Free The Gate of Sorrows by Miyuki Miyabe Page A

“Please sit down.” Shigenori kept a stool in the entryway to help him put on his shoes. “There’s something I want you to take a look at.”
    Shigeru ran a little tobacco stand out of his house. Business had been bad enough, he said, as more and more people insisted on smoke-free environments, but it nosedived when even vending machines started requiring electronic cards with proof of age. But he also managed an apartment building and was comfortably well-off.
    Shigeru looked warm and chic in his trademark multicolor alpaca coat and hood. His brand-name sneakers were emblazoned with a flashy logo. He pulled a new-looking digital camera from his coat pocket and started scrolling through the images with a practiced hand.
    “You remember the tea caddy building in Ida, don’t you?”
    Ida was a district of Shinjuku just north of Wakaba. Not far from one of Tokyo’s biggest shopping areas, Wakaba and Ida were islands that time seemed to have passed by, with houses dating from before the war still occupied by the same families, and “modern” apartment blocks built just after the war. In the bubble economy of the mid-eighties to early nineties, both districts were roiled by speculators whose tactics for persuading owners to part with their property ranged from persistent to unscrupulous. Many old buildings disappeared, replaced by condominiums and apartment buildings—but before the empty lots were filled the bubble collapsed, the speculators disappeared, and many orphaned lots stood empty, like missing teeth. This didn’t make the neighborhood safer from crime.
    Twenty years out from the implosion of the bubble, the neighborhoods had gradually recovered. The empty lots had mostly filled in with apartments, tiny condominiums, and metered parking lots. Things had returned to normal, more or less. The bubble had been a dream, after all, and a foolish one at that. No one expected things to change much in the future, because a bubble like that wasn’t going to come again anytime soon. Just as disease progresses more slowly in the aged, an aging town changes slowly too.
    The tea caddy building was built on the site of a parking lot in Ida during the tech bubble that got rolling early in the new century. Its four cylindrical stories looked for all the world like one of those everyday containers of green tea. The name caught on quickly.
    The tech bubble was different from the stock and real estate bubble of the 1980s and 1990s. That one had raged like a typhoon; this was like a summer downpour that drenched one street but left the next one over dry. It didn’t last long, and the benefit—or damage—was limited to certain people and companies and locations. The people who made money made it in buckets, and one of them was a young founder of a software company who decided he needed a building shaped like a tea caddy in Ida.
    Shigeru had dug around and discovered that no one was living there. It had been used more like a club where the owner and his tech industry friends could throw lavish parties. It seemed astonishing that someone would erect an entire building for such a purpose. It definitely didn’t seem designed as a commercial property. The owner had probably planned to find someone to live there once he tired of it.
    The proportions were indeed like a tea caddy, but the details were ornate, with projecting bay windows adorned with fancy ironwork, reliefs on the outer walls, and a rooftop encircled by a crenellated wall like the turret of a medieval castle. To Shigenori, the building looked like a cheap imitation of an old European castle, or perhaps a monastery. In the building’s heyday, the entrance had actually been flanked by stone statues—a knight in a suit of armor and a robed goddess.
    When the tech bubble popped and the young tycoon’s business sense proved to be a myth, the building was left to its fate. Perhaps because it was a tax dodge, the building had multiple layers of ownership, and multiple