Year of the Talking Dog: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 2) (11 page)

I hurry on. Two windowless flights for every floor. By the time I count 14 I’m sweating. Knowing that I’m high up is enough to give me the shakes, but when I come out into the corridor on the seventh floor, it’s so huge, even the row of outside windows isn’t too scary, revealing the lights of Tokyo all around. I pass a door marked “studio” and then I’m in a single room filled with white light. There are Japanese people all around, but no one pays me any attention. I try to work out what kind of order there is in the mess. Cigarette smoke fills the corridor and a man who looks like a goldfish is sitting next to a nest of tables. He has big eyes behind glasses that went out of fashion before I was born. He wears a white silk shirt and brown tie. His hair is slicked back. He’s deep in thought about the next programme or else he’s daydreaming—it’s hard to tell—but I think it best to give him a wide berth. He doesn’t have a pass pinned to his shirt, which could mean he’s a rebel who hates authority or that he’s so important everyone knows his name. Around him are a mixture of Japanese men and women and some foreigners. I don’t want to be around him.

A great white-haired Japanese man in Bermuda shorts and polo shirt sits cross-legged in a chair behind a pile of printouts and two computer screens. But his attention is on a baseball game on a television perched on a brown filing cabinet against the wall. The sports department? One team wins, one loses. I don’t get the point. I wouldn’t know how to fit in there.

A few computers are on behind piles of papers, newspapers and pictures of family. A handful of foreigners: a woman and two youngish men are the only people in one of the newsroom who weren’t with the group of foreigners I saw in the corridor downstairs. I don’t belong in either area, with the foreigners or the Japanese. But the computers hold the information, which is what I need more than anything else right now. If I sit on the Japanese side, I might be exposed as a fraud if someone just looks at my face and I’d be out of luck before I have even begun. That leaves the foreigners. They might think I’m Japanese rather than Western. If I don’t speak any English to them I figure I can carry on unnoticed. If they speak Japanese to me, I’ll just play dumb. That isn’t a stretch for me.

I sit down at a nest of computers at a desk closer to the foreigners than the Japanese. I try to turn on a computer, but it prompts me for a password. I didn’t think of that.

A Japanese man passes by carrying a printout, he has a slight tremor and his head keeps nodding. I can’t tell if he’s greeting me, checking me out or has the beginnings of Parkinson’s, it’s impossible to tell, but I think it best to offer pity. I crease my brow and nod as wisely as I can. I try my best to communicate sympathy: “I know what you’re feeling. I, too, belong here and I, too, suffer.”

It must have worked, because he looks straight through me and leans over the white woman with a big nose and red cheeks. His hands are shaking. She’s staring into the distance. He’s leaning on the desk now with both hands. He’s talking in dull tones, but her voice gets louder.

“I don’t understand. It’s totally unclear. Who is doing the action? Why are they doing it? Do you see, in English we need subjects and verbs and people doing things. And in news stories, we need, er, news.”

“It’s a word-for word translation; it’s perfectly clear what it means. It’s not my fault if you cannot understand the nuances of Japanese. Some things are untranslatable.”

“Some things are not stories.”

“Some things you will never understand. You are a woman and not Japanese.”

“How very observant of you, Tonkatsu-san. You might even make a journalist one day, Lord knows you might want to consider a second career. Translating is just a hobby for you, eh?”   

“My name is Tokatsu. Tonkatsu is fried pork cutlet. Tokatsu is my name. Either you are very stupid or you are making a joke at me. It’s not right to make jokes at me. I will not stand for it. I’ll tell buchō you were unhelpful. You can go back to teaching English at the clam school.”

“Cram school. Yeah, sometimes I wonder if I ever left.” She sighs. “OK, keep the translation your way.”

“Thank you.”

He brushes past me.

“… anytime Tonkatsu-san. Enjoy your desk dinner! I’m out of here for dinner. Got a hot date with my Indian curry,” she shouts after him. She gets up and leaves. I bury my head in a Japanese newspaper and pretend to be studying it closely.  

