‘True. But given that he had no reason to go on a trip without informing you first, I don’t think it was,’ Sasagaki said, shaking his head. ‘I think whoever made him disappear was trying to arrange things to attract as little attention as possible. If newspapers started piling up at his door, it wouldn’t take long before his neighbours or the concierge started asking questions.’
‘But if what you’re saying is correct, then whoever did this is a hardened criminal. I mean, we’d have to assume that Mr Imaeda was killed, wouldn’t we?’
An emotionless mask fell over the detective’s expression. ‘I think the chances of him still being alive are extremely small.’
Kazunari breathed out. This conversation was nerve-racking. His heart had been racing for what felt like hours.
‘But there’s still no way to directly connect whoever called the newspapers with Yukiho,’ Kazunari said, even as he wondered at himself. Why defend this woman I’m trying to expose? Maybe, he thought, it was because whatever evils he was trying to lay at her feet, murder seemed like one step too far.
Sasagaki went for his other jacket pocket and pulled out a single photograph.
‘Have you ever seen this man?’
‘May I?’ Kazunari took the photo from him.
The photo showed a young man with a thin face. He had broad shoulders and a cold look to his eyes that went well with the dark jacket he was wearing.
Kazunari had never seen him before in his life. He told the detective as much.
‘I see. That’s too bad.’
‘Who is it?’
‘A man I’ve been looking for. Can I borrow that business card I just gave you?’
Kazunari handed the detective back his business card. Sasagaki flipped the card over and wrote a name on the reverse side: Ryo Kirihara.
‘Who’s that?’
‘A ghost.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Mr Shinozuka, I’d appreciate it if you could commit this face and name to memory. If you should see or hear of him, anywhere, I want you to contact me immediately.’
‘That’s fine, but why should I see him? And you’re the police. Wouldn’t you have better luck putting up Wanted posters?’ Kazunari asked with a shrug.
‘I would, if I had anything to charge him with. And besides, I know the one place he’s most likely to show up – one you’re well acquainted with.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Near Yukiho Karasawa.’ Sasagaki wet his lips. ‘Ever heard about the goby and the shrimp?’
‘Sorry? Shrimp?’ Kazunari blinked.
‘Never mind. Suffice it to say, Yukiho Karasawa and Ryo Kirihara have what biologists call a symbiotic relationship. One can’t live without the other. They’re a pair for life.’
Outside the window it was all rice paddies and farmhouses, occasionally interrupted by large billboards proclaiming the virtues of one manufacturing company or the other. It was monotonous, boring scenery. Noriko would have preferred looking at towns and streets, but they had put walls up as sound barriers wherever the bullet train passed through anywhere really interesting.
Elbow resting on the windowsill, Noriko glanced at the seat next to her. Akiyoshi was sitting motionless, his eyes closed. He wasn’t sleeping, she realised, but engaged in some deep thought.
She looked back out of the window, feeling the tension weighing on her like a lump of lead in her stomach. This trip was a bad idea.
And yet this was probably her last chance to get to know him. She couldn’t believe they had been together so long and she had so little to show for it. It wasn’t for lack of interest on her part, although she did try to maintain the mindset that what was past was past. What mattered was the present. And right now, this man was something very important to her.
The scenery changed slightly. They were in Aichi prefecture now, proud home of Toyota. The number of billboards for car manufacturers increased. Noriko thought about her own hometown. She was from Niigata, on the north-west coast, across the Japan Alps from Tokyo. There had been a small automobile factory near her home, too.
Noriko had first come to Tokyo when she was eighteen, with no plans other than getting into university. She hadn’t wanted to become a pharmacist; she’d just gone with the first programme that accepted her, and right after graduation she had slid into her current job at the hospital on a friend’s recommendation. Those first five years after university had been some of her best, Noriko thought.
In the sixth year, she got a lover. He was an older man, thirty-five, working at the same hospital. It was serious – she was considering marriage. But there was one problem: he had a wife and children. He said he planned on divorce and Noriko had believed him. That was why she got her current apartment. It was a place for him to go once he left his wife. She wanted to give him a place to make a soft landing when he left his home.
