My dream had seemed so real that I found it hard to dismiss it as one, even though that was the simplest and most logical explanation, and the one I eventually found myself obliged to accept. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder, like I did every time I woke from a dream this vivid: what was all that, really?
I’d been roused by the sound of a woman talking on the phone to some distant listener.
Yeah . . . Right . . . But . . . Isn’t it . . .? . . . Still . . . You think?
She spoke quietly, as if she didn’t want to wake me, but the voice that pulled me back to familiar reality was raw and unmistakeably real. Sure. A long sigh. Yeah. A slight cough. A half-chuckle as she spoke. The sound of a drink slipping down her throat. The slight exhalation after she swallowed. A can being crushed in her hand and tossed into the bag-lined bin. These sounds, the differently textured sounds of her being alive, slowly took the edges off the lingering realness of my dream, made it more dreamlike and vague. I’ve always had a soft spot for vagueness. Sometimes I find myself thinking how pleasant life would be if we stopped trying to delineate time. I’ve never been able to get my head around the idea of using words and numbers with such rigid meanings—the year two thousand and X, or July, or eight o’clock, or twenty-two years old, or twenty-three times—to divide something up whose existence can’t even be proven. If I had my way, we’d forget all about what day of the summer holidays it is, or how many days there are until the start of term, or how many hours we have until dusk, and simply sit on a beach bathed in sunlight—or, if it was night-time, the glow of portable lamps—endlessly scooping up sand and building castles, as if tomorrow didn’t exist. Our sandcastles might never be finished—the moment we applied the final touches, the waves would surely wash them away—but it wouldn’t matter, because there on the beach things like results and conclusions and ageing and endings wouldn’t exist anyway, only the endlessly repeating moment of the sandcastle-building. Speaking of which, why is that always the first thing kids do with sand, whether at the beach or one of those sandpits in the park? Is the urge to build hard-wired into our genes or something? Are we all architects from birth?
As well as her voice, I could hear a pencil scratching away at some paper. The sound of a professional architect—whether she’d been one from birth I wasn’t sure—sketching in her sketchbook. She’d been commissioned to design a new prison, a tower that would be built in the Gyoen gardens, which is why she was staying at this hotel. For a week spanning late July and early August, she’d told me, she would stay here, in this hotel by the gardens, in order to develop her design.
“I’ve got lots to think about,” she’d explained, “and that includes whether I even want to submit a bid. If not, I’ll need to come up with a way of persuading my team that it’s the right call. It’s an honour for a small firm like ours to even be invited to bid, and the project is groundbreaking enough that just entering the competition will put us in the spotlight both here and abroad. Whatever the outcome, getting our plans out into the world could be really big for us. Unless I can think of a convincing excuse for letting a chance like this slip by, I’ll have failed in my duty as the head of Sara Machina Architects. Plus, while I’m at the hotel, I should spend some time looking back calmly on my life so far. Engage in a bit of soul-searching. I shouldn’t even be thinking about designing an enormous building until I’ve done that. I’m not sure exactly what ‘soul-searching’ involves in practice—in fact, I’m not entirely sure where I’m supposed to find this soul of mine—but I know it’s what I should do next. If I put it off until my forties, I’ll probably overthink the whole thing, my instinct for self-preservation will kick in and I’ll end up making a decision that’s far from sensible. Or too sensible. Sensible doesn’t always mean right, after all.”
Should. Shouldn’t. Something about her habit of using those words had caught my attention, which is why I remembered what she’d said in such detail. Apart from my own mother, I’ve never met anyone with obligation and negation so deeply embedded in their speech patterns. When the Architect said she should do something, she was showing you how deeply she believed what she was saying. She’d taught me that it didn’t matter whether your listener believed your words—the fact that you did, and did so completely, could invest even the most incoherent statements with a colossal amount of meaning.
With my mother it was different. When she got worked up, she liked to tell me that I “shouldn’t really have been born,” that I “should have been aborted,” that people “should pity” me. She even gave a reason of sorts. I’d had twenty-three chances not to be born, she told me, and if just one of them had worked out I wouldn’t be here. But I didn’t see why some stupid number should be a reason for attracting anyone’s pity, and more importantly my mother never sounded like she believed the words that were coming out of her mouth. She was like a saleswoman who didn’t quite believe in the quality of the product she was trying to pitch. When my father came up in conversation, she liked to say—or sob, or yell—“That man was a piece of trash.” But because I could tell that, for her, the words “trash” and “man” had never really been connected by an “equals” sign—to the point that I sometimes wondered if she’d ever even seen a piece of trash—I’d stifle a laugh at the hollowness of her little show. Once, I looked up the etymology of the word “trash” on my phone and learned that one of its original meanings was “fallen leaves.” Ever since, that’s what my father’s been to me. I find it funny to imagine the guy budding from a branch, rustling in the wind, turning red and falling to the ground.
In fact, to my eyes—I guess they’re either not working properly, or working too well—most things in the world look strangely funny. I can derive plenty of amusement just from the sight of humans engaged in their daily struggle. Walking around, learning words, making money. Maybe that’s because the sight of people just being people is still not one I’m used to. In that sense, you could say I’m lucky my father was a piece of trash or a pile of leaves or whatever. Anyway, maths was never my strong suit and my grasp of probability is a little shaky, but instead of lamenting my twenty-three missed chances at an abortion, wouldn’t it make more sense to take comfort in the fact that I had twenty-three chances to be killed and somehow managed to survive?
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From Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan, translated by Jesse Kirkwood. Used with permission of the publisher, S&S/Summit Books. Copyright © Rie Qudan 2024. Translation copyright © 2025 by Jesse Kirkwood.
