It was a sound used to refer to a prickling pain.

Was it precisely this pain, chiku chiku, that her mother had felt during Kana’s years abroad?

✲

This photo album had travelled with her all the way from Boston. Of course it was going to Okinawa. It was a repurposed scrapbook filled with snapshots of Kana’s time in America, decorated with origami and bright pink stickers. Some days Kana would pull out the album and look over the pictures. There she was sitting on the manicured lawn at a students’ picnic. And there she was with her friend Kara, sharing a couch and coffee. And there was Kara saying something to the camera. And there they were in a head shot, beaming.

The album had been Kara’s parting gift to her – the work of several thoughtful hours.

Kara Rodano was the best friend that Kana had always dreamed of having, the kind of friend she hadn’t been quite certain even existed outside of movies, novels and pop songs. She had met her on campus, in an aerobics group, after which they had begun spending time getting to know one another. Kara was from Fallston, Maryland. She was studying communication science and planned to become a speech-language pathologist. She shared Kana’s interest in the mind and helping others, and though she wasn’t the best cook in the world, not by a long shot, when it came to baking she sure knew her way around an oven.

Americans were fascinating to Kana, ever since her three-week homestay in Indiana. That had been right at the beginning, before Boston, when her body clock was still on Japanese time. She’d remembered to stand at the right distance from her hosts, allowing for the imaginary tutus around their waists as they talked and walked and went sightseeing. Kana was charmed by the Americans’ voluble hospitality; the regular potlucks to which she would contribute a salad; their habit of making quote marks with their fingers as they spoke.

But it was with Kara that she would acquire a rapport. That was something new for Kana, and magical. The two young women, hanging out, could talk for hours and neither of them notice the time. Rapidly Kana’s soft voice matched Kara’s accent – she pronounced Maryland as ‘Marilyn’ and said ‘jeet yet?’ for ‘did you eat yet?’ like a Marylander born and bred. Without trying, at least too consciously, she held herself like Kara – or, rather, like Kara in front of Kana. The same straight back, the same folded hands, the same intent gaze. Sitting and talking face to face, they looked like mirror images of one another.

In the album a close-up photo showed the two friends in an excited hug. It captured the day Kana had become certain that their bond was something special. They were sitting on the dorm couch, in the middle of one of the ‘deep conversations’ they enjoyed.

‘No way,’ said Kara. ‘Seriously, you don’t know your personality type?’

‘Seriously,’ Kana said.

Kara got up a web page on her phone. It was a five-minute, multiple-choice quiz, of the kind that appear in waiting-room magazines. Kana took the phone and responded to the questions, agreeing or disagreeing with a list of statements. When Kara was shown the result she squealed with joy.

They had the exact same personality type.

Now, it was simply a quiz, a thought-provoking bit of fun, and Kana knew better than to treat the result too seriously. Yet her having responded just like Kara, even more than the result pronouncing them both intuitive, diligent and compassionate introverts, pleased her no end.

Kara smiled wide at Kana and Kana smiled wide at Kara. Their mutual excitement confirmed to each that their feelings were reciprocated. When Kana saw herself in her friend’s gaze, she saw the assured and cheerful woman she’d hoped she might one day become. She no longer felt her difference as a burden, weighing her down into solitude.

After Kana returned to Japan, the friends would use every way at their disposal to stay connected: letters and parcels, calls and email, text and video messages. Also: prayers.

✲

Kana, on her plane from America, had carried a Bible.

‘You’re a Christian?’ Hiromi repeated the word with unconcealed confusion. Their spirituality had been limited to dropping coins in the local shrine’s collection box on New Year’s Day.

‘Kurisuchan?’ Hiromi said again inwardly, but no, the word still meant very little to her. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark – that was more or less it.

In time Kana would answer her mom’s questions about Jesus and the Gospels. She would attempt to describe what she experienced when she prayed to God and felt His shining presence – felt it all the more keenly when she was alone. Like a light. No, more than that. Like moonlight beaming through the dark. For now, she showed her the Bible that Kara had shown Kana in Boston, and said more or less what her friend had said.

