Masks by Fumiko Enchi Page A

large key-chain. “Writing. If I rented an actual apartment, the hospital would never leave off calling. This is my hideout.”
    They stepped off the elevator on the seventh floor and found a hotel maid waiting for them.
    Mikamé led the way, striding briskly down a dim, unadorned central corridor that suggested a hospital with its rows of identical gray doors. At the end of the corridor was a red light marked “Exit.” They rounded the corner, and the maid unlocked the second door they came to.
    Beyond the door was a neat, compact room furnished with a chair that was the same orange as the carpeting and a single bed next to the wall. As he joked with the maid, Mikamé took off his overcoat and dropped his big briefcase heavily on the bed.
    “This is full of writing paper.”
    Ibuki grunted in acknowledgment and turned toward the window, the thought crossing his mind that to move immediately toward the window upon entering a strange room is probably a universal human reflex. It might not be a bad idea to bring Yasuko to a place like this, he mused.
    He looked down on a narrow, pockmarked alleyway lined on either side with boxlike office buildings devoid of any softness or curvature, so tightly pressed together that the street seemed like the bottom of a deep canyon.
    Sand and white and slate blue and gray, the façades of the buildings were each marked, like human faces, with the signs of their years.
    It seemed to be quitting time. Human figures moved busily to and fro in the windows of all the buildings.
    To the right was a building shaped in a cube like a child’s toy block, its high clock tower rising against a bank of gray clouds, the round glass dial glittering like polished brass in the light of the setting sun.
    “Look down there,” said Mikamé, tapping Ibuki on the shoulder with the hand in which he held a cigarette. Ibuki looked, and saw at the bottom of the street canyon a crowd of men and women wearing coats, streaming forthone after another like objects struck from a mold and walking off silently at the same unvarying speed.
    “Quitting time.”
    “Yes, the liberation of the office worker. They don’t look all that happy about it, do they?”
    “From up here they all look so small and proper.”
    “The effect of distance.”
    “It’s hard to imagine much crime taking place.”
    “I’ll tell you what’s fun about staying here—watching this little back street from morning till night. I did it once. When you get up around six, the pavement is clean and deserted. The first ones out are the vagrants. See over on that corner, the construction site? They come and rummage for food scraps by the bunkhouse, and then they fix themselves a meal; some of them bring their dogs. After that come the cleaning women, and then the young men and women who work in the offices. By nine o’clock almost everyone in that building across the way has clocked in. They go back and forth all morning long, shuffling papers and looking busy, and then at noon the action shifts to the rooftops. Everyone goes up there to exercise, or just to stand and talk—men with men, mostly, and women with women. And here you have quitting time.”
    “It must be deserted at night.”
    “No pedestrians, just cars, and not many of them. The only building on the street with lights in the windows is this hotel.”
    “Do you bring women here?” asked Ibuki, sitting again in the chair.
    “Sometimes. But when you use just one hotel, there’s a practical limit to that sort of thing. It has to be someone totally respectable, if you know what I mean.” He slapped his thigh and, looking sideways at Ibuki, said, “Now there’s the perfect type—someone like Yasuko.”
    Ibuki gave him a wry smile. He was glad Mikamé had shown him this geometric neighborhood with its neat files of silent office workers whose lives were measured so precisely by the clock; in his obsession with Mieko and Yasuko Toganō he had lately grown fearful of losing his