It came to him all of a sudden, as he was exchanging messages with the girl, that she was a part of this scene, walking down the very streets he was picturing. It made perfect sense, but Yuichi, who only knew these streets from the window of his car, had no idea how this plodding scenery appeared to someone who actually lived there and walked down those streets. You walk and walk and nothing around you ever changes. A slow-motion kind of scenery.

These days I haven’t talked to anybody.

He looked down and saw these words on the screen. They weren’t words someone had e-mailed him. Without realizing it, he’d typed the message.

He was about to erase the message, but added All I do is go back and forth between home and work-and after a moment’s hesitation, he sent it.

He’d never felt lonely before. He hadn’t even known what it meant. But ever since that night he’d felt terribly lonely. Loneliness, he thought, must mean being anxious for somebody to listen to you. He’d never had anything he really wanted to tell someone else, before this. But now he did. And he wanted someone to tell it to.

“Tamayo! I might be late tonight.”

Mitsuyo was still on her futon as she heard Tamayo behind the sliding door getting ready to go to work. She listened to these sounds, and tried to decide whether to voice this thought. Finally, when Tamayo was at the front door pulling on her shoes, she did.

“Inventory?” she heard Tamayo say from the front door.

“Uh… yeah. No, that’s not it. I’m taking the day off… I just have something I need to do, so I’ll be back late.”

Mitsuyo crawled out of bed, slid open the sliding door, and peeked out toward the front door. Tamayo had her shoes on and was standing there, hand on the doorknob.

“Something to do?” Tamayo asked. “What do you mean? And what time will you be back? You won’t need dinner?”

Her flurry of questions was more perfunctory, and didn’t mean she was actually interested. She’d already turned the knob and had one foot out the door.

“If you’re getting up, then I don’t have to lock the door, right? Jeez, why do I have to go to work on a Saturday?”

Without waiting for a reply, Tamayo shut the door.

“See you later,” Mitsuyo called out to the door.

Tamayo had left the electric rug on, so as Mitsuyo crawled out of her futon her palms and knees felt the warmth. She held the calendar and traced the green 22 with her fingertips.

The weekend was usually the busiest time at her store, and she hadn’t taken Saturday and Sunday off in a row like this since that time a year and a half ago.

It had been Golden Week, the string of holidays at the end of April and beginning of May, and she’d taken off a few vacation days she’d accumulated so she could stay over at a former high school friend’s place in Hakata. Her friend’s husband was back in his hometown for a Buddhist memorial service for a relative, and the two young women were looking forward to a night of chatting. Mitsuyo also wanted to hold her friend’s two-year-old son.

The bus for Tenjin left from in front of the Saga railway station. She’d bicycled to the station, arriving a little past twelve-thirty, ten minutes before the express bus to Hakata was scheduled to leave. She was in line to buy her ticket when her friend phoned. “My son has a fever,” she explained. It was kind of last minute, but if your child’s sick there’s nothing you can do about it. Without any fuss, Mitsuyo got out of the line and, sulking a bit, went home.

She was back in her apartment, trying to figure out how she would spend these vacation days she’d wasted. The TV was on but Mitsuyo wasn’t paying much attention to it when a news flash came on the screen. At first she expected it to be about a girl who’d been kidnapped years ago, and was in the news lately, that they’d found her. The story had always frightened her, and a shiver ran through her.

But the news flash was about a bus hijacking. For a second she was relieved, but then she couldn’t believe her eyes. On the screen flashed the name of the highway bus she’d been about to board.

“What the-?” Mitsuyo yelled in the empty apartment. She hurriedly switched to another channel and there was a live report on the hijacking. “My God. I can’t believe this…” She hadn’t planned to say this aloud, but the words just came out.

The scene on TV was taken from a helicopter shadowing the bus, which was tearing down the Chugoku Highway. Above the clamor of the helicopter a reporter was excitedly shouting out, “Ah, that was a close one! It just passed a truck.”

Mitsuyo’s cell phone, on her table, rang at that moment, the call from her friend in Hakata.

“Where are you?” the friend suddenly asked.

“I’m fine,” Mitsuyo replied. “I’m at home.”

Her friend had just heard about the hijacking. She was sure Mitsuyo must have given up and gone home, but just in case she decided to call and check. Phone in hand, Mitsuyo couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. The bus sped up and barely slipped by several unsuspecting cars.

“I… I was supposed to be on that bus. On that same bus,” Mitsuyo muttered as she stared at the screen.

Her friend was relieved, and after hanging up Mitsuyo continued to stare at the TV. The announcer gave the bus’s time of departure and route. There was no doubt about it-this was the bus she had almost boarded. The bus she saw outside as she was waiting in line to buy a ticket. The bus the old lady in front of her took, the one the giddy high school girls behind were riding.

She sat transfixed by the images. “We know nothing about the situation inside the bus,” the announcer kept repeating, and Mitsuyo felt like shouting, “But the old lady in front of me is in there! And the girls in line behind me!”

The TV kept showing the roof of the bus barreling down the highway. Mitsuyo started to feel as if she herself were in the bus. She could see the scenery rushing by the window. The old woman from the ticket line was seated across the aisle from her, her face ashen. A few seats in front were the two high school girls, pressed close to each other, sobbing.

The bus didn’t look as if it was going to slow down. It blasted past one car after another filled with families out enjoying the Golden Week holidays.

In her mind, Mitsuyo desperately wanted to move from her aisle seat to the window seat. She’d been ordered not to look toward the front, but her eyes drifted there. A young man holding a knife was standing next to the driver. Every once in a while he’d stab the foam rubber of a nearby seat, and shout out something unintelligible.

“The bus… the bus is pulling into a rest area!” The reporter’s yell brought Mitsuyo back to reality.

The bus had overshot its original destination, Tenjin, and had taken the Kyushu Expressway and now the Chugoku Highway. A patrol car had led the bus into the rest area, where it pulled to a stop. Mitsuyo was watching this scene on TV, but somehow she saw the scene from the interior of the bus, the police outside surrounding them.

“Someone… someone appears to be injured inside! Stabbed and seriously wounded!” The reporter’s voice said over the scene of the spacious parking lot.

If she looked to her side, Mitsuyo would see the old woman there, stabbed. Mitsuyo knew she was in her apartment watching all this on TV, but she was too frightened to look.

Ever since she was a child, she’d felt unlucky. The world was filled with lots of different people, but if you divided them into two groups-the lucky and the unlucky-she was definitely one of the latter. And she was surely in the unluckiest cohort of all. It was a conviction she’d had her entire life.

As if to shake off these memories of the hijacking Mitsuyo opened the window. The warm air inside the apartment rushed out, the cold winter wind flowing in and brushing against her body. Mitsuyo shivered once, stretched, and took a deep breath.