"Villain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Shuichi Yoshida)

CHAPTER 1. WHO DID SHE WANT TO SEE?

Route 263 runs north and south some forty-eight kilometers, connecting Fukuoka and Saga Prefectures and straddling Mitsuse Pass in the Sefuri mountain range. The highway begins at the Arae intersection in Sawara Ward in Fukuoka City, an ordinary intersection in an area that, since the mid-1960s, has become a bedroom suburb of Fukuoka with a mushrooming of large and medium-size condos, including, on the east side, the massive Arae housing complex. Sawara Ward is also an educational hub, with three well-known universities- Fukuoka University, Seinan Gakuin, and Nakamura Gakuen-within a three-kilometer radius of the intersection. Perhaps because of all the students living in the vicinity, everyone you see walking at the intersection, or waiting for buses-even the elderly-seems young and full of life.

Known at this point as Sawara Avenue, Route 263 runs straight south. Down the avenue there’s a Daiei department store, a Mos Burger fast-food restaurant, a 7-Eleven convenience store, and one of those big-box suburban chain bookstores with a massive sign that proclaims, in no-nonsense fashion, Books. The first convenience store has an entrance directly facing the street, but after the Noke intersection the next one has a small parking space for one or two cars, the store after that enough space for five or six, then one with a larger parking lot to accommodate up to ten cars. Past the Muromi River, the convenience stores are surrounded by parking lots that can accommodate several huge eighteen-wheelers, the stores themselves like small boxes almost lost in the midst of massive parking lots.

Here the road begins to gently rise, and just before Suga Shrine curves sharply to the right. There are fewer houses along the roadside; just the brand-new asphalt road and white guardrails leading up toward Mitsuse Pass.

Mitsuse Pass has always had ghostly, otherworldly stories connected to it. In the beginning of the Edo period it was rumored to be a hideout for robbers. In the mid-1920s rumor had it that someone murdered seven women in Kitagata township in Saga Prefecture and escaped to the pass. More recently the pass has become infamous as the place where, so the story goes, someone staying at a nearby inn went crazy and killed another guest. Aware of this tale, young people liked to dare each other to drive over the pass. There have been supposed sightings of ghosts as well, usually near the exit to the Mitsuse Tunnel on the border between Fukuoka and Saga.

The road through the tunnel, a toll road known as Echo Road, was built to bypass the sharp curves and slopes that slow down traffic in the winter. Construction was begun in 1979 and completed in 1986. The toll road costs ¥250 for passenger cars and ¥870 for larger vehicles, and truck drivers on the route between Nagasaki and Fukuoka, weighing the trade-off between time and cost, often choose to drive over the pass.

Taking the regular expressway from Nagasaki to Hakata, a part of Fukuoka City, costs ¥3,650 in tolls for a passenger car, one way, so including the toll for the tunnel, taking the pass road saves nearly ¥1,000. The downside, however, is the drive over an eerie road that, even in daytime, is covered with thick, overhanging trees. At night no matter how fast you drive it feels as if you are tottering over a mountain path with only a flashlight to guide you.

Even so, cars setting out from Nagasaki that take the pass road to save money take the Nagasaki Expressway from Nagasaki to Omura, then to Higashi-Sonogi and Takeo, and get off at the Saga Yamato interchange. Intersecting this east-west Nagasaki Expressway at the interchange is Route 263.

Despite its reputation, until January 6, 2002, Mitsuse Pass was merely a road over a mountain pass, one long overlooked once the expressway was built. For those who lived in the area it was nothing more than a mountain road on the border of the two prefectures with a mammoth tunnel that had cost upwards of five billion yen to complete. But in the beginning of January 2002, an uncommon snowfall lay on the land. There, among the countless networks of artery-like roads spread out over the country, Route 263 and the Nagasaki Expressway linking Nagasaki and Fukuoka suddenly stood out, like a blood vessel bulging near the skin.

On this day, a young construction worker living outside Nagasaki was arrested by the Nagasaki police. The crime? He was suspected of strangling Yoshino Ishibashi, an insurance saleswoman who lived in Fukuoka, and abandoning her body.

On December 9, 2001, Yoshio Ishibashi was standing outside his barbershop near the JR Kurume station. Though he usually had a few customers on a Sunday, no one had visited his shop all morning, so he went out in front, hoping to lure some in. Dressed in his white barber’s smock, he gazed down the road, the cold north wind rushing past. An hour had passed since he had finished the lunch his wife, Satoko, had prepared, and the scent of curry lingered even outside.

From the front of the barbershop he could see the JR Kurume station in the distance. Two taxis were parked in the deserted square in front of the station, waiting for over an hour for customers. Whenever Yoshio saw this deserted square, he thought he would have more business if only his shop were located near the other railroad station in town, the private Nishitetsu Kurume station. These two railroad lines-one state owned, the other private-basically ran parallel from Kurume to Fukuoka City, but while the JR special express train cost ¥1,320 one way and took twenty-six minutes, the Nishitetsu express took forty-two minutes but cost only ¥600.

You either spend sixteen more minutes or ¥720, one or the other.

Every time Yoshio gazed out from his shop at the JR station, it struck him how people would so easily sell sixteen minutes of their time for ¥720. Not that this applied to everybody, of course. It was highly unlikely that another Ishibashi who lived in this town, the world-renowned founder of Bridgestone Tires, and his descendants, would sell their precious time for such small change. But there was only a handful of people like that in this town, and on a late Sunday afternoon at the end of the year, most people were like him. The Nishitetsu station might be a bit farther away, but when they wanted to go to Fukuoka, that’s where they headed.

Once Yoshio calculated his own value based on the difference between the two stations. If you live to age seventy and your time is worth ¥720 per sixteen minutes, how much is a person’s life worth? When he first saw the result on the calculator he was sure he had made a mistake. The bottom line was ¥1.6 billion. He hurriedly punched in the numbers again but came up with the same result. A person’s life is worth ¥1.6 billion. My life, he thought, is worth ¥1.6 billion.

This might have been a meaningless figure, something he’d calculated to kill time, but to Yoshio, the owner of a little barbershop whose customers were deserting him, the number gave a brief moment of happiness.

Yoshio had one child, a daughter named Yoshino, who had graduated the previous spring from junior college and had started working as a door-to-door salesperson for an insurance company in Fukuoka City. When she took the job, Yoshio had argued for a solid two weeks that she should continue to live at home, as she’d done in college, and commute via the Nishitetsu line. Her job and their house were in the same prefecture, after all, and she shouldn’t count on her salary, which was based mostly on commissions. Yoshino countered that her company gave its employees a housing allowance, and that if she lived at home it would interfere with work. So in the end she moved into an apartment building rented by her company, not far from her firm.

Perhaps there were other reasons, but after Yoshino moved to Fukuoka she rarely came home. Once, when Yoshio told her to come back on a Saturday, she’d flatly refused, saying she had to entertain customers. Yoshio was sure she’d at least come back for New Year’s, but just the other day his wife had informed him that Yoshino planned to take a trip to Osaka with friends from her company at the end of the year.

“ Osaka? What’s she going there for?” Yoshio growled.

His wife half expected this reaction. “Don’t yell at me. She said she and her girlfriends are going to some place called Universal Studio or something.” She strode off to the kitchen to begin making dinner for the two of them.

“Why in the world didn’t you let me know about this earlier?” Yoshio yelled at her as she shuffled away.

Pouring soy sauce into a pan, Satoko said quietly, “Yoshino’s an adult. She hardly ever gets a vacation, so when she does we should let her do what she wants.”

When Yoshio had first met his wife she’d been so pretty she could have been selected Miss Kurume, but after she’d had Yoshino she put on weight and now looked nothing like her former self.

“When did you find out about this?”

As he yelled this, the door chime at their shop rang. Clicking his tongue, Yoshio plodded out to the front. His wife hadn’t replied, but he could well imagine his daughter telling her to keep it a secret from Dad that she’d already bought a plane ticket, and Satoko replying, as if it was all too much trouble, “Okay, okay, I get it…”

In the shop stood an elementary school boy from the neighborhood, who until recently always came with his mother. The boy was as cute as one of those chubby little helmeted samurai dolls, but the back of his head was as flat as a cliff, the result, no doubt, of his mother letting him lie too long on his back as a baby.

Still, Yoshio was happy that there were still a few neighborhood children like this who came to get their hair cut. Once they got into junior or senior high, boys started to care too much about their appearance and either let their hair grow long or stopped coming to his shop, claiming that the haircuts he gave were out of style. Before he realized what was happening, local boys were making appointments in salons in Fukuoka and traveling there on weekends to get their hair styled.

The other day there’d been a meeting of the local barber and hair-salon union and when Yoshio mentioned this trend, the female owner of the Lillie Salon, who was drinking shochu, butted in. “You’re lucky you work with boys,” she said. “With girls, the ones in elementary school are already going to get their hair cut in salons in Fukuoka.”

“I remember you were pretty precocious, too, back when you were a kid,” Yoshio joked. “So you can’t just say it’s kids these days.” Yoshio and the woman were the same age, so he felt comfortable kidding her.

“Back in my day, we didn’t go to salons in Fukuoka,” the woman replied. “We stood in front of the mirror, curling iron in hand, for two or three hours, doing it ourselves.”

“The Seiko cut, I’ll bet.”

Yoshio laughed and several people sitting nearby, glasses in hand, joined the conversation. “You’re talking twenty years ago, aren’t you,” one of them said.

Yoshio was of a slightly older generation, but still he knew that Kurume had produced a phenomenally popular female singer, Seiko Matsuda. In the early 1980s, Yoshio mused, this young girl’s clear singing voice really had transformed drab Kurume into something bright and glittering again.

Yoshio had been to Tokyo himself only once, when he was young, as part of a third-rate rockabilly band, his hair slicked back with pomade. He and his bandmates took the night train to Tokyo and checked out the wide pedestrian-only streets of Harajuku.

On the first day there he was bowled over by the crowds. By the second day he was used to the masses of people, but felt a growing sense of inferiority and irritation at being from a country town, and he started picking fights with some of the kids dancing in the Harajuku streets. His rough, dialect-laden challenge didn’t faze the young Tokyoites, though, who calmly asked him to get out of the way. He remembered, too, how when they were searching for a bar written up in a guidebook, Masakatsu, their drummer, muttered a heartfelt comment: “You know, Seiko Matsuda is really something. To come from Kurume and make it here in Tokyo.” Yoshio always remembered these words. And how right after they got back home, Satoko announced that she was pregnant with Yoshino. They weren’t married yet.

Now he stood in front of his shop, which at least seemed like it was paying off; all of a sudden in the evening people came in for haircuts, one after another. The first was a man from the neighborhood who’d retired from the prefectural office the year before. With his retirement pay and pension he seemed to be well off, for he’d recently purchased three miniature dachshunds, each one of which went for ¥100,000. Whenever he went out for a walk, he’d carry the three little dogs in his arms.

Just as the man tied up his three yappy dogs outside and sat down to have his thinning hair trimmed, a junior high student, also from the neighborhood, came in. Without a word of greeting, he plopped down on the bench in the back of the shop and was soon lost in the manga magazine he’d brought with him. For a moment Yoshio considered calling in his wife to have her help out, but he would soon be finished with the dachshund owner so he told the sullen boy, “I’ll be finished soon-please be patient.” When he and his wife married, she commuted to a barber school in Fukuoka and got a license. Their dream was to open a second shop, but the economy in the ’80s was already starting to sputter, and besides, after Satoko’s mother died three years ago of a stroke, she claimed that touching other people’s hair reminded her of touching a corpse, and she stopped working in the shop altogether. Still, when it rains it pours. As Yoshio was in the middle of shaving the retiree, a third customer came in, and he had no choice but to ask Satoko for help.

