He carried a battered satchel that once belonged to his grandfather, leather softened by decades and lined with paper ephemera: ticket stubs, a pressed hibiscus, a map with creases like rivers. The satchel smelled faintly of camphor and stories. Toru walked the length of the boardwalk until he reached the arcade, where the games blinked and chimed with a mechanical cheerfulness that belonged to another century. He paused at a stall that sold postcards—photographs in monochrome and sepia of children running across the pier, of fishermen hauling nets, of the carousel that never seemed to slow down.