Meanwhile, in a different corner of this large and sprawling metropolis...

The man walked up the stairs, carefully holding onto the handrail the entire time. He was greeted with a face full of sunlight and bustle, which took some getting used to. Six months of hospital food and tinted windows had nearly made him forget what city life was like, but in one deep lungful it all came rushing back to him. He smiled,  and took his first few wobbling steps back into real life.

Barely five minutes later, he strolled back into his favourite lunch dive, a doner kebab place run by a    greasy mustachio'd indian man and his wife.  Their eyes lit up as they saw him, happy to recognize a customer. He spent almost an hour in there, explaining why he hadn't been in the shop for half a year, and why he'd gone out to buy 20 boxes of shoe horns, and they'd looked sympathic, in their way, and had offered to give him the kebab on the house, but Tanaka refused. He said it wouldn't be right.

He lingered on the doorway, tucking in his shirt under the colourful belt keeping his jeans up. Even for august, the heat was impressive. It must've been half four and even then the road felt like the sahara desert. For a brief moment he wondered if he was in the middle of a tropical rainstorm, but it turned out to be a lady watering plants in an apartment three stories up. The sight made   him feel thirsty, though, so he feed a couple hundred yen into the first vending machine he could find. It was broken, and spat out a warm can of some off-market flat cola at him. He kicked the sorry machine. His foot went [i]clank.[/i]