“I’m kind of busy,” she replied sullenly.

“What do you mean you’re busy? I’ve got customers waiting here.”

“I’m in the middle of gutting these shrimp.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“It’s better if I do it now…”

Yoshio had given up on her even before she finished replying. In the mirror the man he was shaving gave him a sympathetic smile. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard an exchange like this between them.

“I’m sorry. You’ll have to wait just a little bit longer,” Yoshio said to the junior high student. Still absorbed in his manga, the boy barely noticed.

“She’s a barber’s daughter, not that that makes any difference.” Shifting the scissors in his hand, Yoshio clicked his tongue. His eyes met those of the customer in the mirror.

“My wife’s exactly the same,” the man said. “If I ask her to take the dogs for a walk, she gets all hot and bothered and says, ‘You have no idea how much work it takes to run this house! You think I’m a maid or something?’”

Yoshio gave a forced smile at the customer’s words, but couldn’t help but think that taking this retired civil servant’s dogs for a walk, and a barber asking his wife to help cut customers’ hair, were entirely different things.

The rest of the day they had a steady stream of customers, eight in all, including a man who wanted his white hair dyed, until they closed up at seven p.m. It was as if all the regulars who came once a month decided to come on the same day, and Yoshio was kept running from one to the next. Satoko had finished with the shrimp, but had gone out shopping, so he couldn’t ask again for help.

After the final customer left, and Yoshio was sweeping up the hair from the floor, he thought how nice it would be if-not every day, but at least once a week-they had this many customers. His legs and back were about to give out from standing for so long, but the leather bag he used instead of a cash register was full of thousand-yen bills, more stuffed than he’d seen it in a decade.

When he closed up shop and stepped up into their living room, his wife was on the phone with their daughter. Yoshino always managed, barely, to keep her promise to phone them on Sunday evenings. As he watched his wife talking, Yoshio was less concerned with what they were saying than with how much the call was costing. A few months ago Yoshino had canceled her contract for her PHS phone and had bought a cell phone. Yoshio had told her over and over to use the landline in her apartment, but Yoshino preferred the convenience of the cell phone and always used it when she called.

Yoshino was sitting in her studio apartment in Fairyland Hakata, the building that her company, Heisei Insurance, rented in Chiyo, Hakata Ward, in Fukuoka City. She was redoing her nails and only half listening to her mother drone about how adorable some customer’s miniature dachshunds were.

Fairyland Hakata consisted of thirty studio apartments, all occupied by saleswomen for Heisei Insurance. It was a different setup from a company dorm, for there was no cafeteria and no dorm rules. The women worked in different areas throughout town. They often talked to their neighbors across their verandas, and every evening you could hear some of them in the small arbor in the courtyard, cans of juice in their hands, as they laughed and chatted. Rent for the apartments cost sixty thousand yen per month, half of which the company subsidized. Their studio apartments each had a small bathroom and a kitchen, but many of the women cooked together to save money.

After a while Yoshino grew bored by her mother’s story of the cute dogs. “Mom,” she said, cutting her off, “I gotta go. I’m having dinner with some friends.”

Satoko had already asked her, as soon as she called, whether she’d eaten, but now acted as if she didn’t realize her daughter had yet to have dinner. “Oh, is that right? I’d better let you go. Hold on a second,” she added, “I’ll put Dad on.” She went to get him without waiting for Yoshino’s reply.

Yoshino was bored. She stepped out onto the veranda. Her apartment was on the second floor, and from there she could hear Suzuka Nakamachi talking in the courtyard. Suzuka, perhaps proud that she didn’t have a Kyushu accent like most of the girls, was talking louder than anyone else about some TV drama.

As Yoshino came back in from the veranda, her father said hello.

“I’m on my way out to eat with friends,” she said, trying to keep their conversation short, but her father didn’t seem to have much to say. Instead of his usual complaints about how bad business was, he seemed in a rare good mood. “Is that right?” he said. “Well, stay safe, okay?… By the way, how’s work?”

“Work?” she replied quickly. “Cold calls are hard. Hard to get people to sign up. Anyway, gotta go. See ya.” And she hung up.

She had no idea that this was the last time she’d ever talk with her parents.

Yoshino was waiting by the entrance of the building when her friends Sari and Mako came down the stairs together. All three of them worked in different parts of town, but they were her two best friends in the apartment building.

As tall, thin Sari and short, chubby Mako descended, the distance between each step, which was obviously the same, appeared different.

Earlier that day the three of them had wandered around department stores in Tenjin, but since it was still too early for dinner, they had come back home before going out again.

Sari had purchased a pair of Tiffany Open Heart earrings earlier in the day at Mitsukoshi and was already wearing them. The earrings cost twenty thousand yen, and Sari had paced the store for nearly an hour, agonizing over whether to buy them. When Sari was checking out the prices and trying on different earrings, Yoshino, who was getting tired of waiting, told her, “When you can’t make up your mind, it’s best to just go for their signature item.”

Now she casually told Sari how nice the earrings looked, and stooped down to adjust her boots, which didn’t feel right. The heels were worn out already, the buckles starting to come apart. The two girls beside her had on similar boots.

Yoshino stood up. “So where should we go?” Mako rarely gave her own opinion, but spoke up this time. “How ’bout some gyoza at Tetsunabe?”

“I could go for some gyoza,” Sari agreed readily, and looked at Yoshino to gauge her reaction.

Yoshino slipped her cell phone into the Louis Vuitton Cabas Piano bag her father had bought her as a graduation present when she finished junior college, then pulled out her wallet, also a Vuitton. There was less than ten thousand yen inside, and she sighed.

“Kind of a pain to go all the way to Nakasu, yeah?” Yoshino said.

Sensing something in her reply, Sari asked, “What, you got a date or something?” Yoshino just inclined her a head a bit.

“With Keigo?” Sari, half disbelieving, half suspicious, gazed at Yoshino. “Why do you say that?” Yoshino asked, dodging the question. “I’m just gonna see him for a short time,” she quickly added.

“Better not to have any gyoza, then,” Mako butted in. “You know what it’ll do to your breath.” Her tone was so earnest that Yoshino had to laugh.

It took less than three minutes to walk from their building to the Chiyo-Kenchoguchi subway station, but along the way the road ran past the densely thick Higashi Park. Walking there in the daytime was no problem, but as the neighborhood-watch group’s bulletin board cautioned, it was better to avoid the place at night.

Higashi Park, established by the Fukuoka prefectural office, was home to two bronze statues. One was dedicated to the cloistered emperor Kameyama, who at the time of the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion made a famous prayer at Ise Shrine asking that his life be taken in order to spare the nation. The second statue was that of Nichiren, the founder of the Nichiren sect of Buddhism. The grounds of the park also housed the Toka Ebisu Shrine-dedicated to Ebisu, one of the seven gods of good fortune-as well as the Mongol Invasion Museum. But once the sun set, these buildings seemed to disappear, and the park turned back into dense, thick woods.

As they headed to the subway, Yoshino showed Sari and Mako the e-mail she’d received a few days before from Keigo Masuo.

I’d love to go to Universal Studios too! But it’s pretty crowded at the end of the year. Well, time to get some sleep. Good night.

Sari and Mako each read the message, and in turn each gave a huge, exaggerated sigh.

“Sounds to me like he’s asking you to go with him to Universal Studios.” Mako, who generally took things at face value, was openly envious.

“I don’t know.” Yoshino smiled vaguely.

“I bet he’d go if you asked him,” Sari said.

Keigo Masuo was a senior, a business major at Seinan Gakuin University. His parents owned a Japanese-style inn in the upscale resort town of Yufuin, which would account for Keigo’s expensive condo in front of Hakata station and his Audi A6. Yoshino and her two friends had first met Keigo at the end of October, at a bar in Tenjin. The three girls were out for the evening and, at the bar, they were invited to join Keigo and his lively group of friends to play darts, which they did until nearly midnight.

Keigo asked her for her e-mail address that night-that much was true. But Yoshino’s stories about the dates they’d had since then were all a lie.

“You’re going to see Keigo after this, right? Why don’t you invite him?”

Yoshino had tried to dodge the question of who she was going to meet later that evening, but her two friends were convinced it had to be Keigo.

Yoshino avoided Sari’s eyes and repeated, “We’re just getting together for a little while.”

The footsteps of the three girls were absorbed into the darkness of the empty park. They continued to talk about Keigo until they arrived at the station, their cheerful voices making the eerie path by the park brighter, as if the number of streetlights had increased.

At the station, and in the subway on the way to Tenjin, Keigo continued to be the subject of conversation. They speculated on which actor he most resembled, one of them mentioning that she looked up his family’s inn on the Internet and saw that it had a separate cottage with an outdoor natural hot spring.

Yoshino was proud that she was the only one Keigo had asked for her e-mail address when they’d met in the bar. And that pride had led her, when Sari had first asked if he’d sent her a message, to suddenly lie: “Yeah, he did. I’m going to see him this weekend.” When the weekend came, she had her two friends check her hair and makeup, and they gave her a cheery send-off as she left the apartment. The white lie she’d told had ballooned into something out of her control, and she wound up taking the Nishitetsu line back to her parents’ home to kill the day there.

It was true that Keigo had contacted her. But she was the one who had to take the initiative. Still, if she sent him a message he’d always reply. I really want to go to Universal Studios, she’d e-mailed once, and he said that he did, too, adding, she noted, an exclamation mark. But this didn’t lead to an invitation to go together. Despite the exchanged e-mails, since that first chance meeting at the bar, Yoshino had never laid eyes on Keigo Masuo.

They were still talking about Keigo even after they entered the gyoza restaurant in Nakasu and sat down to a meal of chicken wings, potato salad, and the main dish, grilled gyoza, washed down by draft beer. Mako was envious of Yoshino for having a steady boyfriend, while Sari, half jealous, cautioned Yoshino to make sure he didn’t play around with anyone else.

“Yoshino, you still okay on time?” Mako said, and Yoshino glanced at the wall clock. The hands behind the greasy glass face showed nine p.m.

“No problem,” she replied. “He’s going to see some friends afterward, so we can only see each other for a few minutes.”

Mako sighed predictably. “Of course you want to see him, even if it’s just for a short time.”

Yoshino didn’t correct her misunderstanding but added with a shrug, “And besides, I’ve got work tomorrow.”

The man Yoshino had plans to meet that night, though, wasn’t Keigo Masuo. Irritated that Keigo wasn’t replying to her recent messages, out of boredom she’d registered with a dating site and she was instead going to meet someone she’d met online.

As Yoshino, Sari, and Mako discussed Keigo, about fifteen kilometers away, on a curve over Mitsuse Pass, the man Yoshino was going to meet had pulled his car over onto the gravel shoulder of the road. It was the kind of forsaken stretch of highway that hardly merited being called an interstate.

