It was a miracle.
I hurried onto the train and grabbed hold of one of the gleaming silver poles, hardly daring to believe my good fortune.
It was the evening rush hour and I was running late.
I'd expected to have to cram myself into a car packed with hundreds of other commuters who were on their way back from work, anxious and eager to get home.
But here I was, still panting a little from having run all the way to the station, stepping into a car that was practically empty.
Maybe, things are finally going my way for a change.
I didn't look around. I kept my gaze fastened on the ad above my head, which was advertising a new video game featuring man eating giants and people zipping around on wires.
Don't look. Whatever you do, don't look, don't look, don't look…
With luck, I thought, I might be able to make it all the way to my stop without making eye contact or having any interaction at all with another human being…
It was the butterflies – life-size – that caught my attention at first. No one in Japan would wear white pumps with huge plastic insects on the toes. The romance novel (I assumed it was a romance novel from the helpless-looking, doe-eyed blonde on the cover, safe in the arms of a blonde male with a flowing green cloak and the emblem of wings on his back) had Cyrillic writing on it. The giant roller suitcase parked in front of her was yet another clue that the girl was out of town.
Though none of that – including the fact that she'd pinned her long, mousy brown hair onto the top of her head, Sound Of Music style, and had paired her cheap red polyester dress with neon yellow leggings – was as dead a giveaway to her new-in-town status as what the girl did next.
"Oh, I sorry," she said, looking up with a flash of pearly whites that changed her whole face and made her go from merely pretty to stunningly beautiful. "Please, you want sit?''
The girl moved her purse, which she'd left on the seat next to her so that I could sit down. No sane person from Japan would have ever done that. Not when there were at least a dozen other empty seats on the train.
My heart sank.
I now knew two things with absolute certainty:
One was that, despite the miracle of the nearly empty subway car, things definitely weren't going to go my way that day.
The other was that the girl with the plastic butterflies on her shoes was going to be dead by the end of this week.