Looking up at the apartment building, she made a round around the concrete outer walls. They were grimy, and she estimated the rent to be perhaps 120,000 yen for two rooms.
A bartender job alone wasn’t enough to get by. Kanako wondered what this partner Akira Nakagaki did for a living.
How did the man get along with Miho Tsuzuki, whose temper could explode at any moment? Wouldn’t he have to be fairly broad-minded to be able to live with her?
The balcony to Miho’s room was coming into sight, along with the distinctive orange glow of incandescent lighting—the light of a household, if only faint.
Kanako stood on her toes and tried to peek into the apartment. Miho Tsuzuki suddenly entered her visual field, and Kanako panicked and hid in the shadows.
Miho took in laundry that had been left out to dry. There were no signs of her partner coming home. She unceremoniously grabbed the men’s underwear and disappeared back inside, slamming the sliding window shut behind her.
After finishing taking surveys outside the Shibuya movie theater, recently she headed not to the Inokashira line but to the ticket sales counter of the Yamanote line.
It was almost as though she were a nocturnal bat, Kanako laughed bitterly to herself.
One week ago, Kanako had sweat as she ran a midnight marathon to locate Miho Tsuzuki’s residence.
Three days ago, seeing the lights to the bar turned off, she learned that it was closed on Sundays. She walked to Miho Tsuzuki’s apartment after that, but the lights were off there too. She must have gone somewhere with her partner because it was her off day.
Kanako passed through the bustle in front of the Hachiko statue and pulled out her cell phone. Takumi had said that the photography club was out drinking tonight so he wouldn’t be able to visit her apartment, but just in case she decided to put in a call.
Thinking back, she hadn’t been in contact with Takumi’s warmth since that Sunday morning when he had woken up beside her and pulled their bodies together. When they met at school, they would tangle their tongues and make out in empty classrooms while he roughly stroked her breasts, but that barely counted as contact.
“Where are you now?” she asked.
“At the JamJam in front of the station.”
It was a ninety-minute all-you-can-eat hot pot restaurant. Stuffing their stomachs full of meatballs there before moving on to the bars was the standard course that students at Shimokitazawa took on their nights out.
“What about you, Kako?”
“My part-time just ended. I’m going to go straight home and sleep,” she lied. “Even if you suddenly come knocking when you’re drunk, I won’t wake up,” she added in warning.
“We’ll most likely all go to prez’s apartment afterwards and drink until morning.”
“I’ll buy some Solmac so let’s meet in the cafeteria tomorrow,” she named a digestive medicine that helped with hangovers.
“If I’m still alive then.”
She ended the call and entered the Yamanote line platform.
The next time she visited Ice Storm, she wanted to go after the final trains. Aiming for the closing hours was her best bet at deepening her relationship with Miho Tsuzuki.
Kanako flattered herself that maybe she had the makings of a strategist.
After her part-time ended, she arrived at Gotanda at ten and still had three hours to kill. She had already researched the 24-hour family restaurants in the station area in a magazine guide.
At the first family restaurant, she spent plenty of time eating a slow, late dinner.
At the second, she organized her report for her part-time over dessert. She respected the audience opinion that Robert de Niro was in too many films lately, and that people were getting bored. She reordered coffee and translated two pages from her English textbook in preparation for tomorrow.
She glanced at the clock and saw that it was past one. It was about time, and she took the sales slip in hand as she got up.
Entering the factory district from the vicinity of the station, she saw the blue neon-pipe lights from across the bridge in about five minutes.
This was her third visit, and having become a bit of a regular, she felt at ease trotting down the steps.
“You’re late today,” Miho Tsuzuki greeted her in her usual tank top.
Kanako sat where she had the last time. The guests were rapidly leaving at this hour, and the blond was making his rounds of the table seats asking for last orders. It looked like they were the only two staff tonight.
“Are you closing already?”
