Who Is Mr. Satoshi? by Jonathan Lee

Author:Jonathan Lee [Lee, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Downstairs in the hotel office, Daisuke was wedged in the leather armchair. In his dark clothes he seemed to have merged with the seat, to have succumbed to its immovability. I stood in the doorway, watching as he read a book from back to front. A blue coffee cup was embedded in his hand. It looked tiny there, swamped by the thick folds and pouches of his fingers. Music was coming from the laptop’s speakers, the sole of his right shoe pounding the floor to the rhythm of ‘Islands in the Stream’.

‘Bee Gees classic,’ I said.

As Daisuke glanced up from his book and grinned, I tensed and blinked and tried to stop thinking about Chiyoko having sex upstairs. Electric images of her with a boyfriend or husband or customer were bleaching every other detail around me. It was like driving straight into the sun, your windscreen half ablaze.

‘Parton version better,’ he said, provoking the obligatory nod and murmur from me. ‘You need different room?’

‘No. The room’s great. I was just wondering if I could use your laptop.’

‘Be your guest.’

I took a seat in the swivel chair and behind the laptop I saw, for the first time, a thin grey fax machine. I opened a window onto the Internet and tapped various words into a search engine (‘reginald pickford anthropologist’, ‘reginald pickford academic’, ‘university japan pickford’, ‘japan anthropology pickford’). None of the results looked promising. Still, I could do a proper trawl of the university websites later. And through academic publications. Simple really, even for someone like me, an incompetent amateur detective soaked in grief and medicine.

Reflected in the laptop screen, I saw Daisuke put a bookmark in his paperback and place the book on his knee. I turned to face him.

‘You like to read, Daisuke?’

‘Yes. Daisuke likes reading.’

‘I think I’d like to go to a library this morning. Know any big libraries?’

‘Yes, know big libraries.’

‘Daisuke, I just knocked on Chiyoko’s bedroom door and…realised she had someone in there.’

‘Oh,’ Daisuke said, sucking the last dregs of coffee from his cup. ‘I don’t think Chiyoko-san was going to say about this yet.’

‘No reason why she should. I just feel a bit embarrassed. I hope she didn’t think…’

My voice tailed off, my thoughts found nowhere to go, and into the vacuum came the insistent beep and flash of the fax machine.

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