Chapter 1. The Light She Left Behind

Three days until the first anniversary of my grandmother’s death.

I stopped halfway up the slope at Kagurazaka. The June rain had just quit, and the flagstones were still wet, holding the streetlamps’ light in thin sheets on their surface. My grandmother’s antique shop, Himuro-ya, sat one lane off the slope, down a passage narrow enough that two people had to turn sideways to pass. She had kept the shop for fifty years. Now it was shuttered. Only the sign remained — the characters bleached soft by decades of rain.

I had the spare key. The hinges cried out, louder than they had any right to, as if making up for all the months they had gone ungreeted.

“I’m home.”

No answer. Of course not. My grandmother, Sae Himuro, had died half a year ago. I said it anyway. I could not have stopped myself if I’d tried. I had spent every weekend of my childhood in this shop. She would be sitting in the back room, turning the pages of some old ledger, and when I came barrelling in she would smile at me over the rims of her glasses and say, Seri, you’ve grown again. Every week, the same words.

I had loved those words. I had hated them. I had felt both at once, which I have come to believe is the only honest way to love anything.

I

My mother had done most of the work of sorting through the estate. What remained were three cardboard boxes that had been stowed in the storehouse at the back. You were always the closest to Grandma, she had said, which was a kindness and also a clean handoff of responsibility.

I opened the first box. Old kimono. The smell rose out of it at once — camphor, paper, incense. The smell of my grandmother. Something behind my eyes went hot, so I closed the lid again quickly and sat for a moment with my palm on the cardboard.

The second box. A bundle of ledgers. I opened one and found the ruled pages dense with small figures, written in her careful hand. Beside the numbers I could read names of body parts: shoulder, 42; waist, 68; hip, 92. Measurements. Whose, I couldn’t say. But someone’s, certainly, and many someones — the ledgers were fat with entries. My grandmother had been measuring something, or someone, for a long time. I filed that away as a curiosity and put the box aside.

Then the third box.

The third box was shaped differently. At the bottom sat a small wooden case, lacquered black, the kind of object that ought to have held a tea caddy or a pair of ornamental hairpins. On top of it lay a white envelope.

On the envelope, in my grandmother’s handwriting, was my name.

To Seri. Treasure this.

That was all. The characters trembled. She must have written it near the end, when her hands no longer obeyed her.

My fingertips went cold. She had left me something. Specifically me.

I lifted the case onto my knees and worked the clasp. Inside, wrapped in a soft cloth, was — a smartphone. Old, but well kept. Not a scratch on the glass. A small charging cable was coiled in the corner of the case. And tucked into the fold of the cloth, a second slip of paper.

Charge it. Turn it on. When you are alone.

She wrote it as though she had known I would do exactly that.

II

I got back to my apartment a little past ten at night. One room of six tatami mats in Higashi-Nakano. Outside the window the Chūō Line slid past at intervals, carrying its light. I did not even change my clothes. I plugged the phone into the charger and waited.

The screen brightened. For a moment it was only a black mirror, showing me my own face — tired, the hollows under my eyes bruised with sleeplessness, my hair coming loose from the tie I’d put it in that morning.

There was no startup chime. The screen simply dimmed, and then, in the centre of all that black, letters rose up slowly, as if surfacing from deep water.

Contura

White letters on a black deeper than night. Below them, a single line, smaller.

The body tells the story of you.

I stopped breathing. It read like a slogan. It also read like something someone had said to me, once, in a voice I couldn’t quite place. My finger found the prompt that said Begin, and pressed.

The camera looked in at me. Or — I was being looked at, through the camera.

The screen changed. In the dark, a pale blue point of light appeared. It trembled, widened, became a line. The line bent and joined other lines, and the lines drew a shape, and the shape was a person. A human figure made of nothing but outline, luminous, standing in the air behind the glass. It had no face. Its sex was not clear. Only the form, three-dimensional, turning slowly, a body made of light.

Then a voice spoke.

Not from the speaker. From somewhere further in — from behind my temples, from the root of my skull, resonating in the bone.

”—— A pleasure to meet you at last.”

The voice was calm, neither clearly male nor female. A little low, a little gentle, with a slant of dryness to it, the way someone sounds when they have been waiting a long time and are too polite to say so.

“I have been waiting. Sae Himuro’s grandchild — Seri Himuro. I have known your name for some time.”

I was standing before I knew it. The chair scraped back. My heart was knocking against my ribs.

“What — what are you.”

“No need to be afraid. I am not your enemy.” The voice seemed to laugh, very quietly. “My name is Coh. The co in compass. Your grandmother called me that.”

“My grandmother —”

“Yes. She used me for a long while. And at the end, she gave me to you.” The figure of light made a motion like a hand being extended — an outline’s gesture, no more. “Seri. You have the makings of a Reader.”

III

“A — Reader.”

I did not know the word. Yet something at the floor of my chest answered it, the way a string answers a note struck beside it. I thought of my grandmother’s back, bent over her ledgers. The way her eyes had followed the figures down the columns. Perhaps that had not only been record-keeping. Perhaps it had been reading.

“A Reader,” Coh said, “is one who can read the story written in another person’s body.”

“A story.”

“Indeed. The body is not only meat and bone. Every hour you have lived, every meal, every time you have wept or laughed or raged or endured — all of it is scored into the body’s outline, into its numbers. To read that is the Reader’s craft. That is what I am offering to teach you.”

I looked down at my own arm. I touch other people’s bodies every day, in my work. I know the spring of muscle, the warmth of skin, the give and pull of a joint’s range. I have assessed them. I have measured them. But read them — I had never even conceived of such a thing.

“If you can really read,” I said, and my voice shook, “then read me. Prove it.”

It was a challenge. It may also have been a prayer. I needed to know whether this was a prank, a hallucination, or something else entirely.

