Gently, she turned the handle to Aki’s room and pushed open the door.

The wardrobe was open. She looked around quickly for the X inside it. There it was.

She placed the tip of her forefinger over the mark.

And Aki’s memories came flooding in.

THE SMELL OF INCENSE.

Aki was sitting in front of the commemorative photograph of her recently deceased grandmother.

She was wearing her school uniform and sitting beside her mother and cousins.

The man seated beside her mother was her stepfather.

Her mother always said her father had been totally self-absorbed. He had left them when she was still very young. ‘If I hadn’t got pregnant with you,’ she said, ‘we would probably never have got married. In the end we broke up, so there we are.’

This was how she explained things to her daughter.

Despite this, whenever their relatives got together, she’d go on about how his sports business in Chiba provided all the equipment for the local teams that went on to play in the national baseball tournament in Koshien Stadium.

The commemorative photograph showed her grandmother when she was much younger. Her uncles complained that the last time she’d had a decent portrait taken was a long time ago, and so the only photos they had of her were out of date.

When Aki dyed her hair, her grandmother had let out a shriek.

Aki was sure she was going to shout at her, but actually her reaction was joyful. ‘What a lovely colour!’ she said, and Aki was both deflated and happy.

Her grandmother had been a lively character who loved a joke, the total opposite of Aki’s mother. So different that it made Aki wonder how she could possibly have given birth to her. ‘Don’t let your mother find out,’ her grandmother said whenever she gave her any money. ‘If she finds it, she’ll spend it. This is our little secret, Akiko, just you and me,’ she added, with a clumsy wink.

When Aki introduced her to Atsushi, a college student she’d met through telephone dating, her grandmother’s only reaction was to exclaim ‘Goodness gracious,’ before presenting him with senbei crackers, green tea and pickled vegetables. Aki was embarrassed by her old folks’ hospitality, but Atsushi enjoyed it.

‘I didn’t expect you’d introduce me to your family so quickly,’ Atsushi said.

‘Sorry,’ Aki said. ‘Is it a bit depressing?’

‘Not at all,’ he said.

Atsushi was twenty-three, but had never had a girlfriend. ‘You’re my first,’ he said, ‘and I want to look after you. I don’t have much money, but I do want to get married.’

But Atsushi didn’t come to her grandmother’s funeral.

They hardly communicated these days. She’d send him a message on his pager, and get no reply.

‘Atsushi-kun’s the only person I really wanted to be there.’

‘You poor child.’

This was from an old woman who said she was a friend of her grandmother. She turned to Aki’s mother and scowled. ‘You’ve never paid her any attention.’