Around where many thumbs had pressed to actuate the sliding door the chrome plating had worn off, peeling like sunburn. The door jumped at my touch, rattling away.

The ward office had many such small wounds. Discoloration at the extreme edges of the tiled floor where dirt had been swept and dampened and made steadfast. Shallow moon-shaped scars in the drywall where door handles impacted after long un-careful arcs. A flush of rust beneath a steel pipe where it pierced the wall through a swelling of misapplied caulk.

A vase of bruise-colored flowers at the desk of the ward attendant was the most beautiful thing in the room, I thought. The water was freshly replaced. And because it was so beautiful I started by saying I am sorry to tell you this—even though I had no reason to be sorry, not really—but my boyfriend is missing, I said. I said that I had looked up on the ward website how long someone had to be missing for them to be considered missing, and that it had been that long, and so I was here.

I expected to be asked for an address, which I would clarify was my boyfriend’s address, and a name and a nationality and a visa status and an insurance status. But instead the ward attendant, whose defining features were the dark pouches beneath his eyes and short, high-set eyebrows, almost ovular, lenticular, leaned over the counter and told me that more people had gone missing from the ward in the past year than the twenty two other major metropolitan wards combined, and was I absolutely sure that he was missing.

I was sure, at least I thought. Otherwise I had just been abandoned. My boyfriend had been traveling, up in the north of 本州, not in this ward, I said. And now he was gone, and I couldn't reach him.

The ward attendant said the phenomenon was not that people were going missing within the ward, but that they were going missing from the ward. He was formal in his speech. Internal reporting had been kept low and slow, he said, and so it was not yet clear the extent of this phenomenon.

The word 超常現象, the one he kept using, seemed silly for this kind of thing. The Greek origin of the English ‘phenomenon’ means simply that which has been brought into view. But now it eats at me a little, his word, and in my dreams now its seriousness is like a coruscant black stone at the bottom of a well.

When I asked him what I was supposed to do he suggested a report, and that I should submit, in good time, a series of forms to request access to the documents concerning my boyfriend’s lease and insurance participation and recycling and trash agreement and residency status. He was happy to give me the forms, each opaquely composed and densely printed on thin strong paper. I told him I had my own pen, a thin dainty one for art, even though I didn't draw. It felt especially breakable as I used it. In truth I was happy to receive them, the forms, picking through the characters I did not know, propagating my name and personal details in a tight uniform hand, doing something, pushing my plastic name-seal’s red expression into blank boxes whose purpose was only to receive them.

He said forms take a week or two, and that I could return to the same ward office to check in later, and that in fact this office could handle most of the ongoing progress in this case unless it were found that there was substantial evidence that my boyfriend had gone missing in some other ward which, when I explain again that my boyfriend had been on a trip to another prefecture entirely, I am told was not proof enough yet to widen jurisdiction. These things are almost always local, and almost always explicable, he said, though he seemed, I thought, critically unenthused or disengaged: to be referring to some other ward, some other office, and some other life than the one we were both experiencing.

At home I drank a pint carton of pineapple juice I bought at a 24-hour Lawson’s nearby, mixed together some summer soba mix that had come with finely julienned vegetables in seven varieties in a plastic tub. I felt a little like I was on some distant tropical island, because of the soba, and not in the center of a series of concentric rings of concrete and glass serrated by slow moving rivers whose shores are weed-choked and have been known to flood. Half of Tokyo burned in 1923, and another fair percentage again in 1945, but it is expanding constantly.

I thought of a story and of communication and obedience.

I cracked the window in the living room and turned out the lights. The warm breeze didn’t seem to smell like the city at all, adding to the feeling that I was very far away, and it was good. I was wherever my boyfriend was, and we were not talking, maybe, backs to each other. We had had a fight, maybe, and were taking each a night to ourselves, thinking of all of the intelligently cruel things we could have said, and the evil and violence we could have done to each other and made up for later, fucked out later, when the sun roared back and the water in our nightstand glasses stood freshly replaced. And when I woke up the next morning, having fallen asleep on the couch, I smelled that it had rained, that this rain was mixed with asphalt and soot, and I used a chamois rag to mop up the dull pool of water that had come in through the window screen, erasing it before it began to soak beneath and warp the laminate, though of course I was too late.