As he had driven over the white center line on the narrow road, it rose up in the halogen headlights and looked for an instant like a writhing white snake. The snake stretched out in the distance as if to bind up the pass. Trussed up as tight as it could get, the pass twisted from side to side, making the leaves on the trees appear to shake and tremble.

Far in the distance, in the pitch-black background of this road over the pass, lay the gaping mouth of the Mitsuse Tunnel. Farther down that road, the lights of Hakata would come into view.

The headlights of the stopped car illuminated the dust and, beyond that, palely lit up the surrounding woods. A single moth flitted across the light.

From the Saga Yamato interchange to here was one sharp curve after another, and every time the man turned his wheel over, a ten-yen coin on the dashboard slid back and forth.

The coin was change he got when he stopped for gas at a station just before the pass. Usually he’d just prepay a certain amount, ¥3,000 or ¥3,500, but the attendant was cute so he couldn’t help showing off, and told her to fill it up with premium. That cost ¥5,990, and after he paid with thousand-yen notes, he was left with just a single ¥5,000 bill in his wallet.

The gas attendant shoved the nozzle into his tank. The man watched her the whole time in his side mirror. As the tank filled, the girl walked around to the front and cleaned the windshield, her generous breasts smashed against the glass. The girl’s cheeks were red in the cold night wind. The gas station, alone in the middle of nowhere, was as bright as day.

The man recalled Yoshino’s voice on the phone a few days earlier.

“I have a date with some friends for dinner on Sunday, but if we can meet kind of late it’d be okay…”

“That works for me.”

He picked up the ten-yen coin on the dashboard and stuck it in his pocket. As he did, his fingertips brushed against his stiff penis. Thoughts of Yoshino hadn’t given him an erection, but all the swaying back and forth on the sharp curves had.

The man’s name was Yuichi Shimizu. He was twenty-seven, lived in Nagasaki City, and worked in construction. He and Yoshino had gone on two dates the month before, but since then, he’d had trouble getting in touch with her. Now, though, he was on his way to see her. He was supposed to meet her at ten, but even with the time it took to get over the pass he figured he had plenty of time. He was going to meet her at the place he’d dropped her off last time, the main gate of Higashi Park in Fukuoka. He remembered seeing a huge bronze statue when he’d pulled over.

Yuichi opened his door and swung his legs out the driver’s side. He’d customized the car so it rode low and his legs had no trouble reaching the ground.

It was a perfect time to take a break and have a cigarette, but Yuichi didn’t smoke. At the construction site, when the other workers took a break and all of them started puffing away, he’d sometimes join them for lack of something else to do, but he much preferred just closing his eyes and letting time drift by.

The warm air from inside the car rushed out, brushing against his neck. In the distance he could see the tunnel exit, but nothing else with any color. Still, he could see how the darkness that enveloped the pass came in many shades: the nearly purplish darkness of the mountain ridge, the whitish darkness surrounding the cloud-hidden moon, the blackish darkness covering the woods nearby.

Yuichi closed his eyes for a bit, then opened them to compare the difference between that sort of darkness and the darkness that surrounded him; as he opened his eyes he spotted the small headlights of a car climbing the pass. The lights disappeared when it rounded a curve, only to reappear again. The lights were dim, but still enough to illuminate the white guardrail and the orange mirror set up on each curve.

Just then a small truck appeared from the direction of the tunnel and flew right by him, leaving behind the stink of farm animals. The sudden bestial smell hit him like a jellyfish stinging his nose.

Yuichi closed his door to shut out the smell, pushed back his seat, and lay down. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and checked to see if there were any messages from Yoshino, but there weren’t. When he opened the screen, though, he saw her photo, clad only in her underwear. Her face was off the picture, but the rest of her body appeared clearly, even down to a small telltale pimple on her shoulder.

This one photo had cost him three thousand yen.

“Hey, stop it!”

They were in a love hotel built on reclaimed land in Hakata Bay, and when Yuichi pointed his cell-phone camera at Yoshino, she quickly reached for her white shirt and hid her chest. She was just about to put the shirt on; grabbing it so abruptly got it all wrinkled. “Now look what you’ve made me do,” she moaned.

Their room in the love hotel was a cheap, claustrophobic place that rented for ¥4,320 for three hours. Its concrete walls were wallpapered, the rug was shoddy, and although the pipe-frame bed did have a mattress cover, the quilt on top was, for some unknown reason, one size too small for the double bed. The window didn’t open. It overlooked a highway overpass, not the harbor.

“Come on, let me take your picture.”

Yuichi tried again, vaguely, to persuade her, but Yoshino just laughed at him. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. She seemed more concerned about the wrinkles on her shirt.

“Just one photo. I won’t take your face.”

Yuichi sat up formally on the bed and made his request. Yoshino glanced up at him for a second and said wearily, “How much are you willing to pay?”

Yuichi only had on underwear. His jeans lay discarded on the floor, the wallet in his back pocket bulging out.

When he didn’t reply Yoshino said, “I’ll do it for three thousand yen.” She no longer hid her chest with the shirt, and her shiny bra was visible, her breasts straining against the fabric.

Yuichi pushed the button with his thumb, the shutter snapped, and he was left with a photo of a half-naked Yoshino.

Yoshino leaped onto the bed and pestered him to show her the photo. After making sure her face wasn’t in it, she said, “I really have to get going. I have curfew.” She got up off the bed and buttoned up her shirt.

From the parking lot of the love hotel they could see Fukuoka Tower off in the distance. Yuichi was craning his neck for a better look, but Yoshino said, “I’m kind of in a hurry here,” urging him to get going.

“You ever been up to the observation platform on the tower?” Yuichi asked.

“When I was a kid, yeah,” Yoshino replied, as if she couldn’t be bothered. She motioned with her chin for him to get into the car. “It looks just like a lighthouse,” Yuichi was about to say, but Yoshino was already in the passenger seat.

“If Keigo and I do go to Universal Studios during New Year’s break, we probably should stay two days, don’t you think?” Yoshino said, picking up an already cold gyoza from the pan.

Her date with Yuichi was scheduled for ten p.m. and the clock on the wall showed it was already past that.

“You ever been to Osaka, Yoshino?” Mako asked, her face flushed from two draft beers.

“Nope, never have,” Yoshino replied.

“Me neither. But I have a cousin who lives there.”

Mako was usually the quiet one, but she became talkative when she was drunk. Generally she lisped a bit, but when drunk she talked in a syrupy sort of voice. At parties with guys, she was always kind of a pain.

“I’ve never been abroad, either…” Mako said, seated casually on her cushion, elbows splayed on the table.

“Me neither,” Yoshino said.

“Sari’s been to Hawaii,” Mako said, eyeing the cushion where Sari had been sitting before she got up to use the restroom. Mako didn’t seem particularly envious.

Yoshino sometimes found Mako’s indifferent attitude frustrating. Mako never said things overtly, but she always spoke about herself in a self-deprecating way.

Yoshino, Mako, and Sari were a tight threesome at the apartment building. Sometimes they’d gather for dinner at one of their rooms, or take over the arbor in the courtyard and sit there laughing until dark. Their poor sales records also bound them together. In the beginning Yoshino and Sari competed to see who could close more deals, but once they started turning to relatives to improve their sales figures, they quickly lost interest. Now, after attending the morning meeting at their head office, they more often than not joined Mako in skipping out on pointless cold calls and going to see a movie instead.

Mako, the easygoing one, was like a buffer between Yoshino and Sari.

“Hey, if Keigo and I do end up going to Universal Studios, you want to go with us?”

Sari hadn’t come back from the restroom yet.

“Me?” Mako was resting her head in her hands on the table, and raised her chin in surprise.

“I’ll get Keigo to invite one of his friends and the four of us can go together. At a place like that, the more the merrier, don’t you think?”

Keigo of course hadn’t promised he’d take Yoshino to Universal Studios at this point, but including others in her fantasy plans made the whole picture seem more real and gave her a small thrill. Even if she was deceiving Mako, when the actual time came to go, she could always claim that something came up and Keigo couldn’t make it, and then she and Mako could use the tickets instead of letting them go to waste. Going with Keigo, just the two of them, would be amazing, but if it didn’t work out and she had to settle for Mako, Yoshino still wanted to go over New Year’s.

“But shouldn’t you invite Sari, too?” Mako looked forlornly into Yoshino’s eyes.

“The thing is, Keigo doesn’t get along with her,” Yoshino said, deliberately keeping her voice down.

“You’re kidding. But they seemed to get along so well at the bar.”

“Don’t tell Sari, okay? It’d hurt her feelings.”

Mako nodded solemnly at Yoshino’s mock-serious warning.

Of course it was an outright lie that Keigo disliked Sari. Mako was so gullible that sometimes Yoshino liked making something up and seeing how she’d react.

Mako was from Hitoyoshi City in Kumamoto Prefecture. Her father owned a used-car lot, where her mother had worked part-time, and Mako was their only daughter. As might be expected of a daughter from a good family where the parents got along well, Mako Adachi saw work as a stopgap and wanted, soon after she graduated from junior college, to get married. She was generally pretty passive: since childhood, she had waited to be chosen by others rather than choosing her own friends. After she graduated from high school she decided to go to the junior college in Fukuoka affiliated with her high school, a move that eliminated any worries about entrance exams. She didn’t care if she knew anybody there or not, and as it turned out, she didn’t. After college she was hoping to return home to Hitoyoshi, but couldn’t find a job there. So with no other alternative, she took the job at Heisei Insurance, moved into the company apartment building, and eventually made two friends, Yoshino and Sari. They were flashier than her friends in high school, but she was relieved to have someone to keep her company until she found a man to marry.

“You know, the other day Suzuka Nakamachi called out to me in the courtyard,” Mako said, as if suddenly remembering it. With her chopsticks she skillfully peeled a slice of cucumber stuck in the potato salad from the side of the bowl.

“When was this?” Yoshino made a face, remembering how Suzuka liked to hang out in the arbor in the courtyard, letting everyone hear her Tokyo accent.

“Like-three days ago? She goes, ‘So I hear from Sari that Yoshino and Keigo are going out. Is that true?’ You remember how one of her friends goes to the same college as Keigo?” Mako didn’t seem all that interested in the topic as she chewed the crunchy slice of cucumber.

“So what did you say to her?” Yoshino asked, pretending to be calm.

“I told her I thought so.”

Startled perhaps by Yoshino’s severe tone, Mako stopped chewing for a moment. Just then Sari came back from the downstairs restroom.

“So, what’re you talking about?” Sari said, taking off her boots. Restaurants like this with tatami rooms provided clogs and slippers for customers to use when they went to the restroom, but Sari, a stickler for cleanliness, claimed she felt uncomfortable using communal slippers and always wore her own shoes. Yoshino had her doubts about this explanation.

Yoshino watched Mako reach into the potato salad again with her chopsticks. “I think Suzuka likes Keigo,” she said. “So she sees me as a rival.”

This was another lie, something that just popped into her head, but it might help keep a lid on things. If indeed Suzuka found out more from her friend who went to the same college, Yoshino’s lie could turn anything Suzuka said into a simple case of jealousy.

“No kidding?” Sari said, leaping at this bit of gossip as she stepped up into the tatami room. Yoshino again thought about Sari and her boots and couldn’t believe that fastidiousness had anything to do with her wearing them to the restroom. Yoshino recalled a time when she was eating bread in her apartment; Sari had said, “Give me some,” and then grabbed a bite. She used the same handkerchief every day. Sari also insisted that she had a serious boyfriend when she was in high school, but Yoshino had once told Mako that she thought this was a lie, and that Sari was still a virgin.

