Echo on the Bay. Masatsugu Ono

      Dad had a lot of things bothering him when he was stationed on the coast.

      There was the abandoned boat floating in the bay. There was the body that Mitsugu Azamui said was on the beach, but which nobody had ever found. There were the boys who kept shooting bottle rockets at old Toshiko-bā’s house. And then there was me, in love with Mr. Yoshida, my social studies teacher.

      “Looks like we’ll be able to get a new car!” Dad said, seeing how fed up Mom looked when he told her about the move.

      Mom was worried about my private high school entrance exams. In the city, I’d been going to a well-known cram school in the evenings and was due to join the advanced group when I got to second year. Down on the coast there was no such thing as a cram school.

      Dad wasn’t exactly against me going to a private high school, but he took no interest in the idea.

      “A public school will be fine,” he said. “They’re all the same in the end. Look at me. I never went near a private school, but I’m looking after you all well enough!”

      Dad often said that kind of thing, ignoring the fact that he’d always failed his promotion exams and was set to spend his whole career on the bottom rung. His self-confidence unsettled Mom and made her set all the more importance on my exams.

      Dad had been in a good mood ever since he’d been told about the transfer. His head was full of this new car idea. In fact, upgrading was standard behavior among his colleagues. Whenever any of them was reposted a long way off they always used their relocation allowances to buy a better car. Mr. Yamamoto, whom Dad was replacing, had come back to the city with a Nissan Cima.

      “Yamamoto’s got GPS!” Dad exclaimed. “What’s the use of GPS in a place like that? There’s only one road. Not a single traffic light.”

      “The work’s easy,” Mr. Yamamoto told Dad. “Nothing to worry about.”

      It was the day before we were set to leave and there was stuff all over the floor.

      “Nothing serious happens,” he said. “You won’t get any burglaries. You may have to grab up a high school kid now and then for stealing dried squid, but that’s about it. Nobody even bothers to lock up at night or when they go out. I sometimes went inside people’s houses to turn off their lights when there was nobody there. I suppose I could have been arrested for unlawful entry! But the people there don’t get worked up about a thing like that,” he laughed, pulling a piece of packing tape off his sock. “The only problem is it’s so small. You see the same people all the time and you get too close to them. You’ll have somebody drinking at your house every single night.”

      It was just as Mr. Yamamoto said. Almost every day when I got home from volleyball, I’d find Mitsugu Azamui in the living room, drinking. He’d be sitting cross-legged on the floor opposite Dad. His thin body was always bent so far forward that it looked like he was drinking directly from the tabletop. From time to time he’d look up at Dad, as if suddenly remembering that someone was with him. His eyes were cloudy and yellow. My eight-year-old brother, Keiji, was scared of him and wouldn’t come into the living room. He’d peer in from the kitchen looking miserable. “I wanna watch TV!” he’d snivel to Mom.

      Mitsugu Azamui was one of the village celebrities. He drank all day every day and had sold his house to pay for it. His wife and children had left him long ago. Now he was living in public housing on the far side of the creek that ran past the police house. The reason he didn’t have to work was that he got disability payments for hand-arm vibration syndrome. He’d been a construction worker when he was younger, moving from one tunnel site to the next.

      He’d come over to our house, drink, and talk about a body that had washed up on the beach. Nobody but him had ever seen it.

      “Ain’t no use believin’ a drunk like him,” the villagers warned Dad.

      His hands were always shaking. You couldn’t be sure whether it was vibration syndrome or alcohol that did it. Each of his fingers shook like the needle of a broken compass, one that sent the traveler around in a circle and back to his starting point. People who’d gone to see the traveler off grew weary of his constant returns. And this particular traveler was no hero.

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