Lucy Fly and Lily Bridges's first meeting

Lucy Fly and Lily Bridges's first meeting takes place in a Shibuya bar, where a reluctant act of assistance grows into the beginning of a consequential friendship. Recounted by Lucy while police question her, the encounter is shaped both by her guarded perspective and by the painful knowledge that Lily will not remain in her life.

The Invitation and Its Context

A few months before the interrogation, Bob asks Lucy to meet a newly arrived English teacher at a bar in Shibuya. Lucy knows Bob from a dentist’s waiting room, and he appeals to her because she has found her own place in Japan and speaks Japanese better than the other teachers he knows. His request is practical: Lily needs help understanding the city and, if she wants it, finding somewhere to live. Lucy recognizes that Bob’s supposed idea is really a plan, but flattery wins her agreement.

She has little appetite for the gathering. Lucy rarely socializes with other foreigners, and since beginning her relationship with Teiji, she has felt no need to seek out anyone else. Her expectation of Lily is shaped by envy before they have met: she imagines a tall, beautiful woman with pale skin and an elegant manner, someone who would attract attention without trying. Lucy describes herself as the ugliness that defines beautiful women’s beauty, and assumes that Lily will be another woman whose appearance makes her an object of admiration. This imagined rival gives the meeting an edge before Lily enters the scene.

The First Encounter

At the bar, Lucy finds the English teachers talking loudly about work. Lily is the only person in the group she does not know. Although her skin is pale, she is short and angular, with elbows and knees that seem to jut out. Dyed auburn hair rises from her head before falling over one eye; her dark eyes and fingers twitch. Lucy finds her attractive, but also slightly comical, and the envy she had brought with her gives way to a smile.

Lily greets her in an East Yorkshire accent. Lucy recognizes it immediately as resembling the voices of girls she knew at school. Years of travel and speaking other languages have left Lucy with a neutral, difficult-to-place voice, and she has little patience for people who carry their regional accents like declarations of identity. The contrast is more than a difference in speech: Lily arrives sounding unmistakably connected to the place Lucy has tried to leave behind, while Lucy presents herself as someone who has made distance from her origins part of her life in Japan.

Lily's Need to Begin Again

As they talk, Lily explains that she left after a planned marriage collapsed. Her former fiancé was possessive and sometimes followed her to make sure she was not enjoying herself with anyone else. She wanted to escape him, but also to start over and travel. Japan is therefore not simply a place where she needs housing; it is part of an attempt to begin a different life after a relationship that had narrowed her freedom.

Lucy responds encouragingly and turns the conversation toward the immediate problem of finding an apartment. When Lily falters while describing her current accommodation, Lucy recognizes the kind of run-down building she means: a place inhabited by Western men who take advantage of their position as foreigners and pursue women. Her account is sharply judgmental, but it also makes clear why she considers better housing important. She offers to take Lily to look for an apartment and explains the obstacles: some landlords accept foreign tenants and some do not; the initial costs may include a deposit, rent in advance, and non-refundable key money; and Lily will need a Japanese guarantor. Lily says she has brought her savings and is not deterred, while Lucy warns that the expense will become clearer when she sees the prices.

The Beginning of a Friendship

They arrange to meet the following weekend. Lucy assumes that helping Lily find a flat will be a one-time favor and that she will never see her again. That expectation marks the gap between the small practical shape of their first meeting and the much larger place Lily comes to occupy in Lucy’s story. Lucy remembers the beginning as clumsy and faltering, then observes that Lily was better at exits than entrances: an early description that makes their first meeting carry the shadow of the separation to come without yet disclosing its course.

The recollection also belongs to the tense present of Lucy’s police questioning. She is choosing what to tell the officers and explicitly keeps this account to herself for the moment. Looking back allows her to trace how the past became the present, but her memory is not offered as neutral background; it is part of her control over what the police can learn. In that frame, the bar meeting establishes both the ordinary origins of the connection and the intimacy that makes Lily’s later absence so consequential. The first encounter is not a dramatic declaration of friendship. It begins with Bob’s request, Lucy’s reluctant willingness, and a promise to help with an apartment—precisely the modest beginnings Lucy once thought she could leave behind after a single weekend.