“Yes. It was from a book I read, by some gaijin. I don’t know why I chose that place. Maybe it just seemed large enough. You could store a lot of memories there. Or perhaps it was because I was lazy. I didn’t have to make the Minaguchi-ya up: the gaijin had described it in detail for me. And it was a real place, on the Tokaido Road between Tokyo and Kyoto. I guess I thought if I forgot something, I could find pictures of the place. To be honest, before I was abducted, I had not been using the memory palace. Not since my first few years of university. But then I started again. I thought it was important to remember things. The ship’s details, the guards’ habits, in case I needed them later.”

“What did you put in there?”

“Everything I could think of. The processing deck, the flash-freeze factory, the ports and rails. The hardened glass of the wheelhouse, and its reinforced steel-plate door, the approximate height of the gantry, the shape of the locks on the doors. And then everything I knew about the guards’ movements and habits, their personalities and quirks. I saved it all in the Minaguchi-ya’s rooms, storing the details under tatami mats, in stone lanterns, in lacquer boxes.”

Indra made that sound again—like a laugh or a sob. “You were waiting for your moment.”

“Could be. I never had a clear idea of when I would use all of it. I was just storing it away.” Eiko had not thought of the memory palace since the two of them had last spoken.

“What do you do with all of the things you no longer need to remember?”

“I take them out to one of the courtyards of the inn and burn them.”

“Does it work? Do you forget them?”

“Sometimes.”

A week ago, Eiko had a dream in which the Minaguchi-ya was burning at night, its smoke a roiling curtain between the Tokaido Road’s mountainous backdrop and Suruga Bay. He saw, at the foot of the columns of smoke, the hot red of the flames, the sparks rising into the sky. And then he saw that somehow the mountains were also burning—burning from top to bottom, burning away to reveal a black void beyond. A man, smeared with soot, carrying a bucket of water, stopped and asked, “Why did these people build their mountains out of paper?” then hurried on.

When Eiko woke, part of him expected to have forgotten everything stored in the palace. But it was all still there—every piece of information, saved like a precious album of photographs from a fire.

The soot-covered man who stopped to speak to him in the road was Thomas.