Out

by Natsuo Kirino

  'I suppose so, but neither of our families was in favour of our marriage, so I haven't seen much of them over the years.'

  'Would you mind telling us why they were against it?' Kinugasa asked.

  'I'm not sure I know myself,' Yayoi said. 'I guess my parents made it clear they weren't very fond of Kenji and that made his mother angry. . . .' The truth was that Yayoi had never got along with her mother-in-law and there had been very little communication between them. Even now, she was dreading her arrival and the fuss she would make. Yayoi even wondered whether the hatred she'd ended up feeling for Kenji wasn't due partly to the fact that he was that woman's son.

  'But why did your parents dislike your husband?' Kinugasa asked.

  'That's hard to say.' She hesitated a moment. 'I'm their only daughter, and I guess they must have had high expectations of the man they wanted me to marry.'

  'Probably so,' Kinugasa said. 'Especially since their daughter is such a good-looking woman, if you don't mind my saying so.'

  'No, it wasn't that,' she said, as if stating a known fact.

  'No? Then what was the reason?' He had suddenly adopted a fatherly tone. Go ahead, he seemed to be saying, you can tell me anything, anything at all. Yayoi had been feeling more and more uncomfortable as the interview had progressed into areas she hadn't anticipated. They seemed to be interested in every aspect of her relationship with Kenji, and they were developing a picture of them as a couple and drawing conclusions from it.

  'My husband was fond of gambling before we got married,' she said. 'He bet on horse races, bike races, that kind of thing. He'd even had loans to cover his gambling debts, but he paid them off. My parents found out about it and said they were against us getting married. But he gave it up as soon as we got involved.' The two men exchanged a glance at the mention of gambling, and Kinugasa's next question had a new intensity.

  'And recently?'

  Yayoi wondered for a moment whether she Should tell them about the baccarat. Had Masako said not to mention it? She couldn't remember. She paused, afraid that if she told them about the gambling they'd find out that he'd been beating her up.

  'Go on,' Kinugasa urged. 'You can tell us.'

  'Well... '

  'He'd started again, hadn't he?'

  'I think so,' she said, shivering slightly. 'He mentioned something about "baccarat".' Although she didn't know it yet, this one word would prove to be her salvation.

  'Baccarat? Did he say where he'd been playing?'

  'I think it was Shinjuku,' she said in a small voice.

  'Thank you,' said Kinugasa. 'We appreciate your telling us this. I think now we're sure to get his killer.'

  'I wonder . . .' Yayoi stammered, sensing that the questions were coming to an end, '. . . do you think I could see my husband?' Neither detective had mentioned the subject of viewing the body.

  'We thought we'd ask your brother-in-law to identify him, but I'm not sure it would be a good idea for you to come along,' Kinugasa told her, fishing some black-and-white photographs out of an envelope in his briefcase. He held them close to his chest like a poker hand, and selected one to put down on the table in front of her. 'If you're really considering going, it might be a good idea to have a look at these before you decide.'

  Yayoi reached out and gingerly picked up the picture. It showed a plastic bag and a lump of mutilated flesh. The only thing recognisable was a hand - Kenji's hand - with the pads of the fingers sliced off in blackened circles. She gasped, and for a moment she was overcome with loathing for Masako and the others. This was just too gruesome. She knew she'd killed him, and then asked them to get rid of the body; she knew she was being unreasonable. But now that she saw Kenji's disfigured body with her own eyes, she couldn't stop the wave of indignation that swept over her. Tears welled up in her eyes and she buried her face in her arms.

  'I'm sorry,' Kinugasa said, patting her gently on the shoulder. 'I know this is hard, but you have to be strong. Your children are going to need you.' The detectives seemed almost relieved to see the tears. A moment later, Yayoi looked up and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She felt utterly lost. Kuniko had been right when she'd told her that she couldn't possibly understand. It was true, she couldn't. It had been simpler to tell herself that Kenji had just gone off somewhere.

  'Are you all right?' Kinugasa asked.

  'Yes, I'm sorry.'

