puttered around in the hotel, seeing what there was to see. I checked out the restaurants and lounges, took a peek at the pool and sauna and health club and tennis courts, bought a couple of books in the shopping arcade. I crisscrossed the lobby, then gravitated to the game center and played a few rounds of backgammon. That alone took up the afternoon. The hotel was practically an amusement park. The world is full of ways and means to waste time.

After that, I left the hotel to have a look around the area. As I strolled through the early evening streets, the lay of the town gradually came back to me. Back when I'd stayed at the old Dolphin Hotel, I'd covered this area with depressing regularity, day after day. Turn here, and there was this or that. The old Dolphin hadn't had a dining room — if it had, I doubt I would have been inclined to eat there — so we, Kiki and I, would always go someplace nearby for meals. Now I felt like I was visiting an old neighborhood and was content just to wander about, taking in familiar sights.

When the sun went down, the air grew cold. The streets echoed with the wet sounds of slush underfoot. There was no wind, so walking was not at all unpleasant. It was still crisp and clear. Even the piles of exhaust-gray snow plowed up on every corner looked positively enchanting beneath the streetlights. The area had changed markedly from the old days. Of course, those "old days" were only four years back, as I've said, so most of the places I'd frequented were more or less the same. The local atmosphere was basically the same as well, but signs of change were everywhere. Stores were boarded up, announcements of development to come tacked over. A large building was under construction. A drive-through burger stand and designer boutiques and a European auto showroom and a trendy cafe with an inner courtyard of sara trees — all kinds of new establishments had popped up one after the next, pushing aside the dingy old three-story blockhouses and cheap eateries festooned with traditional noren entrance curtains and the sweetshop where a cat lay napping by the stove. The odd mix of styles presented an all-too-temporary show of coexistence, like the mouth of a child with new teeth coming in. A bank had even opened a new branch, maybe a spillover of the new Dolphin Hotel capitalization. Build a hotel of that scale in a perfectly ordinary — if a bit neglected — neighborhood, and the balance is upset. The flow of people changes, the place starts to jump. Land prices go up.

Or perhaps the changes were more cumulative. That is, the upheaval hadn't been wrought by the new Dolphin Hotel alone, but was a stage in the greater infrastructural changes of the area. Some long-term urban redevelopment program, for example.

I went into a small bar I remembered, and had a few drinks and a bite to eat. The place was dirty, noisy, cheap, and good. The kind of hole-in-the-wall I always look for when I have to eat out alone. Places like this put me at ease, never make me lonely. I can talk to myself and nobody listens or cares.

After eating, I still wanted something else, so I asked for some sake. As the warm brew seeped into my system, the question came to me: What on earth am I doing up here? The Dolphin Hotel, such that I was seeking, no longer existed. It didn't matter what it was I was looking for, the place was no more. And not merely gone, it'd been replaced by this idiotic Star Wars high-tech hotel-a-thon. I was too late. My dreams of the once-Dolphin Hotel had been nothing more than dreams of Kiki, long vanished out the door. Perhaps there was someone crying for me. But that too was gone. Nothing was left. What could you possibly hope to find here, kid?

You said it, I thought. Or maybe I had my mouth open and actually said it to myself. There's nothing left here. Not one thing left for you.

I clamped my lips tight and stared at the bottle of soy sauce on the counter.

You live by yourself for a stretch of time and you get to staring at different objects. Sometimes you talk to yourself. You take meals in crowded joints. You develop an intimate relationship with your used Subaru. You slowly but surely become a has-been.

I left the bar and headed back to the hotel. I'd walked a fair bit, but it wasn't hard finding my way back. I had only to look up to see the new Dolphin Hotel towering above everything else. Like the three wise men guided by a star to Jerusalem or Bethlehem or wherever it was, I steered straight for the main attraction.

After a bath, toweling my hair dry, I gazed out over the Sapporo cityscape. When I stayed at the old Dolphin, hadn't there been a small office building outside my window? What kind of office, I never did figure out, but it was a company and people were busy. That had been my view day after day. What ever became of that company? There'd been a nice-looking woman working there. Where was she now?

I had nothing to do, so I shuffled around the room before flicking on the TV. It was the same old nausea-inducing fare. Not even original nausea-inducing fare. It was phony, synthetic, but being synthetic, it wasn't entirely repugnant. If I didn't turn the thing off, though, I felt sure I'd be seeing the results of some real nausea.

I pulled on some clothes and went up to the lounge on the twenty-sixth floor. I sat at the bar and ordered a vodka-and-soda with lemon. One whole wall of the lounge was win- dow, providing a sweeping panorama of Sapporo at night. A Star Wars alien city set. Otherwise, it was a comfortable, quiet place, with real crystal glasses that had a nice ring.