This here, Kara had said, shyly producing the book from a drawer, wasn’t any old book. She meant, it was a book of course, with pages and everything, and old, thousands of years old in fact, but what she was saying was, it told a story unlike any other. One big story through many smaller ones, some so small blink once, twice and you’d miss them, too small for other books, but included between these covers, even the tiniest, lowliest lives, because you could not tell the one big story without them, every single one, they were all woven together.

‘You know,’ Kara had said, ‘it’s so hard to talk about the deep stuff. Like love.’

Her voice had changed when she said ‘love’.

‘And like what makes each of us, us. Super hard for everyone. Words don’t seem up to it. But this,’ and Kana now patted the book on the table before her mom, ‘this gives us the words to ponder. At least, I believe so.’

✲

Okinawa. Even in November the air was several degrees warmer than on the mainland. Beyond Hiromi and Kana’s new apartment palm trees threw their spiky shade onto the footpaths, and the sandy beach stretched out forever. Flags drowsed on their poles when the weather was calm and the musical drawl of the locals carried far and wide.

The move, like most house moves, had been tense and draining. But each of the boxes had landed on the island, and then reached Chatan, beside the American Village, in one piece. Kana’s Bible and photo album and ballet clothes and research folders promptly made themselves at home, divvying up between them the best spots around the bare shelves and drawers and wardrobe.

Not long afterwards, Kana heard that her research on loneliness was going to appear in a scientific journal in the spring. She spent sunny weeks walking Levi by the sea as she imagined other researchers discovering her work in print. Who knew to where their comments and feedback might yet take her thoughts? Her good mood during this time made her unusually forthcoming. One afternoon, as she was queueing for the vet, an American-sounding voice asked her in English, what was her cute-looking dog’s name? She turned and saw a blonde woman’s tan and smile and answered. Dogs were a safe, reliable way to open a conversation anywhere. On top of that, Kana always felt so much more confident when she could speak in English. She asked for and was given the name of the American woman’s poodle. By the looks of things, Levi and the poodle were already firm friends. Their owners stood and chatted until it was Kana’s turn to go in.

‘See you around,’ said the poodle’s owner.

When the journal article appeared, Kana emailed Kara at once to let her know. Then she emailed the British writer, who replied with congratulations and the news that his narrative about her was almost there. He just needed to study up a bit on Okinawa.

✲

For centuries the Okinawans traded with the mainland, China and other lands in East and South East Asia. Even as Japan isolated itself from the world, goods and peoples and traditions continued to meet and mix on the annexed island. The Shoguns neglected the islanders, world war devastated them, but their culture of welcome and inclusion survived. The Okinawans are easy-going; their lives are slower than those on the mainland, more relaxed, and very long. They have a one-word philosophy: yuimaru. It isn’t a Japanese word, it is Okinawa dialect for ‘looking out for one another’. A newcomer to the island will be asked, more than once, if any help is required. An islander not seen for a day or two will be checked on. And at the approach of a typhoon, the Okinawans do more than batten down the hatches. They share their homes and food with neighbours as everyone waits for the storm to pass.

Warren

For a long time now, he’d had no life worthy of the name. Then, on the morning of 28 November 2012, he’d been found face down in the lake in Dartmouth Park, West Bromwich – by a passer-by according to one local report, by park rangers according to another – with his throat slit, his escaping blood leaving meaningless squiggles upon the water’s surface.

Almost as soon as he’d been found, however, the dead man had been forgotten. Other than the circumstances of his death he had no claim on people’s attention. For reporters there were always more glamorous murders to cover, better-looking victims whose photos, in death as in life, caught the eye and touched a nerve, whose sticky ends generated the clicks and the buzz that paid their salaries. For most residents of the town he’d been only a stranger, no one special, though quite a few among them would have seen him on the streets where he’d crawled the pubs and slept rough some nights, more so in his final months. He’d had no wife turned widow to keep his memory alive, no close friends left behind to mourn. No money for the kind of showy funeral that reliably draws a crowd. So, in the end, just as if the dead man had never lived there, or indeed had never lived at all, the town went on as before and soon forgot him.

Detective Inspector Warren Hines had not, though, and never would. Through all the months of his inquiry, Warren had got to know the dead man well, better it might be said than those who had known him alive. From time to time, as the years went on, he would continue to think of the man, as he did now in 2022, with the hindsight of the intervening decade, during which a lasting bout of depression had resulted in his being diagnosed, at age fifty, on the autistic spectrum. Perhaps it had taken someone like him, Warren found himself thinking, someone with his cast of mind to get to the bottom of such a baffling and curious case.

