Villain a Novel (2010) (2 page)

Yoshio was of a slightly older generation, but still he knew that Kurume had produced a phenomenally popular female singer, Seiko Matsuda. In the early 1980s, Yoshio mused, this young girl’s clear singing voice really had transformed drab Kurume into something bright and glittering again.

Yoshio had been to Tokyo himself only once, when he was young, as part of a third-rate rockabilly band, his hair slicked back with pomade. He and his bandmates took the night train to Tokyo and checked out the wide pedestrian-only streets of Harajuku.

On the first day there he was bowled over by the crowds. By the second day he was used to the masses of people, but felt a growing sense of inferiority and irritation at being from a country town, and he started picking fights with some of the kids dancing in the Harajuku streets. His rough, dialect-laden challenge didn’t faze the young
Tokyoites, though, who calmly asked him to get out of the way. He remembered, too, how when they were searching for a bar written up in a guidebook, Masakatsu, their drummer, muttered a heartfelt comment: “You know, Seiko Matsuda is really something. To come from Kurume and make it here in Tokyo.” Yoshio always remembered these words. And how right after they got back home, Satoko announced that she was pregnant with Yoshino. They weren’t married yet.

Now he stood in front of his shop, which at least seemed like it was paying off; all of a sudden in the evening people came in for haircuts, one after another. The first was a man from the neighborhood who’d retired from the prefectural office the year before. With his retirement pay and pension he seemed to be well off, for he’d recently purchased three miniature dachshunds, each one of which went for ¥100,000. Whenever he went out for a walk, he’d carry the three little dogs in his arms.

Just as the man tied up his three yappy dogs outside and sat down to have his thinning hair trimmed, a junior high student, also from the neighborhood, came in. Without a word of greeting, he plopped down on the bench in the back of the shop and was soon lost in the manga magazine he’d brought with him. For a moment Yoshio considered calling in his wife to have her help out, but he would soon be finished with the dachshund owner so he told the sullen boy, “I’ll be finished soon—please be patient.” When he and his wife married, she commuted to a barber school in Fukuoka and got a license. Their dream was to open a second shop, but the economy in the ’80s was already starting to sputter, and besides, after Satoko’s mother died three years ago of a stroke, she claimed that touching other people’s hair reminded her of touching a corpse, and she stopped working in the shop altogether. Still, when it rains it pours. As Yoshio was in the middle of shaving the retiree, a third customer came in, and he had no choice but to ask Satoko for help.

“I’m kind of busy,” she replied sullenly.

“What do you mean you’re busy? I’ve got customers waiting here.”

“I’m in the middle of gutting these shrimp.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“It’s better if I do it now.…”

Yoshio had given up on her even before she finished replying. In the mirror the man he was shaving gave him a sympathetic smile. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard an exchange like this between them.

“I’m sorry. You’ll have to wait just a little bit longer,” Yoshio said to the junior high student. Still absorbed in his manga, the boy barely noticed.

“She’s a barber’s daughter, not that that makes any difference.” Shifting the scissors in his hand, Yoshio clicked his tongue. His eyes met those of the customer in the mirror.

“My wife’s exactly the same,” the man said. “If I ask her to take the dogs for a walk, she gets all hot and bothered and says, ‘You have no idea how much work it takes to run this house! You think I’m a maid or something?’”

Yoshio gave a forced smile at the customer’s words, but couldn’t help but think that taking this retired civil servant’s dogs for a walk, and a barber asking his wife to help cut customers’ hair, were entirely different things.

The rest of the day they had a steady stream of customers, eight in all, including a man who wanted his white hair dyed, until they closed up at seven p.m. It was as if all the regulars who came once a month decided to come on the same day, and Yoshio was kept running from one to the next. Satoko had finished with the shrimp, but had gone out shopping, so he couldn’t ask again for help.

