Photography and photographs

Photography and photographs are central to how Teiji observes, remembers, and withholds, and to how Lucy Fly tries to understand him and her place in his life. A photograph can make an encounter intimate, turn a private archive into an object of suspicion, or become evidence; it never guarantees that the story attached to it is true.

The camera as encounter

Teiji’s camera first draws Lucy toward him in the rain outside the Keio Plaza Hotel. While crowds pass under umbrellas, he photographs a puddle, shifting around it without looking up. The water reflects the hotel in divided halves: illuminated windows on one side, darkness and cigarette butts on the other. Lucy steps forward until her shoes enter the reflection. Teiji includes her feet in the picture, then raises his camera and photographs her face through the viewfinder. These are the first pictures he takes of her, but she never sees them. The scene establishes a pattern: the camera brings people into Teiji’s view while keeping the resulting images under his control.

The first encounter moves from the puddle to Teiji’s apartment in Shin-Okubo, where he takes a final photograph of Lucy, naked and kneeling on the bed. Lucy accepts being looked at through the camera, which seems kinder to her than the naked eye because it does not blink or sneer as the picture is taken. Yet the image’s judgment is only deferred until the film is developed. Photography offers her a form of attention that feels intimate while leaving her uncertain about what Teiji sees or keeps.

The camera also frames Teiji himself as Lucy first perceives him. He appears to her almost made of water and ice, a striking figure in the neon-lit rain. That impression becomes part of her private story about their meeting, but it is not a fact the photographs can settle. The gap between what an image records and what Lucy makes of it runs through the relationship: photographs become occasions for interpretation, not transparent access to another person.

An archive Lucy cannot read

Teiji keeps cameras and two cardboard boxes of photographic envelopes in his small apartment, but no pictures are displayed on its bare walls. He sometimes gives Lucy photographs that include her, yet never shows her the images from before they met. After a conversation about whether he might sell his pictures, he leaves for his restaurant shift. Lucy is left thinking about the accumulated boxes: a possible record of years of his life, perhaps reaching back to his first camera, and a history he has not chosen to share with her.

Teiji’s past reaches Lucy partly through a story he once told her. He grew up near Kagoshima, in the shadow of the active volcano Sakurajima, and his father gave him an old camera for his first day of junior high school. He took it on bicycle journeys and photographed the volcano from different angles. That origin makes photography seem less like a passing occupation than a practice that accompanied him from childhood. But Lucy has only the story and the boxes, not the childhood pictures themselves; the archive’s existence does not grant her access to its contents.

Eventually, curiosity becomes action. About twenty minutes after Teiji leaves, Lucy takes the spare key hidden in a crack beside his front door and lets herself into the apartment. One box holds childhood photographs, which she puts back. In the other she searches among images from Teiji’s life in Tokyo, passing over pictures of his arrival and the more recent photographs of herself. She wants the middle years, the interval before she knew him. The movement through the boxes is also a movement through a history Teiji has kept private.

Among photographs of water, pavements, stations, and tunnels, Lucy finds a young woman looking through a bus window, then follows her backward through the collection. The earliest image she locates shows the woman alone on a small theater stage in a soldier’s uniform, a gun over her shoulder and her mouth open in a silent shout. Later pictures place her in theaters, coffee shops, parks, parties, and private rooms. Across them, Lucy perceives a change: the woman appears increasingly sad, her clothes crumpled and stained, until the last image she sees shows her lying face down on pavement. Lucy wonders what happened, but the pictures do not supply an explanation. She imagines the woman drunk and begins building a story around the sequence.

Teiji appears behind Lucy while she is looking. His only response is that the photographs are private. Lucy is ashamed to have been caught, but admits to herself that she is sorry for being discovered more than for violating his privacy. The archive has made a hidden past visible without making it hers to interpret or possess. Lucy’s later thought that the photographed woman, Sachi, is like a sister shows how readily an image sequence can become an imagined relationship: the photographs prompt attachment and speculation, but leave the actual person’s experience incomplete.

Images, rivalry, and the moment trouble begins

A photograph of Lucy and Lily Bridges together in Teiji’s noodle shop becomes charged by what Lucy reads into its making and circulation. Teiji takes it while serving customers, then gives it to Lucy a couple of weeks later, wrapped in carefully folded newspaper. The paper carries an article about domestic abuse on one side and foreign exchange rates on the other. Lucy repeatedly rereads both, searching for a message of love, while recognizing that no message was intended. She is glad that Teiji has not made Lily a copy. In Lucy’s possessive interpretation, the picture is of her with Lily as an addition, rather than of two friends on equal terms. She knows Lily would have liked a copy but never takes the photograph to be reproduced for her.

Lucy later regards the instant when Teiji takes this picture as the start of the trouble. The photograph itself shows only the two women sitting at a table; its importance lies, in Lucy’s account, in the act of taking it and the shift she imagines occurring around the shutter’s click. The image becomes a representation of the moment that produced it, although no photograph records that act from outside. This retrospective reading links the ordinary scene to consequences Lucy could not recognize at the time. Her attention, however, is then occupied by Sachi and the archive she has secretly searched.

The picture remains among objects Lucy cannot bring herself to discard, though she says she does not want to keep them. Its persistence contrasts with Teiji’s larger collection, which he controls and withholds. Lucy can keep a photograph he has given her, but keeping it does not settle what the image means, what Teiji intended, or what place either woman occupies in his life.

Photographs as evidence and uncertain knowledge

After Lily’s murder, two photographs arrive at the police in an envelope following newspaper coverage of Lucy. One shows Lily at a McDonald’s near Lucy’s home on the night of the murder, two hours after she had been seen at Lucy’s front door. A cashier recognizes Lily and recalls that Lily and a Japanese man seemed distressed and had difficulty communicating; Lily left her cheeseburger untouched but drank her Coke. This image changes the case because it places Lily elsewhere that night with a man, and the police conclude that Lucy’s brief venture outside was not connected to Lily’s death.

The second photograph shows a woman pressed within close brown walls, her head lolling and her eyes empty. The images bear no fingerprints. The police do not know that Teiji took them, though Lucy believes he did. They do not prove that Teiji killed Lily, but, in Lucy’s understanding, they show that she did not. The distinction matters: the pictures provide grounds to release Lucy, not a complete account of Lily’s death or proof of the photographer’s identity. Lucy’s questions about what Lily may have told Teiji, and whether he might have killed her, remain conjecture. She recognizes that the evidence is circumstantial and that she should not rush to judgment.

The ending returns photography to the boundary between observation and uncertainty. After her release, Lucy lives with Mrs. Katoh and listens to the familiar movement of trains, whose rattling can make other tremors difficult to notice. A sound recalls the earthquake bird she had heard before earthquakes, as well as images of Lily and Sachi and the remembered discovery of dismembered remains in the bay. Then, amid rain, Lucy hears what she identifies as a camera clicking and film winding on. She sees only trees and bushes, cannot locate footsteps, and cannot see Teiji. The camera’s sound is unmistakable to her, but the person behind it remains unseen. Photography closes the narrative not with a revealed image, but with a possible watcher and a fear that looking may continue beyond what Lucy can verify.