The last light still on in the building is mine.
I know this because I made the mistake of looking up from my desk at some point around nine-thirty, and the entire floor had become the kind of dark that feels intentional — the darkness of a place that has given up on you being reasonable. The cleaning lady came and went without a word, which I appreciated. She has learned, over the months, that I am not here because I am dedicated. I think she feels a little sorry for me. Last week she left a wrapped candy on the corner of my desk. Ramune flavour. I ate it in the elevator going down and thought about how that was the most anyone had given me all month, then immediately told myself that was a dramatic thing to think, then ate the wrapper's remaining sugar dust anyway.
The report on my screen has not changed in twenty minutes.
I am aware of this. The report is also aware of this, I think. We have reached an understanding. It sits there, three columns unfinished, patient as a stone, and I sit here, doing the very important work of staring at it and occasionally moving my mouse so the screen doesn't go dark and make me feel even worse about myself.
Finish the report, Satoru.
I know. I know.
The thing about overtime is that after the eighth hour, your brain stops being a brain and becomes something closer to warm damp bread. Thoughts form slowly. They don't complete themselves. I'll start a sentence in my head — I need to remember to check the— — and then it's just gone. The sentence. The thought. Whatever I needed to remember. Gone. My brain has unionised against me and I was not informed of the negotiations.
I type three numbers into the column. Check them. They are correct.
See. Warm damp bread can still do arithmetic. I am fine.
I finish at ten forty-seven.
Not ten-thirty, which was the goal. Not eleven, which would have meant something had gone genuinely wrong. Ten forty-seven, which is the time a person finishes things when they are tired and trying but not failing, exactly. I save the file, close the laptop, and sit for a moment in the particular quiet of an empty office at night.
It is, genuinely, peaceful. I don't know what that says about my life.
The chairs are all pushed in. The monitors sleep. Someone has left a mug on the corner of the kitchenette counter — Hayashi's mug, the one with the chipped handle that everyone avoids in the communal cabinet because the chip looks a little too much like a bite mark — and it sits there in the half-dark looking lonely and vaguely accusatory. I think about washing it. I don't wash it. Hayashi is thirty-four and capable of cleaning up after himself. I tell myself this firmly and then think about it for another few seconds and then go wash the mug because I am apparently incapable of leaving a problem alone even when the problem is not mine and does not matter.
This is, I think, my central flaw as a person.
I put the mug back. Turned upside down. Drying.
I turn off my desk lamp, and the room becomes equal darkness everywhere, and I gather my bag and my coat and my body — which by this hour feels less like something I own and more like something I'm borrowing and will need to return damaged — and I go.
The train at this hour is a different creature from the morning train.
The morning train is pressure and proximity and someone's briefcase handle always finding the exact same spot on my lower back. The night train is three salarymen sleeping in the synchronized, boneless way of men who have fully surrendered, one university student doing something complicated on her phone, and a couple at the far end of the car who are not speaking and may or may not have recently argued, though I try not to look too long because that feels like trespassing.
I stand, because there are seats available and I am always afraid that if I sit I won't get back up. This has not been tested. I prefer not to test it.
Outside the window, Tokyo moves past in amber and neon and the occasional blur of a convenience store too bright for the hour. I watch it without watching it. My reflection in the glass is semi-transparent — I can see the city through myself, which is the kind of thing that would mean something profound if I were more awake. Instead I just notice that my collar is slightly crooked, and I straighten it, and my reflection straightens with me, and we both look a little better for it.
I get off two stops later.
The walk home takes eleven minutes. I know this in the precise way I know all the small measurements of my life — by repetition, without ever deciding to memorise them. Eleven minutes, forty-three steps from the station exit to the first corner, seven minutes if I walk faster, which I don't anymore because walking faster for no reason started to feel like optimism I hadn't earned.
Tonight the air is cold enough to be honest about it. Winter coming in. The kind of cold that gets into the collar no matter how you hold your coat closed, that finds the gap between glove and sleeve and reminds you it's there. I pass the vending machine outside the old Sato building — it hums steadily, lit up like a small argument against the dark — and think about getting a can of something warm.
I don't. Hundred and thirty yen. I know how that sounds, but I know exactly where hundred and thirty yen lives in the week's accounting, and it does not live here.
I keep walking.
The apartment light is on.
It's always on. Kaori leaves it on for me — the small lamp by the entrance, the one with the paper shade we got at that market three summers ago, before everything became what it is now. She never says this is why she leaves it on. I have never asked. There are a hundred small things like this between us that we have silently agreed not to name, because naming them would make them into gestures, and they are not gestures. They are just what we do.
I unlock the door quietly.
She is in the living room, sitting near the low table with a book open in her lap, the baby monitor on the cushion beside her. She looks up when I come in.
"You're back," she says.
"Apparently," I say.
This is how we greet each other, most nights. It started as a joke and then became a habit and now it's just ours — one of the small private languages a marriage builds by accident, without planning, without realising it's happening until one day you look and there it is.
I take off my shoes. Hang my coat. My hands are a little stiff from the cold, and I flex them twice in the entry, which does nothing except make me feel like I'm doing something.
"Mirai?"
"Down since eight-thirty," Kaori says. "She fought it."
"Of course she did."
"She won for forty minutes. Then she didn't."
