Usually Fusae was busy on New Year’s Eve preparing osechi ryori, the special New Year’s dishes, putting up festive decorations at their door, and getting the New Year’s rice cakes ready, but this year she sat alone in her kitchen.
In the morning, Norio’s wife had brought over a small lacquered box of osechi ryori. “I thought you probably hadn’t done any cooking,” she said. “I noticed the detectives aren’t outside today,” she added.
“The last few days the local patrolman’s been coming by to check on me, but that’s all,” said Fusae. Still, Norio’s wife just had a quick cup of tea and then left, perhaps concerned that the house was still under surveillance.
Katsuji was still in the hospital, but initially he’d been given permission by his doctor to go home for the three-day New Year’s holiday. That was the plan until he complained of pain and nausea, so they decided he would stay in the hospital after all.
Norio, not Fusae, was the one who updated Katsuji on Yuichi. Fusae didn’t know what Norio told him, but when she went to visit her husband there were times she was so uneasy that she started to cry. Katsuji didn’t ask her a thing. Instead, he just complained as usual. A few days before, though, after she’d given him his sponge bath and was getting ready to leave, Katsuji muttered, “Why, when I have one foot in the grave already, do I have to go through something like this?”
Fusae left the hospital room without replying. She didn’t get right on the elevator, but went to a restroom, where she broke down. Katsuji had had a hard life, she thought. They’d both gone through a lot to get to where they were now as a couple.
Fusae vaguely reached out for the box of osechi ryori that Norio’s wife had brought and slid it closer. When she opened the lid, the bright colors of the shrimp leaped out at her. She picked up one of them and realized she hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast.
It was already past twelve. Fusae planned to visit Katsuji in the afternoon, so she picked out some of the foods she knew he could eat and got a plastic container down from the shelf.
She was just transferring the konbu to the container when the phone rang. For a second, she hoped it was Yuichi, though over the last few days she’d been let down dozens of times. Maybe, she thought, it was Norio, who was worried about her, or perhaps her elder daughter, always concerned about her own children’s future.
Chopsticks still in hand, she answered the phone and heard a familiar young man’s voice.
“May I speak with Mrs. Fusae Shimizu, please?”
He spoke so politely that Fusae replied, “Yes, this is she.”
“Mrs. Shimizu?”
As soon as she said yes, the man turned haughty. Fusae had a bad feeling and clenched the chopsticks tightly.
“Thank you for signing the contract with us the other day. I’m calling about next month’s delivery.”
As the man rattled on, Fusae tried desperately to interject. “What? What are you talking about?”
“Excuse me? As you recall, Mrs. Shimizu, you signed a contract at our office for health foods.”
The man’s words remained polite, though she could sense how irritated he was.
“You do remember this, I hope.”
Fusae was overwhelmed. “Yes, I suppose,” she said. Her knees were shaking. She remembered the young men at the office and how they threatened her. Her hand holding the phone was trembling, too, and the hard receiver banged against her ear several times.
“The contract, as you know, is a yearly contract.”
“A year-a yearly contract?” Fusae said in a low voice, trying to hide her trembling.
“A yearly contract is exactly that. We received your first payment, so next month will be the second. The second payment doesn’t require a membership fee, so it comes to exactly two hundred and fifty thousand yen. How will you be paying? By bank transfer? Or shall we come to collect it? By the way, if you do a bank transfer, the fee for that is your responsibility.”
It wasn’t the man’s voice that scared her. But as she listened, she had the illusion that she was back in that office, forced to sit there, surrounded by those agitated, intimidating men. They’d told her she had to sign and then they’d let her go home, and with a trembling hand she’d picked up the pen. In her mind now, this scene overlapped with the one from years ago, of scrambling to pick up her ration of potatoes that had been flung to the ground.
In a small voice Fusae said, “I… I can’t do that.”
“What? Old woman, what did you say?”
Shaken, Fusae hung up. Almost as if to crush the receiver under her, she leaned into it as she hung up. Silence returned to the kitchen. Fusae collapsed into her chair. The instant she sat down, the phone rang again, shrilly. She didn’t pick up the receiver again, but it was as if she had. She could clearly hear the angry shouts of the man: “Listen, old woman! What the hell do you think you’re doing? You can’t run away! We’re gonna pay you a little visit right now!” Fusae put her hands over her ears, but no matter how much she tried to block out the sound, the phone kept on ringing.
The phone kept on ringing, but at twenty-one rings it finally stopped.
Mitsuyo looked over from the phone by the bedside to the restroom, where Yuichi was.
It was way past checkout time, and if they didn’t hurry they’d have to pay a late fee. She knew this, but still couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed. Yuichi, shut up alone in the bathroom, no doubt felt the same way. The love hotel charged ¥4,200 per night, and they were supposed to be out by ten a.m. But when they did leave, there was nowhere else for them to go.
She’d lost track of how many days she and Yuichi had been wandering, spending the nights in love hotels. In front of the Karatsu police station, when they’d decided to run away together, they’d planned to leave Kyushu as soon as they could. They never discussed it, but they didn’t head for Shimonoseki and the Kanmon Bridge that would take them to Honshu. Instead they spent the days driving back and forth across the border between Saga and Nagasaki, finding a cheap love hotel each night, hurried out every morning by a phone call informing them that their time was up.
She suddenly remembered it was New Year’s Eve and felt oppressed, cornered. Did Yuichi remember what day it was? She knew they wouldn’t bring it up.
This is impossible. We can’t go on running, she’d told herself over and over, but as she repeated the words she’d asked herself: But what’s so impossible? What can’t we run away from? Was this life going from one love hotel to the next really so impossible? Or was it the life she imagined after she lost Yuichi?
She had to do something. But she had no idea what else to do, other than leave this love hotel and search for the next one. As long as she kept on looking for the hotel, another day would pass.
Mitsuyo reluctantly pulled herself out of bed. “Yuichi,” she said in the direction of the toilet. “It’s about time we leave.” No answer, just the sound of running water.
Yuichi was fastening his belt as he emerged from the bathroom and Mitsuyo passed him his socks. Last night she’d rinsed them with water and put them out to dry, but they still felt damp.
“You didn’t sleep, did you?” Mitsuyo said as he tugged on the socks.
“No, I did,” Yuichi said, shaking his head, but she noticed the dark circles under his eyes.
As she watched him put on his socks he said, apologetically, “I woke up a few times, but I think you’re the one who didn’t get much sleep, right?”
“No,” Mitsuyo said, “I’m okay. We should park somewhere and take a nap,” she went on, trying to disperse the heavy feeling that had taken hold of them.
They couldn’t sleep well in the beds in hotels, but strangely enough they slept soundly for an hour or so when they parked their car beside the road, or in a parking lot.