And in fact Sari, all of twenty-one, had yet to spend the night with a man. She’d made up a story about dating the same boy from the basketball team in high school for three years. But the truth was that it was another girl who’d gone out with the boy, not Sari, who spent those years pining away for him on her own. Nobody knew her in Fukuoka, so she used the opportunity to reinvent her past. She liked to show Yoshino and Mako a photo of her with the boy taken at Sports Day in high school.

“Wow, he’s really cute,” Mako said when she saw the photo, and this was all it took for Sari to blur the boundary between fact and fiction.

Every time Mako exclaimed over how cute the boy was, how tall he was, how he had such nice eyes and white teeth, Sari was under the illusion that she was the one being praised. It was exactly these qualities that she herself had liked, and she had started to convince herself that she and the boy really had been a couple. In Fukuoka Sari had discovered the joy of inventing an ideal self.

Naïve Mako might be fooled by this, but Sari had to consider Yoshino, too, as she sat there looking suspicious. When Sari had first showed them the Sports Day photo, Mako had been blithely ecstatic about it, but Yoshino had asked, “Hey, why don’t you call him now?”

Sari of course demurred. “But I’m sure he still likes you, right?” Yoshino badgered her. “He must have cried his eyes out when you moved to Fukuoka. Don’t you think he’d be happy to hear from you?” Seeing how flustered this made Sari, Yoshino gloated to herself.

For Sari, then, being alone with Yoshino felt claustrophobic. When she was just with Mako, she could be the center of attention, but Yoshino made her feel guilty, as though she were wearing a cheap knockoff brand. Still, if she was with shy Mako in town and some guys tried to pick them up, it was never any fun; but with Yoshino guys would treat them to dinner or to sing karaoke. She’d enjoy it and then feel bold enough to use curfew as an excuse to say a quick goodbye.

The last single order of gyoza came and the three of them made short work of it. They’d already had four orders, which meant they’d gobbled down some thirteen gyoza each.

Yoshino, stretching her legs out under the low table, rubbed her stomach exaggeratedly and said, “I shouldn’t have eaten so much. And after I’d just lost a couple of pounds.” Sari and Mako, their legs also splayed out, both sighed deeply, completely stuffed.

As Yoshino looked at the bill and calculated her third of it, Mako said, “You sure you’re okay? It’s already ten-thirty.”

For a second Yoshino didn’t know what she was getting at. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“You know… with Keigo and all…” Mako said, inclining her head.

Yoshino had momentarily forgotten she’d told her friends that she had a date with him.

“That’s right… I better get going,” Yoshino said, pretending to be flustered.

When it was ten p.m. Yoshino had actually considered e-mailing Yuichi that she’d be a little late, but then she’d gotten so involved in bad-mouthing Suzuka Nakamachi that she hadn’t sent a message.

Yuichi had been so insistent on meeting her that she’d reluctantly agreed. “I still have to pay you for the photo,” he said. If that was all it was, five minutes should be enough.

Yoshino divided the bill into thirds. The gyoza cost ¥470 per order, the potato salad ¥520, and adding on the chicken wings, sardines stuffed with snap eggs, and draft beers, the total came to ¥2,366 each. Sari and Mako took the money from their purses and laid out the exact amount they owed on the table. Meanwhile, Yoshino pulled out her cell phone and checked to see if she had any messages. She had a few, but nothing from Yuichi, let alone from Keigo.

At five after ten, Yuichi was wondering whether he should send Yoshino a message.

He was already in the parking lot in front of Higashi Park with his engine turned off, looking like all the other cars parked in the tree-lined two-hundred-yen-per-hour lot-as if he’d been here for days.

The JR Yoshizuka station was nearby, but at this time of night there weren’t many cars driving on the road along the park. Occasionally a taxi rounding the curve would light up the parked cars. None of the others had drivers in them. Only Yuichi, his face sunburned from construction work, was lit up by the headlights.

Yoshino had definitely said to meet her at the entrance to the park. She said she was having dinner with friends but would be able to make it.

Yuichi considered driving once around the park, but with the narrow paths, that would take at least three minutes. He worried that Yoshino might arrive from the station and figure that he hadn’t shown up.

Yuichi took his hand off the ignition key. He’d turned the engine off over five minutes ago, but the car was still warm from the drive. He could feel the road as he drove over the pass, lit up only by the pale light from his halogen headlights; he felt himself stepping on the gas as if to plunge into that light, the back end of his car sliding as he rounded the curves. No matter how much he pursued this ball of light ahead of him, he never could reach it.

Still, every time he drove over the pass, he had the fantasy that his car would be able to catch that ball of light. In this dream, a moment after his car caught up with it he’d pass through the light to the other side, to a world he’d never seen before. But Yuichi couldn’t imagine what he’d see there. He tried conjuring scenes from movies he’d seen-the green Mediterranean, the Milky Way-but nothing seemed right. Sometimes he tried to imagine his own scene, not one based on TV or movies, but when he did everything went blank before him and he knew he’d never find it.

Yuichi closed his eyes and pictured in his mind the mountain pass he’d just crossed, and the bright lights of Tenjin.

It was now fifteen minutes past the time they were supposed to meet. Even if Yoshino did show up, they wouldn’t have much time to talk; and try as he might, Yuichi couldn’t think of anything he wanted to talk to her about.

The footpath was deserted, just like the road along the park. If they had a half hour alone, he thought, maybe he could get Yoshino to suck him off. She’d resist at first, but if he grabbed her and kissed her, and stroked her breasts, then who knows what she might be willing to do.

After coming down off the pass he’d stopped at the first vending machine he spotted and bought a bottle of oolong tea, which he’d gulped down. Now he suddenly had to pee.

The roads were still deserted. The public restroom in the park was nearby, but once before when he’d parked there and used the restroom, a young man had appeared out of nowhere and stood behind him, unmoving, until he finished peeing, even though the urinal next to the man was unoccupied. Yuichi was afraid the guy would say something to him, so he hurriedly finished, zipped his pants, and leaped out of the restroom as if he were being chased. All the way back to his car he’d glanced around nervously, but there was no sign of the man. It felt creepy.

He flipped open his cell phone and saw that another five minutes had passed. He didn’t think Yoshino would stand him up, but he was getting worried, so he climbed out of his car.

Outside, he realized that the cold air from the pass had swept down to the city. He stretched and took a deep breath, and the chilled air caught in his throat. In the distance the sky over Tenjin was dyed purple. Suddenly the thought hit him that Yoshino was planning to spend the night with him. Since he came all the way from Nagasaki to see her, maybe she was going to go with him to that love hotel they went to before? If that was the case, he didn’t mind her being twenty minutes late. But he couldn’t stay at a love hotel in Hakata tonight. He had to be back at work at seven a.m.

He climbed over the fence, checked to see that no one was coming, and urinated on a hedge in the park. The foamy spray of his urine covered the hedge like a wet cloth and dribbled down at his feet.

“Hey, remember how some guys tried to pick us up at the Meeting Bridge? Yoshino, you remember?” Sari called out to her from behind, and Yoshino turned around.

“When was this?” Yoshino asked.

The three girls had left Tetsunabe, the gyoza restaurant, and were hurrying toward the subway, along the Naka River, its surface lit up by all the neon signs.

“Last summer,” Sari said. She was walking next to Yoshino and she glanced over at the bright surface of the Fukuhaka Meeting Bridge, a semi-covered footbridge.

“Really?” Yoshino asked.

“You remember-those two guys on a business trip from Osaka.”

Yoshino finally nodded. “Um,” she said. Last summer, one time after they’d eaten in Tenjin and were on their way home, two men had called out to them on the bridge, asking if they’d like to go sing karaoke. The men, slim in their suits, were nice looking enough, but Mako had had too much to drink, so the women turned them down.

“I got them to give me their business cards and I found the cards yesterday. They work for a TV station in Osaka.”

“Are you kidding me?” Yoshino replied, not showing much interest.

“I was thinking if I change jobs I’d like to go into mass media, so maybe I’ll get in touch with them.”

“With guys who tried to pick you up?” Yoshino chuckled. Considering the kind of junior college Sari had graduated from, no one in the media was going to hire her, particularly a TV station.

“Hey,” Sari said, changing the subject, “whatever happened to that guy who tried to pick you up in the park next to Solaria?”

“Solaria?”

“You know, the guy who came from Nagasaki, driving some kind of cool-looking car?”

This was the man Yoshino was on the way to see now. “Hmm,” Yoshino said, trying to cut off the topic. She glanced at Mako.

Yoshino had told her friends he’d tried to pick her up at the park in Tenjin. But they had indeed met for the first time in person in front of Solaria. Since he was from Nagasaki, Yuichi didn’t know Solaria, a popular Hakata fashion mall.

“You’ve never been to Tenjin?” Yoshino had asked him, and he said, “I’ve driven here a few times but never walked around.” Yoshino had been hesitant about meeting him, but when he sent her his photo the day before, and she saw how good-looking he was, she e-mailed him, agreeing to meet.

On the day of their date, she arrived at Solaria and saw a tall man who looked like he must be Yuichi, leaning against a show window at the entrance. He was even more handsome than his photo. Yoshino suddenly regretted not having been more honest with him in their phone conversations and messages.

She hesitantly approached him and when he saw her approaching, he got flustered and mumbled something she couldn’t catch.

“Excuse me?” Yoshino asked and he mumbled again.

He must be nervous, Yoshino figured. She deliberately brushed his arm, repeated herself, and looked up at him.

“I-I don’t know any restaurants around here,” he said in a small voice.

“That doesn’t matter. Anywhere’s fine.”

When he saw Yoshino’s smile, the man’s face relaxed.

Yoshino figured his mumbling was just first-date nerves, but as time passed he kept it up. She couldn’t understand a thing he said. It wasn’t nervousness that made him mumble, she realized, it was just the way he normally talked.

“It kind of irritates me being with him,” Yoshino said curtly. She was walking between Sari and Mako, down the stairs to the subway.

“But isn’t he really handsome?” Mako said enviously.

“Yeah, he’s good-looking, all right,” Yoshino replied. “But he’s boring. And besides, I have Keigo.”

“That’s right… But how come you’re the one that always gets to meet guys like that?” Mako asked.

After a pause, Sari said, snidely, “She’s only been going out with Keigo for a short time, so of course she wants to see other guys.”

As she held on tightly to the strap in the crowded subway car, Yoshino looked at the reflection of her two friends in the window. “His car is a tricked-out Skyline GT-R, plus he’s taller than Keigo, I think. The problem is, he’s a total bore. I think he might be slightly retarded.”

“How many times have you guys dated?”

“Two or three times, I guess,” Yoshino said, her eyes on the window.

“But the guy comes all the way from Nagasaki to see you.”

“It only takes an hour and a half.”

“He can get here that fast?”

“He drives crazy fast.”

“You’ve gone driving with him?”

“Just as far as Momochi.”

Sari, who’d been listening to their conversation as both of them stared straight ahead at the window, lowered her voice and poked Yoshino playfully in the side. “If you went to Momochi you must have stayed over, like at the Hyatt?”

“The Hyatt? No way.” Yoshino deliberately left her reply open to interpretation.

