Journey Under the Midnight Sun

by Keigo Higashino

  ‘I was wondering what other applications we’ve had for eddy-current testing coils.’

  ‘“Eddy-current”, you said?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Makoto showed her the title of the paper in his hand.

  She quickly jotted down a memo. ‘Sure thing. I’ll take a look, and if I find anything, shall I print it out and bring it your desk?’ she asked crisply.

  ‘That’d be great. Sorry to interrupt you.’

  ‘All part of the job,’ Chizuru said with a smile. That was her catchphrase. It might have been the catchphrase of all the temp workers, but Makoto wouldn’t know. He’d only spoken directly to her.

  Back at his seat, one of his co-workers asked him if he was ready to go on break. ‘Not quite,’ replied Makoto, shaking his head. ‘Break’ entailed lingering by the vending machines that dispensed drinks into a paper cup. Unusually for a Japanese company at the time, Tozai Automotive didn’t believe in making their female employees serve tea to their male counterparts.

  Makoto had been in the Patent Licensing Division of Tozai Automotive’s Tokyo headquarters for three years now. Tozai Automotive made starters, spark plugs, and other electrical components for vehicles. Patent licensing was responsible for managing the intellectual property rights for all of their products. Specifically, they helped their own researchers file patent applications for new technologies, and devised strategies and countermeasures when they had to dispute another company’s patent claim.

  Chizuru arrived at Makoto’s desk with some printouts a short while later. ‘I think these are what you were looking for?’

  ‘Thanks so much,’ Makoto said, glancing over the sheets. ‘Have you taken a break yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Great, let’s get some tea. My treat.’ Makoto stood and walked towards the door, looking over his shoulder to make sure Chizuru was following him.

  The vending machines were in the hallway. Makoto got a cup of coffee and stood to drink it by the windows a short distance away. Chizuru came over, holding her cup of lemon tea in both hands.

  ‘That must be tough hitting the keyboard all day like that. Don’t your shoulders cramp up?’ Makoto asked.

  ‘It’s harder on the eyes than the shoulders, staring at the screen all day long.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  She smiled. ‘Oh, my eyesight has got much worse since I started this job. I was fine without glasses before.’

  ‘Sounds like an occupational hazard.’

  He’d noticed that Chizuru took off her glasses when she was away from the terminal. Her eyes looked much larger without them.

  ‘It must wear you out, having to shuttle back and forth from company to company,’ he said.

  ‘At least I’m in data entry. The IT guys have it worse. They’re always pulling all-nighters before deadlines. Since the regular employees are using the computers during the day, they have to do all of their debugging and fixing at night. I heard one guy had overtime of more than a hundred and seventy hours.’

  ‘Is that even possible?’

  ‘Depending on what they’re working on, it can take two or three hours just to print out the program. So he’d bring a sleeping bag to sleep in front of the monitor. He said he’d trained himself to wake up when the printer stops moving.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Makoto shook his head. ‘I hope they get paid for all of that.’

  Chizuru chuckled dryly. ‘They only hire temp workers because they’re cheap. Kind of like… disposable lighters.’

  ‘I admit, I didn’t really know how bad it was. I’m surprised so many people stick with it.’

  ‘We have to eat.’

  Makoto gave her a sidelong glance, watching her lips purse as she sipped her tea. ‘What about our company?’ he asked. ‘We treating you OK, I hope?’

  ‘Tozai is one of the better ones. Clean workplace, and good atmosphere,’ she said, but then her brows knitted. ‘I probably won’t be able to work here much longer, though.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  Makoto’s heart thudded in his chest. This was unexpected news.

  ‘I’ll be finished with my allotted amount by next week. My initial contract is only for six months, and even if I did a final check through, it won’t take me much longer than a couple of days.’

  Makoto crushed his empty paper cup. He felt like he should say something, but he didn’t know what.

  ‘I wonder what kind of company I’ll get next,’ Chizuru said, a faint smile blooming on her face as she stared out the window.

  After work that day, Chizuru had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Aoyama with her friend Akemi, another temp assigned to Tozai. They were both the same age, and unmarried, so these dinners had become something of a weekly tradition for them.

  ‘Guess we’ll be saying bye-bye pretty soon,’ Akemi said. ‘When I think about the mountain of patents we got through, I’m kinda impressed.’ She sipped from a glass of white wine and stabbed a piece of octopus out of her salad with a fork.

  Chizuru smiled. Though her friend always wore make-up and feminine clothes, the way she ate and often the way she talked were very rough. ‘It’s my downtown roots,’ she was fond of saying.

  ‘Still, the pay wasn’t bad,’ Chizuru noted. ‘Especially compared to that steel company. They were terrible.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m kinda hoping we don’t get another one like that for a while.’ Akemi frowned. ‘The bosses were a bunch of idiots. They had absolutely no idea how to use us. I think they thought we were slaves or something. It was certainly slave wages.’

  Chizuru smiled and took a sip of wine. Somehow, listening to Akemi bitch about things was an excellent outlet for her own stress.

  ‘So what will you do?’ Chizuru asked. ‘Off to the next place right away?’

  ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’ Akemi skewered a slice of courgette and rested her chin on her other hand. ‘I think I might quit.’

  ‘No kidding? Boyfriend pressure?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Akemi frowned. ‘He says he doesn’t mind me working all the time, but I’m not sure he really means it. You know, we’re always ships passing in the night with our schedules the way they are, and trying to set up a date night is like pulling teeth. Besides, he says he wants children, which of course would mean I can’t work any more, so why not quit now, I say.’

