Picking slugs from the cabbages with a pair of chopsticks, Jacob notices a ladybird on his right hand. He makes a bridge for it with his left, which the insect obligingly crosses. Jacob repeats the exercise several times. The ladybird believes, he thinks, she is on a momentous journey, but she is going nowhere. He pictures an endless sequence of bridges between skin-covered islands over voids, and wonders if an unseen force is playing the same trick on him …
… until a woman’s voice dispels his reverie: ‘Mr Dazûto?’
Jacob removes his bamboo hat and stands up.
Miss Aibagawa’s face eclipses the sun. ‘I beg pardon to disturb.’
Surprise, guilt, nervousness … Jacob feels many things.
She notices the ladybird on his thumb. ‘Tentô-mushi.’
In his eagerness to comprehend, he mishears: ‘O-ben-tô-mushi?’
‘O-ben-tô-mushi is “luncheon-box bug”.’ She smiles. ‘This,’ she indicates the ladybird, ‘is O-ten-tô-mushi.’
‘Tentô-mushi,’ he says, and she nods with a schoolmistress’s approval.
Her deep blue summer kimono and white headscarf lend her a nun’s air.
They are not alone: the inevitable guard stands by the garden gate.
Jacob tries to ignore him: ‘ “Ladybird”. A gardener’s friend …because ladybirds eat greenfly.’ Jacob raises his thumb to his lips and blows.
The ladybird flies all of three feet to the scarecrow’s face.
She adjusts the scarecrow’s hat as a wife might. ‘How you call him?’
‘A scarecrow, to “scare crows” away, but his name is Robespierre.’
‘Warehouse Eik is “Warehouse Oak”; monkey is “William”. Why scarecrow is “Robespierre”?’
‘Because his head falls off when the wind changes. It’s a dark joke.’
‘Joke is secret language,’ she frowns, ‘inside words.’

Once I thought this question: “Do I own my name?” I do not mean my slave names. My slave names change at the whims of my masters. […] My true name I tell nobody, so nobody can steal my name. The answer, I think, is yes - my true name is a thing I own. Sometimes another thought comes to me: “Do I own my memories?” The memory of my brother diving from the turtle rock, sleek and brave…[…] Yes - like my true name, my memories are things I own.
Once I thought this thought: “Do I own this thought?” The answer was hidden in mist, so I asked Dr. Marinus’s servant, Eelattu. Eelattu answered, yes, my thoughts are born in my mind, so they are mine. Eelattu said that I can own my mind, if I choose. I said “Even a slave?” Eelattu said, yes, if the mind is a strong place. […] Master Fischer owns my body, then, but he does not own my mind. This, I know, because of a test. When I shave Master Fischer, I imagine slitting open his throat. If he owned my mind, he would see this evil thought. But instead of punishing me, he just sits there with his eyes shut.

If only…human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

The healthy can’t understand the emptied, the broken. You’d list all the reasons for living, but I left ‘em behind at Victoria Station back in early summer.

It seems I have found my hiding place. I emerge into a library-study with the highest book-population density I have seen in my life. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side-streets, book spillages, book rubble. Paperback books, hardcover books, atlases, manuals, almanacs. Nine lifetimes of books. Enough books to build an igloo and hide in, and then to hide the igloo. The room is sentient with books. Mirrors double and cube the books. A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to make me wonder if I am a book too.