Journey Under the Midnight Sun

by Keigo Higashino

  Noriko took the bill and went over to the cash register.

  Outside, Akiyoshi hailed a cab. He gave a destination to the driver, but the names were all unfamiliar to Noriko. Still, it was fascinating to hear him talk in the Osaka dialect. Just being here made him revert to his native tongue. Noriko had never heard him speak like that.

  Akiyoshi barely said a word in the taxi. He just stared out of the window. Noriko worried that he might be regretting his choice.

  The taxi went into a narrow, dark street. Akiyoshi had begun giving the taxi driver turn-by-turn instructions. Finally the taxi stopped, right next to a park.

  They got out and Akiyoshi went into the park. Noriko followed. It was a big park, large enough to play baseball in, with swings, a jungle gym, and a sandbox.

  ‘We used to play a lot here as kids.’

  ‘Baseball?’

  ‘Some. Dodgeball, too. Even a little soccer.’

  ‘Do you have any pictures from then?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Oh. That’s too bad.’

  ‘There was no other wide-open space like this around here, so this park meant everything to us. This park, and that…’ Akiyoshi said, pointing to the other side of the park.

  Noriko turned around to look. An old building was standing right behind them.

  ‘That building?’

  ‘We used to play in there all the time.’

  ‘What kind of games did you play in a place like that?’

  ‘Time tunnel.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The building wasn’t finished when I was a kid. They’d built about half of it before abandoning the project. So only the rats and the neighbourhood kids ever went in.’

  ‘Wasn’t that dangerous?’

  ‘Why would we play there if it wasn’t?’ Akiyoshi said with a grin. But the humour quickly faded from his face. He gave a little sigh and looked up at the building. ‘One day a kid found a body in there. A man’s body. He’d been murdered.’

  Noriko felt a sharp pain in her chest. ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘A little,’ he said. ‘No one much liked him at all. I guess it comes with the territory when you run a pawnshop. Still, I didn’t like him either. I doubt anyone was much surprised when he got it. Just about everyone in town was a suspect.’ He pointed up at the side of the building. ‘Check out the artwork.’

  Noriko squinted in the dim light. It was hard to make out; the picture had mostly faded, but it was a man and a woman, naked, making love. It was a mural, though there was nothing particularly artistic about it.

  ‘After the murder, the building was entirely off-limits until someone came along and actually rented the place. They covered it in plastic sheets and went to work finishing it. Their little artistic embellishment was hidden until construction wrapped and the sheets came off.’

  Akiyoshi fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it with a match from the restaurant.

  ‘Pretty soon, shady-looking guys started to show up. They’d go in one at a time, looking around to make sure no one was watching. I had no idea what was going on in there at first. None of the other kids knew either, and none of the grown-ups would tell us. But finally, one of us got some information. It was a place where men could buy women, he said. Pay ten thousand yen and they could do whatever they wanted to them, even what was in the painting on the side of the building. I didn’t believe it at first. Ten thousand yen was a lot of money at the time, but even more than that, I couldn’t imagine a woman who would do that kind of work.’ Akiyoshi chuckled dryly, breathing out smoke. ‘I guess I was still pretty naive. I was in elementary school, after all.’

  ‘I think if I’d heard something like that in elementary school I would’ve been pretty shocked.’

  ‘I don’t think I was too shocked by it. But I did learn something. I learned what the most important thing in this world is.’ Akiyoshi took another puff of his cigarette and tossed it to the ground, even though it was only halfway gone. He put it out with his shoe. ‘Anyway, I doubt you care about any of that.’

  ‘Akiyoshi,’ Noriko said, ‘did they ever catch the one who did it?’

  ‘The one who did what?’

  ‘The murder in the old building.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Akiyoshi said, shaking his head. ‘I’ve got no idea.’ He started to walk. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘There’s a subway station down the street.’

  They walked down the narrow, darkly lit road, side by side. The houses were packed in tight along the sides of the street – old terraced houses with their doors opening right on to the road.

  After they had walked for a few minutes, Akiyoshi stopped. He was looking up at a house on the other side of the street. It was large for the area, a two-storey Japanese-style building. A metal shutter covering part of the front made it look as if they ran some kind of business there on the first floor.

  Noriko glanced up at the upper storey. There was an old sign on it: KIRIHARA PAWNSHOP.

  The letters were mostly faded.

  ‘You know this place?’

