Jon Courtenay Grimwood

‘That looks heavy.’

Glancing round, the girl saw a porter in the grey-green uniform of the Tokyo Metro, complete with smart white gloves. He was smiling.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s fine.’

‘If you’re sure?’

‘I’m certain,’ said Nijie, more firmly than was polite. Kids today, she could see him think. No manners.

Having wrestled her case into a left-luggage locker at Shinjuku Sanchome, Nijie Kitagawa slammed its steel door and fed 2000 yen into a slot. She followed this with two 500 yen coins and checked the door was tight.

The longest she could leave her case was three days. After that, she’d need to change lockers. As Nijie was fifteen and official statistics suggested she should live to the age of eighty-three, this meant she’d need to swap lockers 8273 times before she died.

Mind you, official statistics could be wrong.

Alternatively she could spend its contents. On that basis, the girl could afford to take $100 a day for the rest of her life, minus the $500 she’d already used. $15,000,000 was a lot of money to steal, particularly for someone her age.

It was Friday, 22nd of December, the last day of school term and Nijie’s friends would be wondering where she was, Nijie could imagine their conversation. 

She’d left a cup of saké, her videophone and her high-school identity card at a roadside shrine for luck, before entering the station. As an afterthought, Nijie had swapped her card for five $100 bills, anchoring them with her door keys. So now her card lay in a gutter where it belonged. A girl with brown eyes, her hair in bunches, still smiling as people trod down.

The first train was for Ginza, from where it would run the loop to Ikeburuku, giving her twenty-four stations before she needed to change. Getting a corner seat was lucky, because the metro was crowded with Christmas shoppers carrying white-painted twigs and plastic snowmen. So Nijie sat quietly, working out what to do next. After a while she remembered to keep her knees together.

Opposite her, a woman with that day’s Asahi Shimbun was tutting to her husband about the Kitagawa killings, while a photograph of a man with swept-back hair stared from its front page. Tony Kitagawa looked better in back and white, certainly a lot better than when Nijie last saw him.

‘I am a cat,’ she announced. 

Across the aisle a boy in the blue tunic of a local high school glanced up, only to smile as he recognised her words. ‘As yet I have no name,’ he said, finishing the quote for her.

Nijie burst into tears.

When she next looked he was gone. Maybe he was late for school, maybe the start times had changed or perhaps she’d been on the train longer than she realised. Looking around, Nijie decided it was a different train.

Station names changed and smartly-dressed men got on or off, and when every seat but the one next to her was taken, even that one filled up. Having finished her crying, Nijie sniffed, being far too carefully brought up to blow her nose in public.

Her old life had gone. She needed a new name and somewhere hide. Most of all she needed to stop crying and pull herself together. Reciting lines from I Am A Cat was perhaps not the best way to achieve this, but the story came from her grandmother, who’d read it aloud one winter night many years before.

At the end of the line, the girl climbed out of her seat, crossed the platform and waited for the train to take her back. The station was suburban neat, its trees pruned into elegant shapes and a clock above the tracks counted off the seconds until her train would arrive.

When the clock hit zero, Nijie felt it happen, like paper ripping inside her. Several things previously muddled became clear. Neko meant cat, while niku meant meat; she was both of those.

Neku?

Yes, she thought, that was it. She was Lady Neku. And suddenly, the girl who became Lady Neku understood she’d never really been anyone else.