After the final customer left, and Yoshio was sweeping up the hair from the floor, he thought how nice it would be if—not every day, but at least once a week—they had this many customers. His legs and back were about to give out from standing for so long, but the leather bag he used instead of a cash register was full of thousand-yen bills, more stuffed than he’d seen it in a decade.

When he closed up shop and stepped up into their living room, his wife was on the phone with their daughter. Yoshino always managed, barely, to keep her promise to phone them on Sunday evenings.
As he watched his wife talking, Yoshio was less concerned with what they were saying than with how much the call was costing. A few months ago Yoshino had canceled her contract for her PHS phone and had bought a cell phone. Yoshio had told her over and over to use the landline in her apartment, but Yoshino preferred the convenience of the cell phone and always used it when she called.

Yoshino was sitting in her studio apartment in Fairyland Hakata, the building that her company, Heisei Insurance, rented in Chiyo, Hakata Ward, in Fukuoka City. She was redoing her nails and only half listening to her mother drone about how adorable some customer’s miniature dachshunds were.

Fairyland Hakata consisted of thirty studio apartments, all occupied by saleswomen for Heisei Insurance. It was a different setup from a company dorm, for there was no cafeteria and no dorm rules. The women worked in different areas throughout town. They often talked to their neighbors across their verandas, and every evening you could hear some of them in the small arbor in the courtyard, cans of juice in their hands, as they laughed and chatted. Rent for the apartments cost sixty thousand yen per month, half of which the company subsidized. Their studio apartments each had a small bathroom and a kitchen, but many of the women cooked together to save money.

After a while Yoshino grew bored by her mother’s story of the cute dogs. “Mom,” she said, cutting her off, “I gotta go. I’m having dinner with some friends.”

Satoko had already asked her, as soon as she called, whether she’d eaten, but now acted as if she didn’t realize her daughter had yet to have dinner. “Oh, is that right? I’d better let you go. Hold on a second,” she added, “I’ll put Dad on.” She went to get him without waiting for Yoshino’s reply.

Yoshino was bored. She stepped out onto the veranda. Her apartment was on the second floor, and from there she could hear Suzuka
Nakamachi talking in the courtyard. Suzuka, perhaps proud that she didn’t have a Kyushu accent like most of the girls, was talking louder than anyone else about some TV drama.

As Yoshino came back in from the veranda, her father said hello.

“I’m on my way out to eat with friends,” she said, trying to keep their conversation short, but her father didn’t seem to have much to say. Instead of his usual complaints about how bad business was, he seemed in a rare good mood. “Is that right?” he said. “Well, stay safe, okay? … By the way, how’s work?”

“Work?” she replied quickly. “Cold calls are hard. Hard to get people to sign up. Anyway, gotta go. See ya.” And she hung up.

She had no idea that this was the last time she’d ever talk with her parents.

Yoshino was waiting by the entrance of the building when her friends Sari and Mako came down the stairs together. All three of them worked in different parts of town, but they were her two best friends in the apartment building.

As tall, thin Sari and short, chubby Mako descended, the distance between each step, which was obviously the same, appeared different.

Earlier that day the three of them had wandered around department stores in Tenjin, but since it was still too early for dinner, they had come back home before going out again.

Sari had purchased a pair of Tiffany Open Heart earrings earlier in the day at Mitsukoshi and was already wearing them. The earrings cost twenty thousand yen, and Sari had paced the store for nearly an hour, agonizing over whether to buy them. When Sari was checking out the prices and trying on different earrings, Yoshino, who was getting tired of waiting, told her, “When you can’t make up your mind, it’s best to just go for their signature item.”

Now she casually told Sari how nice the earrings looked, and stooped down to adjust her boots, which didn’t feel right. The heels were worn out already, the buckles starting to come apart. The two girls beside her had on similar boots.

Yoshino stood up. “So where should we go?” Mako rarely gave her own opinion, but spoke up this time. “How ’bout some
gyoza
at Tetsunabe?”

“I could go for some
gyoza,”
Sari agreed readily, and looked at Yoshino to gauge her reaction.

