DesperaAs he stared at the images that appeared on the cathode ray tube from dawn till dusk, the man would occasionally think of going to Kabutochō and coming back with large amounts of money in his breast pocket. One might suspect that he could have sold off the things he’d created on a whim here underneath the Jūnikai for a respectable amount of money.
But even if the man really could learn the future, Ain’s actions still seemed unpredictable to him.Whirr, whirr…
The low sound echoed as always through the underground room, like a ringing in one’s ears. This would ordinarily cause a fuss, but nobody in the vicinity of the Ryōunkaku, the so-called Asakusa Jūnikai, gave it notice at all.
No, there was no particular reason for people to assemble around the Jūnikai, a building made famous during the reign of the last great emperor. About ten years had passed since the start of the Taishō era, and around the foot of the Jūnikai, which now could only boast of stateliness in height alone, a tightly packed warren of shabby teahouses had sprouted. Private prostitutes lay inside them waiting for customers, unable to walk out on the streets even in Yoshiwara. It was like a maze that might never be escaped if one became lost.
This was not a place for honest people. Still, along with the sorts of people lured in by the red-light district, there were those who had taken it upon themselves to learn from novelists like Natsume Sōseki and Mori Ōgai, and socialists dissatisfied with the state of society since the Restoration.
Whirr, whirr…
The noise had started about half a year earlier. At that time, the old lightning rod at the pinnacle of the Jūnikai had been exchanged for one three times taller.“Well, that’s got nothing to do with the theory of relativity…”
The man wasn’t entirely clear on what Dr. Einstein had done before, but it was apparently true that he’d gone to America. Ain knew, on top of that, that he’d spent time there with a Serbian genius inventor.
Was it really true that the device was showing the man images from the future, as Ain had said?“If you’re bored, why not go outside? Just don’t threaten people with electricity like you did the other day. All right?”
“Ain won’t do anything like that.”
Ain was the girl’s name, most likely.
Although she looked young, somewhere on the border of twelve, her facial expression seemed more mature than that. Though she wore a large ribbon on her head, like one a Western girl might, it seemed like it had been forced on her. It looked not entirely unlike a big pair of cat’s ears. For her part, Ain spoke to the man like he was her friend, one equal in age. They were most likely unrelated by blood.
“Oh, that’s right. There’s a lecture in Mita today. You know, by that German scientist.”
“… Oh, right, that was today.”
“Weren’t you going to go meet him?”
“Yeah…”
The magazine Kaizō had extended a formal invitation to the German scientist Einstein, who had won the Nobel Prize the previous year. His arrival in Japan had become the talk of the town.
“Come on, you should go meet him. He might teach you something. They say it’s thanks to Dr. Einstein’s theory of relativity that we’ve been able to see the future on these cathode ray tubes.”A certain man was responsible for this.
None of the neighborhood women, nor the commuting men, knew of this cavernous cellar-like space, enclosed by brick walls, underneath the Jūnikai. Nor was it likely any of them would care to know.
The sound appeared to emanate from a generator-like device in another room, further underneath where the man and another girl lived.
The man spent much of his time in this room, surrounded by countless machines, all apparently of his own invention.
Around the man were large glass bowls, like the lamps on fishing boats, on which pictures and words appeared as if they were lanterns. People said those goldfish bowl lamps were the discovery of an Englishman named Brown.This is likely corrupted hearsay based on the name of the real inventor of the CRT, German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun.The man’s eyes were fixed on those pictures and words.
“Hey, don’t you ever get tired of that?”
The girl, impatient from boredom, spoke up for the first time in hours.Ain, who had run out of affection for the man who had no desire to go outside, walked further into the low-ceilinged room that had become her home. A morass of wires and components of disassembled machines lay strewn all over the floor. At the center was a mass of gears, pulleys, and cables, larger than Ain was when she sat down, that had been left there half-completed. Whenever Ain began working on it, she would become so absorbed that she would forget to take care of things like the man’s meals. The fact that he hadn’t even a single idea of what Ain was working on annoyed the man more than anything else.
