Chapter 1: The Entire Menu
The first time Gojo Satoru walks into your shop, he orders everything.
Not one of everything. Everything. He points at the chalkboard behind you with one long finger, the way a man might point at a mountain he plans to buy, and says, "That."
It's 1:40 in the morning. Yoake has six stools, one oven that runs hot on the left, and a closing time of two that you enforce with the cheerful brutality of someone who survived six years of hotel banquets. You look at him. He is extremely tall and extremely white-haired, and he has a black blindfold wrapped around his eyes like he's on his way to a firing squad, or to a party where that's the theme.
"All of it," you say.
"All of it."
"There are nine items."
"I can count." The grin he gives you is lopsided and enormous. "Probably better than you. No offense."
"Some taken." You pull the yuzu tart from the case anyway, because a man who orders nine desserts twenty minutes before close is either a gift or a psychological event, and either way he's paying. "Can you even see through that thing?"
"Better than you can see without it."
"You're really committed to the comparisons."
"It's a whole bit," he agrees, and eats the tart in three bites.
He finishes all nine. He leaves a tip bigger than the bill and a single line on the back of the receipt, in handwriting like a seismograph reading: the mont blanc is perfect, the castella is a war crime, see you tomorrow.
He comes back the next night. And the next.
Six weeks later, you know these things about Gojo Satoru.
He works for something he calls "the government, sort of," and something Shoko calls "a cult with a dental plan." He takes his coffee as a delivery system for sugar. He has never once come through the door while you were looking at it. You'll glance down to pipe a rosette, glance up, and he'll be on stool three with his chin in his hand, as if he's been there for an hour, as if you're the one who just arrived.
On nights he skips the blindfold he wears little round sunglasses, and he looks at the menu over the top of them, and his eyes are the blue at the very bottom of a gas flame. You have stopped dropping things when he does that. Mostly.
He has opinions about mochi that would get him run out of Sendai. He has asked you eleven times to stock zunda kikufuku, and eleven times you've told him that you are a pastry chef in Koenji, not a Miyagi souvenir stand, and that if he wants edamame paste in his mochi he can take the shinkansen like a grown man.
"I'm a very busy grown man," he said, the eleventh time.
"You're here every night."
"Busy being here."
He remembers that you hate cilantro. He remembers your mother calls on Sundays and that you quit the Kōgetsu in Ginza after the head chef threw a sheet pan at your sous-chef's head. He once stayed past close to help you clean the oven, which he did by laying his palm flat on the steel until a decade of carbonized sugar simply wasn't there anymore. You didn't ask. He looked so pleased that you didn't ask.
He flirts the way other people breathe, constantly and without apparent effort.
And he has never, not once, asked you out.
That's the part that has started to itch. Every time the conversation tips toward a door, toward a when and a where, he swerves. He tells a story about a coworker named Nanami who apparently has the warmth of a tax form. He orders a second mont blanc. He looks at his phone and says "Ah, duty calls," and when you turn around from the sink, stool three is spinning gently on its own.
"He's scared of you," Shoko says.
She's on stool one, which she treats as rented property, drinking shochu she brought herself because you don't have a liquor license and she doesn't care. Ieiri Shoko has been your friend since you were both twenty, broke and smoking on the same fire escape in Kyoto, and she's the reason Gojo found your shop at all. She mentioned it once. He showed up within the hour, like a cat who'd heard a can open.
"Nothing is scared of me," you say. "I cry at train commercials."
"He's scared of you specifically." She taps ash into the saucer you keep for her. "Look. You know what he does. You know what we do."
You do, more or less. You've seen the gray things since before you could name them, the shapes folded into the corners of the Chuo line, the thing with too many knuckles that lives under the Shinjuku overpass. Most people can't. Shoko told you, years ago, that there's a whole world built around people who can, and a smaller world inside that one of people who can fight what they see. You told her you'd stick to croissants.
"He's the strongest in that world," Shoko says. "Not top ten. The top. There's nothing alive that can touch him, and I mean that literally. He has a technique that stops anything from reaching him. Fists, bullets, rain. Hands." She lets that sit. "He's never had to be bad at something in front of someone."
"So he's bad at dating."
"Catastrophic. I've watched him try. It's like watching a fighter jet attempt parallel parking."
You wipe down the counter that doesn't need wiping. "Then why does he keep coming here?"
Shoko gives you a look over her glass, the flat, merciful look of a doctor who has seen everything and is about to tell you what's on the X-ray.
"Babe," she says. "Think about it for one second."
So you ask him.
