The detective stopped speaking and Yoshio sat there, glaring at him.
“So who was my daughter meeting, then? Don’t hide anything from me. Was it someone from one of those dating sites or…” He couldn’t go on.
After the detective had finished his explanation and left, Yoshio slumped down in one of the barber chairs. Satoko, still seated formally at the entrance, was wringing her hands and sobbing.
Our daughter is killed and she cries, he thought. They can’t find the criminal and she cries, and she cries when it turns out the suspect is innocent.
According to the detective, Yoshino was supposed to meet a blond man with a white car. Yet she lied to her colleagues from work, and when she left them told them she was meeting this college student named Keigo Masuo. And even though she was meeting this other man, she only exchanged a few words with him and went with Masuo, whom she’d run into by accident.
They were talking about his daughter, the daughter he’d raised, but when Yoshio reviewed the events of that night, he just couldn’t picture Yoshino being part of it. It felt like someone else, some unknown woman who’d been pretending to be Yoshino.
When the two of them arrived at Mitsuse Pass they got into some kind of argument. Yoshio had no idea what they argued about, but that guy literally kicked my daughter out of the car, he thought. On that dark, deserted mountain road-he kicked my daughter out!
The detective had said they didn’t know yet exactly what happened after that. The chances were good that the man she was waiting for in Higashi Park knew something about it.
Yoshio had been sure all the time that the college student had done it. He’d promised himself that when they caught him he’d kill him himself, with his own hands, right in front of his rich parents with their high-priced inns.
Yoshio realized that he’d been hoping that this college student was indeed the murderer. Otherwise, he thought, my daughter has been snatched away by some unknown man, some man she met in an indecent way. My daughter isn’t the type of girl that TV programs and magazines should find amusing. She just happened to meet some stupid college student and got killed by him. She wasn’t like those disgusting girls you see on TV and in the magazines all the time. She couldn’t be! Satoko and I didn’t raise her like that. The daughter we raised so lovingly-there’s no way she could be like all those idiots on TV.
Yoshio took the white barber’s coat he’d been clutching and flung it at the mirror he’d been staring at. The coat just spread out and barely grazed it.
Yoshio got to his feet and leaped out of the shop. If he sat there any longer, he knew he was going to scream. As he closed the front door he heard Satoko calling out “Honey!” to him, but Yoshio was already running.
Yuichi drove through Tosu and then toward Yobuko. The scenery flowing past changed, but they never seemed to get anywhere. When the interstate ended, it connected up with the prefectural highway, and past that were city and local roads. Mitsuyo had a road atlas spread out on the dashboard. She flipped through the maps and saw that the highways and roads were all color-coded. Interstates were orange, prefectural highways were green, local roads were blue, and smaller roads were white. The countless roads were a net, a web that had caught them and the car they were in. All she was doing was taking off from work and going for a drive with a guy she liked, but the more they tried to run away, the more the web of roads pursued them.
To shake off this bad feeling, Mitsuyo snapped the book shut. Yuichi glanced over at the sound and she lied, saying, “Looking at maps in the car makes me feel kind of queasy.”
“I know the way to Yobuko,” he said.
That morning, after they’d left the love hotel and eaten the rice balls they’d bought at the convenience store, Mitsuyo had asked him, “Shouldn’t you call your work and let them know you won’t be in?”
“No, it’s okay” was all he said, shaking his head and avoiding her eyes.
She knew it didn’t make up for Yuichi not calling, but Mitsuyo phoned her sister, who was already at work.
“Oh, thank goodness!” she said. “I was thinking that if you didn’t get in touch today, I might have to call the police.” She sounded both relieved and angry.
“I’m really sorry,” Mitsuyo said. “A whole bunch of things happened-nothing to worry about, though. Anyway, I’ll tell you all about it when I get home.”
“You mean you’ll be back today?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? I thought you might be at work, so I phoned your store. Mrs. Mizutani said, Gee, sorry to hear about your father. I played along, but come on, Mitsuyo…”
“Sorry. Thanks for covering for me.”
“What’s happened? You gotta tell me.”
“I don’t know… I just wanted to take a day off. You’ve done that yourself, right? Remember when you were a caddie and played hooky from work?”
Yuichi was listening intently to this conversation as he drove.
“Is that all?” Tamayo asked, still not totally convinced.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Mitsuyo insisted.
“Well, okay then… But, where are you?”
“I’m on a drive.”
“A drive? With who?”
“With who? Well, it’s sort of…” She hadn’t meant to do so, but she realized her voice had softened, making it obvious to her sister that she was with a man.
Picking up on this, Tamayo said, more loudly this time, “No! Are you kidding me? When did this happen?”
“I’ll tell you all about it when I get back,” Mitsuyo replied.
They had just entered Yobuko Harbor, where there were stands lining the road selling dried squid.
Tamayo still wanted more information, but Mitsuyo cut her off and was about to hang up, when she heard Tamayo say, “Is it somebody I know?”
“See ya,” Mitsuyo said, and hung up.
They parked in the parking lot away from the harbor, and when they got out of the car they were hit by a blast of cold wind from the sea. There were several more stands near the parking lot, and the wind blew the strands of dried squid hanging down.
Mitsuyo shivered. “The food there is really good,” she said to Yuichi as they got out of the car. She pointed to a bed-and-breakfast-cum-restaurant next to the seaside.
When Yuichi didn’t reply she turned to him, and he suddenly murmured, “Thank you.”
“Huh?” Mitsuyo said, holding down her hair in the sea wind.
“For being with me the whole day,” Yuichi said. He was still clutching the car keys tightly.
“But I told you yesterday. How I’d always be with you.”
“Thanks… Let’s eat some squid over there and then drive out to see the lighthouse. It’s kind of a small lighthouse, but they have a little park there with a great view from the end of it. And it’s nice just to walk there.” Yuichi had hardly said a word in the car, but now the words poured out of him.
“Okay.”
The sudden change in him left Mitsuyo at a loss for words. A young couple in another car drove into the parking lot, and Mitsuyo took Yuichi’s arm to guide him out of the way so the other car could pass.
“Is squid really all they have?” Yuichi asked cheerfully, as if something had been opened inside of him.
Taken by surprise, Mitsuyo nodded, “Ah, yeah,” and went on to explain the menu. “You start off with squid sashimi, then they have deep-fried legs or tempura…”
It wasn’t yet noon but the restaurant was filling up. The tables on the first floor, which ringed a tank of live fish, were full, so when Mitsuyo told the middle-aged waitress in her white apron that there were just the two of them, she urged them to try the second floor.
They went up the stairs and removed their shoes. They were led down a creaky hallway to a dining room with a large window overlooking the sea. The room would probably fill up soon, but at this point it was empty, with eight tables lined up on the worn-out tatami. Mitsuyo went straight to a table by the window. Yuichi, seated across from her, couldn’t keep his eyes off the scene of the harbor below them. There were rows of squid-fishing boats, and far off, beyond the breakwater, the surface of the sea glittered in the winter sun, white-caps leaping about. Even with the window closed they could hear the sound of the waves breaking against the wharf.