Villain a Novel (2010) (5 page)

“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.

“Where are you meeting him?” Mako asked, from a few steps ahead of Yoshino.

“Um … In front of Yoshizuka station,” she lied. She couldn’t believe the two of them planned to follow her and check things out, but since she’d already lied about meeting Keigo, she had to be cautious.

“You okay getting to the station by yourself?” Mako was worried that Yoshino would have to walk alone past the dark park.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Yoshino said. She nodded with a smile.

“Well, then we’ll see you,” Sari said, and she quickly turned the corner.

Yoshino would have to walk down this gloomy path until she reached the entrance of the park.

After saying goodbye at the corner, Yoshino sped up. She could hear her friends’ footsteps gradually fade into the distance. Finally she was left with just the sound of her own footsteps echoing on the narrow path.

It was already ten-forty. Yoshino was sure the whole business would take at most three minutes. She felt bad that he’d come all the way from Nagasaki, but he’d insisted on meeting her tonight to pay her the ¥18,000 he’d promised for an evening with her. Even after she’d told him she was busy and that he could just transfer it to her account.

Sari and Mako both listened to the sound of Yoshino’s footsteps disappearing. At the end of the road they could see the brightly lit entrance to their apartment building.

“I wonder if Yoshino’s really gonna come back soon,” Mako said, glancing behind her. Sari looked back, too. The only color on the monochrome street was a solitary red mailbox at the corner where they’d said goodbye.

“Do you really think Yoshino’s going to see Keigo?” The words suddenly spilled out of Sari.

“What do you mean? If she isn’t, then where’d she go?”

“Somehow I just can’t believe that Yoshino and Keigo are going out.”

“But Yoshino’s always going out on dates with him these days, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, but think about it—have we ever seen them together? Like right now, maybe she’s just going to hang out at a convenience store or something.”

Mako laughed it off. “No way,” she said.

Yuichi turned on the overhead light in his car and angled the rearview mirror toward him. In the darkness the reflection of his face was indistinct. He moved his head from side to side, combing his fingers through his hair. His hair was soft and feline; the fine strands flowed through his rough fingers.

In the spring of last year, Yuichi had dyed his hair for the first time in his life. He dyed it a brown that almost appeared black, and when none of the guys on his construction site noticed, he dyed it a lighter brown, then even lighter the next time, until finally now, a year and a half later, his hair was nearly blond.

Since the change in hair color was so gradual, no one kidded him about it. Only once did another worker, Nosaka, laugh and say, “Hey, since when are you a blond?” His blond hair went well with his skin, tanned from outdoor work, so perhaps that explained the lack of teasing.

Yuichi was not a flashy guy, though when he went to Uniqlo and
other inexpensive clothing stores to buy sweatshirts and sweatpants, he always wound up going for bright colors, reds and pinks. He would tell himself he’d get something subdued, black or beige, something that didn’t show dirt easily, but when he got to the store and stood in front of the racks of clothes, for some reason he’d reach for the brighter colors. It’s only going to get dirty anyway, he told himself.

His old chest of drawers at home was stuffed full of similar sweatshirts and T-shirts, all of them with threadbare collars, frayed sleeves, the cloth all worn out. All of this made the colors stand out even more, like colors in a deserted theme park. He liked these old sweatshirts and T-shirts, though, because they absorbed the sweat and grease well, and the more he wore them the more they felt like part of his skin, a feeling he found liberating.

Yuichi leaned forward and looked again in the rearview mirror. His hair was in place. His eyes were slightly bloodshot, but at least the pimple between his eyebrows was gone.

Until he graduated from high school, Yuichi was the type of boy who never combed his hair. He wasn’t on any sports team, but every couple of months he’d go to the neighborhood barbershop and get a buzz cut.

Around the time he started attending an industrial high school, the barber had sighed and said, “Yuichi, pretty soon I bet you’re going to get all particular about your hair, telling me how to cut it.” The huge mirror in the barbershop reflected a young boy, tall and skinny, who was far from being very masculine.

“If you have anything special you want me to do, let me know, okay?” said the barber. The barber liked to sing
enka
, and he made his own recordings, posters for which were plastered on the wall.

But Yuichi had no idea what
anything special
meant when it came to hair. He had no idea where to begin. Until he graduated from high school, Yuichi always got his hair cut at this shop. Afterward, he worked for a short time at a small health food store, and then, after he quit, just hung out at home. A former classmate invited
him to work at a karaoke box place, but within half a year the place closed down and he took a series of short-term jobs, at a gas station for a few months, then at a convenience store. And before he knew it he was twenty-three.

It was around that time that he started working in construction. He was considered more of a day laborer than a regular employee, but since the owner of the company was a relative, he earned more than he would have otherwise. He’d been working with this company now for four years. Yuichi liked the irregularity of the work, how they worked in good weather and didn’t when it rained.

Fewer and fewer cars passed in front of the park. It had become so quiet that the presence of the young couple two cars ahead of him, who had driven away quite some time ago, still lingered.

And right then he spotted Yoshino walking, not so quickly, down the path that ran parallel to the park. Yuichi had been cleaning his nails under the interior light in his car.

He gave his horn a light tap. Surprised by the sound, Yoshino stopped for a moment.

On Monday morning, December 10, 2001, Sari woke up five minutes ahead of her alarm, a rare occurrence. Sari was not a morning person, and when she was living with her parents in Kagoshima City, almost every morning her mother got upset when she wouldn’t get up on time. Even after Sari moved out and started living in Fukuoka, her mother would occasionally call her to remind her to get up.