As Yuichi got dressed, Mitsuyo casually opened the guest book on the table.

Here I am again with Takashi. This is the third time for us-By the way, this was our two-month anniversary so we went to see a movie in Hakata and stopped here on the way back. I really like it here-it’s cheap, and clean. Oh, and I definitely recommend the chicken nuggets! They’re probably frozen, but real crunchy!

Without really thinking about it, Mitsuyo continued to read through the girlish writing.

On the next page, in pink fluorescent pen she saw this:

Today Akkun and I did the dirty deed for the first time in a month. Since April we’ve lived far away from each other, which makes me soooo sad. Boo hoo!

Beneath it there was a mangalike sketch of a guy, probably by the girl, and in the dialogue bubble over it, in a stronger hand-no doubt that of the man-were the words I’ll never cheat on you!

Mitsuyo closed the guest book and placed it back on the table.

Just as they were leaving, Mitsuyo turned and looked back at the room. The down comforter had been straightened, but the white sheets underneath were wrinkled and tossed about, a sign of last’s night’s insomnia. Mitsuyo was struck by a sudden thought. Which was bigger-this bed or Yuichi’s car? You can stretch out on the bed, but can’t go anywhere. The car’s more confining, but in it you can go anywhere you like.

Yuichi looked concerned-Mitsuyo was just standing there, spacing out. He tugged her arm.

They walked down the orange-carpeted hallway to the stairs, which were painted white. They put the key in the box at the front desk, and were heading for the half-underground parking lot when they saw a cleaning woman, broom in hand, staring at the license plate of Yuichi’s car. Yuichi came to an abrupt halt and his heels squeaked on the floor. The cleaning woman glanced over in their direction. But she turned right back to his car.

Mitsuyo pulled Yuichi by the arm and ran toward the car. As if trying to sound them out about something, the cleaning woman said, “Excuse me-I wanted to-” but they ignored her and quickly got in the car. Yuichi got in first, and while she was waiting for him to unlock the passenger side, Mitsuyo was exposed to the woman’s eyes.

She avoided looking at her, though, and was soon in the car and they took off. The plastic curtain at the parking lot’s exit licked their windshield as they left, and once outside, the winter sunlight illuminated the car’s interior. Until they left the hotel grounds, Mitsuyo could barely breathe. She knew that if she looked in the rearview mirror she’d see the cleaning woman, broom in hand, watching them go, but something, perhaps fear, kept her from glancing back.

“That woman saw it. Didn’t she,” she said. Yuichi didn’t respond.

Once they were out on the main road, Mitsuyo finally worked up the courage to glance in the mirror. All she could see was a van following them. The cleaning woman, and the entrance to the hotel itself, had disappeared.

“She saw it, I know she did,” she almost shouted.

“Our license plate… She… she saw the number,” Yuichi said. Frightened, he stepped on the gas. The van behind them faded in the distance.

“What should we do? We can’t go on like this… We can’t use this car anymore!”

“Yeah, I know…” Yuichi said.

She had known this day would come. But as one day followed the next, and nothing happened, she’d begun to feel that they weren’t running away so much as pursuing time. But while they made their way from one love hotel to another, reports about Yuichi were making their way down the web of connected highways and roads, down the interstate, crossing prefectural borders, traveling down prefectural and city roads.

“If we keep this car,” Mitsuyo said, “they’ll find us. We have to ditch it.”

When he heard these words, Yuichi gulped.

Mitsuyo knew they couldn’t escape. The only destination awaiting them was jail. She could try to convince herself otherwise, but that was the reality of it. Still, she couldn’t say goodbye to Yuichi. Not yet.

“Let’s ditch this car somewhere! If it’s just the two of us, we can hide out.” Mitsuyo was desperate to get away.

I’ve known Yuichi since grade school, about twenty years, and sometimes I can’t figure out what’s on his mind. Other guys say he’s hard to approach, but I think they’re reading too much into it. I don’t think he’s thinking anything. It’s like he’s a ball that’s left lying on the playground for a couple of days. The kids play with it all day and then when it gets dark someone gives it a final kick and it rolls over by the horizontal bars. The next day someone else gives it a final kick and it comes to rest under a cherry tree… This makes Yuichi sound pretty pathetic, but it never bothered him to be treated like that. He actually prefers it that way. When I suggest we go somewhere for a drive, or go do something, he’s usually happy to oblige. He wouldn’t do it if he didn’t want to, right? I’ve never forced him to do things with me.

Not long after the murder, I actually went over to Yuichi’s house. That evening I e-mailed him from a pachinko parlor and he said he’d drop by on the way home from work. We played the slots for a while, and then went to his house, where his grandmother made dinner for us.

Was he acting? I’ve thought about it a lot, but he seemed the same as always. Maybe he was really trying to act normal, but even though he’d killed somebody not too long before, he looked like the same old Yuichi. After dinner we went up to his room for a while, and he sprawled out on his bed like usual, and was reading car magazines… He said, “If I didn’t have a car I never could have gone anywhere.” And I went, “Yeah, but what about trains or walking? People can go anywhere they want to.” I laughed when I said this, but Yuichi didn’t reply… Somehow I can’t forget those words now. If I didn’t have a car, I never could have gone last New Year’s anywhere. Or the look on his face.

Everybody knew how crazy Yuichi was about cars. Cars aren’t my thing so I don’t know the details, but somebody told me once that Yuichi’s was tuned to professional specs, and come to think of it, his car was featured once in a specialty magazine, Car something or other. “This is a national magazine!” he said, excited for once, and he must have bought five copies to keep. It was just one of those black-and-white photo spreads at the back of the magazine, but it was a whole page and they showed Yuichi, looking kind of tense, standing next to his precious car.

Yeah, I remember now. This was around the time he fell for that massage-parlor girl. He said he gave her a copy of the magazine.

I really feel sorry for him about that whole thing. I was actually worried Yuichi might commit suicide back then. I’m not trying to justify him or anything. I mean, he was spending every day at a massage parlor, trying to pick up this girl who worked there. But there they were, sharing all their hopes for the future, and Yuichi decided to rent an apartment in the city for the two of them, and right when he did, the girl disappeared.

He didn’t tell me anything at first, but one day out of the blue he said, “Hifumi, I’m going to move soon, so could you help me?”

Yuichi isn’t the talkative type like me. So this was really unexpected. I asked him why he was moving and he said, “I’m going to live with a girl.” I was astonished. I mean, with a girl in that kind of business, besides. I didn’t pry any further, but I had a bad feeling about it. The week after that, I think it was, I helped him move. And right after that, the girl quit the massage parlor and vanished.

About a month later, I helped him move again. Yuichi told me all about the reasons for it without any prompting from me, and I couldn’t believe it. He’d never discussed any of the details with the girl. When they were at the massage parlor, she’d just mentioned the type of life she’d like to live someday. Yuichi’s always been that way. He’s always leaped from point A to point D, imagining the intermediate steps, and never telling anyone what he had in mind. When she happened to tell him, “I’d love to quit this job and live in a small apartment with a guy like you,” the first thing he did was go out and rent an apartment. Unbelievable.