Villain a Novel (2010) (20 page)

Mitsuyo looked up and saw the still rice fields in front of her. She glanced at her cell phone in the sunlight coming in the open window. When she checked for new e-mails, she found the dozens of messages she’d exchanged recently.

Three days before, she’d gathered her courage and e-mailed this man named Yuichi Shimizu, and his response had been encouraging. Three months before that, she’d been drinking with her colleagues, something she rarely did, and, a bit tipsy, playfully looked into an online dating site. She wasn’t sure how it worked, but when she received the updated list of men, she’d chosen Yuichi.

The reason she’d chosen someone from Nagasaki was simple. If it was someone from Saga she might know him; Fukuoka was too big a city for her; and Kagoshima and Oita were too far away.

But three months ago when Yuichi had said,
Let’s meet
, she stopped e-mailing him right away.

Three days ago, too, she didn’t feel like actually meeting him. Before going to bed she’d simply felt like talking to someone, even via e-mail. And that had led to a three-day exchange of messages. Now she wanted to see him, a desire that had grown more intense over the three days. She wasn’t sure what it was about him that made her feel this way, but when she exchanged messages with him she felt like the person she was back then, the one who didn’t get on that bus. Nothing was guaranteed, but if she screwed up her courage she felt as if she’d never have to get on that bus again.

Mitsuyo held her cell phone in the sunlight and read last night’s final e-mail.

Well, I’ll see you tomorrow at eleven in front of Saga station. Good night!

Simple words, but to her they seemed to glow.

Today I’m going for a drive with him, in his car
, she thought. To see the lighthouse. The two of them, going to see this lovely lighthouse facing the sea.

When it gets dark you turn on the fluorescent lights. He’d done it every day without thinking, but now, to Yoshio Ishibashi, it seemed like an unusual, special act.

It gets dark and you turn on the light. Simple as that. But even in performing a simple act, a person runs through a series of feelings.

First your eyes sense it’s grown dark. Darkness is inconvenient. If you make things lighter, the inconvenience vanishes. To make it light, you have to switch on the fluorescent lights. And to do that you have to stand up from the tatami and pull the cord. Just pull the cord, and this place is no longer dark and inconvenient.

In the gloomy room Yoshio stared at the light cord above him. All he needed to do was stand up, but the cord was miles away.

The room was dark. But he didn’t need to do anything about it.
He didn’t mind a dark room. And if he didn’t mind, he didn’t need to turn on the light. If he didn’t need to turn on the light, he didn’t need to stand up.

So Yoshio stayed lying on the tatami. The room was filled with the smell of incense. Just a few minutes before he’d asked Satoko, “Why don’t you open a window a little?”

“Okay,” she’d replied. She was seated in front of the Buddhist altar, but over ten minutes passed with no sign that she was going to get up.

Beyond the darkened room was the barbershop, also dark. Trucks roared past occasionally, just outside, rattling the thin front door. If he listened carefully, Yoshio could hear the faint sputter of the incense and candles burning at the altar.

The wake and funeral for his daughter, Yoshino, were over, but how many days had passed since that? It felt as if it was a while ago that he’d brought Satoko back from the funeral home, sobbing. But it also felt as if he’d said goodbye to Yoshino a half a year ago.

The funeral was at the memorial hall next to the Chikugo River. And lots of people came: relatives, neighbors, old friends of Yoshio and Satoko all jostling to help out. Some of Yoshino’s classmates and colleagues came as well. When the two colleagues who were with her on that last night came to offer flowers, they touched her cold face and sobbed uncontrollably, unconcerned about those around them: “We’re so sorry, so sorry. We’re sorry we let you go by yourself.” They were all gathered for Yoshino’s sake, but no one spoke about her. No one said a word about why this had happened.

A couple of TV crews were gathered outside the memorial hall. The police were there, too, and what the reporters learned about the investigation from them filtered back to the mourners. The college student who was supposedly meeting Yoshino the night of her death was still missing. Can’t tell for sure, one policeman declared, but if it turns out the boy is on the run, then that must mean he’s the one who did it.

“They can’t even find one college student? What the hell do the police think they’re doing!” Yoshio yelled in an angry, tearful voice.
“What are you doing here offering incense? Go out and find the guy!” Totally at a loss, he spit out these angry words, his body shaking uncontrollably.

His great-aunt and others hurried from Okayama and arrived on the night of the wake, and they tried to persuade him to get some sleep. “I know it’s hard,” they said, “but you have to try to rest,” and they laid out a futon for him in a waiting room of the memorial hall. He knew he couldn’t sleep, but maybe if he did he’d wake up and find out this was all a dream, so he closed his eyes and tried his best.

Beyond the sliding door he could hear the hushed voices of his relatives mixed in with the occasional can of beer popping open, and crunching sounds as someone chewed crackers. From what he could make out of their conversation, his wife refused to leave the altar and Yoshino’s side, and whenever anyone spoke to her she broke down in tears.

Yoshio longed to fall asleep. Here he was, unable to do anything but wait for the young Buddhist priest to show up, the one whose hobby was collecting anime dolls, and he found it pitiful and frustrating. But no matter how hard he tried to close his eyes, he couldn’t filter out the muffled voices from the next room.

“It would be better for Yoshino if it does turn out that the college student did it. Think about it—what if it turns out she’s involved with one of those dating sites, like the police said? On TV they said if that’s true, then she took money to sleep with men.”