“It’s fine, you’re only going to have one or two drinks anyway, right?”
Miho had already figured out that Kanako wasn’t a big drinker. It probably had to do with the way she drank.
“Then…a martini on the rocks.”
“Dry, not sweet vermouth, right?”
She apparently thought that Kanako might be a sweet tooth.
“Dry,” Kanako replied without hesitation.
Miho eyeballed gin and dry vermouth into a rocks glass with ice and gave it a light stir. She tossed a spear with two olives into it and was done.
Kanako drank. It was dry. It stung her throat, stimulating the membrane coating it.
“You were working at your part-time this late?” Miho’s eyes seemed to be asking if Kanako worked the nightlife.
“I conduct opinion surveys at a movie theater and then make reports out of them.” The text part was a hassle and it had taken until this late, she explained.
“A movie theater, huh? It’s been a long time since I’ve gone,” Miho Tsuzuki sighed as she began washing the glasses that had piled up in the sink. Kanako noticed that a scent like peppermint wafted around her. There was a compress stuck onto her right shoulder.
“What happened?”
“I swung a bit too hard.” She motioned swinging a racket.
Miho Tsuzuki didn’t give off the impression of someone healthy enough to play tennis during the day. Kanako thought she was lying.
No sooner than the cut by her mouth healed, she had another bruise. She looked like someone who fought regularly.
The couple who had been at the tables until the end got up to go to the register, leaving Kanako as the only customer. After the blond finished up with the bill, he followed the couple up the stairs. He had probably gone to turn off the neon-pipe lights.
“Can I ask your name?”
With just the two of them in the bar, Kanako got bold. She had put a considerable amount of practice into asking this. She went for how a third-time customer might try to get to know the bartender just a little better.
“Miho Tsuzuki.”
“What characters?”
Miho took out a ballpoint pen and wrote her name on a coaster. Her handwriting was large, bold, masculine.
“I’m…”
Borrowing the ballpoint pen, Kanako started writing right by Miho’s name—close enough to fit under an umbrella sign, like children did with their crushes. “Yukako Fuyuki” was the fake name she’d come up with.
“It sounds like the name of a celebrity.”
“Really?”
Had Miho seen through her alias? Kanako’s heart skipped a beat. Not Akiba, but Fuyuki: Akiba was written as “autumn” and “leaf,” Fuyuki as “winter” and “tree.” The autumn leaves fallen, only the winter tree remained—a somewhat self-deprecating joke on Kanako’s part. For her first name, she’d wanted something that would yield the nickname “Kako,” which Yukako did.
The blond came down the stairs and said, “Miho, can I leave the rest to you?”
He had his hands pressed together before him as though begging. Maybe his girlfriend was waiting for him, and he wanted Miho to close up alone tonight.
“Sure,” she agreed lightheartedly. They probably helped each other out like this all the time.
The blond went back to the staff changing room to prepare to leave and rushed back past the counter on his way out, exchanging words of parti
ng with Miho. He had a pair of drumsticks sticking out of his back pocket.
“Apparently someone from a record company agreed to listen to them soon, and he’s been practicing every night.”
“Wow.”
Miho Tsuzuki asked Kanako if she wanted another round.
“I do, but don’t you need to clean up?”
Miho didn’t mind.
“Then, I want something that’s a fitting close to a day. Something that’ll give me energy for tomorrow.”
The request must have felt like a challenge to a bartender, and Miho stood with her arms crossed, taking some time to think.
She took a bottle of brandy in hand. She poured some into the shaker, followed by a solid black liquor and a bit of fresh cream from a carton. She closed the lid and started shaking. Her biceps stretching out from under her tank top flexed. Apparently, mixing alcohol could be physically strenuous.
The completed drink was a cocktail that looked like cafe au lait.
“Alexander.”
It was sweet. After a martini, the rich sweetness stood out.
