f6e3d1a8b5c9e2f7a4d0c63e1f8a5c2d9b7e4a6c0f3
He flips the pages.
“Seriously! What’s all this?”
Hikari steps close. “That’s just his jottings.”
“Whose?”
“Father’s. He likes codes.”
Every margin of every page is filled with similar long strings.
Episode 5
“What do you have against haiku?” Grandpa tries to retrieve books from Naoko’s arms.
“Nobody hides important things in poetry.” She secures her load and continues on to the entry porch. “They’re just being stored here for now.”
“They contain too much suspicious weather,” adds Rin.
The gate bell rings.
“I’ll go,” offers Hiroshi.
He returns with the second-hand bookseller.
“I heard you were clearing out your collection.” The store owner glances at the confusion of books that covers the floor.
“Absolutely not.” Grandpa stands in the doorway, arms and legs spread wide.
“No, not just yet,” Hiroshi says.
Grandpa glares from one man to the other. “Never.”
“Half these books should go,” Hiroshi says. “Nobody needs this many.”
“That sentence alone disqualifies you from making decisions.”
“We can barely walk through the hallway.”
“That’s because people insist on moving them.”
“You’ve got three copies of the same dictionary.”
“One is revised.” Grandpa crosses his arms. “One has water damage. And one,” he says sharply, “still has dignity.”
“Ah, perhaps now isn’t the right time.” The book seller backs out hastily.
Kaito bursts out laughing.
Three heads swivel.
“Rin hides good snacks behind the dried seaweed,” he reads another of Grandpa’s notes. “So that’s why I always missed out.”
“We’re not getting anywhere.” Naoko sits down. “And the house is a mess.”
“I know we’ve gone over this, again and again.” Kaito pats Grandpa’s shoulder. “But is there anything you remember?”
“Let me think.” Grandpa picks up a book from the top of a nearby stack. Long fingers caress the spine; gentle thumbs stroke the cover. “Ah, yes.”
“What?” Four voices hit different pitches.
He raises the book close to his face and breathes deeply. “What a beautiful scent.”
“Grandpa!”
“I’ve lent some books,” he says casually, as if the endless days of searching are of no consequence.
“Not this again,” mutters Kaito.
“Only three people,” Grandpa says defensively.
“How long ago?” Rin sighs.
“I don’t remember dates.” Grandpa shrugs. “That’s why I jot things down.”
It takes half an hour, but finally Kaito has the names of the borrowers. Pining down the addresses takes longer.
Even though it’s raining, he’s glad to be out of the house. The air is cool against his skin and carries the sweet smell of wet earth. He tugs his coat close.
He follows narrow streets lined with low buildings where potted plants and parked vehicles compete for space. The familiarity of the old wooden houses settles him to an easy stride.
His mood drops at the first stop. The borrower of Grandpa’s book has passed away, and the property is for sale.
He walks on, down alleyways, past houses lacking an obvious order to arrive at the next address. A man of indeterminate age answers his knock. He denies that Grandpa ever lent him any books, and in return accuses him of not returning his own.
The streets rise and fall gently, bending around low hills and stone embankments. At the final house, the man can’t remember borrowing any books but invites Kaito inside for tea.
“I’ll teach you bonsai.” The man places a plate of delicate cakes on the table. “If you’ll move some boxes for me.”
Kaito declines the lesson but agrees to the boxes.
“Don’t cut what draws attention.” The man motions snipping a tiny branch. “Cut what quietly ruins the shape.”
When the tea is finished, Kaito carries several large cartons up to the small storage area under the roof. He crawls across the cramped space, pushing the boxes forward. In the gloom, he knocks over a plastic tub. Books spill out.
He checks them in the dim light of a torch. The tenth book has Grandpa’s name scrawled inside.
Something is written on the publication page. He can just make it out:
November 2006
Kaito is like the ocean
A freer spirit than most
He’ll find it difficult to anchor in life.