  ‘A little,’ he said. ‘Just a little.’

  They had only gone ten metres from the pawnshop when a stocky woman about fifty years old came out of one of the houses. There were a dozen or so potted plants in front of the house, about half of them actually sitting on the street. The woman was wearing a tattered T-shirt and carried a watering can in her hand.

  She looked up as the couple passed, curiosity in her eyes, and gave Noriko the once-over. Her eyes had the look of someone who didn’t care whether she was caught staring.

  Next her eyes slid over to Akiyoshi, but then she reacted in a very unusual way. She had just been stooping down to water one of her plants but now she stood straight up.

  ‘Ryo?’ she said, staring straight at Akiyoshi.

  He didn’t even look in her direction. It was as if he hadn’t even heard her speak. His pace didn’t quicken, he just kept going straight ahead, leaving Noriko no choice but to follow him. They passed in front of the woman, who was still staring at him.

  ‘Looks just like him,’ Noriko heard the woman mutter to herself as they passed. Akiyoshi didn’t seem to hear that, either.

  But the woman calling out that name, ‘Ryo’, stuck in Noriko’s head. As they walked, she could hear it echo back and forth, growing louder and louder.

  Noriko had to spend their second day in Osaka by herself. After breakfast, Akiyoshi left, saying he had some research to do and wouldn’t be back until that night.

  Not wanting to sit around the hotel all day, Noriko decided she would take a walk downtown, near the moat where they had gone for dinner. She passed an area with upscale boutiques, the kind that you might find in the Ginza in Tokyo, except in Osaka the fancy storefronts stood side by side with game arcades and pachinko parlours. They didn’t seem to put as much value on appearances here in Osaka and business was business.

  She did a little shopping, but was still left with plenty of time on her hands. She started feeling like she wanted to go back to the place where they had gone the night before – that park, and especially the pawnshop.

  She took the subway from the main station in town. She still remembered the names of all the stops and was pretty sure she could find her way back to the park from the station once she got there.

  After she had bought her ticket, a thought occurred to her and she stopped by a small station shop to buy a disposable camera.

  Reaching her destination, she walked down the street, retracing their steps from the night before in reverse. The town looked remarkably different in the daylight. Many of the shops were open and there were a lot of people on the street. There was a strength in the eyes of the people she saw working in the shops and the passers-by. Not a mercantile energy so much as an attitude. Everyone was looking for something – a weakness. No one let their guard down. It was just like he said.

  She walked slowly, taking pictures every
now and then. She wanted this record of Akiyoshi’s hometown for herself. She knew she could never tell him about it.

  She arrived at the pawnshop to find it closed. In fact, it might have been closed for some time. She hadn’t noticed at night, but seen in the daylight it had a distinctly abandoned feel to it.

  She took a picture.

  Then she came to the old building by the park. Some kids were playing soccer. She took more pictures, hearing their shouts as they played behind her. She even took a picture of the pornographic mural. Then she went around to the front of the building. It didn’t seem as if they were doing any business here at all now. It was just another abandoned building, like so many that had been abandoned after the economic bubble burst, just a lot older.

  Back on the main street, she grabbed a taxi back to the hotel.

  It was after eleven that night when Akiyoshi returned. He looked as if he was in a terrible mood and exhausted.

  ‘Did you finish your work?’ she asked, somewhat fearfully.

  He threw himself on the bed and took a big sigh. ‘It’s finished,’ he said. ‘Everything’s finished.’

  She almost said ‘good’, but something about the tone of his voice made it hard for her to speak. In the end, she said nothing and they went to sleep in silence.

  Kazunari rolled over in bed. It had been too hot to sleep comfortably the last few nights and now his conversation with Sasagaki was stuck on a loop in his head. The whole situation strained belief – and yet, when he let it in, the reality of it hit him like a ton of bricks.

  Though he might not have used the word ‘murder’, the old detective had all but said that Imaeda had been killed. At the time Kazunari had listened to everything Sasagaki told him as if it was a story about other people, not him – something he might have seen on television or read in a novel. Even though he knew, intellectually, that these events affected people directly around him, they lacked visceral impact when heard in the meeting room at Shinozuka Pharmaceuticals. Which was why he hadn’t really worried when Sasagaki told him that he should be careful, too.

  But once he was alone in his room with the light off, lying down in bed with his eyes closed, anxiety gripped him and he broke out in a cold sweat.