Besides myself, there were only three other customers. Two middle-aged men talking in a hush at a back table. Some very important matter by the look of things. A plot to assassinate Darth Vader? And sitting at a table directly to their right, a girl of twelve or thirteen, plugged in to a Walkman, sipping a drink through a straw. She was a pretty girl. Her long hair, unnaturally straight, draped silkily against the edge of the table. She tapped her fingers on the tabletop, keeping time to the rhythm she was hearing. Her long fingers made a more childlike impression than the rest of her. Not that she was trying to act like an adult. No, not disagreeable or arrogant, but aloof.

Yet, in fact, the girl wasn't looking at anything. She was completely oblivious to her surroundings. She was wearing jeans and white Converse All Stars and a sweatshirt emblazoned with GENESIS, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and she seemed to be concentrating entirely on the music. Sometimes she'd move her lips to form fragments of lyrics.

"Lemonade," the bartender volunteered, as if to excuse the presence of a minor. "The girl's waiting for her mother."

"Hmm," I answered, noncommital. Certainly, you don't go into a hotel bar after ten at night and expect to find a young girl sitting by herself with a drink and a Walkman. But if the bartender hadn't broached the subject, I probably wouldn't have thought anything was out of the ordinary. The girl just seemed a part of the place.

I ordered another drink and made small talk with the bartender. The weather, the view, assorted topics. Then nonchalantly I dropped the line that, hey, this place sure has changed, hasn't it? To which the bartender strained a smile and admitted that, until recently, he'd been working at a hotel in Tokyo, so he scarcely knew anything about Sapporo. And at that point, a new customer walked in, terminating our fruitless conversation. I drank a total of four vodka-and-sodas. I could have drunk any number more but decided to call it quits. The girl was still in her seat, grafted to the Walkman. Her mother hadn't shown, and the ice in her glass had melted, which she didn't seem to notice. Yet when I got up from the counter, she looked up at me for two or three seconds, and smiled. Or perhaps it was the slightest trembling of her lips. But to me, it looked like she smiled. Which — I know it sounds strange — really shook me up. I felt as if I'd been chosen. A charge shot through me; my body seemed to lift up a few centimeters.

A bit disarmed, I boarded the elevator and returned to my room. A smile from a twelve-year-old girl? How could anything so innocent have set me off so much? She could have been my daughter.

And Genesis — what a stupid name for a band.

But because the girl had that sweatshirt on, the name seemed somehow symbolic. Genesis.

Why do rock groups have overblown names like that?

I fell back onto the bed with my shoes still on. Closed my eyes and the young girl's image came to me. Walkman. White fingers tapping tabletop. Genesis. Melted ice.

Genesis.

With my eyes shut, I could feel the alcohol swimming around inside me. I pulled off my work boots, got out of my clothes, and crawled under the covers. I was too tired, too drunk, to feel much of anything. I waited for the woman next to me to say, "Had a bit too much, have we?" But there was no such conversation.

Genesis.

I reached out to turn out the light. Will my dreams take me to the Dolphin Hotel? I wondered in the dark.

When I awoke the next morning, I felt a hopeless emptiness. No dream, no hotel. Zilch.

My work boots lay at the foot of the bed where they'd fallen. Two tired puppies.

Outside my window the sky hung low and gray. It looked like snow, which added to my malaise. The clock read five after seven. I punched the remote control and watched the morning news as I lay in bed. Something about an upcoming election. Fifteen minutes later I got up and went to the bathroom to wash and shave, humming the overture to The Marriage of Figaro as a wake-me-up. Or was it the overture to The Magic Flute? I racked my brain, but couldn't get it straight. I cut my chin shaving, then popped a button from my cuff getting into my shirt. The signs for the day were not good.

At breakfast, I saw the young girl I'd seen in the bar, sitting with a woman I took to be her mother. Wearing the same GENESIS sweatshirt but at least without the Walkman. She'd hardly touched her bread or scrambled eggs, seemed absolutely bored drinking her tea. Her mother was a smallish woman in her early forties. Hair pulled into a tight bun, eyebrows exactly like her daughter's, slender, refined nose, camel-colored sweater that looked like it was cashmere over a white blouse. She wore her clothes well, clothes that suit a woman accustomed to the attentions of others. There was a touching world-weariness in the way she buttered her toast.

As I passed by their table, the girl glanced up at me. Then smiled. A more definitive smile than last night's. Unmistakably, a smile.

I ate my breakfast alone and tried to think, but after that smile I couldn't focus. No matter what came to mind, the thoughts spun around uselessly. In the end, I stared at the pepper shaker and didn't think at all.