He was six!
Holding the torch with his mouth, he flips the pages. And there on the inside back cover is a list of titles:
The Lost Art of Churlishness, and Why it Matters – bank accounts
Small Pleasures – pins
Supremacy in Battle – medication schedules
Endless Nights – keys
The Art of Non-attachment – passwords
Victory and Defeat – books hidden from the sunlight
Episode 6
“You were always halfway to somewhere else,” Grandpa says. “And yet here you are.”
Kaito looks up, nods. Temporary places have always suited him. And now he’s stuck in the house seeking something that nobody can find.
He picks up the next book. The novelty of the search wore off days ago. Now it feels more like inheriting someone else’s confusion, than solving a puzzle.
“Grandpa!” Rin says. “What are you doing?”
“Exactly what it looks like.” He relaxes onto a cushion. “Reading.”
“If you’re not helping, why do I have to?”
“Look what I’ve found.” Hiroshi stops scrolling. “It’s in the USA, but I’m sure we can organise it.”
Rin groans. “No. I don’t want to hear another crazy idea.” She wipes her hands on a cloth. “I’m swapping dust for a date.”
She walks around the stacks and is gone.
“We can use an AI reader to scan the books and do the searching for us.” Hiroshi waves his phone in the air.
“What?”
“Just like how they inputted all the books.” Hiroshi laughs with excitement. “To train AI in the beginning.”
“Dad! You do realise they manually ripped up all the physical books and scanned them page by page.”
“Wouldn’t the cost of shipping be exorbitant, dear?”
“You always want to destroy my books.” Grandpa takes Hiroshi by the arm. “Out. Now.”
He escorts Hiroshi out of the library and disappears down the hallway with a book tucked under his arm.
Naoko tidies the shelf she was working through.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I have some work to prepare for tomorrow. But I did finish all this section.”
Kaito is left alone. He pauses, breathes in the silence. Then continues on. Black on white begins to blur to grey. His fingers cramp, his eyes sting.
Halfway through the night, he finds Supremacy in Battle, and a list of medication schedules, years out of date.
At 5:03am he finds Victory and Defeat. He’s too weary to be excited.
Which is just as well.
He rubs his eyes and reads what is scrawled on the inner blank page:
It is easy to feel sorry for them.
Their world was turned upside.
I can relate to that.
They had to swap their swords for pens.
Ferocious warriors who once chased fame, glory, and honour,
became tied to the shuffling of papers and the tedium of meetings.
There is no list; no bank accounts, pins, passwords. No crypto key.
Kaito slips out of the house. His body craves movement; his mind stillness. He ambles without direction as the soft dawn turns the pavement pale gold.
“You walk like you’re not expected anywhere.” The voice is gentle.
“Huh?”
“Here.” The man gives him a broom. “Take this.”
“I was only taking a short-cut.”
“Sweep over there.” The man points. “Close to the shrine.”
The wooden handle is placed in his hands. He doesn’t move. The man smiles, motions him forward.
He sweeps.
The shrine has no system to decipher. There is nothing to solve here.
He rakes.
By the time he’s finished, the leaves are gone, the gravel is neat; and he hasn’t thought about the key once.
It’s the calmest he’s felt since returning home.
As he walks away, he stretches his fingers. The tension is gone.
Episode 7
“Are you still searching?”
Kaito shrugs, nods.
He’s sitting in the sun, feeling the warmth on his skin, relishing not flipping pages.
And now the neighbour has to remind him.
“No more coming or going?” Hikari asks. “I thought travellers were supposed to leave eventually.”
The breeze stirs up some dust which catches in his eyes. He rubs. Then it hits him. The search may never end.
It belongs to the house, not to him.
He laughs, hard and deep. Perhaps more than the thought deserves.
“You’re right,” he says.
Hikari smiles and walks on.
Kaito leans against the wall and pulls out his phone. One click brings up his travel app.
The trains no longer sound far away.