That first day when she met Yuichi at Solaria, they went to eat at a nearby pizza restaurant. Yuichi seemed totally unsure of himself. He couldn’t get the busy waitress’s attention, and when she brought the wrong order to them, he didn’t know what to do, and didn’t complain. Mentally, Yoshino was already comparing him to Keigo, when they’d played darts at the bar in Tenjin.

When Yoshino first moved into the Fairyland Hakata apartments, there was a time when she was totally wrapped up in online dating sites. This was before she became friends with Sari and Mako, and she’d spend every night, bored, alone in her room punching out replies to ten or more so-called online friends. All of them wanted to meet her. At night, typing out replies to turn them down, she felt like a girl with a busy, full social schedule, when in fact, not yet used to Hakata, all she was doing was sitting alone in a corner of her little apartment, busily moving her thumbs along a keypad.

After she and Sari and Mako became friends, she didn’t have the time to deal with her online friends. Then she’d met Keigo in October, and given him her e-mail address; but when she became irritated that he hadn’t contacted her much, she registered again with the same online dating site. In three days she got over a hundred e-mails, some of them from older men looking to have a relationship. She separated the replies by age. Next she decided, based on their language, which ones were lying about their age, and replied just to the handful who seemed like real possibilities.

Yuichi was one of these. In his first reply he said he was into cars. When Yoshino read this, she had a mental image of herself sitting next to Keigo in his Audi. He hadn’t invited her for a drive, of course, but she daydreamed about his car: where they would go and what CDs they’d play. Out of the hundred or so replies she received, Yuichi’s e-mail probably stuck with her for this reason.

The moment she first saw Yuichi she regretted having told him, via phone and e-mail, that she had a boyfriend but that they weren’t getting along well, and that she didn’t feel like going out with anyone right now. Yuichi’s skittishness became more pronounced over time. Once he did start to talk, he told long, pointless stories about his car. Yoshino mentally classified him as a Loser. Unlike Yuichi, she didn’t just want to go for a drive. She wanted to look cool whizzing down the streets of Hakata as she rode with a man everyone would envy. The rough hands of this construction worker from Nagasaki should have been sexy to her, but instead they struck her as just those of an overworked manual laborer.

Yoshino and the other girls got off the subway at the Chiyo prefectural office stop, two stops away from Nakasu-Kawabata station, and climbed the cramped stairs, emerging behind the City Sports Center. During the day this part of town was usually lively, but at night and on weekends it was so quiet it felt like stepping into a dream.

“Where are you meeting him?” Mako asked, from a few steps ahead of Yoshino.

“Um… In front of Yoshizuka station,” she lied. She couldn’t believe the two of them planned to follow her and check things out, but since she’d already lied about meeting Keigo, she had to be cautious.

“You okay getting to the station by yourself?” Mako was worried that Yoshino would have to walk alone past the dark park.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Yoshino said. She nodded with a smile.

“Well, then we’ll see you,” Sari said, and she quickly turned the corner.

Yoshino would have to walk down this gloomy path until she reached the entrance of the park.

After saying goodbye at the corner, Yoshino sped up. She could hear her friends’ footsteps gradually fade into the distance. Finally she was left with just the sound of her own footsteps echoing on the narrow path.

It was already ten-forty. Yoshino was sure the whole business would take at most three minutes. She felt bad that he’d come all the way from Nagasaki, but he’d insisted on meeting her tonight to pay her the ¥18,000 he’d promised for an evening with her. Even after she’d told him she was busy and that he could just transfer it to her account.

Sari and Mako both listened to the sound of Yoshino’s footsteps disappearing. At the end of the road they could see the brightly lit entrance to their apartment building.

“I wonder if Yoshino’s really gonna come back soon,” Mako said, glancing behind her. Sari looked back, too. The only color on the monochrome street was a solitary red mailbox at the corner where they’d said goodbye.

“Do you really think Yoshino’s going to see Keigo?” The words suddenly spilled out of Sari.

“What do you mean? If she isn’t, then where’d she go?”

“Somehow I just can’t believe that Yoshino and Keigo are going out.”

“But Yoshino’s always going out on dates with him these days, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, but think about it-have we ever seen them together? Like right now, maybe she’s just going to hang out at a convenience store or something.”

Mako laughed it off. “No way,” she said.

Yuichi turned on the overhead light in his car and angled the rearview mirror toward him. In the darkness the reflection of his face was indistinct. He moved his head from side to side, combing his fingers through his hair. His hair was soft and feline; the fine strands flowed through his rough fingers.

In the spring of last year, Yuichi had dyed his hair for the first time in his life. He dyed it a brown that almost appeared black, and when none of the guys on his construction site noticed, he dyed it a lighter brown, then even lighter the next time, until finally now, a year and a half later, his hair was nearly blond.

Since the change in hair color was so gradual, no one kidded him about it. Only once did another worker, Nosaka, laugh and say, “Hey, since when are you a blond?” His blond hair went well with his skin, tanned from outdoor work, so perhaps that explained the lack of teasing.

Yuichi was not a flashy guy, though when he went to Uniqlo and other inexpensive clothing stores to buy sweatshirts and sweatpants, he always wound up going for bright colors, reds and pinks. He would tell himself he’d get something subdued, black or beige, something that didn’t show dirt easily, but when he got to the store and stood in front of the racks of clothes, for some reason he’d reach for the brighter colors. It’s only going to get dirty anyway, he told himself.

His old chest of drawers at home was stuffed full of similar sweatshirts and T-shirts, all of them with threadbare collars, frayed sleeves, the cloth all worn out. All of this made the colors stand out even more, like colors in a deserted theme park. He liked these old sweatshirts and T-shirts, though, because they absorbed the sweat and grease well, and the more he wore them the more they felt like part of his skin, a feeling he found liberating.

Yuichi leaned forward and looked again in the rearview mirror. His hair was in place. His eyes were slightly bloodshot, but at least the pimple between his eyebrows was gone.

Until he graduated from high school, Yuichi was the type of boy who never combed his hair. He wasn’t on any sports team, but every couple of months he’d go to the neighborhood barbershop and get a buzz cut.

Around the time he started attending an industrial high school, the barber had sighed and said, “Yuichi, pretty soon I bet you’re going to get all particular about your hair, telling me how to cut it.” The huge mirror in the barbershop reflected a young boy, tall and skinny, who was far from being very masculine.

“If you have anything special you want me to do, let me know, okay?” said the barber. The barber liked to sing enka, and he made his own recordings, posters for which were plastered on the wall.

But Yuichi had no idea what anything special meant when it came to hair. He had no idea where to begin. Until he graduated from high school, Yuichi always got his hair cut at this shop. Afterward, he worked for a short time at a small health food store, and then, after he quit, just hung out at home. A former classmate invited him to work at a karaoke box place, but within half a year the place closed down and he took a series of short-term jobs, at a gas station for a few months, then at a convenience store. And before he knew it he was twenty-three.

It was around that time that he started working in construction. He was considered more of a day laborer than a regular employee, but since the owner of the company was a relative, he earned more than he would have otherwise. He’d been working with this company now for four years. Yuichi liked the irregularity of the work, how they worked in good weather and didn’t when it rained.

Fewer and fewer cars passed in front of the park. It had become so quiet that the presence of the young couple two cars ahead of him, who had driven away quite some time ago, still lingered.

And right then he spotted Yoshino walking, not so quickly, down the path that ran parallel to the park. Yuichi had been cleaning his nails under the interior light in his car.

He gave his horn a light tap. Surprised by the sound, Yoshino stopped for a moment.

On Monday morning, December 10, 2001, Sari woke up five minutes ahead of her alarm, a rare occurrence. Sari was not a morning person, and when she was living with her parents in Kagoshima City, almost every morning her mother got upset when she wouldn’t get up on time. Even after Sari moved out and started living in Fukuoka, her mother would occasionally call her to remind her to get up.

Part of the reason she had trouble getting up was that she couldn’t fall asleep easily. Back when she was still in school she’d go to bed early, but as soon as she closed her eyes, her mind started replaying conversations she had had with her friends. If only I’d said this to her, she’d think. If only I’d come back to the classroom earlier. She couldn’t help worrying about all the little things that happened. A lot of people do this, of course, but in Sari’s case her regret over trivial events of the day would, before she realized it, balloon into the same imaginary scenario.

It was hard to explain what this scene was, exactly. She had just entered junior high and was in bed one night when it popped into her mind, and ever since, no matter how much she’d try not to think of it, it came to her as she struggled to sleep.

The time period wasn’t clear, perhaps the late 1920s or early ’30s. In this mental scene Sari was locked up in a cramped room, a photograph of an actress clutched in her hands. Sometimes in the photograph the actress wore Western clothes like a pinup film star; at other times it was a newspaper clipping, an ad for what appeared to be the actress’s new movie. Sari had no idea who the actress was, but she did know that in her fantasy she was ragingly, overwhelmingly jealous of this woman. Through the latticed window, she sometimes saw gallant young soldiers marching down a cherry-tree-lined street; sometimes she heard the shouts of children throwing snowballs at each other.

In this fantasy, Sari always felt irritated. If only I could get out of this room, she thought, then she would be able to take the actress’s place in the movie. Her fantasy had no plot, no other characters. Just this one protagonist, Sari’s alter ego, whose feelings became her own when Sari couldn’t sleep.

Just before her alarm buzzed, Sari reached out and turned it off. It hadn’t rung, but she felt as if she could hear it. She flipped open her cell phone to see if there were any messages from Yoshino, but there were none.

She got out of bed and opened the curtains. From her third-floor window she had a nice view of Higashi Park bathed in the early morning sunshine.

Last night, just before twelve, she’d phoned Yoshino, certain she’d be back by then, but there was no answer.

Yoshino’s phone had rung but eventually gone to voice mail, so Sari had hung up and gone out on the veranda to peer down at Yoshino’s apartment, which was directly beneath hers. The lights weren’t on. If she really had met up with Keigo and come home afterward, twelve was too early for her to have gone to sleep.

Flustered, Sari had then decided to phone Mako, who sounded as if she was brushing her teeth when she answered the phone.

“So Yoshino isn’t back yet?” Sari asked her.

“Huh?”

“Didn’t she say something about coming back right away? But I just called her cell and she didn’t pick up.”

“Maybe she’s taking a shower?”

“But her light’s off.”

“So maybe she’s still with Keigo.”

Mako sounded like she couldn’t be bothered, so Sari just let it be.

“She’ll be back soon. Did you want something?” Mako asked her.

“No, not really…” Sari replied and hung up.

No, she didn’t have anything else she wanted to ask Mako. Instead, the sound of Yoshino’s footsteps, fading as she walked toward the darkened park, came back to her.

Normally Sari wouldn’t have given it another thought, but after she took a shower and went back to bed, she was still concerned. She knew she was being a pest, but she called Yoshino’s cell phone one more time. This time, though, the call went immediately to voice messaging, as if the phone had been turned off. Right as it did, Sari pictured Keigo’s condo in front of Hakata station. Feeling foolish, she tossed the cell phone aside.

That morning Sari arrived at her company’s Hakata branch, also in front of Hakata station, just in time for the eight-thirty morning meeting. Normally she rode her bicycle for the one-kilometer commute to the office, but today, just as she was straddling the bike, Mako-who usually commuted by subway to the company’s Seinan branch-called out to her. “I’ve got to stop by the Hakata office,” Mako told her, so Sari decided to take the subway, too.

