As he came to the traffic circle in front of the station, Keigo took shelter from the wind behind a direction billboard. In front of him, crowds of people were streaming up from the underground shopping mall into the station.
Yesterday he’d read through a few of the newspapers at the sauna but didn’t find any reports of the murder. The talk shows had spent so much time covering it, but now they’d moved on to covering another murder that had taken place a few days ago: a housewife who’d grown exhausted taking care of her sick father-in-law had killed him. Not a single word about the murder at Mitsuse Pass.
Behind the direction billboard Keigo lit a cigarette. He took a puff and suddenly realized how hungry he was. He stamped out the cigarette and went down to the underground mall. Keigo walked down one step at a time, weaving his way through the hordes of people ascending the stairs toward the station. With each step, two thoughts came to him: At this rate I’ll never be able to escape. But I just don’t get it.
He’d never felt like he wanted to kill that girl. He’d never even wanted to have anything to do with her. But there was no doubt about it-he was the one who’d driven her to that freezing pass, and he was the one who had left her there.
As soon as Yoshino Ishibashi had climbed into his car on the street along Higashi Park, Keigo had started driving. He’d said they could go to test their courage at Mitsuse Pass, but soon after he started out he regretted it. Especially when Yoshino began talking about the friends she’d had dinner with.
“Those girls I was with when we met in that bar in Tenjin? You remember them, right?”
It appeared that Yoshino was silently agreeing to go for a drive with him, because she snapped on her seat belt.
“I don’t know.” Keigo shrugged, hoping to cut short the conversation, but she went on blabbing away.
“You remember. There were three of us? One was Sari? She’s tall and has a sort of stern-looking face…”
Keigo just drove around, speeding through intersections to beat the light. Before long they’d left Higashi Park far behind and the overpass for the city highway loomed above.
“Are you taking off from school tomorrow?” Yoshino asked.
Yoshino had, without asking, adjusted the car heater, and now was trying to open his CD case at her feet.
“Why are you asking?” He didn’t want to keep the conversation going and didn’t want her rummaging around in his CDs without permission.
“I was just thinking if we go for a drive now, it’ll be pretty late when we get back…” Yoshino placed the CD case on her lap, but didn’t open it.
“How ’bout you?” Keigo said, motioning with his chin.
Things had just happened, and here she was riding with him, but Keigo was irritated at himself for driving around aimlessly.
“Me? I have to go to work. But if I call in and tell them I’m going directly to see a client, then it doesn’t matter if I’m late.”
“What kind of job do you do?” Keigo asked without thinking, and Yoshino gave him a playful rap on the shoulder.
“I don’t believe it,” she said coquettishly. “I told you already-I work at an insurance company.”
Something must have made Yoshino happy, for she giggled. Keigo waited patiently for the laughter to subside and then said, coldly, “Something smells like garlic. Do you smell it?”
Yoshino’s expression froze and she clammed up.
Without a word, Keigo opened the passenger-side window. The cold wind blew Yoshino’s hair around. The garlic smell flowed out of the car, quickly replaced by chilly air swirling up around their legs.
The car had left the main shopping district behind without being stopped at a single red light, a rare feat.
Keigo thought Yoshino might not speak after being ridiculed like that, but she took a stick of peppermint gum out of her handbag and explained, “I had teppan gyoza for dinner.”
With the Christmas season in full swing, the trees along Tenjin were lit up, the sidewalks filled with couples strolling along arm in arm. Keigo stepped on the gas and blew past them.
“Sari and Mako seem to think that you and I are going out. I told them we aren’t, but they wouldn’t buy it.” Yoshino babbled on and on, chewing the gum with her back teeth. No matter how roughly Keigo swerved to change lanes or how much he slammed on the brakes, she wouldn’t stop talking.
“We’re not going out…” Keigo said coldly. Who the hell would ever go out with you? he said to himself.
“Keigo, what kind of girl do you like?”
“None in particular.”
“Isn’t there a type you like?”
To avoid answering, he sharply swerved and wound up on Route 263, the one that leads to Mitsuse Pass.
“You know, when I was taking a leak back there at the park, a gay guy tried to put the moves on me,” Keigo said, changing the subject.
“Are you serious? What’d you do?”
“I shouted, I’m gonna kill you! and he ran away. I wish they’d keep them out of places like that,” Keigo vented, but Yoshino didn’t seem particularly interested.
“Yeah,” she said, “but regular places are closed to them, right? So that’s the only place they can go. Don’t you feel a little sorry for them? I mean, there’re all kinds of people in the world.” She popped another stick of gum in her mouth.
Keigo had just been trying to change the subject and hadn’t expected her to argue with him. He didn’t know how to respond.
They’d left the showy shopping district behind and the road grew more deserted, but still the streetlights were strung with banners announcing Christmas sales. A pathetic scene, drained of all color and life.
Yoshino was silent until she spit out the gum and wrapped it in a tissue. She didn’t tell him she wanted to go back. He kept missing opportunities to pull off, and so they continued south along Route 263 toward the pass.
Up until they started to climb to the pass, they saw hardly any other cars coming in the opposite direction. In the rearview mirror Keigo occasionally caught a glimpse of the light of a car far behind them, but no cars ahead. Their headlights palely lit up the cold asphalt of the road over the mountain pass. Every time they rounded a curve their lights shone on the woods and the complex patterns of the bark on the trunks.
Yoshino continued to chatter, but Keigo ignored her and focused on his driving. Yoshino had pulled a CD out of the case without asking-“Oh, I love this song!” she’d said-and played a sugary ballad over and over.
As she was hitting the repeat button for the umpteenth time Keigo suddenly was struck by a thought: This is the kind of girl who’s going to get murdered by a guy someday. What kind of girl he meant he couldn’t say, exactly. But he was convinced that she was the sort of girl who could enrage a man so much he’d strike her down.
As Keigo maneuvered around the increasingly sharp curves, he thought about this girl beside him, happily humming along to the insipid ballad, and what the future held for her.
She’d work as an insurance saleswoman, save up a tidy sum of money, enjoy her days off, gazing at herself in the mirror of some brand-name stores. Who I really am… Who I really am… would become her pet phrase, but after working for three years, she’d finally realize that the image she’d created of herself wasn’t who she really was at all. She’d give up on carving out a life on her own, and somehow find a man and pour all her problems out on him. Which would only put the man in a bind. What are you going to do with my life, now that you’ve ruined it? This would become her new pet phrase, and her hopes for her children would swell in inverse proportion to her frustration with her husband. She’d compete with the other mothers at the park, eventually forming a neat little clique that would gossip and bad-mouth others. She wouldn’t realize it, but as her little clique grew tighter, she’d bad-mouth those outside her group exactly the way she did back in junior high, high school, and junior college.