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 fa
ce 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?”
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