Four hours at Haneda

Vlad desu ne. Hajimemashite, Nozaki desu. (You are Vlad. Pleased to meet you, I am Nozaki.) Sorry, that came out in Japanese. Hello. You are taller than I thought.

taking the strap of his bag before he can lift it We have four hours until the flight, so nothing is urgent. Is Akima still on the phone?

Then let me talk to her before you put it away. holding her hand out for the phone Akima, mukaeraretayo, mushiro watashi ga sagasu made mo nakatta. (Akima, I have got him, and I did not even have to look for long.)

handing the phone back Money first, then the shuttle to Terminal 1, and we eat there because the food is better on that side. Do you have anything to change, or is it all on a card?

turning the card over in her hand and giving it back The euros are the safe part. Let us find a counter and put those into yen, and we can try the card at the machine afterwards to see whether it does anything here.

following where he is pointing Ryougae, yes, that is the one. The two characters are exchange and change.

starting across the floor with his bag still on her shoulder Come.

stopping at the counter and stepping aside so he can reach it Passport out, and put all the notes on the tray at once.

Zenbu en ni onegaishimasu. Kono kata, Ruumania no pasupooto desu. (All of it into yen, please. This gentleman has a Romanian passport.)

turning to him She wants you to confirm the amount before she counts it in. Five hundred and seventy, and the rate is on the small screen facing you.

A hundred and one thousand four hundred and sixty. The rate here is worse than in town, though you will need cash the moment we leave Tokyo, so take it.

The machine, yes. There is one past the counter and we can put the card in and see what the screen says, since no one here has heard of a Fluidian card and the machine will simply refuse it or not.

walking with him to the machine by the wall Put it in and take the English screen. If it asks for a four-digit number, this is where it will stop, because ours are all four and I doubt yours is.

It read far enough to name who issued it and then stopped, so I would expect the same answer at every counter and every machine from here to Kochi. Keep it in your bag and treat the cash as the only thing you have.

Three and a half now. The shuttle to Terminal 1 runs every few minutes from the door at the end, and we can eat once we are through security on that side.

setting off toward the end of the hall, keeping a pace he can match This way, and stay on my left.

putting his bag against the leg of the table At an airport, yes. If you sit inside you only see the shops, and I can watch the aircraft turn round from here.

turning the page a little toward herself and tilting it So the head is the file, the middle is the first five lines of what is on the card, and the bottom is which version was on it the day they handed it to you. Why put code where anyone can look at it?

reading it twice and putting her finger on the fourth point So the only thing they keep to themselves is the seed, and everything else is out in the open where I could go and look at it.

None of it changes the machine downstairs. The thing you put in was a slab of plastic twice the thickness of anything a reader expects.

sitting back and looking at the window for a moment No one at the company liked her. She was the one who said the thing everyone was avoiding, and after she left I was the only person who still had her number.

She said the pressure was the same every day and the work never changed, and she said it in a room where the manager was sitting. Everyone else waited until the corridor to agree with her. I wrote to her after the fall because I saw the news and knew which building it was.

Because I never deleted it. When she left, the group chat dropped her within a week, and I kept the number sitting in my phone without using it.

A few times, at the company dinners, but not a lot. Somebody puts a glass in front of you and you hold it, and that counts as having drunk with them.

I have never been there, so what I have is Akima's version and a week of reading. It sounds like a place where the day is yours. What does a normal evening there actually look like?

Six hours, and you hand the rest to a machine you wrote. Here the machine would be given the six hours and I would be given something else to fill those hours with.

Whatever the manager has been keeping in a drawer and whatever the section was putting off.

Then you also have people who trust that the drawer is empty.

pulling her jacket off the back of the chair and folding it on her knees When the bots do the work and who decides what they are pointed at?

So the pointing is the job and the running is not. That is one skill for the whole cooperative, and what happens to a person who cannot learn it?

They move and it costs them nothing. Here you stay three years before the interviewers will look after you.

Because leaving early is read as a person who will leave again. There is a saying about sitting three years on a stone until the stone is warm.

So there the danger was having no job at all, and here it is having had too many. Was that enforced on people, or it was only on paper?

Then a person who wanted out of a bad workplace had six months and no other opportunity. looking at the gates below the window What happened to the ones who used the six months and found nothing?

We never had that. The pressure here came from the company keeping you for life, and leaving was costly.

