Villain a Novel (2010) (4 page)

“You know, the other day Suzuka Nakamachi called out to me in the courtyard,” Mako said, as if suddenly remembering it. With her chopsticks she skillfully peeled a slice of cucumber stuck in the potato salad from the side of the bowl.

“When was this?” Yoshino made a face, remembering how Suzuka liked to hang out in the arbor in the courtyard, letting everyone hear her Tokyo accent.

“Like—three days ago? She goes, ‘So I hear from Sari that Yoshino and Keigo are going out. Is that true?’ You remember how one of her friends goes to the same college as Keigo?” Mako didn’t seem all that interested in the topic as she chewed the crunchy slice of cucumber.

“So what did you say to her?” Yoshino asked, pretending to be calm.

“I told her I thought so.”

Startled perhaps by Yoshino’s severe tone, Mako stopped chewing for a moment. Just then Sari came back from the downstairs restroom.

“So, what’re you talking about?” Sari said, taking off her boots. Restaurants like this with tatami rooms provided clogs and slippers for customers to use when they went to the restroom, but Sari, a stickler for cleanliness, claimed she felt uncomfortable using communal slippers and always wore her own shoes. Yoshino had her doubts about this explanation.

Yoshino watched Mako reach into the potato salad again with her chopsticks. “I think Suzuka likes Keigo,” she said. “So she sees me as a rival.”

This was another lie, something that just popped into her head, but it might help keep a lid on things. If indeed Suzuka found out more from her friend who went to the same college, Yoshino’s lie could turn anything Suzuka said into a simple case of jealousy.

“No kidding?” Sari said, leaping at this bit of gossip as she stepped up into the tatami room. Yoshino again thought about Sari and her boots and couldn’t believe that fastidiousness had anything to do with her wearing them to the restroom. Yoshino recalled a time when she was eating bread in her apartment; Sari had said, “Give me some,” and then grabbed a bite. She used the same handkerchief every day. Sari also insisted that she had a serious boyfriend when she was in high school, but Yoshino had once told Mako that she thought this was a lie, and that Sari was still a virgin.

And in fact Sari, all of twenty-one, had yet to spend the night with a man. She’d made up a story about dating the same boy from the basketball team in high school for three years. But the truth was that it was another girl who’d gone out with the boy, not Sari, who spent those years pining away for him on her own. Nobody knew her in Fukuoka, so she used the opportunity to reinvent her past. She liked to show Yoshino and Mako a photo of her with the boy taken at Sports Day in high school.

“Wow, he’s really cute,” Mako said when she saw the photo, and this was all it took for Sari to blur the boundary between fact and fiction.

Every time Mako exclaimed over how cute the boy was, how tall he was, how he had such nice eyes and white teeth, Sari was under the illusion that she was the one being praised. It was exactly these qualities that she herself had liked, and she had started to convince herself that she and the boy really had been a couple. In Fukuoka Sari had discovered the joy of inventing an ideal self.

Naïve Mako might be fooled by this, but Sari had to consider Yoshino, too, as she sat there looking suspicious. When Sari had first showed them the Sports Day photo, Mako had been blithely ecstatic about it, but Yoshino had asked, “Hey, why don’t you call him now?”

Sari of course demurred. “But I’m sure he still likes you, right?” Yoshino badgered her. “He must have cried his eyes out when you moved to Fukuoka. Don’t you think he’d be happy to hear from you?” Seeing how flustered this made Sari, Yoshino gloated to herself.

For Sari, then, being alone with Yoshino felt claustrophobic. When she was just with Mako, she could be the center of attention, but Yoshino made her feel guilty, as though she were wearing a cheap knockoff brand. Still, if she was with shy Mako in town and some guys tried to pick them up, it was never any fun; but with Yoshino guys would treat them to dinner or to sing karaoke. She’d enjoy it and then feel bold enough to use curfew as an excuse to say a quick goodbye.

The last single order of
gyoza
came and the three of them made short work of it. They’d already had four orders, which meant they’d gobbled down some thirteen
gyoza
each.

Yoshino, stretching her legs out under the low table, rubbed her stomach exaggeratedly and said, “I shouldn’t have eaten so much. And after I’d just lost a couple of pounds.” Sari and Mako, their legs also splayed out, both sighed deeply, completely stuffed.

As Yoshino looked at the bill and calculated her third of it, Mako said, “You sure you’re okay? It’s already ten-thirty.”