As they were walking to the station Sari asked, “So, have you heard from Yoshino?”

“Yoshino? She hasn’t come back?” Mako asked, mellow as usual.

“She never answered her cell.”

“Then I suppose she must have stayed overnight at Keigo’s. She’ll go to work from there.”

Mako’s laid-back attitude convinced Sari that she must be right. They stopped discussing it and rushed into the subway.

When their morning meeting at work was over, the branch manager switched on the TV set on top of a shelf in the small reception area. He’d never turned it on before, so all the employees collectively turned toward the screen.

“Something has happened at Mitsuse Pass,” the branch manager said, turning toward the others. Several employees had already heard something and, from the corner of the room, they began to talk loudly. Several others moved closer to the TV.

The morning light shone through a large window, over which hung a decoration left over from the Tanabata midsummer festival. It was the only spot in the office where the summer heat still seemed to linger.

Sari turned to Mako, who was busy counting promotional gifts packed into a cardboard box. “Mako,” she asked, “don’t tell me you’re planning to buy those? Aren’t they kind of expensive?”

“New ones are coming out, they said. Plus we can buy these at seventy percent off.”

The box was crammed with not very appealing stuffed bunnies.

“Who’s going to sign a contract with us just because we hand out this kind of junk?” Sari asked.

“Yeah, but there are some people who ask specifically for the stuffed toy animals,” Mako said seriously.

Then several staff members in front of the TV exclaimed loudly: “No way.” “How awful.” Their voices weren’t so much tense as indifferent, so Sari merely glanced around at the TV.

Normally this local morning show reported on bargain sales in town, but today on the TV a young reporter, frowning very seriously, was standing in front of the road that ran through the mountains.

“They found a dead body up at Mitsuse Pass,” one of the staff members said, turning around.

Everyone began to move toward the TV.

“The young woman’s body was discovered this morning at the base of the cliff that’s visible over there. The police have roped off the area, but even from here it’s clear that the cliff is quite steep.”

The reporter, out of breath, was almost shouting, as if he’d just arrived at the site.

Sari was struck by an awful premonition and glanced over at Mako, who was obliviously pawing through the stuffed animals.

“Mako,” Sari said, and Mako-thinking Sari wanted some of the stuffed animals-held out the one in her hand, the smallest of the bunnies in the box.

“Not that. Look,” Sari said, irritated, motioning with her chin. Mako slowly turned to the screen.

“… The victim has not yet been indentified. According to authorities the body was abandoned there today, before dawn. Most likely the victim has been dead for eight to ten hours…”

Mako returned to her box. Sari, half afraid, waited for what Mako might say. Mako’s face stiffened and she said, “ Mitsuse Pass is where there’re all those ghosts, right?”

“That’s not the point!” Sari shouted. If she explained it, she was sure Mako could catch her drift, but she was reluctant to put her thoughts into words.

“What?” Mako said, reaching again for the box.

“Yoshino did go to work today, didn’t she?”

Sari finally got this much out, but Mako still didn’t follow. “Yeah, I guess so,” she said.

“Should we call her?”

Sari looked helplessly at the TV again and Mako finally got it. “No way!” she said in disbelief. “I’m sure she went to work from Keigo’s place.

“If you’re so worried, why don’t you call her?” she added.

“I don’t know…”

“Want me to call her?” Mako wearily pulled her cell phone out of her bag. “I’m only getting voice mail,” she said. “Hi, Yoshino? When you get this give me a call.”

“Why don’t you call the other branch directly?” Sari suggested.

“She’s gotta be there,” Mako said, but at Sari’s urging she dialed the number in Tenjin.

“Hello? This is Miss Adachi from the Seinan branch. I was wondering if Yoshino Ishibashi is there?”

Cell phone pressed against her ear, Mako knelt down and stuck her hand among the plush toy animals.

After a moment she stood up. “Yes? Is that right?” she said. “I see. Yes, I understand.” Her voice was cheery enough, but after she hung up she turned to Sari with a dazed look.

“She didn’t come to work?” Sari asked.

“On the schedule board it said she was going directly to meet a client. It’s probably the owner of that coffee shop. You know, the guy Yoshino did a cold call to the other day.”

People were starting to drift back to work, but Sari wasn’t finished.

“ Mitsuse Pass is a creepy place. I drove through there once,” Suzuka Nakamachi said, her eyes still glued to the TV. She shuddered dramatically.

Later Sari realized that if Suzuka hadn’t spoken to her right then, it might have been the end of it. They worked in the same sales district but weren’t close. Still, Suzuka always spoke to Sari in an overly familiar way. Mako didn’t mind her, but Yoshino disliked Suzuka intensely. Once she’d said, trembling with emotion, “I hate the way she acts.”

“Suzuka,” Sari said, shooting a quick glance at the TV. “You know Keigo Masuo, right, who goes to Seinan University? Do you know how to get in touch with him?”

“Keigo?” Suzuka said, guardedly. “Why do you ask?”

“Yoshino went to stay over at his place, but isn’t answering her cell. Do you know his number?”

Suzuka listened, expressionless. “I don’t really know him, but my friend sort of does.”

“Would he know how to get in touch with Keigo?”

“Gee, I don’t know…”

Sari was pretty sure she wasn’t going to get any help from her.

Mako was listening to their conversation. “Well, it’s time for me to get going,” she said and closed the lid of the cardboard box. Just then the TV showed an interview with the old man who had first discovered the body. Several people in the office were watching and burst out laughing. The old man had exceedingly long nose hairs. The laughter broke the tension in the room and the office’s normal, peaceful atmosphere returned.

“I noticed that the rope tying down the load on the back of my truck had broken,” the old man was explaining, “so I stopped right at that curve over there. I got out and happened to glance over the edge of the cliff and saw something stuck in a tree. When I looked more closely… I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

That same morning, Suzuka Nakamachi arrived at the coffee shop in the Mitsukoshi department store just after ten a.m. She had an appointment with a client, the first contract she’d managed to land in some time. Though the premiums for the new account were neglible, the client had promised he’d introduce her to his cousin and his wife, which could mean more business for her.

They were scheduled to meet at ten-thirty, so she had a little time. Suzuka decided to phone a friend, a guy named Yosuke Tsuchiura, who attended Seinan Gakuin University. She was hoping to use this opportunity to get closer to Keigo. She’d liked him for some time.

Yosuke and Suzuka were both from Saitama Prefecture and had been classmates in high school. After Yosuke graduated he decided to attend a private university in Fukuoka, where he had no relatives or any connections, and his friends were surprised. Why Fukuoka of all places? they asked him. “If I’m going to go to college,” Yosuke explained, “I’d like to go someplace where I don’t know anybody.” Suzuka alone found the idea appealing.

After she graduated from a junior college outside Tokyo, she felt exhausted trying to find a job there and she suddenly recalled his words. She wasn’t chasing after him, but two years after Yosuke moved to Fukuoka, so did she. They saw each other fairly often, and though their relationship wasn’t totally platonic, they didn’t consider themselves a couple.

Yosuke must have still been asleep when she called. “Ah-hello?” he answered sleepily, a bit annoyed.

“You’re still sleeping?”

“Suzuka? What time is it?”

“It’s after ten. Don’t you have classes today?”

Yosuke gradually woke up. She quickly apologized for waking him, and turned to the real reason for her call. “There’s a guy named Keigo Masuo a year ahead of you in school, right?”

“Keigo?”

“You know-when we were drinking in that bar in Tenjin, you pointed him out.”

“Oh, Keigo. Right.”

“Do you know his phone number?”

“His phone number?”

Suzuka could detect a hint of jealousy, and it gave her a tiny thrill.

“One of my co-workers is supposedly going out with him, and she’s been out of touch since yesterday. So I was wondering if you could tell me how to contact him.” Suzuka tried to make it sound straightforward.

“No, I don’t know his number. He’s a year above me and he’s not really the kind of guy who hangs out with someone like me,” Yosuke said, self-deprecatingly.

“So you don’t know his number?’

“No, I don’t… Oh-wait a sec. You know, I think I heard some rumor about him a couple of days ago. They said he’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Yeah. The word’s going around that he hasn’t been in his apartment the last few days, and apparently didn’t go back home to see his parents, either.”

“So what happened? He just vanished?”

“I think he’s off on a trip by himself. His folks run an inn in Yufuin so he’s got to be loaded, right?”

Yosuke was so casual about it that Suzuka started to find his explanation plausible. Keigo had gone off on a trip.

“The thing is, though, one of the girls at work was supposed to meet him yesterday in our neighborhood.”

“Yesterday? Then maybe it’s just a rumor after all, about him disappearing,” Yosuke said. “He must still be there, at his place.”

Suzuka could picture them-Yoshino and Keigo-making out on his bed.

The truth was, Suzuka had fallen in love with Keigo the moment she first saw him in the bar in Tenjin, but the more she’d heard about him from Yosuke and his friends, the more she felt he was out of her league. When Suzuka had heard Sari and Mako, in the courtyard at their apartment building, talking about how Yoshino and Keigo were going out, she frankly didn’t buy it. Everything she’d heard about Keigo indicated that he led a flamboyant life-he was the best-known guy in his college and he was dating a local newscaster. Could a man like this really be going out with someone like Yoshino who was-among the girls at their building-at best only slightly above average?

After finishing her morning rounds collecting premiums from her main clients, Sari anxiously hurried back to the Hakata branch office. She’d e-mailed Yoshino several times while making her rounds, with no response, and on her breaks she’d called Yoshino’s cell, which immediately went to voice mail. She knew this could mean anything but still, ever since Sari had seen the morning TV report on the murder at Mitsuse Pass, she’d felt uneasy.

As soon as she got back to the Hakata branch, she phoned Yoshino’s office. Please, let her be there, she prayed, at the same time feeling she wouldn’t be. Her finger shook as she dialed.

The middle-aged woman who answered the phone gave her the same message as in the morning: Yoshino wasn’t at work.

“She was going to go directly to see clients this morning and be here by eleven. It, uh, doesn’t look like she’s back yet, though.”

Sari hung up and glanced around the office, empty during lunch hour. The section chief was gone, the tag on his desk turned over to indicate that he was out. The instant Sari saw this she thought, That’s it. I’ll call the Tenjin branch one more time and get Yoshino’s parents’ phone number.

Just then, from the TV in the next room, she heard the beginning of another report on the discovery at Mitsuse Pass. Drawn by the sound, Sari drifted into the reception area. No one else was there to turn around at the click of her high heels on the floor.

The reporter, a helicopter above him droning over the valley where the body had been discovered, was listing the characteristics of the dead woman.

“Sari…”

Sari turned. She’d been so engrossed in the scene on TV she hadn’t noticed Mako.

“Have you heard from Yoshino?” Mako asked. She looked more plaintive than worried.

Sari shook her head. “Take a look,” she said, and pointed to the screen.

The scene changed from the deep valley to an illustration of the characteristics of the dead woman. The physical description matched Yoshino, as did the hairstyle and clothes she’d been wearing when they’d said goodbye to her last night.

Sari took Mako’s hand and tugged her away from the TV. Mako had been too scared to watch the TV at her own office after the morning meeting, and before she knew it, she’d come over to Sari’s branch.

“Shouldn’t we let somebody know?” Sari said.

“But who would we tell?” Mako asked forlornly.

