Tokyo After Midnight – Part 2: Not Empty

Eight months into eighteen, Daniel had learned three things about living in Tokyo.

One: the trains are never late, and if you are late, it is your fault.

Two: the old woman who runs the vegetable shop on Kenji’s street will give you an extra persimmon if you say oishii loudly enough.

Three: Kenji Sato, who photographed only empty places, had taken more than four thousand photographs of Daniel.

He found them in March. A whole drawer full of contact sheets, in the cupboard under the window. Daniel asleep. Daniel cooking, badly. Daniel laughing on the Yamanote line. Daniel standing in the rain outside the museum, a hard hat on his head, waving.

“You have a problem,” Daniel told him.

Kenji was making coffee and didn’t turn around. “It’s a professional interest.”

“Four thousand photos is not a professional interest.”

“Four thousand two hundred and sixteen,” Kenji said. “I count.”

---

The gallery called in May.

A small, serious place in Omotesando, white walls and concrete floors, the kind of gallery that shows one artist at a time and never puts prices on the wall. A curator had seen Kenji’s empty-places series online. She wanted to give him a solo show.

“That’s amazing,” Daniel said. “Kenji, that’s huge.”

Kenji was quiet for a long time. He was sitting on the tatami by the window, turning the curator’s card over and over in his fingers.

“I want to show the new ones,” he said finally.

“The empty places?”

“No.” He looked up. “The new ones.”

Daniel understood.

“Kenji,” he said slowly. “People will see. Everyone will see. Your regulars at the bar. Your neighbours. The whole city.”

“I know.”

“That’s a big thing. Here.”

“I know.” Kenji put the card down on the tatami, very carefully, the way he put down everything. “I have spent sixteen years photographing empty rooms because I was afraid. Of my father. Of my uncle’s rule. Of people leaving.” He looked at Daniel. “I am tired of empty rooms.”

---

The exhibition was called Not Empty.

Forty photographs, black and white, hung in a single long line around the white walls of the gallery. The first ten were the old ones: an empty train platform at dawn, an empty playground in the snow, an empty chair beside a window. And then, slowly, as you walked around the room, something began to appear in them.

A shadow on a wall. A coffee cup with lipstick on it. A man’s hand on a railing. A pair of shoes beside a door.

And then a man. Laughing in a jazz café. Asleep on a futon with the morning light across his face. Standing in the rain in a hard hat.

The last photograph was taken on the rooftop of the bar in Golden Gai, at night, with the whole of Shinjuku glowing behind it. Two men, side by side, from behind, holding hands.

Under it, the card said only: Self-portrait.

The gallery was full. Kenji’s regulars came, every single one, even the old salaryman who never left his stool. Daniel’s colleagues from the museum came. Strangers came, after a magazine wrote about it. People stood in front of the last photograph for a long time and didn’t say anything.

Kenji stood in the corner in a black suit, holding a glass of wine he hadn’t touched, looking like he might be sick.

“Breathe,” Daniel said, standing beside him.

“I am breathing.”

“You’re holding your breath.”

“That is a kind of breathing,” Kenji said. “Japanese breathing.”

Daniel laughed, and Kenji almost did, and then the gallery door opened and Kenji went completely white.

---

The man in the doorway was about sixty-five.

He was small and grey-haired and wore a dark, old-fashioned suit. He held his hat in both hands. He had the same cheekbones as Kenji, the same careful way of standing, as if he were afraid of taking up too much space.

“Kenji,” Daniel said quietly. “Who is that?”

Kenji didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

The man walked slowly into the gallery. He didn’t look at anyone. He went to the first photograph, the empty train platform, and stood in front of it for a long time. Then the next. And the next. He walked around the whole room, one photograph at a time, while the crowd moved around him and Kenji stood frozen in the corner, not breathing at all.

At the last photograph, the man stopped.

He stood in front of the two men on the rooftop for a very, very long time.

Then he turned around, and looked across the gallery, straight at his son.

---

They talked outside, in a small garden behind the gallery, by a stone lantern and a maple tree.

Daniel didn’t go with them. He stood by the gallery window, watching through the glass. He couldn’t hear anything. He could only see Kenji and his father standing three metres apart on the gravel path, not touching, both of them looking at the ground.

They stood like that for twenty minutes.

Then the old man said something. Kenji’s shoulders started to shake.

And then his father stepped forward, slowly, awkwardly, like a man who had forgotten how, and put his arms around his son.

Daniel turned away from the window. Some things were not his to watch.

---

“He saw the magazine,” Kenji said much later, in the dark of the apartment, lying on the futon with his head on Daniel’s chest. “My mother showed him. He said,” Kenji stopped. Swallowed. “He said he has been sorry for sixteen years. He said he didn’t know how to come.”

Daniel stroked his hair. “How do you feel?”

“I don’t know.” Kenji was quiet. “Angry. Happy. Very tired.” He turned his face into Daniel’s chest. “He wants to meet you. Sunday. At my mother’s house. She is going to make too much food.”

“Your mother is going to feed me?”

“My mother is going to feed you until you die,” Kenji said. “It is how she shows love. And fear. Mostly fear.”

Daniel laughed softly. Then he turned Kenji’s face up toward his own.

“I’m proud of you,” he said. “You know that?”

Kenji looked at him in the dark for a long moment. Then he kissed him, slowly, the way you kiss someone when there is nothing left to be afraid of, and Daniel pulled him close. Outside, the city hummed and glittered and a late train rattled by on the elevated track.

What happened after belonged only to them: to the rain beginning softly on the window and the single lamp turned low, to the quiet, unhurried closeness of two men who had both, in very different ways, come home.

---

Ten months later, on Daniel’s last week in Tokyo, Kenji closed the bar at midnight and took him up to the rooftop again.

The museum was finished. The glass building in Ginza had opened in August, and Daniel’s name was on a small brass plaque by the door. His firm in Toronto had sent three emails asking when he would be back.

He hadn’t answered any of them.

“So,” Kenji said, handing him a glass of the Hakushu, the whisky that tasted like rain on leaves. “Eighteen months.”

“Eighteen months.”

“You are not a regular anymore,” Kenji said. “You are something else. I don’t know the word in English.”

Daniel looked out at the city. Then he reached into his jacket and took out an envelope.

“My firm offered me the Asia office,” he said. “Here. Permanently. I said yes this morning.” He held out the envelope. “And I bought these.”

Kenji opened it. Two plane tickets. Tokyo to Toronto, at Christmas.

“My mother,” Daniel said, “has been asking about you for a year. She has seen the exhibition catalogue. She has a lot of questions. She is also going to make too much food.”

Kenji stared at the tickets. Then at him.

“Your mother,” he said slowly, “is going to feed me until I die?”

“Probably.”

Kenji laughed, the real, open laugh, the one that had taken eighteen months to learn, and pulled Daniel close on the rooftop under the orange Tokyo sky.

“Then I will need,” he murmured against his lips, “a lot of photographs. Just in case.”

---

The End.

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