“Be quiet! Yoshio’s in the next room!”

Someone shushed the great-aunt and the others. But after a few moments someone hesitantly brought it up again.

“That college student has to be the one. Otherwise he wouldn’t run away, right?”

“That makes sense. Maybe he found out about her getting money from other men and they had a fight. And things escalated after that.…”

A draft of cold wind blew in from the kitchen, which was next to the barbershop. Still lying down on the tatami, Yoshio stretched out his
legs and pushed the sliding door shut. The darkened room now lost every last bit of light.

“Satoko …” he called out listlessly to his wife.

“Yes?” she replied, sounding as though she were replying to a question from five minutes ago.

“Shall we have something delivered for dinner?”

“Okay.”

“We could call Rairaiten.”

“All right.”

Satoko answered but made no move to get up. Still, Yoshio felt this was the first time he and his wife had actually had a conversation the whole day, which she’d spent frozen in place in front of the altar.

Yoshio had no choice but to get up himself. He pulled the cord for the fluorescent light and it blinked a few times and came on, revealing the worn tatami and the cushion he’d been sitting on. On the low table was a stack of extra gift boxes for mourners, and on top of that a bill from the funeral home.

“You’ll have people visiting you at home,” the funeral director had explained.

Yoshio looked away from the table, dialed the number for Rairaiten, and ordered two bowls of vegetable ramen. The owner of the store answered, very awkwardly, “Ah, Mr. Ishibashi. Of course. We’ll bring it over right away.”

After he hung up he could still hear Satoko sniffling. No matter how much she sobbed she couldn’t sob out all her pain.

“Satoko.” Yoshio crouched down again on the tatami and called out to his wife’s back as she sat there, leaning toward the shelf on the altar. “Did you know that Yoshino was seeing this college student?”

It felt like the first time since the murder that he’d used his daughter’s name. Satoko lay prostrate before the altar now and didn’t reply. She was no doubt sobbing again; the candle on the shelf was flickering as her body shook.

“Yoshino isn’t the kind of girl they say she is. She wouldn’t go with guys and …”

His voice started to shake and before he knew it, tears were running
down his cheeks. His wife began sobbing aloud, crying with clenched teeth, just as Yoshino used to do as a child.

“I won’t let him get away with it! I don’t care what anyone else says, I won’t allow it!” But his voice wouldn’t work. The words stuck in his throat and he gulped them back.

Some time ago, he couldn’t remember exactly when, Yoshino had made her usual Sunday evening call to them and she and Satoko were on the phone for a long time. The call came in just before Yoshio was about to take a bath, and continued long after he finished, so they must have talked for over an hour.

After his bath Yoshio was enjoying some
shochu
mixed with oolong tea, watching TV and half listening to their conversation. From Satoko’s answers Yoshio could surmise that Yoshino had been asking questions like “When you and Dad first met, who was the first to say ‘I love you’?” and “Since Dad was in a band and girls were really into him, how did you get him to fall for you?” To each of these Satoko gave an honest answer.

Usually at this point Yoshio would yell at them for talking too long, but considering the topic he wasn’t sure what to say, and instead drank at a faster pace than normal.

When Satoko finally hung up he asked, feigning ignorance, what they’d talked about, and Satoko, a happy look on her face, said, “Yoshino has somebody she likes.”

For a second he was taken aback. Yoshino likes a man? But then he thought it was touching, cute even, that she’d phoned her parents asking about how they’d first met.

“She’s going out with somebody?” Yoshio asked brusquely.

“I don’t think they’re actually going out yet,” Satoko replied. “You know, she always tends to act sort of tough in front of boys. She’s kind of stubborn, not so open.… But it sounds like she’s really fallen for this guy. She was crying a bit. She’s still a little girl in a way, isn’t she, calling her parents about this instead of talking with her friends.”

Yoshio didn’t say anything, but instead drained his cup of
shochu
, and Satoko added, “The boy is apparently the son of a family that owns an upscale inn in Yufuin or Beppu or someplace.”

About a half a year ago Yoshio had taken a trip with the barber’s union to an inn at Yufuin and he was remembering what the town was like. The inn they stayed at was a cheap place, but when he went for a stroll he’d run across a famous old inn with a huge entranceway. The owner’s beautiful young wife just happened to be standing at the entrance, and though she recognized from the
yukata
they were wearing that they were staying at a different inn, she casually called out to them. When Yoshio and his group commented on how great the air was in Yufuin, the lovely young woman smiled and said, “Please come back and visit us again!”

That night, as he stared at Satoko’s backside as she washed the dishes, he pictured Yoshino in a kimono standing in the threshold of that nice old inn and smiling at him. He grinned wryly at how his mind had leaped ahead a few steps, but actually it didn’t feel too bad to imagine a future like this for her.

Staring at Satoko now, collapsed in tears in front of the altar, Yoshio again muttered, “He won’t get away with it.…” If he could go back in time, he’d go back to that night, grab the phone away from Satoko, and tell Yoshino, “I don’t want you to have anything to do with that guy!”

It felt awful not to be able to do that. All he’d done was casually imagine his daughter standing there in a kimono, and he’d ended up feeling sad and impotent.

Koki Tsuruta realized that Keigo Masuo had been on his mind for several days.