That wasn’t Wada’s fault, as her mother used to acknowledge but now seemed inclined to forget. She was a widow. Her husband Tomohiko – Hiko, as she’d called him and still did, in the privacy of her own thoughts – had been killed in the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway back in 1995, though technically he hadn’t actually died until twelve years later. The decade and a bit he’d spent in a coma froze Wada’s life. Her mother had still hoped, when he finally expired, that Wada would find somebody else to marry. But it had never happened.

Sometimes, though she’d never have admitted it to anyone, she was glad she hadn’t gone on in the world with Hiko, bearing his children, keeping house for him, cooking, cleaning, deferring, conforming. She was as sorry as anyone could be that he’d died as he had. There was a time when she’d been sorry on the same account for herself. But that time had passed. That was why she’d finally dropped his surname and gone back to the one she was born with: Wada.

She’d met Kodaka because of the sarin attack. He was gathering evidence to use against members of Aum Shinrikyo, the murderous cult responsible, on behalf of relatives of other victims and wanted to know if Hiko had said anything to her, before lapsing into his coma, about Yozo Sasada, the cult member who’d released the gas in the train carriage Hiko had been travelling in that fateful spring morning in 1995. No, was the answer. Hiko was already unconscious when she’d reached the hospital. He’d said nothing. To her or anyone else.

She was working as an English translator when Kodaka first contacted her, earning money the only way she knew how. She enjoyed speaking and reading English. It took her to a mental space half removed from the Japanese world she didn’t quite have a firm stake in any more. She felt freer there, better able to be herself.

It was a surprise when Kodaka contacted her again a few months later, this time inviting her to apply for a job as his secretary. Her fluency in English was something he reckoned would be valuable in dealing with foreign clients. Not that he actually had any foreign clients. But he was optimistic about expanding the reach of his operations and there were quite a few occasions when an improvement on his halting grasp of the international language was called for.

She took the job, which she described as personal assistant rather than secretary. It often involved working late or at the weekend for no extra pay, but she didn’t mind and Kodaka rewarded her with occasional bonuses when business was good.