It's a Thursday. He's on stool three, blindfold pushed up into his hair so it sticks out in a white crest, eating a strawberry daifuku with a level of focus you've only ever seen in surgeons and golden retrievers. You set down his coffee. You do not let yourself think about it.
"Saturday," you say. "Dinner. There's a yakitori place under the tracks by the north exit. Seven."
He stops chewing.
"With me," you add, in case the strongest man alive needs it spelled out.
"Yes," he says, through daifuku. Then he swallows and says it again, too fast, like he's worried the offer has a timer. "Yes. Yeah. Saturday. Seven. I know the place. The one with the guy who looks like a thumb."
"That's the owner."
"I love him," Gojo says, with total sincerity, and then he looks down at his daifuku as if it has personally betrayed him by not being more interesting than you, and the tips of his ears go a pink you will think about for the rest of the week.
The date is good.
That's the thing you'll keep coming back to afterward: it is genuinely good. The thumb-shaped owner gives you the two stools at the end, crammed against a wall papered with forty years of beer posters, and the trains rattle overhead every four minutes so you both have to lean in to hear. Gojo wears a black turtleneck and the sunglasses and orders like a man who has never been told no, which you suspect is accurate. He eats tsukune off your plate without asking. He tells you about the time he got banned from a hotel in Kyoto, and the story involves a goat, and you laugh so hard you knock over your oolong.
He's different when he isn't performing. Not much. A few degrees. He listens with his whole head tilted, like a bird. When you talk about the Kōgetsu, about leaving, about how the first month of running Yoake you slept on a camping mat behind the counter because you couldn't afford both the lease and the apartment, he goes very still, and you get the sense that behind the dark lenses he is looking at you with an attention so complete it has weight.
"That's insane," he says. "You're insane. I respect it."
"Thank you."
"No, really. Most people would've stayed." He turns his glass in a slow circle. "Stayed and been miserable and called it being an adult."
"Is that what you did?"
He laughs, but it comes out wrong, a beat too late. "I don't do miserable. Bad for the skin."
It's two hours in. The trains have stopped bothering you. There's a smear of tare on his cheekbone, just under the edge of the sunglasses, and he hasn't noticed, and it is so stupid and so human on a face like that that you don't think. You just reach up to wipe it off.
Your fingers stop.
Not against skin. Against nothing. A centimeter from his cheek, the air goes solid, not hard exactly, more like pushing a magnet toward its twin. Your hand simply cannot travel any closer. It's the strangest thing you've ever felt and you've felt a curse breathe on the back of your neck.
Gojo has stopped talking. He's looking at your hand where it hovers.
"Oh," you say. "That's the thing Shoko meant."
For a second, his face does something. It's fast, and you only catch the edge of it under the glasses, but it is not the face of the strongest man in the world. It's the face of someone who has just remembered there's a window between him and everything else, and has realized you can see it.
"Hey," you start, gently, "it's fine, I don't..."
And he's gone.
Not up and out. Not a dramatic exit. Just gone, the way a light is gone when you flip a switch. His stool rocks. His chopsticks clatter onto the plate. Somewhere overhead a train goes by, and when it passes, there's a stack of ten-thousand-yen notes on the counter that would cover dinner for the entire restaurant, and the thumb-shaped owner is looking at the empty stool, then at you, with an expression of deep and ancient pity.
"Happens," he says.
"Does it?"
"No," he admits, and gives you a free beer.
You walk home. You don't cry, because you're twenty-seven and it was one date and you cried at a JR commercial last week and you refuse to give this the same honor. You climb the three flights to your apartment rehearsing what you'll say to Shoko. Something dignified. Something like, your friend is a coward and I want the yakitori money as emotional damages.
There's a box on your doormat.
It's white, tied with green string, and when you pick it up it's cold, actually cold, beaded with condensation in the October air. The logo on the lid is a shop in Sendai, three hundred and fifty kilometers north. You check the time on your phone. It's been fifty-one minutes since he vanished.
Inside are six zunda kikufuku, pale green and dusted with starch, still chilled. And a receipt, folded in half, with that seismograph handwriting on the back.
Sorry. Emergency. (Not a real emergency.)
Can I try again?
And underneath, smaller, pressed so hard the pen nearly went through the paper:
Also. Something moved into your stairwell tonight. Don't walk past the second-floor landing after dark. I mean it.
You go very still. Because you just climbed those stairs. You've seen the gray things all your life, in every corner of this city, and you walked right past the second-floor landing and saw nothing at all.
Slowly, you turn around and look down the stairwell.
The bulb on the second floor is out.