For me they did. I would see a posting on Monday, think about it for a week, and by the time I wrote, it was down and the position was filled.

Walking, mostly, and going in places I have not been. counting it off Sweets from a shop where they make one thing only, hot springs in the cold months, and sleeping on a train I do not have to get off.

On the long ones, yes. I take a seat by the window, watch until the towns stop coming, and wake up somewhere I have never been with an hour still to go.

Never. If I shut my eyes there I miss the stop.

the colour coming up again looking down at the table I know. I have thought about that call more than once. It is easier now that you have seen me do it, in a way.

I am aware of it, which makes it worse. Give it a minute and it goes.

Why did you say yes to this? Akima asked you to cross the world and knock on a door belonging to a man who has never heard of you.

You have never met him and you already want him not to be alone. straightening in the chair Do you know what you will say when he opens it?

I will say it first, in Japanese. After that you speak and I put it across.

You mean the writing. taking a napkin and turning it toward him Which ones, the square ones or the ones with strokes going everywhere?

writing 駅 on the napkin with the pen from her jacket, slowly, and turning it round This one. The left half is a horse and the right half is only there for the sound, and none of that helps you, so you learn it as a shape that means station.

writing 両替 beside it The first is a pair, the second is to swap, and on a sign the pair of them means the counter where you change money.

writing これは秘密の書類です under the other two and pushing the napkin across Kore wa himitsu no shorui desu. (This is a secret document.) Kore is this, wa marks it as what I am talking about, himitsu is secret, no ties it to shorui, which is the document, and desu closes it. Your article has nowhere to go, since we have none.

writing 彼らが腐敗しているので、それは秘密です Karera ga fuhai shite iru node, sore wa himitsu desu. Because they are corrupt, that is secret. The reason goes first and the thing being explained comes after, so the halves of your sentence swap places.

writing 彼らが腐敗しているので、これは秘密の書類です Karera ga fuhai shite iru node, kore wa himitsu no shorui desu. Because they are corrupt, this is a secret document. The reason still sits first.

You do not, at the start. pointing at 秘密 with the pen You learn this pair as one lump that means secret and you read a hundred times, and the sound comes after the meaning, or sometimes never.

It is. That one ties the two words on either side of it, so 秘密の書類 is a document that is secret.

Here they would call it a specified secret and put a designation on it, and the papers would report that the designation exists without ever revealing what is under it. capping the pen Did anyone get to see the flights in the end?

pulling two more out of the holder and putting the pen on top of them Here.

reading the napkin upside down Twenty million for the small ones and over a billion for the largest. My mother's house cost about thirty million, so the cheap flight is most of a house and the expensive one is a street of them.

And nothing happened to him while he was in office, since the designation was his to make. turning her glass without drinking from it What was he flying to, two hundred times?

a short laugh into the back of her hand Two hundred times in eleven years is a man who lives on a plane and works between the flights.

still laughing, quieter now He was putting up his own house out of everyone else's money, which must have been explained to him as normal.

laughing again, both hands off the table You have a whole system for it. Do the ones who do it in your country get shut out of the next contract, or do they keep bidding?

So you keep the case moving slowly and the case eventually expires on its own, and the man walks out with a conviction that no longer exists.

laughing some more, putting her hand over her mouth So, with the card for the budget, the paperwork comes out correct at the end and nothing on it is wrong.

sitting back with her hand still half over her mouth Stop, I am going to make a noise in a public place.

wiping under her eye with one finger Give me one of those cards and my rent stops mattering. I would buy fruit in the box and three days of food without counting.

Of course it is not. Everything good gets a line saying it is unavailable in this country.

Medicines, mostly. Things approved elsewhere sit unapproved here for years, and the pharmacy will not have them at all. Beyond that there are services that work in every other country but not here, or machines sold everywhere else but never brought in.

If they are easy to fix, then who would have to sign for that, and what would it cost them?

We had a run of that, cuts to everything except the people announcing them.

How long has he been sitting there without a government behind him?

Here that would have ended in a month, since the party would have replaced him to stop the damage showing.

Then the ones in power stay by arguing that whatever follows them is worse.

So the second side is not defending the courts, it is defending the silence about them. What happens to a journalist who publishes anyway?

A list with no power behind it can work. pushing the napkins into a pile Does anything happen to the ones on it, or is the list the whole punishment?

standing and picking up her bag We should walk to the gate, and you can tell me the rest of it on the way.