Villain

by Yoshida Shuichi

  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.

&
nbsp; 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.