“How about the section chief? Oh, Mako, d’you know Yoshino’s parents’ phone number?”

“That’s right! Maybe she went back home.” Mako nodded, relieved, and pulled her cell phone out of her bag.

As Mako made the call, Sari looked back and forth between her and the broadcast from Mitsuse Pass.

“Hello, my name is Mako Adachi. I was wondering if Yoshino is there?” The phone had apparently rung for some time before anyone answered. Mako spoke hurriedly, glancing in Sari’s direction.

“Ah, no-thank you. It’s so nice to talk with you… Uh, no… No… I see… No…”

Mako held the phone away from her, cupped her hand over it, and said to Sari, “What do you think? Is it okay to tell them that Yoshino didn’t come back last night?”

“Tell them we’re calling ’cause Yoshino said something about going back to her parents’ home this afternoon. Tell them she may very well be coming back here soon.”

Sari listened as Mako repeated her lie. Sari began to feel that all their fears were groundless.

Mako hung up and said, quite casually, “They just said to tell her to call them when she gets back.”

Sari and Mako sat for a while, watching the continuing TV coverage, going round and round about whether they should tell their general manager or even the police, or just wait a while longer to see if Yoshino came back.

Then Suzuka returned to the office.

“Any luck getting Keigo’s phone number?” Sari called out to her.

With one eye on the TV, Suzuka ran over.

“He seems to have disappeared.”

Sari and Mako exchanged a look. “Disappeared?” they chorused.

“Yeah. I didn’t hear this from him directly, naturally, but from a friend of his friend. The last couple of days nobody can get in touch with him. Maybe disappeared isn’t the right word. Seems like he might have just gone on a trip by himself somewhere.”

“Wait a sec!” Mako said loudly.

“He was supposed to meet up with Yoshino at the park last night!” Sari continued.

“You still haven’t got in touch with her?” Suzuka said, turning to the TV.

“No, not yet,” Sari and Mako said, both shaking their heads.

“Don’t you think you should tell somebody? The whole thing about Keigo disappearing might just be a rumor, and maybe he actually did hook up with Yoshino.”

Suzuka was suddenly acting very friendly, and Sari felt that she was being forced into doing something she’d rather not.

“The police?” Sari said, tilting her head.

Suzuka replied, “Telling her general manager’s enough right now, don’t you think? Not by phone, but just go there and tell him directly. I’ll go with you.”

Sari and Mako felt as if Suzuka was leading them by the hand as, together, they exited the building.

It was only a few minutes by taxi to the Tenjin branch where Yoshino worked. The TV was on there, too, and several staff members were watching events unfold as they ate their lunches.

Nervously, all three of them made their way to see Goro Terauchi, the general manager of the Tenjin branch.

Mr. Terauchi had been napping at his desk. Sari briefly explained their concerns. She emphasized that it might all prove groundless. But when she mentioned how much the police sketch of the victim resembled Yoshino, Terauchi turned pale.

Terauchi was finishing his fourth year as general manager. He’d been hired by the company twenty years ago, and finally, after working furiously for years, had achieved his present position, supervising a fifty-six-person branch, the second largest in Fukuoka.

He had a bad leg, which he dragged a little, but it didn’t interfere with his ability to do his job. His pace when he walked around the office was slow, but he was sharp at sniffing out potential new customers. In his younger days it was rumored that he flirted with older female employees near retirement, in order to get them to pass along their clients to him, which is what led to his eventually getting promoted.

After he was promoted to general manager, Terauchi decided to start fresh. He no longer had to struggle anymore, calculating how much commission he’d earn for each client. Instead, he decided he would be a good father figure to the young female employees who were working their hardest to earn money, women younger than his own daughter.

And in fact he always was willing to lend an ear to whatever the girls had to say. The more they talked with him, he thought, the stronger their bonds would be. He wanted to hear personal details but the girls didn’t usually seek advice about life and love. Instead they wanted to talk about the kind of professional topics he had, over the past twenty years, experienced and grown sick of: “One of the other girls is coming on to her clients,” one would say. “My relatives are starting to hate me for trying to sign them up,” another would complain.

Still, Terauchi was proud of the fact that in his years as head of the Tenjin branch their sales had grown dramatically. The previous manager had been somewhat hysterical and many new employees had quit in protest before they’d even finished their probationary period. In the world of insurance, where the best way to get new clients is to take good care of the employees, the job of the manager is less to soothe the clients than to keep up the morale of the sales force.

So when Sari and Mako told him they were worried about Yoshino, his first reaction was mild anger. He was worried that it might negatively affect the Tenjin branch’s reputation, that it would all lead to a fight over who would take over Yoshino’s clients. He thought Sari and the others lacked a sense of urgency over what could be something very serious.

First, Terauchi phoned the Heisei Insurance Fukuoka branch. The receptionist didn’t seem to grasp the situation and told him roughly that she’d transfer him to the chief of general affairs.

When the chief heard what Terauchi had to say, he replied timidly, “I… I think you’d… better call the police.” It was clear that he was hoping Terauchi would handle the whole thing.

As Terauchi hung up, he looked up at the three girls standing in front of him.

“I’m going to call the police now,” he said.

“Huh? Oh-I see,” they said, nodding.

“You said you haven’t been able to contact her since last night, correct? And the description of her clothes on TV matches?” Terauchi asked, his tone sharp. The three girls, huddled closer together, nodded fearfully.

Terauchi dialed 911. After speaking with several detectives, he called a taxi. Sari and the others wanted to come with him, but thinking there was an outside chance he might have to identify the body, Terauchi told them he’d go alone.

When he arrived at the precinct and identified himself at the front desk, he was immediately escorted to the fifth-floor investigation headquarters. The main detective he’d spoken to on the phone appeared, and Terauchi proffered his company ID and business card. He was immediately hustled down to the morgue. As they walked, the detective asked him details about the location of the Tenjin branch and the Fairyland Hakata apartment building.

The experience was just as he’d seen on TV and in the movies. Incense was burning in the room, and the detective ostentatiously drew back the thin green sheet covering the body.

There was no doubt about it. The body lying there was Yoshino Ishibashi.

“It’s definitely her,” Terauchi gulped. He was surprised at how naturally this line came out.

“She was strangled,” the detective said, and Terauchi’s gaze fell on Yoshino’s white neck. It was ringed with a purplish bruise.

Terauchi remembered how Yoshino looked when she smiled, how she used to rush into the office barely in time for the mandatory morning meeting. It surprised him that he could remember so clearly the face of one employee out of the fifty-odd people who worked for him.

As Terauchi was identifying the body, thirty kilometers away in Kurume, Yoshino’s father, Yoshio, was in his house after a late lunch, lying down, using his zabuton seat cushion as a pillow.

From where he lay he could see into the darkened barbershop, closed as always on Mondays. With the lights out inside, the sunlight shone through the window at the front of the shop, projecting the name Ishibashi Barbershop, painted in white on the window, as a shadow on the floor.

Yoshio had taken over the business from his father around the time that Yoshino was born. Up until then, he’d mainly hung out with his delinquent friends from the band, living off the money he’d pestered his parents to give him, but at his wife’s urging he started training at the barbershop. The year Yoshino started elementary school, his father died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His mother had passed away ten years before, so Yoshio, his wife, and their daughter moved from their apartment into the vacant family house. Yoshio sometimes wondered how his life would have worked out if Satoko hadn’t become pregnant so early, but it was just a random thought. He couldn’t picture any other life. But truthfully Yoshio had always hated his father’s profession. He’d taken over the family business reluctantly. It was a profession he took on for his daughter, but Yoshio had started to sense the instinctive dislike Yoshino had for her father’s work.

As Yoshio gazed vacantly around the dark shop, Satoko called out to him from the kitchen. “You think she’s coming back?” Apparently one of Yoshino’s colleagues had called in the afternoon saying she was.

“I bet she’ll ask us to introduce her to somebody she can sell insurance to…”

Yoshio had nothing else to do today, so he thought he’d ride his bike over to the station to meet her, though he knew she wouldn’t be happy about it.

Yoshio was half dozing when the call came from the police. As if in a dream he heard Satoko say, “Yes. Yes. That’s right. Yes, that’s correct.” She called out, “Honey!” and he snapped awake. Her voice sounded far away, but echoed nearby in the tiny house.

He rolled over and saw Satoko looming over him as if she were going to trample him, her hand cupped over the phone.

“Honey… I, I don’t know what it’s all about… It’s the police…”

Yoshio sat up. Satoko’s hand was shaking as she held the cordless phone.

“What do they want?” Yoshio asked, leaning away from the phone.

“You ask them… I don’t know what they’re talking about…”

Satoko’s eyes were out of focus, her face drained of blood.

Yoshio grabbed the phone from her and shouted an angry hello.

It was a woman’s voice on the phone-slightly unprofessional, small and hard to hear. The cordless phone was always full of static and Yoshio couldn’t get used to it. “That’s normal. It’s just the signal,” Yoshino had explained, and Yoshio had been putting up with it for nearly a year. Today the static was a loud buzzing in his ears.

Yoshino had been involved in an accident, the woman explained, so they would need to please come to the station as soon as possible for identification. “Eh? What’d you say?” Yoshio said, feeling as if he were talking more to the static than to a person.

When he hung up, Satoko was sitting beside him. She looked less astonished than resigned.

“Come on, let’s go!” Yoshio said, tugging at her hand. “No way a company director’s going to remember the face of every employee!”

Satoko seemed paralyzed and Yoshio yanked her to her feet. After she’d given birth to Yoshino, Satoko had put on weight, and her rear end slid heavily across the worn-out tatami.

“But Yoshino’s coming back today! She’s coming home!”

The call from Terauchi to the Tenjin branch came in after three p.m. Sari, Mako, and other employees were gathered around the TV in the reception area, quickly switching from one channel to the next to find coverage of the incident. Sari answered the phone.

Mako had a premonition: “It’s true. Yoshino’s been murdered…”

Sari was listening intently. Suddenly she screamed out, “What?” Several others turned to look at Mako.

“See? I knew it…” Mako said weakly.

As soon as Sari put down the phone, she began to talk as if she’d been jolted by electricity. There was too much she needed to say and the words tumbled out all at once.

“It was Yoshino, she was strangled, Mr. Terauchi wants us to wait here until he gets back.” Sari’s body began trembling uncontrollably.

“Are you okay?” someone next to Mako asked, holding her, but Mako couldn’t bring herself to look up to see who it was. The office, usually nearly empty at this time of day, seemed claustrophobic. She tried to breathe, but it seemed as if someone had sucked away all the air, and no matter how she tried to take in a breath, the air wouldn’t go inside. Sari was standing there, still blabbing away, but Mako couldn’t hear her. People’s mouths were moving but it was as if they were all drowning, their mouths just moving. Please, someone cry, she prayed. If somebody cried she knew she could, too. And then she could breathe again.

“Someone’s coming here from the police! They want to find out exactly when and where we left her last night!” Sari shouted.

Finally, Mako could react. She nodded, and stood up from her chair without really knowing what she was doing. Her body was still shaking and the floor looked miles away.

From the outset Mako had always sensed a rivalry between Yoshino and Sari. They’d never quarreled openly or anything, but they had used Mako as a sounding board to bad-mouth each other. Yoshino bragged to Mako about dating men she’d met at online dating sites, but always cautioned her to keep it a secret from Sari. Mako didn’t see why meeting guys and having dinner with them was something she had to hide, but Yoshino seemed to find it embarrassing as well as fun, and Mako didn’t want Sari to use this against Yoshino.

