The 3:17 from Shizuoka always ran late, but today it arrived early.
Miyo Sukegawa knew this because she'd checked her phone seventeen times since sitting down, and the clock had jumped backward. Not figuratively. Actually backward, from 3:31 to 3:24, the numbers flickering like a dying fluorescent tube. She'd taken the seat by the window to avoid the old woman with the purple umbrella, and now she couldn't leave.
"Don't stare at the clock," said the woman across the aisle. She had papery skin and wore a train conductor's cap that was three sizes too big, tilted over one eye like a sleepy cat. "It makes them self-conscious."
Miyo turned. "The clocks get self-conscious?"
"Everything does, dear. Even borrowed things." The woman produced a rice ball from her sleeve, wrapped not in plastic but in a lotus leaf that looked freshly picked. "You're the temp worker, yes? The one whose grandmother ran the Yubata bathhouse in Kusatsu?"
Miyo felt her stomach drop lower than the train tracks. "That burned down in 1987. Before I was born."
"Did it?" The woman smiled, and her teeth were the color of pickled ginger, sweet and slightly wrong. She gestured at the window with her rice ball. "Look outside, Miyo-chan. Tell me what year it is."
The fields of Shizuoka were gone. Instead, the train rattled over a causeway of red lacquered wood, each pillar carved with faces that turned to watch as the cars passed. Water everywhere, but not ocean—too still, too silver, reflecting a sky with two pale moons hanging like forgotten lanterns.
"I need to get to my interview," Miyo said, because it was the only sentence she could still trust. "Four o'clock. Customer service desk. It's for a phone company."
The old woman stood, adjusting her ridiculous cap with both hands. She smelled of sulfur and camphor and something underneath, something that made Miyo think of her grandmother's funeral, of incense curling through rain.
"Welcome to the Yubata, then. You've been hired."
The train did not stop, but the door did open, and the wind that entered had fingers, had intentions, had the temperature of a bath drawn just too hot to bear. Miyo grabbed her backpack—containing one resume, one dead phone, one convenience store egg sandwich she'd already eaten—and stepped out onto nothing.
The water held her. Of course it did. The water had been waiting.
She walked the causeway toward the bathhouse that rose from the silver lake like a half-remembered dream of her grandmother's stories: sixteen stories of wood and paper and light that leaked from every window, each floor dedicated to a different kind of washing. Washing of clothes, of dishes, of sins, of years. The sign above the great entrance read, in her grandmother's exact handwriting, "Closed to the Living, Except by Appointment."
Miyo pushed through the noren curtains anyway. The interview was at four. She was not going to be late.
Inside, a boiler the size of a whale sighed steam into a lobby crowded with customers who had no faces, only masks. Fox masks, cat masks, masks of carved radish and dried squid. At the front desk, a boy no older than twelve sat filing his fingernails with a knife made of ice.
"New temp," he said without looking up. "You're late. Clock started at 3:17." He flicked a nail toward a board behind him, where names appeared and disappeared in wet ink. "Two rules. Don't eat the food until you've worked three shifts. Don't let anyone know your real name."
"My name's on my resume," Miyo said. "Miyo Sukegawa."
The boy finally looked at her. Behind his eyes, something ancient and patient stirred like sediment in a tub that hadn't been drained in centuries.
"Not anymore it isn't."