* * *

Okay, back to what happened next at the Inageya supermarket. It was here that the script diverged from Psychomart homage and became something altogether different.

Tom instructs me to choose a microwaveable meal and a drink from the convenience food section. The unfamiliar packaging makes this quite challenging, but I guess I can recognise a pizza when I see one in a photograph. I choose a small bottle of white wine and an orange juice to go with it. Next, he says, go to aisle four.

But there is no aisle four – the supermarket has superstitiously skipped from three to five; the word for four is related to the word for death – and it takes me several self-conscious minutes to notice the hand-printed sign on yellow paper stuck next to what looks like a delivery bay door. ‘Aisle 4 inside,’ it says, with a wonky arrow pointing towards the door. There’s a more permanent no-entry symbol on the door along with some Japanese text that I’m guessing means ‘Staff Only’.

What do I do? Obey the norms of global supermarket etiquette or Tom’s instructions? That’s my dilemma. The option of obeying neither instruction doesn’t enter my head. I’m here to be directed.

I look at the pizza slice sweating in the trolley alongside the fruit and the wine, which is looking quite tempting at this stage, and figure the authorities at the shop must be in on the show and I probably wouldn’t be arrested if I’m just playing a game. Besides, I want to see what’s there – whatever lies beyond will either elevate this rather humdrum experience or confirm that Metamuse was a one-hit wonder and has slumped to join the rest of post-late-capitalism’s moribund creative practitioners, both of which would be satisfying in their own way.

With one last glance over my shoulder, I push through the service doors, the rubber buffers of the double doors sucking at each other like lecherous toothless monsters with overactive salivary glands. (Remember, at this stage I’m still trying to make my own excitement.)

Through the doors is a wide corridor lined with movable shelving stacked with cling-wrapped cans and bottles and sacks, leading into a vast stockroom. The smell is of layered spices and flour and an undertone of astringent chemicals. Three women loading carts look up at me as I pass but turn back to their work without comment.

There’s another yellow sign across the stockroom floor and I hurry across to follow it, through another pair of double doors that lead me outside onto a freezing cold ledge overlooking a delivery bay. Someone’s unloading vegetables from a van onto a—

—woman falls out of the sky, right in front of me. She flips gracefully through the air two metres from my face. Time slows to an incremental crawl. I have time to replay the curve and cartwheel of her body, to trace the woman’s trajectory from the upper floors of the building above me, before she ploughs into the conveniently placed skip full of plastic and paper padding.