Then she’s gone along with the other two foreigners. I don’t know how long a dinner break will last, or if there is a restaurant in this building, but I figure I have at least 30 minutes or at best one hour to find what I need to know. I hurry to her terminal. As long as the screensaver doesn’t come on, I won’t need to type a password.

I look at her screen; it’s some kind of word processing program. There is a world wire page updating itself like a Twitter feed. There is a “search” option. I type in “missing girl Aoi” but it opens a file about blue movies, whatever they are. I close the file and look around the desktop. I find an icon called “archives”. I click on there and type in missing girl Aoi. Still no good.

I take out my missing girl leaflet.

She had disappeared on February 3rd, 1996, from Abiko. So I type for news from Abiko from that date to three months after. This search gets me two news stories. The first is a brief:

CHIBA CITY: — Chiba Prefectural Police have appealed for information from members of the public in the ongoing search for a girl, aged five, who went missing from her front garden in Higashi-Abiko, Chiba Prefecture, on Tuesday while waiting for a kindergarten bus. Police have interviewed the distraught parents and have issued this picture of her. Police believe she wandered away from her home in the Kounoyama wooded area of the city and are combing the woods nearby.

The second was even briefer:

CHIBA CITY: — Police have interviewed the father of a missing Abiko kindergartener. She went missing last month. Police interviewed the father, Mr Ishihara, 35, a scientist at NEC, specialising in the study of DNA.   

And that is it. I broaden my search and I include all of Chiba, then Japan, but there are no more stories on it. I look up at the clock on the computer. I’ve eaten up thirty minutes already. The journalists might be back any second, and I don’t fancy trying to explain myself. I’ll have to think of a cover story, or else be someone completely different.

Then I find a story from two years ago. Again another brief.

CHIBA:
 
A Chiba mother has issued a heart-felt plea to members of the public for any information on the disappearance of her daughter.

Aoi Ishihara, 5, went missing while waiting for a bus on the way to kindergarten. Mrs Ito said she would not rest until she knew the truth.

Strange. Her mother is Ito, not Ishihara. And no mention of a father this time.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The white woman is back. With the two security guards and the bucho.

On the TV is a news report: An imposter with Hikaru Hayashi’s ID had infiltrated a pop show. A blurry version of my face is showing on the screen. All eyes in the newsroom are on me.

“I can explain.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

But I can’t explain. At least, not in a way the journalists can understand. Or that even I can understand.

The NHK people take the press pass from me and escort me to the entrance where a police car picks me up.

Uncle Kentaro is still angry with me for getting into trouble and having to pick me up from the police station in Shibuya. Detective Watanabe takes notes and tells me he’s very disappointed in me too. But I’ll tell you what I really think. I think Uncle Kentaro didn’t like it that it was really his fault. I wouldn’t have gone off to Tokyo if he hadn’t given me the leaflet about Aoi. Or maybe it’s the fact that he hates authority. He pretends he’s not at home when the man from NHK comes to the door asking for the TV licence fee. But he’s like that sometimes, can’t face up to his own responsibilities for all his talk of doing the right thing. That’s why he drinks. So, here I am once again, working through my Japanese homework, only this time Uncle Kentaro is stricter than ever. But if the whole thing hadn’t been his fault, he might not have taken me back in, so there’s that. But now he makes me make another promise: no more investigations into Aoi. Or anyone. Just study and promise to accept Japan as my saviour or something.

I promise that to Uncle Kentaro. It’s an easy promise to make. It’s keeping promises when you don’t really believe them — that’s the difficult bit.
 

I have plenty of time to think about what I’ve found. And what I’ve found are more questions. I don’t know much about the pre-internet age, but it’s got to be odd that a five-year-old goes missing and there are only three stories in 15 years about her. Also, that the mother’s name changes without explanation from Ishihara to Ito. And, how does a five-year-old go missing while waiting for a bus? Doesn’t the mother always stay with her kid until she gets on the bus?

Something doesn’t add up.  