Yoshino slipped her cell phone into the Louis Vuitton Cabas Piano bag her father had bought her as a graduation present when she finished junior college, then pulled out her wallet, also a Vuitton. There was less than ten thousand yen inside, and she sighed.

“Kind of a pain to go all the way to Nakasu, yeah?” Yoshino said.

Sensing something in her reply, Sari asked, “What, you got a date or something?” Yoshino just inclined her a head a bit.

“With Keigo?” Sari, half disbelieving, half suspicious, gazed at Yoshino. “Why do you say that?” Yoshino asked, dodging the question. “I’m just gonna see him for a short time,” she quickly added.

“Better not to have any
gyoza
, then,” Mako butted in. “You know what it’ll do to your breath.” Her tone was so earnest that Yoshino had to laugh.

It took less than three minutes to walk from their building to the Chiyo-Kenchoguchi subway station, but along the way the road ran past the densely thick Higashi Park. Walking there in the daytime was no problem, but as the neighborhood-watch group’s bulletin board cautioned, it was better to avoid the place at night.

Higashi Park, established by the Fukuoka prefectural office, was home to two bronze statues. One was dedicated to the cloistered emperor Kameyama, who at the time of the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion made a famous prayer at Ise Shrine asking that his life be taken in order to spare the nation. The second statue was that of Nichiren, the founder of the Nichiren sect of Buddhism. The grounds of the park also housed the Toka Ebisu Shrine—dedicated to Ebisu, one of the seven gods of good fortune—as well as the Mongol Invasion Museum. But once the sun set, these buildings seemed to disappear, and the park turned back into dense, thick woods.

As they headed to the subway, Yoshino showed Sari and Mako the e-mail she’d received a few days before from Keigo Masuo.

I’d love to go to Universal Studios too! But it’s pretty crowded at the end of the year. Well, time to get some sleep. Good night
.

Sari and Mako each read the message, and in turn each gave a huge, exaggerated sigh.

“Sounds to me like he’s asking you to go with him to Universal Studios.” Mako, who generally took things at face value, was openly envious.

“I don’t know.” Yoshino smiled vaguely.

“I bet he’d go if you asked him,” Sari said.

Keigo Masuo was a senior, a business major at Seinan Gakuin University. His parents owned a Japanese-style inn in the upscale resort town of Yufuin, which would account for Keigo’s expensive condo in front of Hakata station and his Audi A6. Yoshino and her two friends had first met Keigo at the end of October, at a bar in Tenjin. The three girls were out for the evening and, at the bar, they were invited to join Keigo and his lively group of friends to play darts, which they did until nearly midnight.

Keigo asked her for her e-mail address that night—that much was true. But Yoshino’s stories about the dates they’d had since then were all a lie.

“You’re going to see Keigo after this, right? Why don’t you invite him?”

Yoshino had tried to dodge the question of who she was going to meet later that evening, but her two friends were convinced it had to be Keigo.

Yoshino avoided Sari’s eyes and repeated, “We’re just getting together for a little while.”

The footsteps of the three girls were absorbed into the darkness of the empty park. They continued to talk about Keigo until they arrived at the station, their cheerful voices making the eerie path by the park brighter, as if the number of streetlights had increased.

At the station, and in the subway on the way to Tenjin, Keigo continued to be the subject of conversation. They speculated on which actor he most resembled, one of them mentioning that she looked
up his family’s inn on the Internet and saw that it had a separate cottage with an outdoor natural hot spring.

Yoshino was proud that she was the only one Keigo had asked for her e-mail address when they’d met in the bar. And that pride had led her, when Sari had first asked if he’d sent her a message, to suddenly lie: “Yeah, he did. I’m going to see him this weekend.” When the weekend came, she had her two friends check her hair and makeup, and they gave her a cheery send-off as she left the apartment. The white lie she’d told had ballooned into something out of her control, and she wound up taking the Nishitetsu line back to her parents’ home to kill the day there.