Revised Chapter One of New Novel

“Tonight at Huddle’s Books, we are honored to have Kazuki Ono, who joins Kafka, Dickens and Orwell as a novelist whose name has become an adjective.”

The crowd that had jammed Huddles, cramped on a slow day, applauded. Many fans raised Ono’s Enrique the Freak above their heads and banged it like a tambourine.

Hugh glanced out from his aisle. There were hundreds of people in the crowd, each possessing Ono’s new novel and a numbered ticket that would allow them to get Ono’s signature after he read from his latest work. Hugh’s ticket was 251. He had arrived late so as to be camouflaged by the crowd. Across the room Ono, whose sight was never good, would not recognize him—20 years had passed—but should he walk by and see Hugh, the Lion of ?saka would surely roar.

Hugh had followed Ono’s work over the last twenty years not because he was a fan, which he was, nor the novelist’s ex son-in-law, but because he hoped that his own fictional counterpart would appear in one of the stories. Hugh sifted the pages of each new work searching for himself among the ever shifting landscape of the novel, a fly on the window of a train looking for a way out. He searched for a mistake that paralleled his mistake. But in all eight novels since the tragedy, there had been nothing connected with Hugh. He had bought Ono’s latest novel earlier in the day. Hugh had already read half of the two hundred pages in a park.

It had been five years since Ono had been in Los Angeles, when he appeared at this same bookstore with Sleepwalk # 3, his eleventh novel. Hugh had attended that night and heard Ono read from the book in his hesitant English, which was a mark of his modesty. Ono’s English was perfect. Hugh fled in the middle of the reading, for the voice had cracked his breastbone like a surgeon uncovering a heart. Hugh heard the voices of his sons.

He had learned of tonight’s appearance by chance. Among the numerous e-mail invitations to yoga classes and operas, singles meetings and symphonies, was the notice of Ono’s appearance at Huddle’s. That he neither expected nor hoped that Ono would change his course was not completely true. In his fiction, Ono sometimes found redemption for the most repulsive of his characters.

Hugh glanced down at his book, turning up the back cover. The rainbow grid of lines, some with the back cover, the blurbs and Ono’s photograph with the mass of now mostly gray hair, though in his youth it had been freakishly, naturally blond. He was a handsome man, with the same bone structure as his daughter.

The bookstore’s owner signaled for Ono, who stood at the rear of the platform, to come forward. The crowd erupted with applause as the author stepped on the stage, looking trim and athletic though he was in his sixties. At his side, he held his novel. Ono smiled, bowing several times. He closed his eyes and the applause tapered off to silence. He stepped up to the microphone.

“Thank you. During my promotional tours, I visit many large bookstores, vast bookstores, I might say. Most are part of chains, which is simply the nature of bookselling these days, and I have no complaints about the way my books are treated. But there remains something special about an independent bookstore like Huddle’s, where can be found the obscure and the masterpieces. This is a house of words.”

The crowd applauded.

“Now in the house of words I would like to add a few more of my own.” He lifted his book, set in on the podium and opened it.

“I leased an apartment in the Hatsudai District. The landlord explained that as a condition of the lease the body would be kept in the living room as I had been kept by the previous tenant. He would be visible floating in the liquid nitrogen in the Plexiglas chamber, but the mechanisms for his maintenance would be silent. The building’s electricity supplied power, but in the event of a power loss, an emergency generator would take over. There was no need to pay any special attention to the chamber. It could be cleaned of dust and grit with a common household cleaner, but no other maintenance was necessary. Any attempt to hide or cover the body, for example when guests came over, would break the lease. The landlord advised against inviting children into the apartment, not because the children would be disturbed by the sight, but the tendency of even the best-behaved children is to get into mischief, and sometimes putting their own lives in danger....”

Hugh straightened as if someone had someone had dropped an icicle down his shirt. Why hadn’t he read that in the book?

“Any damage to the chamber would be his responsibility. He agreed, knowing he had constructed this arrangement or did he was....”

Ono looked up as if someone in the audience had jeered. He tilted back his head. His eyes danced around and his mouth fell open as if he were receiving a revelation. The audience murmured, confused, frightened. Ono drew his trembling lips together. Once again his mouth fell open. Ono jerked back his head and sneezed.