I held the "fude" calligraphy pen and watched the paper absorb the first dab of ink as the tip of the pen touched the envelope. In my best possible "gaijin kanji," I wrote "gokoryou" along with my name in "katakana" at the bottom. Into this envelope I put a 5,000 yen bill.
If you live in the city, it is easy to get a crisp new 5,000 yen bill from the cash machine, but on the island where I live, there are no cash machines, so we iron out old bills to make them look new and respectable. As I pushed the iron across the bill, hoping I hadn't set the iron too high, the starch residue on the bottom of the iron made the bill stiff -- stiff as a cadaver, I thought.
I had come back from a jog on the beach in the morning, around 6 a.m. When I approached my house, my neighbor Kazuko was standing at her door in her pajamas talking to a white-haired man from our neighborhood. This was the first time I had ever seen Kazu-chan in her pajamas -- something must be wrong.