“It’s a favorite after-dinner drink. At the end of a tiring day, I think sweet ones are the best. Sweetness is the first flavor humans learn, right? Next comes saltiness, and it’s only after adulthood that we appreciate sourness and bitterness. So I think at the end of a day, you should drink something sweet to return to your childhood. Then you can be reborn the next day.”
“Reborn the next day, huh?”
Kanako tasted the cocktail, rolling it around with her whole tongue, and was reminded of the flavor of the slab of chocolate she’d shared with her little brothers, a simple Meiji-brand snack that their mother had bought for them and that they had split cleanly into three.
Perhaps sweetness was a flavor that let you rediscover that you’re alive. Her two brothers, whose faces had been smashed in by a hammer by Norio Tsuzuki, had no use for it now.
The nape of Kanako’s neck stiffened, but she quickly kneaded the knot away with her hands. She gulped down the rest of the cocktail.
She stepped onto the floor, calling out, “Can I help?” to where Miho Tsuzuki was wiping down tables with a rag.
“I had you make me a complicated cocktail after last orders.”
She was asked to gather the ashtrays and throw out the husks.
Stacking the ashtrays, Kanako brought them behind the counter. There was an empty can of retail-purpose ketchup that already had cigarette butts in it. She dumped the stinky trash into it and washed the five ashtrays with water.
Miho Tsuzuki was sweeping the floor with a broom.
“The owner’s the first one to arrive, so he gets mad if we don’t clean up at the end of the day.”
“What’s the owner like?”
Kanako wanted to know everything about Miho Tsuzuki’s relationships.
“He’s a young businessman who always wears Armani with three places like this one in the city. He has a wife around ten years older than him and a daughter in elementary school who’s part of a junior theater troupe. Once a year, there’s a trip to Atami that our families are also invited to. It’s pretty unusual to bring them along on a company outing, don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure I’d feel at home.”
“Exactly. We even have karaoke contests between the three bars with all of the staff participating.”
After finishing with clean-up, Miho Tsuzuki extended her hand.
“The last earnings of the day.”
She was going to close out the register. Kanako’s two cocktails had cost 1,800 yen. She held out a thousand-yen bill and some coins, but Miho said, “Just this is fine,” and returned a 500-yen coin.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Miho punched in the register and printed out the sales for the day. “Wait a sec. Once I’m done with this, we can leave together.”
That was precisely what Kanako had been waiting for. The strategist in her chuckled.
She had come at closing time so the two of them could head home together. If their relationship deepened from a bartender and her guest to friends who opened their hearts to each other, Kanako would be free to step inside Miho Tsuzuki.
What did she think about her father, who’d been sentenced to death? Why had she blurted out “They should just kill me too” to the former police officer Hashimoto? Kanako wanted to come into contact with Miho’s core. It needed to be scarred worse than her own.
She wanted to see a deeper, more vivid wound on Miho Tsuzuki than the cut lip that looked like she’d been struck or her inflamed shoulder with its compress.
If, no matter how much Kanako searched, she could only find wounds shallower than her own, then…
“There, done.”
Miho stuck the day’s sales printout in the register tray before going into the changing room to grab a jeans jacket.
Kanako exited first and Miho locked the door behind them, putting the key in a pocket in her jacket. Closing-time staff seemed to be entrusted with a duplicate key.
They climbed the stairs and stepped outside. Miho asked if Kanako was taking a cab, and she replied yes.
“Then I’ll come with you to the avenue. Wait here for a sec.”
Miho went to remove the dial lock from the bicycle parked by the monthly parking lot and returned, still on her feet.
Walking side by side, their heights and shoulder widths were around the same. Hashimoto had said that the two of them were similar. He hadn’t meant their appearance but rather the aura that they emitted; he felt scared of both Miho and Kanako.
“Is your house close?” Kanako asked, though she knew the answer.
“It’s around a twenty-minute walk. On a bicycle, it doesn’t even take ten minutes.”