I allow myself a small, private victory on behalf of us. Forty minutes is good. Forty minutes means she's spirited, which is an expensive quality in an infant but a good one to grow into.
I wash my hands in the kitchen. The fluorescent light there flickers once, the way it always does before settling — it has been doing this for six months and I have been meaning to look at it for six months, and every morning I forget because by morning it has stopped and every night I remember again. We are in a long-term arrangement of mutual procrastination, the light and I.
"Have you eaten?" Kaori asks from the other room.
"Not really."
The pause that follows is the kind that means she is deciding whether to say something about that. I know this pause. I have a detailed taxonomy of her pauses by now — their lengths, what they mean, the small difference between the pause that is concern and the pause that is choosing not to argue.
This one is concern.
"There's rice," she says. "I made too much."
She did not make too much.
She made exactly enough for two, and she has set aside half. I know this because she eats carefully — her appetite, with everything her body demands of her, is something she monitors without making a show of monitoring. She would not have made too much. She made enough, and saved half of it, and called it too much so I would eat without feeling like a burden.
I eat without feeling like a burden.
The rice is good. She made it with a little of the dashi powder, the way I like it, and there are two pieces of tamagoyaki in the container beside it, slightly cool now, which only improves them, I think — egg is better when it's had a moment to settle into itself.
I stand at the counter eating, because sitting at the table alone feels ceremonial in the wrong direction, and Kaori doesn't comment on this. She has returned to her book, or is pretending to read her book, which from here is the same thing.
"How was the office?" she asks.
"Quiet," I say. "Hayashi left his mug again."
"You washed it."
It is not a question.
"I washed it," I confirm.
"You should stop doing that."
"Probably."
A small silence. The good kind. The kind that doesn't need filling.
"My mother called," she says.
I put down my chopsticks for a moment. "About anything specific?"
"Nothing specific. She wanted to know how Mirai is sleeping."
"What did you tell her?"
"That she's sleeping well."
"Is that true?"
Kaori considers this with the seriousness it deserves. "Approximately."
I pick my chopsticks back up. "Good answer."
Her mother calls every two weeks and asks questions that are about Mirai but are really about Kaori, and Kaori answers questions about Kaori as though they are questions about Mirai, and they have been doing this for almost a year now and both of them seem satisfied with the arrangement. I stay out of it. I have learned, in marriage, that there are conversations happening several layers beneath the surface of other conversations, and the best thing a husband can do is acknowledge that they exist and not attempt to excavate them.
"Tanaka-san's cat had kittens," Kaori says.
I look up. "How many?"
"Five. She said she's keeping two."
"Which two?"
She looks at me then — a small look, almost amused, almost. "I don't know. I didn't ask."
"That seems like the main question."
"It wasn't the main question when I was talking to her."
"It would have been the main question if I'd been talking to her."
She says nothing, but there is something in the way she looks back down at her book that I choose to interpret as the distant cousin of a smile.
This is also ours. The small debates about nothing. They require almost no energy and they make the room feel slightly more alive, and I think on some level we both know this and do it on purpose without ever deciding to.
I wash the container. Put it away.
The kitchen is clean by the time I'm done — Kaori always cleans up after cooking, which I used to argue about and no longer do, because I understood eventually that it is one of the few physical things in a day that she can do, and doing it matters to her, and taking it from her would be taking something else. So I wash what she cannot reach and dry what she sets aside and we have never had a single conversation about this division. It simply exists, the way the lamp exists, the way the eleven-minute walk exists.
The things that hold a life together are mostly things that were never decided.
I check on Mirai before bed.
She is on her back, both arms flung wide in the particular abandon of infants, as though she fell asleep mid-celebration. Her chest rises and falls with a steadiness that I find, every single night, quietly extraordinary. That something so small can maintain such a reliable rhythm. That she sleeps so completely, without worry, without reservation — taking up her full space in the bed in a way that adults spend decades learning not to do.
I stand there probably ten seconds longer than necessary.
I close the door carefully.
The bedroom is dim. Kaori is already in bed, her book closed on the nightstand. She is lying on her side, facing the window, which she prefers. I have long since stopped trying to determine whether she is already asleep or simply resting with her eyes closed, because the answer changes nothing and the question disturbs both of us.
I change quietly. Sit on the edge of the bed. My back makes a sound that I choose not to acknowledge philosophically.
I set my alarm. Four fifty-three. Not five — five sounds like a choice, four fifty-three is just what the newspapers require.
I lie down.
The ceiling is the ordinary ceiling — a slight water stain in the far left corner that I have been estimating the cost of fixing for approximately eight months. The lamp from the entry casts its small light under the door in a thin line across the floor. The apartment settles around us, making its small sounds. The refrigerator hum. The occasional creak of the building doing whatever old buildings do at night — remembering themselves, maybe.
Kaori breathes steadily beside me. I listen to it for a moment without meaning to.
I think about the unfinished column in tomorrow's report, which is technically today's, now. I think about whether the tamagoyaki had been there when Kaori made dinner or whether she had made it separately for me and said nothing. I think about the cat's kittens and feel, faintly, that I really do want to know which two Tanaka-san kept, and that this is perhaps a strange thing to still be thinking about at eleven-thirty at night.
I think that tomorrow I should—
I don't finish the thought.