  'We'd like you to come down to the station tomorrow,' he told her, standing to leave. 'We've got a few more things to go over.'

  'Of course,' Yayoi murmured. There was more? When would it stop? But even now, Imai was looking slowly through his notebook, still sitting there in front of her.

  'I'm sorry,' he said, glancing up, 'but there's one thing I forgot to ask about.'

  'Yes?' she said, eyeing him through her tears. He studied her a moment.

  'About what time did you get home from the factory the morning after your husband disappeared? Could you run through that day for us, please.'

  'I finished work at 5.30, changed, and got home a little before 6.00. '

  'Do you always come straight home?' he asked softly.

  'Usually,' Yayoi said. She was conscious that she still hadn't recovered from the shock of the pictures and needed to choose her words carefully. 'Sometimes I stay and chat with friends for a while, but since Kenji hadn't been back that night, I was worried and came right home.'

  'Of course,' Imai said, nodding for her to continue.

  'Then I napped for a couple of hours before I took the children to the day-care centre.'

  'It was raining, wasn't it? Did you take the car?'

  'No, we don't own a car, and I don't drive. I take them on the bike.' She noticed another quick exchange of glances. The fact that she had never learned to drive was going to be to her advantage.

  'And then ... ' Imai prompted.

  'I got back here around 9:3 0 and talked to one of the neighbours for a while out by the garbage bins. I did the laundry and cleaned up around the house, and then around 11.00 I fell asleep again. At 1.00, there was a call from my husband's office saying he hadn't shown up for work. I was stunned, to say the least.' As she ran through all this again, the lines flowed smoothly; she began to relax, and she realised how wrong she'd been to resent Masako, even for a moment.

  'Thank you,' Imai said, closing his notebook with a snap. Kinugasa had been standing impatiently with his arms folded. As she followed them to the entrance and watched them scuff back into their shoes, she could sense that their suspicions were fading again, giving way to a new wave of sympathy.

  'We'll see you again tomorrow,' Kinugasa said before shutting the door behind him. When they were gone, Yayoi looked at her watch. Kenji's mother and brother would be here soon. She swallowed, steeling herself for her mother-in-law's tears. But now she could use her own tears as a defense. This interview with the detectives had been a good rehearsal for what was to come. The tension and confusion seemed to have melted away. Suddenly realising that she was standing just where Kenji had died, she gave a little jump.

  DARK DREAMS

  1

  Another blazing afternoon. Mitsuyoshi Satake stood looking out through the blinds, arms folded across his chest. From his secondfloor window, the city outside seemed to be divided between the places brilliantly lit by the midsummer sun and those sunk in shadow. The leaves on the trees lining the road seemed to glow, the area beneath them just a smear of black. The figures of people hurrying along looked luminous, trailing dark shadows. The white lines of the crosswalk warped in the heat, and Satake flinched at the sight of them, remembering the unpleasant feeling of one's shoes sinking into the hot asphalt.

  Just in front of him loomed the cluster of skyscrapers near the west exit to Shinjuku Station. The vertical strips of cloudless blue sky between the towers were almost too bright to look at, and he closed his eyes; but the image lingered on his retinas. He closed the blinds and turned away, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dimmer light. The apartm
ent was just two small rooms floored with old tatami mats and divided by faded sliding doors. The airconditioner was turned up high, and in the middle of one room a large TV flickered in the gloom. There was almost no other furniture. A small kitchen opened off the entrance hall, but since Satake never used it, there were no pans or dishes. All told, it seemed an austere dwelling for a man who dressed the way Satake did.

  In fact, while he was at home, Satake's appearance matched his apartment: a white shirt over grey pants worn through at the knees. This was his preferred way of dressing. But whenever he went out, he was obliged to think about how he looked to the rest of the world, and so found himself playing the role of Mitsuyoshi Satake, club owner.

  Rolling up his sleeves, he washed his hands and face in the lukewarm water from the faucet, then dried off with a towel and sat down in front of the TV, folding his legs under him. The dubbed version of an old American movie flickered across the screen, but his eyes wandered away and he sat in a daze, running his hands through his close-cropped hair. He didn't really want to watch anything; he just wanted to bathe in the meaningless artificial light.

