“Sometimes I catch a ride to work with the husband of an older woman I work with,” Mitsuyo said, “and his car is like a garbage dump. He says, Come on, get in! Get in! but it’s like, with all the junk where am I supposed to sit?” Mitsuyo laughed at her own words but when she glanced at Yuichi his expression hadn’t changed.

Yuichi suddenly brought the car to a halt just past a tiny village, right at the point where they were about to enter a dark mountain road. He slowed and steered toward the shoulder, the tires crunching gravel. At a break in the guardrail just up ahead was an unpaved path, barely wide enough for a compact car, that stretched up into the hills.

Yuichi kept the engine running but doused the lights. In an instant the world in front of them disappeared. With nothing to be seen outside, Mitsuyo looked over at him. And right then he leaned over and tried to get on top of her.

“What… what are you…?”

The emergency brake got in the way when he tried to find a place for his hand, and Mitsuyo could feel his frustration. Her seat fell back and she brought her legs, which had unconsciously spread wide, back together again.

Yuichi, on top of her, roughly kissed her lips, her chin, her neck. As her body sank back in the seat, it was strange how perfectly it fit her, almost as if she were tied down. Mitsuyo glanced out the window. From her horizontal position she could see the night sky, beyond the black trees. The sky was full of stars.

As Yuichi continued to cover her with kisses, she slowly pushed back on his chest. He clutched her tighter and she pounded on his chest. For a second his arms went limp.

“What’s wrong?” Mitsuyo asked, so close her breath went into his mouth. “I don’t know what happened, but you don’t have to worry. I’ll always be with you.”

She hadn’t rehearsed these words and was surprised at what she’d said. Her words seemed to seep into Yuichi’s skin. On the shoulder of this dark mountain road without a single streetlight, inside their parked car, all that existed were her words, and his skin.

“If you don’t feel like talking about it, I’m okay with that. I’ll just wait until you feel like it.” Mitsuyo slowly pushed him up, away from her, and Yuichi let her have her way.

“I just don’t… know what to do…” he murmured. “I was planning to go home. But I felt like if I said goodbye to you now, I’d never see you again.”

“So you came back?”

“I wanted to be with you. But I didn’t know what I should do to be with you… I didn’t know what to do…”

Mitsuyo pushed her seat up and reached out and touched Yuichi’s ear. They’d been in the warm car for quite a while, but his ear was surprisingly cold to the touch.

“I was planning to take the highway home. But all of a sudden I remembered something from the past.”

“From the past?”

“When I was a kid and my mom took me to see my father. What happened back then.”

He let her finger his ear as he spoke. She could tell something was troubling him, and she wanted more than anything to know what it was. But she felt as though once she did know, Yuichi would disappear from her.

“Let’s just be together,” she said, gently stroking his ear.

Another car drove past, lighting up the dark world outside. The guardrail stretched out far ahead, glaringly white.

“Why don’t we stay somewhere tonight, forget about work tomorrow, and go for a drive instead?” Mitsuyo said. “I mean, we haven’t gone to Yobuko lighthouse yet. The other day we spent the whole time in a hotel.”

Under her hands, Yuichi’s ear grew warm.

Seated on the step that separated the barbershop from their living quarters, bathed in the winter sun, Yoshio Ishibashi stared out at the road. Several days had passed since his daughter’s funeral, but he had yet to reopen his shop. He knew he couldn’t go on like this forever, grieving, and this was the end of the year, besides, usually a busy time for him. But as soon as he thought of reopening, he felt lethargic. If he did reopen, would anybody come? And if they did, he knew they’d talk with him warily, unsure of what to say.

Yoshio roused himself to stand up. All he had to do was take a few steps, go outside, and plug in his barber’s sign-and ordinary, everyday life would return. But reopening the shop wouldn’t bring Yoshino back.

He sat back down and was staring at his feet when there came a knock at the glass door. He looked up and saw the detective from the local precinct who had attended the funeral, face pressed against the glass, peering inside.

Yoshio gave a huge sigh, got to his feet, and trudged over to open the door.

“I’m sorry to bother you so early,” the detective said, his voice overly loud.

“It’s all right,” Yoshio said curtly. “I was just sitting here thinking about reopening the shop.”

“Well, you might have already heard it on the news yesterday, but they found that college student.”

The detective said it so matter-of-factly that at first Yoshio could only respond with a simple, “Oh, is that right?” But then, when it hit him, he raised his voice. “What? What did you say?”

“They located that college student in Nagoya.”

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?!”

“The thing is, we had to look into something last night, and we didn’t want to get in touch until we’d got everything straightened out.”

Yoshio had a bad feeling about this. Arresting that college student should mean they’d caught Yoshino’s killer, but the detective didn’t seem excited by events.

Yoshio sensed something behind him, and turned and saw his wife, Satoko, on all fours peering out in their direction.

“Ah, hello, Mrs. Ishibashi. Well, from what the college student has told us, and the facts at the scene, it would appear he is not the perpetrator. Though we are certain that he took your daughter to Mitsuse Pass.” The detective rattled on quickly so he wouldn’t be interrupted.

Before Yoshio realized it, Satoko had come out to the entrance and was seated formally there, legs tucked neatly beneath her. Yoshio clutched the white barber’s coat in his hands and said, “What-what do you mean the college student isn’t the criminal? You have to tell us everything!” Yoshio looked about ready to grab the detective by the collar, but Satoko reached out and clutched his hand.

“Well, we’ve established that the college student did drive your daughter to Mitsuse Pass. She ran into him at the park near the building where she lives.”

“By run into him, you mean she was planning to meet him there?”

“No. Masuo… I mean the college student… according to him, your daughter was meeting someone else there and just happened to meet up with him.”

“Who is this other person?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. According to what this college student told us, there was definitely another person involved. He told us what this other man looked like and the type of car he was driving.”

“So-what happened to Yoshino?” As Yoshio shouted this, Satoko shot the detective a solemn glance and began stroking her husband’s back.

“They drove to Mitsuse Pass. There they apparently got into an argument and that man…”

“What? What did he do?” This time it was Satoko, not Yoshio, who fired back.

“The man forced your daughter to get out of the car.”

“In the pass, where there’s nobody around? Why would he…” Satoko looked about to cry, and now it was Yoshio who stroked her back.

“They apparently quarreled, and he pushed your daughter, and then her neck…”

Unable to bear it any longer, Satoko began to quietly sob.

“Rest assured, we grilled the college student thoroughly. He ended up blubbering and it was pretty pathetic. But he’s definitely not the one who killed her. The finger marks left on your daughter’s throat were larger than those of the college student’s hands. The difference between a child’s hands and those of an adult…”