So that was around how far it was. The marathon had felt longer that night.
“Are you nocturnal, so to speak?”
Miho replied that she got up at around noon, made rice every day, and ate a late breakfast and late lunch before heading out in the afternoon. “You, you’re gonna feel sleepy tomorrow. As a sophomore, I bet you have classes packed all day. The Eiwa Gakuin girl who worked with us complained about it.”
“Yeah, I do have a lecture at nine in the morning.”
“You don’t live at home, do you?”
“It’s a commutable distance, but I had to have my own place.”
“I’m jealous that you do movie-related work. Are you angling for a job in that field after college?”
“If possible.”
“Any good movies lately?”
Kanako decided to recommend a spy movie starring Tom Cruise that was still playing.
“Oh, I think I saw the first one on TV. A helicopter chases them into a tunnel, right? That was cool…Hmm. I might go and see it. But I don’t really want to go alone…”
“What about your boyfriend?”
“…He’s the type who only watches movies on video.”
This came out mumbled, the words tinged with fatigue towards the end. Women spoke that way about a husband of many years who thoroughly bored them.
“Then let’s go together,” the invitation spilled out of Kanako’s mouth.
“But you’ve already seen it, right?”
“I’ve been thinking I’d like to again.” Her intonation was off and it sounded like an excuse even to her own ears.
“This might be the first time I’ve ever gone to see a movie with a girl my own age.”
They exchanged their numbers.
Miho Tsuzuki stopped her bicycle and inputted the number Kanako told her into her cell phone, registering it under “Yukako Fuyuki.” Kanako also tapped Miho’s number into the screen of her own phone.
Did Miho never have any friends to go to the movies with before coming to Tokyo?
Kanako imagined a girl with gloomy eyes leaning against the wire fence in a corner of the school courtyard all by herself. Had the brand of being a murderer’s daughter ruled over Miho Tsuzuki�
�s childhood?
They made it out to the avenue and waited for an empty taxi.
“Ah, I have tomorrow off!” Miho Tsuzuki said, stretching. One of her joints popped.
“I thought Sundays were your off days.”
Miho explained that all employees were granted five days off every month and that they could choose when to take their breaks outside the set dates.
“When you have time off from school, where do you like to hang out? Since you’re in Shimokita, around Shibuya?”
About that, Kanako replied vaguely.
Kanako asked herself why she hadn’t also provided a fake university and address when she had given a fake name.
She planned to eventually disappear from Miho Tsuzuki’s life. When that happened, Miho might come to Shimokitazawa and Eiwa Gakuin’s campus and ask around for a “Yukako Fuyuki,” and perhaps learn that she had been Kanako Akiba. Miho Tsuzuki would be shocked to learn that her customer had been the only living member of the family her father had murdered.
Kanako wondered if Miho would apologize for her father’s crimes. Or would she just shunt that aside and nervously demand to know why Kanako had lied about her background and approached her?
Was Kanako waiting for that moment?
Maybe she’d revealed that she attended Eiwa Gakuin because she wanted to see Miho Tsuzuki’s shock and was looking forward to that confrontation. Whether it was a need for conflict or for self-destruction, Kanako herself couldn’t say.
“Oh!” Miho called out near a convenience store emitting a bright light on the other side of the street. A tall man with a bag slung over his arm had walked out. “Akira!”
Hearing the name, the young man looked around for the voice’s source, and his eyes landed on them. He wore a round-necked shirt with a linen jacket thrown carelessly over his shoulders. He was about six feet tall. The intimidating aura rolling off his broad shoulders and thick neck was palpable even from a distance. The golden chain decorating his neck glittered in the light from passing cars. His hair was long and tinged blond. His expression was vague, but the area from his mouth to his cheeks moved like a mollusk, probably because he was chewing gum.
Kanako had seen scouts like him appraising young women on Shibuya’s Central Street. They’d tried to chat her up more than once.
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