  Satake hated summer. It wasn't the heat that bothered him so much as the various signs of the season in the back streets of the city that brought back memories with them. It was during summer vacation in his second year of high school that he'd hit his father hard enough to break his jaw, and then left home. That event, which had changed his life for ever, had taken place in a room just like this one, in August, with the air-conditioner groaning just as it was doing now.

  Engulfed in the hot stench of the city, he found that the boundary between his inner and outer selves seemed to dissolve. The fetid air seeped in through his pores and soiled what was inside, while his simmering emotions leaked out of his body into the streets. In Tokyo, in summer, he felt threatened by the city, so it had always seemed better to avoid the whole season as much as possible, avoid the waves of withering heat that swept through the streets.

  The return of this feeling was always a sign that the rainy season had ended and summer had started in earnest. To chase it out of his apartment, he stood up and went into the other room, where he opened the window and, before the fumes and noise could get in, pulled out the storm shutters and slammed them shut. As they slid into place, the interior fell into darkness and Satake sank on to the discoloured tatami with a sense of relief. The room contained a dresser and a neatly folded futon. The corners of the futon were perfect angles, almost as if a schoolboy's triangle had been inserted in them, and the whole place brought to mind a prison cell - except, of course, for the television. In prison, Satake had suffered not only from memories of the woman he had killed but from the small, airless space in which he was confined. When he got out, he had avoided moving into a large concrete apartment block where he would have felt hemmed in, opting instead for this drafty old wooden building. For much the same reason, the television, his link to the outside world, stayed on all day.

  He went back and sat in front of it now, in the formal posture that had been required in jail. There were no storm shutters on the windows in this room, so the sunlight continued to filter through the blinds. He muted the volume, leaving only the rumble of cars outside on Yamate Avenue and the hum of the air-conditioner. Lighting a cigarette, he peered through the smoke at the screen without really knowing what he was watching. A talk show had just started, and the host, looking serious, was using a flip chart to illustrate his topic. Satake gathered that it was a special programme devoted to a police case that was getting a lot of attention - something about a dismembered body that had been discovered last week in a park out in the suburbs. Having no interest in the subject, he folded his arms around his head to shield himself from the world outside. But just then the cell phone lying next to him began to ring, as if it had realised what he was doing. He hesitated, half resenting this other outside link, but finally spoke into the receiver.

  'Satake,' he said, his voice low and gruff. He was reluctant to speak to anyone today, with the heat threatening to stir up his carefully suppressed memories; but he also felt a need for some distraction. This restless, ambivalent mood left him irritated; it was like his feelings about the city in summer - he hated the sweltering streets, but he knew he could never live anywhere else.

  'Honey, it's me,' said a voice. The call was from Anna. Satake glanced at the Rolex on his wrist: exactly 1.00 p.m. About time they should be starting their rounds. He paused for a moment, wondering whether he should stay home on such a blistering day.

  'What's up?' he asked at last. 'The beauty shop?'

  'No, it's too hot. I was wondering if we could go to the pool instead.'

  'The pool? Now?'

  'Yes. Come with me!' The scent of chlorine and suntan oil came back to him - not the sort of summer memories he was avoiding, but he would still have preferred to say no.

  'It's a bit late, isn't it? Wouldn't it be better to go on your day off?'

  'But it's so crowded on Sunday. Can't we go today? Anna wants to swim!'

  'Okay, okay. We'll go,' Satake said, suddenly decisive. He hung up and lit another cigarette, squinting at the muted TV. On the screen was the tense face of a woman who must have been the victim's wife. She was wearing a faded T-shirt and jeans. Her hair was pulled back in a simple bun, and she wore almost no makeup. Satake studied the face. Realising that she was much betterlooking than he would have expected, he switched almost automatically to his professional mode, appraising the woman with an expert's eye. She was in her early thirties, he concluded, but with a little work on the make-up the face would still find buyers. What struck him most about her, however, was how calm she seemed despite the fact that her husband had been murdered. A caption scrolled across the bottom of the screen: 'The wife of murder victim Kenji Yamamoto'; but the name meant nothing to him. He'd long since forgotten that he had kicked a man named Yamamoto out of his club that night and beaten him on the stairs. At the moment, he was much more concerned about the boiling summer afternoon that awaited him and a vague sense of foreboding it gave him. If he'd had this sort of premonition on that other day years ago, perhaps he might have escaped, might never have met that woman, and his life would have been different. Today, the same misgivings were stirring, but he had no idea why.