When she first moved into the Fairyland Hakata apartments, Sari had said to Yoshino, half joking, “You’re from Kurume, right? And your last name is Ishibashi? Hey, maybe you’re related to the president of Bridgestone?” By then Mako already knew that Yoshino’s family ran a barbershop, so she was sure Yoshino would deny this, but instead she nonchalantly replied, “Hm? Me? We’re sort of distant relatives.”

Sari of course nearly shrieked when she heard this. Surprised at her reaction, Yoshino hurriedly added, “But, we’re just… very, very distant relatives.”

When Sari had left, Yoshino told Mako, “Don’t tell anybody my family runs a barbershop.” Mako had been thinking of calling her on this lie, but Yoshino looked so fierce and Mako was afraid of losing a new friend, so she nodded weakly.

Mako couldn’t figure out why Yoshino would lie like that, especially when the three of them had just become friends.

Mako wasn’t sure of the exact number, but Yoshino always seemed to be corresponding with four or five guys she’d met online. Sometimes, when Sari wasn’t with them, she’d let Mako see the messages from the men.

“Isn’t this sick?” she’d say, showing Mako a message that said, Thanks for the photo! You’re so cute! I spent a whole hour just looking at your picture! Most of the messages were, indeed, fairly repulsive.

Of the men Yoshino met online she’d actually met three-no, four-of them.

Whenever Yoshino met one of these men, she always told Mako all about it. Not what they did for a living or what they looked like, but things like how one man took her to a famous teppanyaki place and bought her a fifteen-thousand-yen tenderloin steak. Or comments on the guy’s possessions, how one drove a BMW.

Mako listened without comment whenever Yoshino reported back on these dates. She never once felt envious. She knew that having dinner with a man she’d just met would make her too nervous, and she much preferred spending an evening alone in her room reading. But she never had a problem listening to Yoshino talk about her exploits. There was a vicarious pleasure in hearing about Yoshino and the kind of life Mako would never know.

“Sari said the person Yoshino went to see last night wasn’t Keigo Masuo, but I think it had to have been.” Mako was in the lobby of the Fairyland Hakata, answering questions from a police officer. “I heard from Suzuka Nakamachi that for the last couple of days no one knew where Keigo was. But if they wanted to get in touch with each other, they could have. So if she really wanted to see him last night they could have hooked up…”

Mako felt regretful. The young detective had urged her to tell him anything she might know about Yoshino, so she’d told him how Yoshino and Sari didn’t get along, and how Yoshino had met men online. Mako felt she’d given the detective a bad impression of Yoshino.

Mako and the young detective weren’t alone in the apartment-building lobby. Every so often a uniformed policeman would come over and report to the detective. Still, it was just the two of them facing each other across the lace-covered table, and talking with a police detective was, of course, a first for her. The young detective had a small scar from stitches next to his right eyebrow. His muscular upper arms strained the fabric of his suit.

“I’d like you to tell me more about these online friends of Ms. Ishibashi’s.”

At the beginning of last month, a Sunday, a cold rain had fallen since morning. It was just a light drizzle, but to Mako, looking out from the third-floor veranda of her apartment, it seemed as if the rain had erased all the sounds of the city.

Yoshino had stopped by to see her and stood looking out at the same scene. She turned to Mako and asked her to come with her to the convenience store. Whenever she did this, Mako always thought, The convenience store? Can’t you manage that on your own? But she never said anything, figuring it would cause a rift between them, and she never lied about having something else to do. After all, it wasn’t that big a deal.

They were walking, holding umbrellas, to the convenience store in front of Yoshizuka station, avoiding the rain puddles, when Yoshino said, “Take a look at this,” and held out her cell phone.

On the screen was a picture of a young man. “We started e-mailing each other recently,” Yoshino explained.

Mako looked at the phone, which had a few raindrops on the LCD. The photo wasn’t that good, but she could see the sort of rough look of the man, his dark skin, his nicely shaped nose, the lonely look in his eyes as he gazed at the camera. He was good-looking enough that she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

“So what d’you think?” Yoshino asked.

“He’s sexy,” Mako replied honestly. If this is the kind of guy Yoshino hooks up with, Mako thought, maybe online dating isn’t so bad after all.

Apparently satisfied, Yoshino said, “But I don’t feel like seeing him anymore. I mean, I’ve got Keigo now and everything.” She intentionally banged her cell phone shut.

“What do you mean you don’t feel like meeting him anymore?… You mean you’ve already met him?”

“Yeah, last Sunday.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Remember the guy I was talking about who tried to pick me up at the park in front of Solaria?”

“What?” Mako said loudly.

“Don’t tell Sari, okay? That wasn’t just some pickup. We had a date.”

“No way…”

If you’re so embarrassed about meeting guys online, thought Mako, then why don’t you quit? She couldn’t figure Yoshino out sometimes. She acted embarrassed about online dating, yet here she was showing off the photo of one of the guys she met.

“He’s good-looking, all right, but a complete bore. It’s no fun being with him. Plus he’s a construction worker, which doesn’t turn me on.”

Yoshino continued talking about the guy as she folded up her umbrella and went into the convenience store.

Mako hadn’t gone to the store thinking to buy anything, but as soon as she went in she found she wanted something sweet.

“The only thing is, he’s good in bed,” Yoshino suddenly whispered in Mako’s ear, just as she was reaching for a strawberry pudding cup.

“Huh?”

Mako reflexively glanced around them. Luckily there were no other customers by the dessert counter, and the two clerks were back at the register, helping a woman mail a package.

“The sex is great,” Yoshino whispered again, a knowing smile on her lips, and reached for an éclair.

“Are you telling me… you did it with him already? The first time you met him?” Mako asked, eyes wide.

Examining the éclairs one by one, Yoshino laughed strangely. “Well, isn’t that the whole point?

“He’s like, so good at it,” she went on. “It’s like I completely lose it, and can’t help screaming. The way he moves his fingers is so smooth. I was on my back, but before I knew what was going on I was on my stomach, and his fingers were all over my back and butt. It was like all the strength had left me. I tried to move, but all he has to do is touch my knees and I’m a complete wreck. Usually I’m too shy to make much noise, but when I’m with him, I don’t care anymore. I shout as loud as I can. And the more I cry out, the more I lose control, and it’s like I know we’re in a small hotel room but it feels like we’re in some vast open place. I’ve never sucked a guy’s fingers as crazily as I did with him.”

Yoshino didn’t mind talking about such shameless things even in public like this, but Mako did, and glanced around anxiously. A part of her rejected lewd talk like this, but as she listened she pictured herself on the white sheets with the man, writhing under his touch. She could see the man in the photo, his fingers moving over her body, his voice telling her to just let go.

Outside the rain was gloomy and heavy. Yoshino changed gears and began instead to recount how squeamish she felt when she recently watched the movie Battle Royale with all its cruel, violent scenes.

“So you’re not going to see that guy anymore?” Mako asked.

A mean look flashed across Yoshino’s eyes. “If I dump him, you want me to introduce you?”

Mako was flustered. “No, no way,” she demurred. It felt as if Yoshino had seen into her mind and all her silly fantasies.

Mako could sense how Yoshino looked down on her as a woman. Maybe that was inevitable, for Mako was twenty and had never gone out with a man, which, unlike Sari, she didn’t hide. And of the three of them, Yoshino was by far the most experienced.

Strangely enough, though, Mako never felt inferior to Yoshino, no matter how much she bragged about her sex life. All her stories about hooking up with men from dating sites, and Keigo Masuo, were like something far away, like a TV drama, and Mako never felt contempt for her, or envy. But this time was different. For the first time, one of Yoshino’s stories took hold of her. She knew she should just let it go, but her rainy-day convenience-store fantasies about the man and his caresses made her overwhelmed by a mixture of jealousy for Yoshino, who really had been touched by this man, and contempt for her for leaping into bed with a guy she’d just met online, despite already having a boyfriend, Keigo. The more contempt Mako felt, though, the more uneasy she became, concerned that deep down she wanted to be just as shameless as Yoshino.

Mako knew she wasn’t the type to try to date men she met online. But she also knew she wasn’t like Sari, who was distressed that she couldn’t act like Yoshino, secretly trashing her because Yoshino could. If possible, Mako wanted to marry someone also from Kumamoto, settle down there, and raise a happy family. That’s all she really wanted-but the instant she pictured herself in the arms of Yoshino’s man, her dream evaporated.

“Um…”

The detective with the scar beside his right eyebrow looked at Mako.

Bright sunshine lit up the apartment-building lobby. The automatic front door must have had a slight gap in it, for the wind was blowing in, making a strange whistling sound. In addition to Mako and the detective interviewing her, five or six other policemen had entered and were making their way between the lobby and Yoshino’s apartment, on the second floor.

Every time they brought down another box of Yoshino’s possessions, Mako thought, Ah, Yoshino really was murdered. Sari, who’d been questioned before her, had broken down, wailing loudly, but Mako couldn’t do that. Not that she wasn’t sad. But the tears just wouldn’t flow.

“So those were the only three men you heard about from Miss Ishibashi?”

Mako tried to focus. “Uh, yes, that’s-that’s right.” She nodded.

“Two last summer and then one more this autumn. The two men from last summer were both from Fukuoka? And they took her out to dinner, bought her clothes and so on, and though you don’t know their ages, they seemed much older?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And the man she met this autumn is a college student, and they went for drives together sometimes?”

“Yes, that’s what I heard.”

“There weren’t any others?”

“No, these are the only three I remember. She might have mentioned others… Of course there were a lot more she e-mailed with.” Mako got this out in a rush, telling herself that she was helping the investigation, not putting down her friend.

“Is there anybody else besides yourself that Miss Ishibashi might have told these things to?”

The young detective’s long fingers had very healthy-looking nails. Perhaps it was his bad habit, but the backs of his fingers were marked where he had pressed his nails into them.

“I think I’m the only one she told,” Mako replied.

“All right. Let’s go over it one more time. You believe that last night Miss Ishibashi went to meet Keigo Masuo, correct?” The detective sighed deeply.

“Sari has her doubts,” Mako replied, “but I think that’s what happened.”

“I see…”

“Maybe somebody took her away after that…”

“We’re checking into that possibility,” the detective said, cutting her off, and Mako looked down meekly, knowing she’d been too pushy.

The detective looked down at his notebook and his scrawled notes.

“I understand. I’m really sorry I had to ask you all these questions.”

Mako was taken aback. “You-you mean we’re finished?”

Brusquely, the detective yelled out to a policeman standing at the entrance.

“Excuse me…” Mako said.

“Yes?”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, we’re finished here. I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time. Especially now, with what happened to your friend.”

Mako went out in the hallway and saw Suzuka standing there, eyes puffy from crying. She was next to be questioned, it seemed. Mako silently slipped past her.

As soon as she was in the elevator, Mako wondered why she hadn’t told the detective one more thing. About one more man Yoshino met online. But she just couldn’t bring herself to tell the young detective about him. If she did, he’d think she was the same sort of girl as Yoshino, a girl who hunted for men online. She would hate for him to think that.

Mako didn’t realize it at the time, but this decision of hers threw off the subsequent investigation.