I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like Read Online Free

dream, and arranged, in his calmest voice, to meet her.
    — I’m busy this week, she said. I could make time tomorrow, if—
    He was imposing now, he knew.
    — Only if you don’t have anything on, he said.
    She didn’t.
    He hung up and sat at the kitchen table. In their conversation Nanako had revealed nothing of herself or her situation, and although it could have been the phone’s fault, he felt her voice had been without the light tone of its old reticence. There was a harder undercurrent, a flatness. Probably, he’d changed too.
    He considered gifts, flowers, old photographs — but there was nothing for him to prove. Neither the Nanako he had known nor the voice on the phone was likely to be moved, so he ate dinner, sorted some accounts from work and adjusted the edge of his canvas. The shading still bothered him, and the figure’s top — the apex of the geometric construction — remained indistinct. For a week he’d outlined its edges without the top’s shape presenting itself. It troubled him, but there was nothing to be done now. He slept early and didn’t dream of her. The next day, when he caught the train, all he carried with him was an umbrella, his phone and some cigarettes.
    He got off at Omotesando, taking the Chiyoda Line to Hibiya. As he walked through the park, across to the benches, a light rain fell. He sat next to the pond and watched the crowd putting up their clear plastic umbrellas, narrow rivulets sliding between the struts. The benches filled. In a moment the heavy rain started and a curtain of water fell over the roof. Through it he watched the rain strike the edge of the pond, scattering a school of goldfish. A turtle floated by, and further ahead he could see a great black fish drifting beneath the surface. He’d come here as a teenager, he remembered.
    On the bench across from him an old couple sat next to each other watching the pond. Further along a young girl paged through a picturebook. When the rain stopped she waited for a while, then jumped onto the grass. He got off the bench and walked past the pond. The turtle had moved towards the center, but he couldn’t see the black fish. The girl and her father circled the pond and as he watched the father bent down and tied his daughter’s laces.
    Someone brushed past him and he reached to guard his pocket. He folded his umbrella and walked back to the station.
    It was dusk when he arrived at Kita-Senju. The rain had stopped and there was no wind, but he felt a strange lightness as he left the station, as if he could join the crowd or drift out of it; there was no need to separate himself from the crowd but neither was he hurried, instead he seemed to drift on the crowd’s momentum, carried along by a calm sadness. He extended his umbrella and looked over the railing before descending, watching how the streets narrowed like nerves. A neon sign cast light on an alley to the north, and he could make out a distant pile of newspapers sunken in the faint rose light.
    Already his expectations were catching up with him, and the imminence of disappointment made him smile, a little. On the street now, he caught sight of his reflection in the bar windows, in the gutter’s broken glass. Young people passed him by and he walked close to the windows to avoid them. He looked down at the map he’d drawn and crossed the two blocks to Nanako’s flat. There was a repair sign on the elevator doors, so he climbed the stairs. On the third floor he stopped at the balcony, taking in the night view of Kita-Senju. He heard footsteps and turned; a young boy had followed him up the stairs and now ran past him, cap in hand. He watched the boy disappear into a doorway. A woman stood at the far end of the balcony smoking.
    He walked over and rested against the ledge. A crowded warmth from somewhere; perhaps he’d overdressed. The earlier rain hadn’t picked up, and already he felt a torpid stillness settling over the night. He looked at the woman, caught