Where can I go from here? Which makes me wonder. Where had Aoi been going that morning? When Uncle Kentaro isn’t paying attention, I check the internet on my phone for kindergartens in the Abiko area. That nets five results. I look on the websites of each. Two started up in the last ten years, leaving two that were established before Aoi went missing and one that started in the year after she went missing.

So that narrows it down to two. I look over their websites. It’s like I’m looking for an out-of-date carton of natto in a poorly-lit supermarket. What do I think I can find now, that couldn’t be found 20 years ago?

But I do have one advantage. This is the closest thing I have to a hometown, I know this place. So I have to be the cop. Travel back in time to imagine my way around. I just need one thing to be out of place. One thing. I read through the policies of the kindergarten schools on Google Translate. The best that I can tell, one was a Buddhist school that emphasised discipline and dedication. Exactly the kind of place I would have hated. Their website has a picture of kids in blue empuku uniforms.
 

The uniforms.

I compare the picture of Aoi in the police leaflet to the uniforms on the website. Nothing like it. Aoi was wearing a grey tweed jacket with beret. I check the other website. This was for Fuji Kindergarten. Their students all wear purple uniforms.

What am I missing?

I look again at the two likely candidates. It’s possible that they had changed their uniforms in the last 20 years, but I doubt it. Why bother? Japanese don’t change anything unless they have to. That left me with nothing. There’s no point in looking at the other kindergartens; they hadn’t existed when Aoi had disappeared.

Wrong! Chigau
,
as they say in Japanese. But chigau actually means “different”. Saying “wrong” is too severe in Japanese. Different is more acceptable. Completely different.

Like a kindergarten that lost a child. That would be the end of the business. No mother could send their daughter to such a place. It would have to close down. Or move. Or re-open under a different name.

I look again at the website for the school that had started in 1997, the year after Aoi disappeared. Their website is all whites and pinks. That goes well with their name, Sakura Kindergarten — Cherry Blossom Kindergarten. But their uniforms are not pink and white. They are blue and grey, the same as Aoi’s. That doesn’t make sense. If you want to change your image, a change of colours is easy enough, but they should have changed the uniforms, too. Unless the change was made in a hurry and people had already bought blue and grey kindergarten uniforms. Don’t give existing customers a reason to quit. And then over time, it becomes easy enough to keep the same uniform. Maybe. Or maybe I’m completely wrong.
 

I open the Sakura Kindergarten website on my phone. The evidence is staring me in the face. One of their pictures has an old guy waving from the big yellow bus. And inside they were all wearing blue and grey uniforms.

Uncle Kentaro is sitting cross-legged, sucking on a Lucky Seven, staring absently at the TV. It’s the commercial break between baseball innings. A J-pop girl band is on a TV commercial singing and dancing, waving cans of coffee around at businessmen.
 

I have an idea.

“Uncle Kentaro? You know how you have been pestering me to think of my future in Japan? I’ve been thinking. I could teach English.”

“You’d never be allowed to teach in a Japanese High School, you need a degree. And you’re too young for the chain schools to take you. Plus, you wouldn’t last ten minutes following their rules.”

“I was thinking of teaching one-to-one myself. Teaching to school kids and housewives. Anybody who wants to practise conversational English.”

“You’d need a classroom, some place to teach.”

“I was thinking more like a coffee shop.”

“Possible. How would you find your students?”

“I’ll put posters around on lampposts near coffee shops. Or, you know, kindergartens.”

“Good idea. Give it a go.”

I smile.

I send a text to Firefly.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Me and Firefly sit in the shade of a bamboo patch watching an old man. We don’t talk, but that is not hard to do since my Japanese is still no better than a five-year-old’s. Just perhaps a little more polite. Firefly is carrying a stack of photocopies I made. They shout “Hana’s English Academy! Chat with a native speaker! Only ¥2,000 and the price of a coffee per hour!” and have a picture of me and my mobile phone number. I grimace at my picture. It’s from a year ago when I had long hair. I’m smiling like an idiot, but Uncle Kentaro said I had to have a silly picture if I wanted to be taken seriously.