“So how far are we gonna drive?”

“Hm?” Keigo said curtly to this sudden question. The ballad had finally ended, replaced by a strangely cheerful tune.

“Are you really going over the pass? There’s nothing beyond here. During the day there’s a good curry shop, and a bakery, but not this time of night… Oh, you know that noodle place we passed? It’s closed now, but have you ever been there? It’s supposed to be really good. One of my friends said so… What’s the matter? How come you’re so quiet?”

The words spilled out of her, as if in time to the cheerful music. She really does think we’re on a date, Keigo thought.

“Your family runs a really nice inn in Yufuin, right? And a big hotel in Beppu? So your mother must be the mistress of the places, huh? I bet that’s a lot of responsibility.”

“Yeah, my mother is the mistress of the place, but that’s nothing for you to worry about,” Keigo said. He surprised himself at how cold his voice was. Yoshino looked puzzled.

“The two of you are different types.”

“Huh?” Yoshino asked, still confused.

“My mother and you are different types of people. You’re more the maid type, don’t you think? If you were working in our inn, I mean.”

Keigo suddenly slammed on the brakes. Yoshino pitched forward.

When he’d spied the entrance to the tunnel, Keigo had instinctively turned off onto the older mountain road. Now they were almost at the summit of the pass.

“I want you to get out. I can’t stand having you in my car anymore.”

Keigo stared right into her eyes, but Yoshino was still stunned and his words didn’t register.

The upbeat song played on. Your love makes me strong, the lousy singer belted out, in a voice as appealing as fingernails scraping across glass.

“I want you to get out,” Keigo repeated, his voice flat, face expressionless.

“What are you talking about?”

In the dark car Yoshino’s eyes went wide. She tried to smile, hoping against hope that this was Keigo’s idea of testing her courage.

“You’re kind of a slut, you know that?”

“What?”

“How can you just jump into a guy’s car like this, without even thinking? Somebody you don’t even know? Most girls would refuse. The kind of girl who leaps at an invitation to go for a drive in the middle of the night isn’t my type. So just get out. Or do I have to kick you out?”

Keigo pushed her. She finally seemed to understand that this was no joke.

“But… if I get out here…”

“If you stand over there, somebody will stop and give you a ride. You’ll ride with anyone, right?”

Unsure what she should do, Yoshino clutched her handbag in her lap.

Ignoring her, Keigo reached over her and opened the passenger-side door. He gave it too hard a shove, and it swung open and banged against the guardrail. He could smell the cold soil outside, and the freezing mountains beyond.

“Get out!” Keigo commanded, giving Yoshino’s thin shoulder a shove.

Yoshino twisted aside, and his hand slipped off her shoulder and dug into her neck.

“Stop it!”

“I mean it! Get out!”

Keigo kept on pushing her resisting body, almost as if strangling her. He felt the warmth of her skin, which only made him more irritated. His thumb dug deep into her neck.

“All right! I get it,” Yoshino said, and unfastened her seat belt. Perhaps out of fear, her voice sounded strangely defiant. Keigo lifted one leg from under the steering wheel and, muttering, kicked Yoshino hard in the back.

“Ow!” Yoshino fell out and hit her head on the guardrail. The clang rang out, echoing down the guardrail and out into the pass.

To me, the name Mia fits her more than Yoshino Ishibashi. So is it okay if I call her that? Mia-chan?

I teach elementary school kids at an after-hours juku, so I’m used to hearing names like that that don’t sound exactly Japanese, the kind of names that are trendy now. In the class I teach, there’s a boy named Raymond, and girls named Sheru and Tiara. It’s enough to make a teacher pull out his hair.

As I’ve told you a couple of times already, I don’t have any interest in little kids. I just happen to be a juku teacher…

But anyhow, kids’ names these days sound kind of, you know, like the fake names girls use on dating Web sites. It’s like there’s an imbalance between the person and his name, and I remember when I first took roll call I felt sorry for them. They talk about gender-identity disorder, right? Pretty soon I think we’re going to see people with name-identity disorder.

So what I was saying was, other than Mia-chan I must have met about ten other girls on online dating sites. Mia-chan would have been the second, or maybe the third one I met. Her face and body weren’t exactly my type, but when I think about it, now I can see she was a kind, gentle sort of girl. When she showed up for our date and immediately asked me to reimburse her for the taxi it did upset me a little, I’ll admit it, but still there was something, I don’t know, sort of kind about her.

I mean, take a look at me. I’m fat and hairy, and look like a bulldog. No way I’m going to be popular with the ladies, and I’m not. But even a guy like me, if a girl says one nice thing it makes me feel like I’m not completely hopeless. Mia-chan was good at making a guy feel like that. But I could be wrong.

We were in the hotel, just after we’d done it, and I was about to pay her. All of a sudden she goes, “I wonder if we hadn’t met in the dating site if we would have hooked up.”

“You never would have given me the time of day,” I said, laughing, but Mia-chan, with this sort of sad look on her face, said, “I wonder. There is the age-difference thing, but when I was in junior high, I really liked my biology teacher and he was kind of chubby, too.”

Yeah, I know it was just an empty compliment. I was handing over the money to her, and threw in an extra two thousand yen. But Miachan seemed like she really meant it. She had this look on her face like, Yeah, maybe if we had just run across each other on the street, we might have gotten together.

Men are idiots and we never forget words like that. Oh, well, guys who are popular would forget it right away, but for someone like me who has worried about how to talk to girls ever since college, even a transparent, empty compliment stays with you. It gives you more confidence. This was a long time ago, but back when I was in college one of the older girls in the tennis club I was in said, “Hayashi-kun, you understand people right away. When I’m with you, I feel like you see right through me.” It’s weird, but after that I came to rely on what she said. Whenever I wondered what kind of man I was, I always remembered what that girl told me… She told me later she had no memory of ever having said that, but to me these were truly important words. It might be a bit of an exaggeration, but over the past twenty years those words have helped keep me going as a man.

You must think this is pretty stupid, right? That I’m a real loser. But a guy like me needs a woman like that. It doesn’t matter if it’s just transparent flattery. Without that, I’d be left with nothing.

Mia-chan was the kind of girl who said those things. Maybe not consciously, but she’s the sort of girl who might say something that a guy like me would cling to for twenty years.

When I heard that she’d been murdered, it made me sad. She’s just a girl I met online and saw only once, but I’ll never forget her. “The guys I respect the most,” she told me when I took her to an Italian restaurant, “are the ones who know good food.”

After he’d finished breakfast on Saturday, Yuichi went out without telling anyone where he was going. Fusae thought he was going out for a drive as usual and would be back for dinner, so she made meatballs, one of his favorites. But Yuichi never came back, so she went ahead and ate the slightly too sweet meatballs herself.