They’d arranged to meet in the lobby of a hotel next to the Fukuoka Dome. A long bench encircled the spacious lobby, and it was nearly filled with families staying at the hotel.

Mia showed up ten minutes late. She didn’t quite live up to the photo she’d e-mailed him, but to a forty-two-year-old bachelor like Hayashi, this young girl was still as cute as a ladybug. There was nothing hesitant about her. She pulled out a taxi receipt for the ride over to the hotel and asked him to reimburse her. He’d told her to take a taxi when she’d said that the hotel was far away for her, but still, when she pulled out the receipt and demanded payment before she’d even said hello, it struck Hayashi that their meeting was definitely a business transaction.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Mia told him. Hayashi decided to skip going to a coffee shop first, as he’d been planning to do, and they drove directly to a love hotel.

This wasn’t the first time Hayashi had done this. He handed over the thirty thousand yen he’d promised and they wasted no time going up to their cramped little guest room.

It was obvious that this wasn’t the first time for Mia, either. As soon as she got the cash, she stripped off her clothes and, just in her underwear, asked, “Okay with you if I order some drinks?” and called the front desk. Her ribs showed just below her full breasts, but her belly had a slight roll of fat.

Hayashi had never been with a prostitute, but watching her seated on the bed phoning the front desk, to him that’s what she looked like. She seemed to enjoy their time in bed. Her skin and vagina got so wet he couldn’t see it as just an act done for money.

An amateur pretending to be a prostitute, or an amateur prostitute-Hayashi couldn’t decide which was more erotic. Maybe it didn’t matter, they were women all the same, but Hayashi couldn’t help thinking that there was something very different about the two.

The talk-show report on the murder at Mitsuse Pass finished, and Hayashi finally put down his piece of toast, a neat half-moon of tooth marks from the single bite he’d taken carved out of it.

Over the past couple of days he’d mulled over this notion that a girl he’d met just once had been killed by someone, and though he could understand it on a conceptual level, emotionally he couldn’t absorb the reality.

If he were to compare it to anything, it was maybe like the mixed feelings he’d had when he saw a girl from his junior high school days appear on local TV as a newscaster, the mixture of ridicule and envy he’d felt when he couldn’t believe she was actually on TV reporting the news. Mia was no newscaster, however. The only reason she was on TV was because somebody had strangled her and dumped her body out in the cold.

The criminal must be somebody just like me, Hayashi thought. She met another guy like me online, the only difference being that this other guy turned out to be a murderer.

Hayashi didn’t know if he was trying to justify, or ridicule, himself. Of course I didn’t kill her, he thought, but the murdered girl is someone I knew, and was killed by someone very much like me. The murderer must have viewed her as an amateur playing at being a prostitute. If he’d seen her as an amateur prostitute he might never have felt like killing her.

He was going to be late for class, so he switched off the TV and adjusted his tie before heading out. That’s when a knock came at the front door. Thinking it must be a poorly timed delivery, Hayashi gruffly yanked open the door. Two men in suits stood there, like a wall blocking his way.

“Kanji Hayashi?”

At first he couldn’t figure out which one had spoken. Both men were around thirty, with identical crew cuts.

“Uh… yeah. Yes.”

He knew immediately that it was about the murder. He’d known this day would come. Once they examined her cell phone, his number would surely come out.

“We have a few things we’d like to ask you…”

The two detectives spoke almost simultaneously. “I understand,” Hayashi said, nodding quietly, and hurriedly added, “No, that isn’t what I mean. You’re here about the murder at Mitsuse Pass, right?”

The two glanced at each other, then shot him a sharp look.

“I know her, but I don’t have anything to do with what happened.”

Hayashi let them come in and shut the door. The cramped entrance was littered with shoes and the three hulking men stood there awkwardly, trying not to step on them.

“I knew you’d be coming. You found out about me on her cell phone, right? About her and me having a, what should I say? A friendship.”

Hayashi spoke without any hesitation. Ever since he heard about the murder he’d been thinking about what he should say. The two crew-cut detectives listened silently, exchanging an occasional glance. Their faces were expressionless and it was hard to tell whether they believed him.

“I met her online about three months ago,” Hayashi went on. “We went out on one date, but that was it.”

“A date?” the detective with the polka-dot tie asked, smiling wryly.

“There’s nothing illegal about it. She was an adult and it was consensual… And the money was… something I earned on the stock market and I just gave it to her so she could have some spending money, that’s all…”

Spittle flew out as Hayashi spoke. One of the detectives stepped way back, crushing a discarded sneaker. “Take it easy,” he said, trying to calm him down while looking around for a better spot to stand.

As he looked up at the two tall detectives, Hayashi began to suspect that he wasn’t the first man they’d questioned who knew her.

“Let’s not get into the question of this spending money right now. But I do want to make one thing clear: we don’t know the contents of e-mails and conversations from cell-phone numbers we’ve retrieved.”

The polka-dot-tie detective finally pulled out his notebook, flicking it open in front of Hayashi. “Where were you this past Sunday? At about ten p.m.?” The detective, for some reason, rubbed his eyebrows as he asked this.

Here we go, Hayashi thought, and let out a deep breath.

“I was at work then. I teach at a juku, and finished my last class at ten-thirty. For an hour after that I worked with some colleagues writing a supplementary curriculum for the winter break. Then I went out to a bar and left there at three-thirty. On the way home I stopped by a video-rental place. I still have the video here.”

They finished in under ten minutes. The detectives smiled and left, and without realizing it, Hayashi sank to the floor where he stood.

He’d been bold enough when he told them about his alibi for Sunday, but when the detective told him because of the nature of the crime they’d have to investigate his workplace, Hayashi pleaded with them not to. “Look, I’ve worked there twenty years,” he said. “It will put me in a real spot if you do that. Can’t you look into it in secret? Like, ask the owner of the bar, or use some other excuse to question my colleagues?” He nearly broke down in tears.

The detectives gave a noncommittal reply and left. It didn’t look as though they really suspected him, but neither did they seem to care about how this might affect his future.

Everything he’d told the detectives was the truth. But he’d never realized how hard it was to tell the truth. Telling a lie would have been so much easier on me, Hayashi thought. But he was late for work. He’d just focus on doing his job, and if any of this happened to leak out, he’d apologize and promise never to do it again. And there was one other thing he could most definitely swear to. That he never, ever, had any sexual interest in the elementary school girls who studied at his juku.

He found he could talk again, though he was still frozen, slumped to the floor.

The detectives hadn’t given him an exact number, but had indicated that they’d questioned other men who’d had a relationship with the girl. These men had signed on to an online site for fun and had got to know her, and now they were at their wits’ end. It was the same with him-he couldn’t believe any of them had hooked up with her in order to kill her. But the fact remained: she’d been murdered.