At the station, and in the subway on the way to Tenjin, Keigo continued to be the subject of conversation. They speculated on which actor he most resembled, one of them mentioning that she looked up his family’s inn on the Internet and saw that it had a separate cottage with an outdoor natural hot spring.
Yoshino was proud that she was the only one Keigo had asked for her e-mail address when they’d met in the bar. And that pride had led her, when Sari had first asked if he’d sent her a message, to suddenly lie: “Yeah, he did. I’m going to see him this weekend.” When the weekend came, she had her two friends check her hair and makeup, and they gave her a cheery send-off as she left the apartment. The white lie she’d told had ballooned into something out of her control, and she wound up taking the Nishitetsu line back to her parents’ home to kill the day there.
It was true that Keigo had contacted her. But she was the one who had to take the initiative. Still, if she sent him a message he’d always reply. I really want to go to Universal Studios, she’d e-mailed once, and he said that he did, too, adding, she noted, an exclamation mark. But this didn’t lead to an invitation to go together. Despite the exchanged e-mails, since that first chance meeting at the bar, Yoshino had never laid eyes on Keigo Masuo.
They were still talking about Keigo even after they entered the gyoza restaurant in Nakasu and sat down to a meal of chicken wings, potato salad, and the main dish, grilled gyoza, washed down by draft beer. Mako was envious of Yoshino for having a steady boyfriend, while Sari, half jealous, cautioned Yoshino to make sure he didn’t play around with anyone else.
“Yoshino, you still okay on time?” Mako said, and Yoshino glanced at the wall clock. The hands behind the greasy glass face showed nine p.m.
“No problem,” she replied. “He’s going to see some friends afterward, so we can only see each other for a few minutes.”
Mako sighed predictably. “Of course you want to see him, even if it’s just for a short time.”
Yoshino didn’t correct her misunderstanding but added with a shrug, “And besides, I’ve got work tomorrow.”
The man Yoshino had plans to meet that night, though, wasn’t Keigo Masuo. Irritated that Keigo wasn’t replying to her recent messages, out of boredom she’d registered with a dating site and she was instead going to meet someone she’d met online.
As Yoshino, Sari, and Mako discussed Keigo, about fifteen kilometers away, on a curve over Mitsuse Pass, the man Yoshino was going to meet had pulled his car over onto the gravel shoulder of the road. It was the kind of forsaken stretch of highway that hardly merited being called an interstate.
As he had driven over the white center line on the narrow road, it rose up in the halogen headlights and looked for an instant like a writhing white snake. The snake stretched out in the distance as if to bind up the pass. Trussed up as tight as it could get, the pass twisted from side to side, making the leaves on the trees appear to shake and tremble.
Far in the distance, in the pitch-black background of this road over the pass, lay the gaping mouth of the Mitsuse Tunnel. Farther down that road, the lights of Hakata would come into view.
The headlights of the stopped car illuminated the dust and, beyond that, palely lit up the surrounding woods. A single moth flitted across the light.
From the Saga Yamato interchange to here was one sharp curve after another, and every time the man turned his wheel over, a ten-yen coin on the dashboard slid back and forth.
The coin was change he got when he stopped for gas at a station just before the pass. Usually he’d just prepay a certain amount, ¥3,000 or ¥3,500, but the attendant was cute so he couldn’t help showing off, and told her to fill it up with premium. That cost ¥5,990, and after he paid with thousand-yen notes, he was left with just a single ¥5,000 bill in his wallet.
The gas attendant shoved the nozzle into his tank. The man watched her the whole time in his side mirror. As the tank filled, the girl walked around to the front and cleaned the windshield, her generous breasts smashed against the glass. The girl’s cheeks were red in the cold night wind. The gas station, alone in the middle of nowhere, was as bright as day.
The man recalled Yoshino’s voice on the phone a few days earlier.
“I have a date with some friends for dinner on Sunday, but if we can meet kind of late it’d be okay…”
“That works for me.”
He picked up the ten-yen coin on the dashboard and stuck it in his pocket. As he did, his fingertips brushed against his stiff penis. Thoughts of Yoshino hadn’t given him an erection, but all the swaying back and forth on the sharp curves had.
The man’s name was Yuichi Shimizu. He was twenty-seven, lived in Nagasaki City, and worked in construction. He and Yoshino had gone on two dates the month before, but since then, he’d had trouble getting in touch with her. Now, though, he was on his way to see her. He was supposed to meet her at ten, but even with the time it took to get over the pass he figured he had plenty of time. He was going to meet her at the place he’d dropped her off last time, the main gate of Higashi Park in Fukuoka. He remembered seeing a huge bronze statue when he’d pulled over.
Yuichi opened his door and swung his legs out the driver’s side. He’d customized the car so it rode low and his legs had no trouble reaching the ground.
It was a perfect time to take a break and have a cigarette, but Yuichi didn’t smoke. At the construction site, when the other workers took a break and all of them started puffing away, he’d sometimes join them for lack of something else to do, but he much preferred just closing his eyes and letting time drift by.
The warm air from inside the car rushed out, brushing against his neck. In the distance he could see the tunnel exit, but nothing else with any color. Still, he could see how the darkness that enveloped the pass came in many shades: the nearly purplish darkness of the mountain ridge, the whitish darkness surrounding the cloud-hidden moon, the blackish darkness covering the woods nearby.
Yuichi closed his eyes for a bit, then opened them to compare the difference between that sort of darkness and the darkness that surrounded him; as he opened his eyes he spotted the small headlights of a car climbing the pass. The lights disappeared when it rounded a curve, only to reappear again. The lights were dim, but still enough to illuminate the white guardrail and the orange mirror set up on each curve.
Just then a small truck appeared from the direction of the tunnel and flew right by him, leaving behind the stink of farm animals. The sudden bestial smell hit him like a jellyfish stinging his nose.
Yuichi closed his door to shut out the smell, pushed back his seat, and lay down. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and checked to see if there were any messages from Yoshino, but there weren’t. When he opened the screen, though, he saw her photo, clad only in her underwear. Her face was off the picture, but the rest of her body appeared clearly, even down to a small telltale pimple on her shoulder.
This one photo had cost him three thousand yen.
“Hey, stop it!”
They were in a love hotel built on reclaimed land in Hakata Bay, and when Yuichi pointed his cell-phone camera at Yoshino, she quickly reached for her white shirt and hid her chest. She was just about to put the shirt on; grabbing it so abruptly got it all wrinkled. “Now look what you’ve made me do,” she moaned.
Their room in the love hotel was a cheap, claustrophobic place that rented for ¥4,320 for three hours. Its concrete walls were wallpapered, the rug was shoddy, and although the pipe-frame bed did have a mattress cover, the quilt on top was, for some unknown reason, one size too small for the double bed. The window didn’t open. It overlooked a highway overpass, not the harbor.