Villain a Novel (2010) (10 page)

Recently every time Norio and Fusae saw each other she’d say the same thing. Yuichi might be helpful to have around, but the more Fusae said this, the sorrier Norio felt for his quiet cousin—whom he treated like a nephew—as he was practically bound hand and foot to this elderly couple. Besides this, Yuichi was almost the only young person in his village. The rest of the residents were old couples, or old people living alone, and Yuichi was kept busy shuttling not just his grandparents but other elderly neighbors to the hospital. But he always brought his car around without a word of complaint.

For Norio, Yuichi was like the son he’d never had, which is why
he’d been so upset when Yuichi had taken out a loan to buy his flashy car. Once Norio had calmed down, though, he started to feel sorry for him—since the whole point of having the car seemed to be to ferry old people back and forth to the hospital.

Unlike the other young guys on the construction site, Yuichi never overslept and he always worked hard. But Norio had no idea what made this young man happy.

On this particular day Norio made his usual rounds to pick up the other workers. Yuichi was the only one of all of them who wasn’t in his late fifties—the others, including Norio, filled the van with cigarette smoke and groans about married life, about how much their knees ached, or how much their wife snored.

They all knew Yuichi wasn’t talkative, so they barely spoke to him. When Yuichi had first joined their construction gang, they tried to take good care of him, inviting him to boat races, or out to bars in Doza in Nagasaki. But at the races he wouldn’t even make a single bet, and wouldn’t sing even one karaoke song when they went drinking.
Young guys these days are no fun at all
, they concluded, and washed their hands of him.

“Hey, Yuichi! What’s the matter? You look pale.”

Norio glanced in the rearview mirror. He’d almost forgotten that Yuichi was there, but now he saw that his face was white as a sheet. They were just about to enter the city, at a spot where they could see the harbor between the row of warehouses along the coast.

“What’s wrong? You don’t feel good?” Norio asked.

Yoshioka, seated behind Yuichi, said, “You gonna throw up? Open the window! Right now!” and hurriedly leaned forward to roll it down.

Yuichi weakly brushed his hand aside and whispered, “No, I’m okay.”

Yuichi looked so bad that Norio decided to pull over. As he did, the truck behind them roared past, blaring its horn, the wind rocking their van.

As soon as the van stopped Yuichi tumbled out, holding his stomach,
and vomited on the ground. Nothing seemed to come up from his stomach, though, and he just stayed there, his breathing ragged and labored.

“You got a hangover?” Yoshioka called out from the van. Yuichi, hands on the paving stones of the sidewalk, shuddered as he nodded.

Koki Tsuruta held the curtain, dyed in the evening sun, open a crack and peered down at the street below. From the twelfth-floor window he could see all of Ohori Park. Two white vans were parked on the street and the young detective who had just questioned him was climbing into one of them. His parents had bought this condo for him near the university, but Koki had never liked the view. The broad vista outside it made him feel small, like a worthless, spoiled rich kid.

The digital clock beside his bed showed five past five. The detective had banged on his door at four-thirty, and Koki, who’d just dragged himself out of bed, answered his questions for a half hour.

Koki sat down on his bed and took a sip of lukewarm water from a plastic bottle.

Until it dawned on him that the detective was after Keigo Masuo, Koki had answered him sullenly. He’d been watching videos until morning and couldn’t hide how upset he felt at having someone pounding on his door. When the detective, not too much older than himself, showed him his badge and said he’d like to ask him some questions, Koki figured that the guy who molested women in the park must have been at it again.

“I hear that you and Keigo Masuo are close.”

When he heard this, Koki put the two together, concluding that Keigo must have molested somebody—or maybe picked up some girl at a bar and raped her. Somehow the word
raped
seemed a better fit for Keigo than
molested
.

Koki was fully awake at last as the young detective summarized the facts as they knew them.
Mitsuse Pass. Yoshino Ishibashi. Dead
body. Strangled. Keigo Masuo. Disappeared
. As he listened, Koki’s knees gave out. Keigo had done something far worse than rape, and had fled. Koki started to sink to the floor, and the detective said, “We don’t know exactly what happened, but thought that maybe you could tell us where Mr. Masuo might be. Has he gotten in touch with you recently?”

Koki lightly tapped his sleepy face and tried to remember. The detective stood there patiently, pen and notebook in hand.

“Well …” Koki began, gazing at the detective. “How should I put it.… I haven’t been able to get in touch with him the last three or four days. Everybody’s saying he just dropped off the grid for a laugh, but I figure he went off on a trip somewhere by himself.” Koki got this out in a rush of words, then stopped and glanced at the detective again.

“Yes, that seems to be the case. When was the last time you talked with him?” The detective’s expression remained unchanged, and he tapped the notebook with the tip of his pen.

“The last time? Umm … it must have been over the weekend.”

Koki searched his memory. He remembered talking to Keigo on the phone, but what day of the week that was, he couldn’t say. The signal had been bad and it was hard to hear him. “Where are you?” Koki had asked him, to which Keigo replied, laughing, “I’m up in the hills.”

He hadn’t called for any special reason. He’d just wanted to double-check the time for their seminar exam the following week. Koki was sure he’d been watching the movie
Whacked
on video that night. He remembered wanting to tell Keigo about it when the phone went dead.

