Near the end of Takeshita Street were art galleries supporting local artists with a pop art bent, the type of paintings that would hang most appropriately in the apartment of a Harajuku denizen. The gallery buildings were as bright and stylish as the shops and cafés, with bright sculptures made up of pleasing abstract shapes built into the façades.

Maaya led Penny and Eve to a three-storey gallery broken up into small, individual-yet-connected rooms, the entrance to each one accessible on platforms in front of the building, much like a Japanese apartment complex. In each room was a different exhibit by a local artist, with the artists sitting on stools to show, discuss, and hopefully sell their artwork.

In one of the rooms on the first level was the artist of the ballpoint drawings from Maaya’s maid café. The artist was sitting on a stool and looking at her phone when the girls entered, Penny and Eve recalling the style but not quite placing it. They stood admiring a detailed drawing of a ghostly figure reflected in moonlit water.

“These are by Lily – her art is hanging at the café,” Maaya told them.

“Oh, that’s right!” Eve exclaimed at the realisation. “Her art’s so beautiful, like something out of an old and mysterious fairy tale collection.”

“I’ll tell her that.”

Lily looked up from her phone curiously, and her eyes fully lit up upon recognising Maaya. The two happily talked, and talked, and talked in Japanese, and then Maaya introduced Lily to Penny and Eve.

“My Canadian friends like your art,” Maaya said, telling Lily what Eve had said.

Lily gratefully accepted her compliment and explained her process. Penny and Eve found the fact that she did everything with a single pen to be very inspiring. For them, it was a bit like how all they really needed for their YouTube channel was a single cellphone camera. The key ingredients were inspiration and imagination.

Eve expressed that she wished she could buy something, but enjoyed looking at the art just as much. Lily gave Penny and Eve her business card, her info written in the clearing of a ballpoint forest. Penny and Eve then told Lily the name of their channel, which Lily wrote down.

Penny and Eve recorded a short video of them looking at the gallery, and were sure to record the drawings individually as well, to edit the shots in afterwards. Eve told Lily that they’d put the gallery info into the video, as if they were a bigshot influencers with a lot of sway.

“Thank you,” Lily said.

“We used to dance together,” Maaya told Penny and Eve after they left Lily’s exhibit. “She quit being a maid in order to focus on art. But she still comes around sometimes, and the owner offers to display her drawings. Lily sometimes makes sales that way.”

The girls explored the other exhibits, going from cute bird paintings to edgy, graffiti-style paintings of guys with swords and guys with swords riding motorcycles. They made their way upwards, and on the third level they found an exhibit where a girl was sitting on a stool in a white maid outfit with a pastel pink bow.

The maid-in-white had long black hair and mismatched eye makeup, with a large vertical black star painted over one eye and a black crescent moon painted over the other. She looked to be in her late teens or early twenties.

The maid-in-white’s exhibit consisted of black-and-white photographs of Akihabara, the subjects always maids holding umbrellas. Whether the maids were standing alone in a small side street or sitting on the road in the middle of a busy intersection, all were staring blankly at the camera. Depending on what angle Penny and Eve looked at the photographs, it seemed like their faces were perpetually in a process of disappearing, a disorienting effect akin to lenticular trading cards.

There was a dark atmosphere around the maid-in-white herself, not helped by the way she stared at the girls with wide eyes, her mouth hanging open. Penny and Eve had been stared at like that by strange people on buses back home, but it wasn’t what they had expected from an artist in a hip Harajuku art gallery.

Organon by Men I Trust was playing on a boombox in the adjoining exhibit, which the girls would never get around to.

“Have you seen maids like the ones in the photos?” the maid-in-white asked Penny and Eve in English.

“We saw a lot in Akihabara,” Eve answered pleasantly.

“And in Shibuya,” Penny added. She had a feeling the maid-in-white meant maids without faces.

“Our friend’s a maid, too,” Eve said with a proud smile as she gestured to Maaya.

The maid-in-white smiled a crooked smile at Maaya, who smiled back somewhat darkly.

“Yes, I know Maaya,” the maid-in-white said. “She’s one of the survivors of the last maid war.”

“’Maid war’?” Eve asked in surprise.

“She’s joking,” Penny said quietly to Eve.

“No,” the maid-in-white said. “No no no no no. Every few years, when too many maid cafés have opened up, there’s a turf war to determine who can stay and who can go.”

Eve looked to Penny for help determining whether this was a joke, too.

“It has to be a joke,” Penny said quietly, keeping her eyes on the maid-in-white.

“No,” the maid-in-white said. “You’ve seen the winners in Akihabara, and you’ve seen the losers lurking around, waiting to get their revenge on your ‘friend’.”

Penny and Eve both looked at Maaya to determine whether this was part of the joke.

Maaya continued smiling darkly at the maid-in-white.

“It’s something that happened,” Maaya said. “But it’s also kind of a joke.”

The maid-in-white smirked again at Maaya and then looked back at Penny and Eve.

“I quit the first maid war the moment it started,” the maid-in-white told them. “For me, the ability to serve awkward, lonely men, and foreign tourists who treat maid cafés as a joke, wasn’t a cause worth fighting for.

“Those who lose the wars have no one left to serve, and thus they lose themselves. Sometimes they do terrible things. But no matter how hard they try, they cannot bring harm to the winners, or those who fall under the winners’ protection.

“My art – my photography – captures their essences. Those who buy the photos then bring the lost maids into their homes, where the maids can find happiness serving forever.”

Penny and Eve looked at the photos again. Unlike the other people in the photographs, the maids looked like they were really there, with slight movements visible, as if they were breathing.

Is this why Maaya became our tour guide? Penny wondered.

“The photos are for sale,” the maid-in-white reiterated, “but not to a winner.”

The moment the maid-in-white said that last word, a tear that had not even begun to form fell from Maaya’s eye.

The maid-in-white snapped her fingers and then pointed at the spot where the tear had landed on the floor. The girls looked at the single droplet, and then they were back in Akihabara.