But when she set her mind on their future, he started giving her excuses. He was worried about the kids, the alimony payments would be too big, it was better to take it slow, cautiously. Each word came like a blow to Noriko. She wasn’t sleeping with him so she could hear about his family problems.
The split came in an unexpected fashion. She went to work at the hospital one morning to find him missing. When she asked another of the nurses on staff, she said that he’d quit the day before.
‘He was swiping money from the patients,’ she told Noriko in a hushed voice, her eyes gleaming with the joy of the gossip. How much more brightly they would have gleamed if she had known about the man and Noriko.
‘Swiping?’
‘He was making it look like there had been errors when handling the bills, and erasing the records of patients paying for their hospital stays. Then he took the money they paid and put it in his own wallet. After a few incidents of people who had already paid getting delinquency notifications in the mail, they found him out.’
Noriko watched the nurse’s ruby-red lips smile as she felt her world crashing down around her. It was like a nightmare.
‘How much did he take?’ Noriko asked, desperately trying to keep her cool.
‘About two million yen, I heard.’
‘That much? I wonder what he was using it for?’
‘Someone said he was using it to pay back the loan on his apartment. You know he bought right at the peak of the bubble,’ she said, her eyes still bright.
Apparently, the hospital didn’t mean to press charges. As long as he paid the money back they were going to sweep the whole thing under the rug. They didn’t want word getting out to the press.
For the next few days, she heard nothing from him. She had trouble focusing on her work and began making so many slip-ups that her co-workers began to suspect something.
She considered calling him at home, but when she imagined someone other than him picking up the phone, she couldn’t bring herself to dial the number.
One night, very late, her own phone rang. She knew it was him, although his voice on the other end of the line was hushed and thin.
‘How’ve you been?’ he wanted to know.
‘Not good,’ she told him.
‘Yeah, I thought not.’
She could picture his pained smile.
‘You’ve probably already heard, but I won’t be going back to the hospital.’
‘What are you going to do about the money?’
‘I’ll pay it. In instalments. They’re giving me that much.’
‘Can you pay it?’
‘Well, I’m going to have to. There’s no way around it, even if I have to sell the apartment.’
‘It’s two million, right?’
‘Two point four, to be exact.’
‘Can I help?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have some savings. I can probably handle two million.’
‘I don’t know —’
‘No, you could pay it off, and then you could leave —’
Your wife, she was going to say, but he cut her o
ff.
‘No, I can’t.’
She gasped. ‘Can’t what?’
‘I can’t let you help me like that. I need to do this myself.’
‘But —’
‘My wife,’ he said, ‘we borrowed money from her father to buy this place.’
‘How much?’
‘Ten million.’
Noriko felt a lump in her stomach. A bead of sweat trickled from her armpit.
‘If I’m going to get a divorce, I have to do something about that first.’
‘But you never said anything about that before.’
‘What good would that have done?’
‘What does your wife think about all this?’
‘What do you care?’ he said, sounding displeased.
‘I care. Is she angry?’
Noriko was hoping that his wife would be so angry he might be forced to get a divorce. But his answer surprised her.
‘Heh. She apologised.’
‘To you? Why?’
‘She was the one who wanted this apartment in the first place. I resisted quite a bit at first. The loan was going to be too difficult for us to pay back, I thought. Which is how we got to the current situation.’
‘Oh…’
‘She’s going to get a part-time job to help pay the money back.’
What a perfect wife. ‘So,’ she said after a moment, ‘I guess I can’t expect anything to happen with us any time soon.’
He was silent for a while. She heard him sigh. ‘Can you just stop it with that?’ he said.
‘With what?’
‘That pretending-to-be-angry thing you do. You knew the deal as well as I did.’
‘What deal?’
‘I was never going to get a divorce. That was just part of the game we were playing.’
Noriko was speechless. She wanted to get angry, to tell him how serious she had been. Except she knew how miserable she’d feel the moment she said it. Her pride wouldn’t let her utter a word – which was of course exactly what he wanted.