From an article in the Express and Star, dated 28 November 2012:

A body was discovered floating in the boating lake of a West Bromwich park today, sparking a police investigation.

West Midlands Police spokeswoman Deb Edmonds said: ‘We are treating the death as unexplained at the moment and we are asking anyone with information to contact police.’

Annette Welch, secretary of Friends of Dartmouth Park, said that she was shocked to hear what had happened.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I was only walking by the lake around 9 a.m. this morning and I thought it was unusually busy.’

One 73-year-old man, who visits the park twice a day with his dogs, but wished to remain anonymous, said: ‘The first I heard about it was when I saw the police down here this morning. We don’t know what could have happened. I know people do drink in the park. It’s possible someone could have come down here last night and fallen in.’

Warren was quick to the scene that morning, brought there by his trusty Mini. A well-worn brown trilby and woollen scarf kept away the water’s icy breath. The lake was home to some Canada geese who honked as they were cordoned off, while, held back around its banks, men and women gathered for the impromptu spectacle. Then, one by one, losing interest, they peeled away.

The dead man had been fished out and driven away to the morgue for a post-mortem. Of South Asian heritage, between forty and forty-five years old, short dark hair, brown eyes, slender, average height. Gazing round at its scruffy trees and barren grass, Warren thought about how the park must have withheld hospitality from the man in his final moments. He was familiar enough with the site to know what he wasn’t looking at. The Refreshment Room (burned down by vandals in the eighties); the boathouse (burned down by vandals – the same or others – in the nineties); the art deco bandstand (demolished after rust devoured its walls). The presently non-existent benches you could not sit or lie down on. What on earth, then, had impelled the man to be out here in the smallest hours of a midweek morning? In the biting cold and dank and dark. A lovers’ tryst? A drug deal? An insomniac’s desperate urge to stretch his legs? For now, every scenario was possible.

Including suicide. That couldn’t be ruled out, not right away. There was the stubborn argument of statistics – most of the time a violent death’s victim and perpetrator bear one and the same name – but equally the setting of this man’s demise, once body and identity were reunited, seemed to corroborate the idea of a truly desperate act.

The man’s name, the police learned, was Jasbir Singh Bains. Forty-one and of no fixed abode. That might explain what he was doing out in the middle of the night, having no indoors to leave. A local man – you couldn’t get more local – from Herbert Street, where he’d grown up, it was no more than a ten-minute walk to the lake. Acquaintances described a harmless drifter, long down on his luck, who’d let the years slip by and drunk whatever money came his way, living as if there were no tomorrow.

It wasn’t implausible, then, that he would have taken a knife to his own throat and ended his life, after wandering through the dark into a final ambush of desperation. Perhaps he’d chosen this desolate spot to die because it reminded him of his childhood, of racing in and out of the shadows of trees, of family picnics on the grass after which he’d fed breadcrumbs to the lake.

Some of Warren’s youngest colleagues protested. A bloke slash his own throat? They were newbies and Warren gave them a look he reserved for people who talked daft. The kind who thought they’d seen it all. No one ever had. You couldn’t begin to understand the harm a human being might inflict on another, Warren said, until you saw what harm they were all capable of inflicting upon themselves. He told them about the time his squad had attended an address in Sandwell. Reports of a domestic dispute earlier in the week. Neighbours hadn’t seen the young woman since. Warren watched his team knock and knock before they took down the front door; he heard a gasp escape them when they went in. They’d entered the woman’s living room, and turned away instinctively at the sight of so much blood. Blood on the carpet and on the bare wall and on the kitchen knife that lay beside her – the knife that had stabbed her chest over and over again. Everyone thought murder, even Warren, until he studied more closely the steady, rhythmic pattern in the bloodstains. He saw then what must have happened: the shouts of recrimination, words that could not be unheard, the boyfriend storming out, the woman’s violent weeping. A broken heart. Thoughts that cloud and darken. Difficulty breathing – and too much pain. The shudder of cutlery in the drawer jolted open. Her body leaning still against the wall before each releasing thrust of the blade.

The woman whom neighbours spoke of as gentle and level-headed.