Koki hurried to his bedroom and checked the receipt from the video store. “It was last Wednesday,” he told the detective standing in the entrance.

Whenever Keigo came over, Koki always made him watch videos that he liked. Keigo wasn’t interested in movies so he’d either fall asleep or go home; but Koki, who dreamed of making a film someday, had talked with Keigo about producing something together.

Sometimes Keigo would invite him out drinking at night, saying they could talk more about movies, but as soon as they arrived at a bar, Keigo would forget about movies and start trolling for girls. Keigo was a flashy guy—even other guys could see that—and it wouldn’t be long before he’d snag a girl. He’d bring her back to where Koki was sitting and introduce him, saying, “My friend here’s gonna make a film next year. You want to be in it?”

The girls Keigo picked up were themselves far from flashy. Koki had asked him about this and he’d replied, laughing, “It’s the down-and-out-looking ones that make me hard.”

Koki remembered hearing the name the young detective had mentioned, Yoshino Ishibashi. When the detective had told him that they’d discovered the body of a woman with that name at Mitsuse Pass, the first image that flashed in front of Koki’s eyes was from a film he’d seen sometime, of a white woman’s frozen corpse. But after the detective had repeated the name, it finally dawned on him that this was the name of a girl that Keigo had tried to pick up in a bar in Tenjin a few months ago.

Koki had been with him that night. They were playing darts, and Koki remembered sitting at the end of the bar and discussing the films of Eric Rohmer with the bartender. Keigo had just invited Yoshino and her two friends to go sing karaoke, but they’d demurred, saying they had a curfew and were about to leave. Koki and the bartender were deep into their debate over Rohmer’s films, the bartender arguing that
Conte d’été
was his best, while Koki insisted that
Le genou de Claire
was his masterpiece.

Keigo followed him to the counter and was standing just behind Koki when he said, “Tell me your e-mail address. I’ll take you out to dinner next time.” Koki turned around, and sure enough the girl wasn’t much to speak of. She quickly gave him her address.

As the girls walked up the stairs, Keigo gave them a casual, “Bye now! See you!” and then came back to the bar, ordered a beer, and showed Koki the coaster with the girl’s e-mail address on it. The name scrawled on the coaster was Yoshino Ishibashi.

Koki remembered the name since it was the same name, with just one character different, as that of a girl in the film club he belonged to who was below him in college.

As Keigo took the beer from the bartender, Koki had said, “The Ishibashi I know’s much cuter than this girl.”

Keigo continued to toy with the coaster. “Yeah,” he said, “but I like that kind of girl. The kind that you know isn’t quite grown up. She runs around, looking all cross, with her Louis Vuitton handbag, but still deep down is a farmer’s daughter. Give me a girl with a Louis Vuitton bag and cheap shoes walking on a path between rice fields and I’m all over her.”

When Koki first met Keigo in college he found it strange how, even though their likes and personalities were so different, they got along so well. It must have been because they were both from wealthy families and could afford to be laid-back. If Keigo were a prima donna movie star, then Koki was the director, the only one who could coax a good performance out of him.

Koki remembered a time when he and Keigo were eating ramen at an outdoor stand in Nagahama. Keigo had just bought a new car and spent all his free time tooling around town in it.

As they were slurping down their noodles Keigo asked him, “Koki, is your dad the type who cheats on his wife?”

“What?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering.”

Koki’s father owned a number of rental buildings in central Fukuoka. He’d inherited all of them from his own father, and even to his son he was a man with too much time and money on his hands. Koki found it hard to respect him.

“Well, I can’t say for sure he hasn’t played around.… But I imagine the most he’s done is just fool around with some bar hostesses or something.”

Keigo didn’t seem too interested. A pile of ramen still remained in his bowl, but he snapped his disposable chopsticks in half and dropped them into the bowl.

“How ’bout your dad?” Koki said, trying to be casual. Keigo took a sip of water from the worn-out plastic cup and said, “My dad? Well, remember he runs an inn.” He practically spat out the words.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Inns have maids,” Keigo said with a knowing grin. “Since I was a kid I saw my dad taking maids into one of the back rooms. I wonder about that.… Those women probably hated it, right? … No, of course they hated it, though it didn’t look that way to me.”

As they exited the ramen stand, Keigo turned to the owner and said, “Thanks for the meal. It was awful.”

For an instant the other customers froze. It was an awkward moment, but Koki liked this about Keigo. And in fact the stand they’d eaten at was aimed at tourists and charged way too much.

As Yuichi scrubbed away the dirt from his hands in the water-filled drum, Norio stood behind him, smoking and watching him. The drum was used for mixing cement and no matter how much clean water was poured in it, a snakelike pattern remained on your skin after your hands dried.

It was six p.m. and the various work crews on the site were getting ready to go home. Several pieces of heavy machinery now sat quietly in a row; only a few minutes ago, they were in use, tearing down a wall.

It was their fourth day tearing down a former maternity hospital, and two-thirds of it had now been mercilessly ripped apart. In a large-scale site like this, Norio had to subcontract out some of the work. His company owned a 15m heavy-duty power backhoe, but one machine wasn’t nearly enough to pull down a three-story steel-and-concrete structure.

Yuichi dried his hands on the towel around his neck. “You know,” Norio said, crushing out his cigarette in an ashtray, “it’s about time you got a heavy-equipment license.”