Then she heard a voice behind him asking who he was calling at this time of night. It must be his wife.
‘It’s a friend; they called because they were worried about what’s going on,’ he told her.
A moment later he spoke again, his voice quieter than before. ‘Right, anyway, so that’s that,’ he said.
That’s what? Noriko wanted to say. But the emptiness that had spread to fill her entire body robbed her of her voice. Seeing that his work was done, he hung up without waiting for her reply.
It was the last time they spoke. She never even saw him again after that.
She got rid of all of the things he had left in her apartment. His toothbrush, his razor blade, shaving cream, condoms.
The only thing she forgot to throw out was the ashtray, the dust accumulating on it like the scar tissue forming over the wound he had left in her heart.
Noriko didn’t see anyone for a while after that. It wasn’t that she had decided to go it alone. Rather, she wanted more than ever to get married. She wanted to find the right man, have kids, and live the quiet, family life.
About a year after breaking up with the man from the hospital she paid a visit to a matchmaking service, intrigued by their new computer system that promised to help find the perfect match. She decided she could only find her life partner by cutting romance out of the equation. She had had it with romance.
A middle-aged woman with a kind smile asked her questions and typed her responses into the computer. Several times she paused to assure Noriko not to worry, she would find the right man.
As promised, the matchmaking service started introducing men they thought she would like. She looked at the results and chose six of them to actually meet. Five of them she only met once. They were the kind of people who made you depressed just seeing them. Disillusioned. Some of them looked nothing at all like their photographs. One guy had registered with the service as being unmarried, but it turned out he had a kid.
One man out of the six, however, she met for two more dates after the first. He was a little over forty, but serious enough, and Noriko started contemplating the idea of marriage. It was on the third date that she learned that he was living with his mother, who had dementia. Apparently he had specifically requested a woman with ‘medical experience’ on his application to the company.
‘I wish you the best,’ she said, and left him. She was being made a fool of. Not just her, but every woman.
After the sixth introduction, she stopped her contract with the matchmaking service, feeling as if she had wasted precious months of her life.
Six months later, she met Akiyoshi.
It was evening by the time they reached Osaka. They checked in at their hotel, and Akiyoshi took Noriko out for a tour of the town. Despite his hesitation at taking her when she had first proposed the trip, he seemed unusually generous today. Maybe, Noriko thought, it was the effect of coming home after a long time away.
The two of them walked downtown by the famous Dotonbori Moat and ate takoyaki octopus skewers – the local speciality. It was the first time they had ever taken anything resembling a trip. And while Noriko was still uneasy about what was to come, it made her happy. It was her first time ever in this part of the country.
‘Is the place where you grew up far from here?’ she asked as they shared beers at a restaurant overlooking the moat.
‘Only five stations away by train.’
‘That’s close.’
‘Osaka isn’t all sprawled out like Tokyo is,’ Akiyoshi said, looking out the window. A large neon sign for Glico chocolates shone outside.
‘Say,’ Noriko ventured after a moment of hesitation, ‘would you take me there?’
He looked up at her, a wrinkle forming between his eyebrows.
‘I’d like to see the town where you lived.’
‘I think we’ve done enough touristy stuff.’
‘But —’
‘I have work to do,’ Akiyoshi said, looking away. His mood was clearly dampened.
‘I’m sorry…’ Noriko said, her head hanging.
They finished their beers in silence. Noriko watched the people busily crossing a bridge over the moat. It was a few minutes after eight o’clock. The Osaka night was just getting started.
‘It’s a worthless place,’ Akiyoshi said abruptly.
Noriko looked over at him. He still had his eyes out the window.
‘A dull town. Dusty, dirty, filled with worthless people who squirm like so many insects. But their eyes are sharp, beady. A town where no one lets their guard down, not ever.’ He finished his beer. ‘You still want to go there?’
‘I do.’
Akiyoshi thought for a moment, then putting down his beer glass he stuck his hand into his jeans pocket and pulled out a single ten-thousand-yen bill. ‘You mind paying?’