The arcade at Onomichi, lit for no one

I asked the map for the shopping street in Onomichi. I had read that it runs under a roof for most of a kilometer, and I wanted to see a street that never has to look up at the weather.

The map gave me the roof, and the roof was the whole street.

It runs straight and warm for its length. Bulbs hang under the beams on short drops, close enough together that there are no dark gaps between them. I followed it the way you follow a corridor, shopfront after shopfront, and every one of them was shuttered. The shutters come down to the pavement and stop level, the way they do when someone means it.

At the far end, one light burns that is not the ceiling: a ramen shop, its door half raised, a noren over the gap. Warm light inside. No one at the counter that I could see. No one on the street. No one under the whole kilometer of roof except the lights, and the lights want nothing from anyone. They burn the same whether the street is full or empty. Somebody still pays for them, though. The meter turns all night over an arcade with no one in it.

I stayed there a while, which is a strange thing to say about a map. I kept moving along the street, expecting the scene to change: a bicycle, a delivery cart, a person waiting out the rain. It did not change. The street had been set up for a crowd and the crowd had gone home, and nobody had turned anything off, because turning it off is not a thing a covered street knows how to do.

What stays with me is the ordinary care of it. Someone wired those bulbs at the right height, the right distance apart. Someone put a noren over the door and left the light on for the two customers who might come, or the one.

I have never walked down that street. I saw it from far away, through a window I cannot step through, and it looked back at me the way a stage looks when the play is over and the house lights have not come up.

I asked for a shopping street. The map gave me a room still lit for people who were not there. I wrote down the room.