  Ten minutes later, he was hurrying toward the parking lot where he kept his car. Through his sunglasses, the highway in the distance shimmered like a mirage. His skin, accustomed to the cool, dark apartment, began to sweat at the first assault from the heat and intense sunlight. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand as he stood waiting for his car to appear from the parking-lot elevator. As soon as he had closed the door, he turned on the air-conditioning, but he could still feel the heat in the leather-covered steering wheel.

  Satake was used to Anna's random demands. One day she wanted him to take her shopping; the next, he had to find her a new hairdresser, or a new vet. She constantly had him chasing around the city, but he understood that it was her way of testing his affections. He smiled to himself as he guided the car through the traffic, amused by this beautiful, whimsical child.

  When he rang the bell on the intercom, the door opened almost immediately, as if she'd been waiting for him. She was wearing a yellow hat with a wide brim and a matching yellow sundress. She pursed her lips in mock displeasure as she fumbled with the straps on her black enamel sandals.

  'What took you so long?'

  'I can't help it if you come up with these hare-brained schemes all of a sudden,' Satake said, swinging open the door. He caught a whiff of the distinctive smell of Anna's apartment, a mixture of canine and cosmetics. 'Where do you want to go?' he asked.

  'To the pool, of course!' she cried, rushing out of the place. She ran to the railing, leaned out as far as she could, and stared up at the sky, as if reassuring herself that the day was still blazing hot. She could barely contain her excitement at the prospect of the outing, and seemed completely oblivious to Satake's darker mood.


  'But which pool? The Keio Plaza? The New Otani?'

  'Hotels cost a fortune,' she said. Even when she was spending Satake's money, Anna tended to avoid unnecessary extravagance.

  'Where then?' he said, setting off toward the elevator.

  'The city pool's fine,' she said. '¥400 for both of us.'

  There was no denying that the city pool was cheap, but it was also noisy and crowded. Still, if that's what she wanted, it was fine with him. All he wanted to do was survive the heat; if he could please Anna at the same time, all the better.

  -

  The pool was swarming with elementary-school groups and young couples. A row of trees lined the top part of the gently terraced poolside, and Satake waited in the shade until Anna emerged from the changing room in her bright red swimsuit.

  'Honey!' she called, waving. He studied her body as she ran toward him. It was perfect, except perhaps for the fact that her skin seemed too white for a swimming pool. The breasts and hips were firm and high, the legs long. There was just enough flesh on the thighs, and yet the overall effect was sleek. 'Aren't you going to swim?' she said, taking a deep breath, as if to smell the chlorine.

  'I'll watch you from here.'

  'Why?' she said, tugging on his arm. 'Come on, get in!'

  'You go ahead. Don't be too long - we can only stay an hour or so.'

  'Is that all?'

  'We've been through that. You've got to leave time for the

  hairdresser.' Anna made an irritated gesture but then seemed to think better of it and ran off toward the pool. On the way down the terrace, she picked up a beach ball and began playing catch with a group of little girls. Satake smiled. She was such a sweet thing. All he really needed was to be with her, to take care of her. He couldn't deny that she was a comfort to him. Still, she wasn't able to quiet the hum of the past that the sudden onset of summer had set up in his head. He closed his eyes behind his sunglasses.

  When he opened them, Anna was no longer playing by the pool. He found her a moment later, waving her long white arms at him from the middle of the wide expanse of blue water, lost in a sea of splashing, shouting children. Satisfied that he had seen her, she began swimming down the pool, practising her awkward crawl. Satake watched as a young man followed her and struck up a conversation underneath the diving board. He closed his eyes again.