He climbed over the fence, checked to see that no one was coming, and urinated on a hedge in the park. The foamy spray of his urine covered the hedge like a wet cloth and dribbled down at his feet.

“Hey, remember how some guys tried to pick us up at the Meeting Bridge? Yoshino, you remember?” Sari called out to her from behind, and Yoshino turned around.

“When was this?” Yoshino asked.

The three girls had left Tetsunabe, the gyoza restaurant, and were hurrying toward the subway, along the Naka River, its surface lit up by all the neon signs.

“Last summer,” Sari said. She was walking next to Yoshino and she glanced over at the bright surface of the Fukuhaka Meeting Bridge, a semi-covered footbridge.

“Really?” Yoshino asked.

“You remember-those two guys on a business trip from Osaka.”

Yoshino finally nodded. “Um,” she said. Last summer, one time after they’d eaten in Tenjin and were on their way home, two men had called out to them on the bridge, asking if they’d like to go sing karaoke. The men, slim in their suits, were nice looking enough, but Mako had had too much to drink, so the women turned them down.

“I got them to give me their business cards and I found the cards yesterday. They work for a TV station in Osaka.”

“Are you kidding me?” Yoshino replied, not showing much interest.

“I was thinking if I change jobs I’d like to go into mass media, so maybe I’ll get in touch with them.”

“With guys who tried to pick you up?” Yoshino chuckled. Considering the kind of junior college Sari had graduated from, no one in the media was going to hire her, particularly a TV station.

“Hey,” Sari said, changing the subject, “whatever happened to that guy who tried to pick you up in the park next to Solaria?”

“Solaria?”

“You know, the guy who came from Nagasaki, driving some kind of cool-looking car?”

This was the man Yoshino was on the way to see now. “Hmm,” Yoshino said, trying to cut off the topic. She glanced at Mako.

Yoshino had told her friends he’d tried to pick her up at the park in Tenjin. But they had indeed met for the first time in person in front of Solaria. Since he was from Nagasaki, Yuichi didn’t know Solaria, a popular Hakata fashion mall.

“You’ve never been to Tenjin?” Yoshino had asked him, and he said, “I’ve driven here a few times but never walked around.” Yoshino had been hesitant about meeting him, but when he sent her his photo the day before, and she saw how good-looking he was, she e-mailed him, agreeing to meet.

On the day of their date, she arrived at Solaria and saw a tall man who looked like he must be Yuichi, leaning against a show window at the entrance. He was even more handsome than his photo. Yoshino suddenly regretted not having been more honest with him in their phone conversations and messages.

She hesitantly approached him and when he saw her approaching, he got flustered and mumbled something she couldn’t catch.

“Excuse me?” Yoshino asked and he mumbled again.

He must be nervous, Yoshino figured. She deliberately brushed his arm, repeated herself, and looked up at him.

“I-I don’t know any restaurants around here,” he said in a small voice.

“That doesn’t matter. Anywhere’s fine.”

When he saw Yoshino’s smile, the man’s face relaxed.

Yoshino figured his mumbling was just first-date nerves, but as time passed he kept it up. She couldn’t understand a thing he said. It wasn’t nervousness that made him mumble, she realized, it was just the way he normally talked.

“It kind of irritates me being with him,” Yoshino said curtly. She was walking between Sari and Mako, down the stairs to the subway.

“But isn’t he really handsome?” Mako said enviously.

“Yeah, he’s good-looking, all right,” Yoshino replied. “But he’s boring. And besides, I have Keigo.”

“That’s right… But how come you’re the one that always gets to meet guys like that?” Mako asked.

After a pause, Sari said, snidely, “She’s only been going out with Keigo for a short time, so of course she wants to see other guys.”

As she held on tightly to the strap in the crowded subway car, Yoshino looked at the reflection of her two friends in the window. “His car is a tricked-out Skyline GT-R, plus he’s taller than Keigo, I think. The problem is, he’s a total bore. I think he might be slightly retarded.”

“How many times have you guys dated?”

“Two or three times, I guess,” Yoshino said, her eyes on the window.

“But the guy comes all the way from Nagasaki to see you.”

“It only takes an hour and a half.”

“He can get here that fast?”

“He drives crazy fast.”

“You’ve gone driving with him?”

“Just as far as Momochi.”

Sari, who’d been listening to their conversation as both of them stared straight ahead at the window, lowered her voice and poked Yoshino playfully in the side. “If you went to Momochi you must have stayed over, like at the Hyatt?”

“The Hyatt? No way.” Yoshino deliberately left her reply open to interpretation.

That first day when she met Yuichi at Solaria, they went to eat at a nearby pizza restaurant. Yuichi seemed totally unsure of himself. He couldn’t get the busy waitress’s attention, and when she brought the wrong order to them, he didn’t know what to do, and didn’t complain. Mentally, Yoshino was already comparing him to Keigo, when they’d played darts at the bar in Tenjin.

When Yoshino first moved into the Fairyland Hakata apartments, there was a time when she was totally wrapped up in online dating sites. This was before she became friends with Sari and Mako, and she’d spend every night, bored, alone in her room punching out replies to ten or more so-called online friends. All of them wanted to meet her. At night, typing out replies to turn them down, she felt like a girl with a busy, full social schedule, when in fact, not yet used to Hakata, all she was doing was sitting alone in a corner of her little apartment, busily moving her thumbs along a keypad.

After she and Sari and Mako became friends, she didn’t have the time to deal with her online friends. Then she’d met Keigo in October, and given him her e-mail address; but when she became irritated that he hadn’t contacted her much, she registered again with the same online dating site. In three days she got over a hundred e-mails, some of them from older men looking to have a relationship. She separated the replies by age. Next she decided, based on their language, which ones were lying about their age, and replied just to the handful who seemed like real possibilities.

Yuichi was one of these. In his first reply he said he was into cars. When Yoshino read this, she had a mental image of herself sitting next to Keigo in his Audi. He hadn’t invited her for a drive, of course, but she daydreamed about his car: where they would go and what CDs they’d play. Out of the hundred or so replies she received, Yuichi’s e-mail probably stuck with her for this reason.

The moment she first saw Yuichi she regretted having told him, via phone and e-mail, that she had a boyfriend but that they weren’t getting along well, and that she didn’t feel like going out with anyone right now. Yuichi’s skittishness became more pronounced over time. Once he did start to talk, he told long, pointless stories about his car. Yoshino mentally classified him as a Loser. Unlike Yuichi, she didn’t just want to go for a drive. She wanted to look cool whizzing down the streets of Hakata as she rode with a man everyone would envy. The rough hands of this construction worker from Nagasaki should have been sexy to her, but instead they struck her as just those of an overworked manual laborer.

Yoshino and the other girls got off the subway at the Chiyo prefectural office stop, two stops away from Nakasu-Kawabata station, and climbed the cramped stairs, emerging behind the City Sports Center. During the day this part of town was usually lively, but at night and on weekends it was so quiet it felt like stepping into a dream.