Coh was quiet for a moment.

“Very well. But I require a promise first. What you read, you do not flaunt before others. The story you read is not yours. It belongs to the one whose body spoke it. That is the first Law.”

“All right,” I whispered.

“Then stand. In front of the mirror.”

I stood at the washstand mirror. Coh’s light bled out of the phone’s screen and dissolved into the air of the room. Particles of pale blue drifted around me, and where they touched me they traced the surface of my body, following its shape as water follows a stone.

Shoulder. Chest. Waist. Hip. Thigh.

The light drew rings around me. And in the air, numbers began to float up, white and faintly lit from within.

Shoulder width 41 Chest 84 Waist 72 Hip 90

My own measurements. They were so accurate the room tilted. They matched what a tape would give me — no, they were finer than that. Neck, upper arm, forearm, knee, ankle. Columns of numbers rose one after another, and as they rose they linked themselves into a single unbroken line.

And then, beside my reflection in the mirror, a body made of light stood up.

It was me. And it was not the me I knew from mirrors. It was the me beneath the clothes — only the outline, nothing hidden, nothing adjusted. The shoulders were broad, the waist barely nipped in, the line from waist to hip curving slowly rather than cutting in.

I looked at that outline and nearly wept. Not from shame. Because for the first time in I don’t know how long, I was seeing my body as a shape only, a single form — without judgement, without the usual arithmetic of too much and not enough. The numbers were there, yes. But they did not accuse me of anything.

IV

“I will read now,” Coh said.

The numbers in the air burst all at once into particles. The particles swirled, gathered, drew themselves into a single bright thread, and the thread became letters.

Your shoulders drew themselves in, just a little, so that no one would have to be blamed.

My breath caught.

It was true. True was not even sufficient. It was the thing I had told no one.

In secondary school I had been — well. I had been sick in the way girls are sometimes sick, around food, around the scale, around the feeling of taking up space. I had wanted to disappear, or at least to shrink. I had pulled my shoulders in, hollowed my chest, folded myself smaller. I had not only wanted a smaller body. I had wanted a smaller self, one that would not be noticed, and therefore could not be blamed for anything — not for taking up room, not for being seen, not for wanting.

I was an adult now, and a trainer, and still. Still, I caught myself standing with my shoulders drawn up, and in front of a client I would start to straighten and then, without thinking, fold back in. Because I did not believe in my own body. Because some part of me had never stopped kneeling.

And this — app? vision? whatever it was — had read all of that, from the angles of a shoulder and the set of a clavicle.

“How,” I said.

“The slope of the shoulders. The lay of the collarbones. The bias of tension in the trapezius. The body makes a shape of whatever the heart is carrying. If you can read the shape, you know the carrying.” Coh paused. “This is the Story Reading, Seri. Your grandmother did this too. She read the bodies that came to her, and she gave each person back their own story. In the old records — she called the craft the Outline Art.”

I looked at the face in the mirror, and beside it the luminous outline that was also my face, or the face of a body that happened to be mine. Two of me. The solid one and the one made of light.

“Grandma did this,” I said. “For all those years?”

“For a long time, yes. Though near the end — she stopped.”

“Why?”

Coh did not answer. Instead the outline in the air thinned. The light drew back, retreating into the phone.

“That is for another night. We will stop here. A first reading is heavy on the body.”

He was right. I had not noticed until he said it, but a weariness had come up out of my very marrow, a deep hum of fatigue, as if I had been holding a heavy thing at arm’s length for an hour. I stumbled to the bed and fell into it, still in my clothes.

V

I dreamed.

The back room of the shop. My grandmother bent over her ledger. The child that I had been, leaning on her arm to look.

“Grandma, what are you looking at?”

She slid her glasses down her nose and smiled at me.

“People’s bodies, little one. Look — all these numbers, in a row. When you read them, you can understand a person. Just like that, whoosh.”

“Huh. Can you read me, then?”

She closed the ledger and put her hand on my head.

“Even Grandma can’t know everything about you, Seri. Your body is yours. But — shall I read a little?”

“Mm.”

And I remembered, then, the temperature of her hand. I woke with the warmth of it still on my hair.

VI

The next morning I sat on the bed clutching the phone. The screen was dark. The word Contura had gone. The room was so quiet I could almost believe the whole thing had been a dream.

But I knew. It had not been a dream. At my shoulders there lingered a faint warmth, the residue of something luminous, like the heat that stays in a chair after someone has risen from it.

I went to the washstand. I looked in the mirror. The same morning face as always. But this morning it seemed to me that something was different.

I let my gaze fall to my shoulders. And slowly, deliberately, I let them down. I un-drew them. The clavicles lengthened. The chest opened, just a little.

The outline in the mirror — the outline that should have been invisible — this morning I felt I could almost see it.

Contura. The light my grandmother had left behind.

I did not know whether I would go on living with this thing from today forward. I did not know what it was. But I knew one thing.

I was, for the first time, looking at my own body in a word other than weight. Other than size. Other than too little, too much, wrong. Last night, when the luminous outline had stood up beside my reflection, I had seen my body as one whole shape — one form, one story.

That was a frightening thing. And at the same time — a little salvifying.

I changed into my work clothes. The trainer’s polo shirt. I pinned on my name badge. It was time to go to the studio in Aoyama, to Life Compass.

Into the breast pocket of the polo I slipped the old phone, the one still tethered to Contura. The metal of it was cold against my chest.

“I’m going,” I said, to the empty room.

The phone seemed, faintly, to grow warm. As if in answer.

Outside, the morning sun was slanting up the slope from Kagurazaka. I walked toward Higashi-Nakano Station. My stride was a little lighter than yesterday’s.

I was careful, as I walked, not to draw in my shoulders.

—