For a second Yoshino didn’t know what she was getting at. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“You know … with Keigo and all …” Mako said, inclining her head.

Yoshino had momentarily forgotten she’d told her friends that she had a date with him.

“That’s right … I better get going,” Yoshino said, pretending to be flustered.

When it was ten p.m. Yoshino had actually considered e-mailing Yuichi that she’d be a little late, but then she’d gotten so involved in bad-mouthing Suzuka Nakamachi that she hadn’t sent a message.

Yuichi had been so insistent on meeting her that she’d reluctantly agreed. “I still have to pay you for the photo,” he said. If that was all it was, five minutes should be enough.

Yoshino divided the bill into thirds. The
gyoza
cost ¥470 per order, the potato salad ¥520, and adding on the chicken wings, sardines stuffed with snap eggs, and draft beers, the total came to ¥2,366 each. Sari and Mako took the money from their purses and laid out
the exact amount they owed on the table. Meanwhile, Yoshino pulled out her cell phone and checked to see if she had any messages. She had a few, but nothing from Yuichi, let alone from Keigo.

At five after ten, Yuichi was wondering whether he should send Yoshino a message.

He was already in the parking lot in front of Higashi Park with his engine turned off, looking like all the other cars parked in the tree-lined two-hundred-yen-per-hour lot—as if he’d been here for days.

The JR Yoshizuka station was nearby, but at this time of night there weren’t many cars driving on the road along the park. Occasionally a taxi rounding the curve would light up the parked cars. None of the others had drivers in them. Only Yuichi, his face sunburned from construction work, was lit up by the headlights.

Yoshino had definitely said to meet her at the entrance to the park. She said she was having dinner with friends but would be able to make it.

Yuichi considered driving once around the park, but with the narrow paths, that would take at least three minutes. He worried that Yoshino might arrive from the station and figure that he hadn’t shown up.

Yuichi took his hand off the ignition key. He’d turned the engine off over five minutes ago, but the car was still warm from the drive. He could feel the road as he drove over the pass, lit up only by the pale light from his halogen headlights; he felt himself stepping on the gas as if to plunge into that light, the back end of his car sliding as he rounded the curves. No matter how much he pursued this ball of light ahead of him, he never could reach it.

Still, every time he drove over the pass, he had the fantasy that his car would be able to catch that ball of light. In this dream, a moment after his car caught up with it he’d pass through the light to the other side, to a world he’d never seen before. But Yuichi couldn’t imagine what he’d see there. He tried conjuring scenes from movies he’d
seen—the green Mediterranean, the Milky Way—but nothing seemed right. Sometimes he tried to imagine his own scene, not one based on TV or movies, but when he did everything went blank before him and he knew he’d never find it.

Yuichi closed his eyes and pictured in his mind the mountain pass he’d just crossed, and the bright lights of Tenjin.

It was now fifteen minutes past the time they were supposed to meet. Even if Yoshino did show up, they wouldn’t have much time to talk; and try as he might, Yuichi couldn’t think of anything he wanted to talk to her about.

The footpath was deserted, just like the road along the park. If they had a half hour alone, he thought, maybe he could get Yoshino to suck him off. She’d resist at first, but if he grabbed her and kissed her, and stroked her breasts, then who knows what she might be willing to do.

After coming down off the pass he’d stopped at the first vending machine he spotted and bought a bottle of oolong tea, which he’d gulped down. Now he suddenly had to pee.

The roads were still deserted. The public restroom in the park was nearby, but once before when he’d parked there and used the restroom, a young man had appeared out of nowhere and stood behind him, unmoving, until he finished peeing, even though the urinal next to the man was unoccupied. Yuichi was afraid the guy would say something to him, so he hurriedly finished, zipped his pants, and leaped out of the restroom as if he were being chased. All the way back to his car he’d glanced around nervously, but there was no sign of the man. It felt creepy.

He flipped open his cell phone and saw that another five minutes had passed. He didn’t think Yoshino would stand him up, but he was getting worried, so he climbed out of his car.

Outside, he realized that the cold air from the pass had swept down to the city. He stretched and took a deep breath, and the chilled air caught in his throat. In the distance the sky over Tenjin was dyed purple. Suddenly the thought hit him that Yoshino was planning to spend the night with him. Since he came all the way
from Nagasaki to see her, maybe she was going to go with him to that love hotel they went to before? If that was the case, he didn’t mind her being twenty minutes late. But he couldn’t stay at a love hotel in Hakata tonight. He had to be back at work at seven a.m.

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.