  He knew Yukiho was dangerous. He’d just never imagined he might be placing Imaeda in harm’s way by putting the private eye on her case. For the hundredth time he wondered just who Yukiho was.

  And that man, Ryo Kirihara.

  Sasagaki hadn’t been very forthcoming about him – except that he and Yukiho were a pair and the detective didn’t know where he was hiding, even after searching for nearly twenty years.

  Two decades. Kazunari couldn’t understand how something that had happened so long ago in Osaka could be having such an effect on his personal life in the here and now.

  He opened his eyes, staring out at the darkness, and grabbed the remote control for the air conditioning off his bedside table. He pressed the switch and sighed as cool air filled the room.

  Just then, the phone rang. Starting up, he turned on the lamp. His alarm clock showed that it was one a.m. For a moment he worried that something had happened to his parents – he had been living alone downtown since buying his apartment the year before.

  He coughed to clear his throat and picked up the phone.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Kazunari. Sorry to call so late.’

  Yasuharu. A feeling of dread came over him. The premonition quickly turned to certainty. ‘Did… something happen?’

  ‘Yeah – the matter I mentioned to you the other day. I just got a call from Yukiho.’

  Yasuharu’s voice sounded hushed over the phone – and not just because it was the middle of the night.

  ‘Her mother?’

  ‘She passed away. Never regained consciousness.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Kazunari said, the words only a reflex.

  ‘You good for tomorrow?’ Yasuharu asked. It wasn’t a question.

  ‘You still want me to go to Osaka?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m completely tied up. Some people from Slottermeyer are coming, and I have to see them.’

  ‘I was supposed to be at that meeting.’

  ‘Not any more. Get on the first bullet train you can, got it? Thankfully it’s already Friday. I’ll probably have to go out with our guests tonight, but I should be able to head down there Saturday morning.’

  ‘What do we tell the boss?’

  ‘I’ll talk to him tomorrow. His old body can’t take getting woken up at this time of night.’

  The CEO – Yasuharu’s father, Sosuke – lived in a residential area of Setagaya, on the western side of town, close to the house Yasuharu had moved into at the time of his previous marriage.

  ‘You ever introduce him to Yukiho?’ Kazunari asked, hoping he wasn’t sounding too nosy.

  ‘Not yet, no. But he does know I found a potential bride. You know how he is. He’s probably too busy to worry about his forty-five-year-old son getting married anyway.’

  Public opinion said Sosuke Shinozuka was a very open-hearted, generous man, and he’d never been very controlling with his son or with Kazunari when it came to private matters. But Kazunari had long understood that this was because his uncle was first and foremost a company man. He just didn’t care about anything outside of business. As long as his son’s intended didn’t do something outrageous to besmirch the family name, he honestly didn’t care whom he took for his second wife.

  ‘So, thanks for doing this,’ Yasuharu said.

  Kazunari wanted nothing more to do with Yukiho and yet he couldn’t think of any good reason to refuse.

  ‘Where in Osaka am I going?’

  ‘I got a fax with the address of the funeral parlour and the mother’s home, so I’ll send that along. Your fax number is the same as the phone, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘OK, I’ll hang up. Give me a ring once the fax comes through.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Kazunari got out of bed. He looked up at the glass doors set in his bookshelf, behind which stood a bottle of Remy Martin and a brandy glass. He took the glass out and poured himself a finger, tipping it back without bothering to sit down. The brandy hit his tongue and he drank in the fragrance and the taste and the sting of the alcohol. His blood stirred. His nerves were ringing.

  Ever since Yasuharu had come to him with his feelings about Yukiho, Kazunari had considered pulling an end-run by bringing his concerns to his father in hopes that he might talk to his uncle, Sosuke. But vaguely defined worries would lack the weight he needed to stop Yasuharu’s marriage. Yasuharu was positioned to eventually become the most powerful member of their extended family, and he could already hear his father telling him to worry about his own life before he started worrying about Yasaharu’s. Besides, his father had been recently appointed CEO of Shinozuka Chemicals. He had enough on his plate without worrying about his nephew’s family plans.

  Kazunari arrived in Osaka just before noon. For a moment he just stood on the platform in the station, feeling the humidity and the heat on his skin. Even though it was already late in September he could feel sweat trickling down his back. Summer lingered longer down here than it did up in Tokyo.