  Chizuru had started nodding halfway through. ‘Yeah. You can’t keep working these hours for ever anyway.’

  ‘Yup.’ Akemi popped the courgette into her mouth.

  She was due to get married next month. Her fiancé was a salaryman five years older than her. They’d had an ongoing argument about whether she should keep working after they got married, and it sounded like a decision had finally been made.

  The pasta arrived. Chizuru had the sea-urchin cream spaghetti, and Akemi the garlic pepperoncini. It was Akemi’s stated belief that a life lived in fear of stinking like garlic wasn’t worth living.

  ‘What about you, Chizuru? Going to keep at it for a while?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, using her fork to twine her spaghetti into a ball. She let it rest on the plate for a while. ‘I’m thinking I might go back to my parents’ house for a bit.’

  ‘Sapporo, right? It’s nice up there,’ Akemi said.

  Chizuru had come down to Tokyo for college, and hadn’t been home for more than a couple of days at a time since.

  ‘When would this be?’

  ‘When Tozai finishes up, I guess.’

  ‘So, soon. Like next weekend soon.’ Akemi said, shovelling some pepperoncini into her mouth. She swallowed and said, ‘Hey, isn’t Mr Takamiya getting married that Sunday?’

  ‘What, really?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure I overheard some people talking about it.’

  ‘No kidding. Someone from the company?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Some college sweetheart, I heard.’

  ‘Right,’ Chizuru said, mechanically putting spaghetti in her mouth. It tasted l
ike nothing.

  ‘I don’t know who she is, but she’s done well for herself. They don’t make many men like that.’

  ‘Look at you, talking like you’re not about to get married yourself. Or is he your type, Akemi?’ Chizuru teased.

  ‘It’s less about type and more about the financial package that comes with it. His parents are big landowners, you know.’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  Despite the many times they’d got tea together, they had rarely discussed private matters.

  ‘Yeah they’re quite the elites. His house is out in Seijo and they own all kinds of land around there. An apartment building, too. It sounds like his father passed away, but they’re living just fine on rental income. Heck, the lack of a father-in-law is probably a bonus.’

  ‘You’re certainly well-informed,’ Chizuru said, looking across the table at her.

  ‘Oh, the talk’s made the rounds of the entire patent team. Apparently more than a few of the women had set their sights on him. Too bad they can’t all be college sweethearts.’ Akemi seemed to have enjoyed the entire spectacle, possibly because she hadn’t ever been in the running herself.

  ‘I think even if he weren’t rich or good-looking he’d be a catch,’ Chizuru said. ‘I mean, he’s always been a gentleman to the temps. You know how rare that is.’

  Akemi waved her hand. ‘See, now you’re just showing your own inexperience. It’s only the rich families that produce that kind of class. The money comes first. Looks and style follow, every time. Put the same kid in a poor family and you can kiss all that goodbye. I bet he’d be all bucktoothed, too.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Chizuru said, laughing.

  The main dish arrived and the conversation drifted on to their fish and other matters, and never once returned to the subject of Makoto Takamiya.

  It was a little after ten o’clock when Chizuru got back to her apartment. Akemi seemed like she wanted to go for a nightcap, but Chizuru turned her down, pleading fatigue.

  She opened the door and flicked on the switch, filling her one-room apartment with pale fluorescent light. The sight of the clothes, bags and magazines lying scattered throughout the room increased her weariness tenfold. She’d been living in the same apartment since sophomore year at college, and at times it felt like her room was a physical catalogue of all her worries and breakdowns.

  She flopped into the bed in the corner without even bothering to change. The bed frame creaked loudly as she landed on the mattress. Nothing’s new. Everything’s just getting older.

  Makoto’s face floated through her mind.

  She hadn’t been completely unaware that he had someone in his life. She’d heard one of the women, an employee in the licensing division, say something about it not too long ago. But she’d never known how serious it was, and she’d never asked. There wasn’t anything she could have done about it, anyway.

  There was really only one thing she liked about being a temp worker, and that was meeting people – especially men. Each new posting was a chance to meet Mr Right, even if nothing had panned out so far. She even suspected the female employees at some companies of purposely arranging things, like where the temp workers sat, to minimise their chances of meeting men.

  But not at Tozai Automotive. She’d only been one day on the job when she met the man of her dreams: Makoto Takamiya. His looks were what first caught her attention, not that he would have passed for a model or a movie star. It was the quality of upbringing he exuded with every act, as though he existed on a higher level of being. She had known her share of young dandies, but most of them just dressed the part. He was the genuine article.

  The more she worked with Makoto, the more she realised her first impressions had been spot on. He was kind to the temp workers, to the point that he’d even stuck up for them more than once when things went wrong due to bad instructions or overly optimistic schedules.

  She’d gone so far as to imagine they might get married one day.

  He seemed to like her too. At least he was aware of her. He never said as much, but the way he acted, the furtive glances, the way he talked – all told the same story.

  And yet she had been mistaken. She thought back to their tea break that day, and laughed at her own stupidity. She’d been this close to saying something truly embarrassing.

  This is it, she’d thought when he asked her to go on break with him. He’s finally going to ask me on a date. But the question never came, and when she played the only card she had left and told him she’d be leaving soon, she’d got nothing more than a ‘good luck’.

  Of course, after hearing what Akemi had to say about him, she realised his unavailable status had been plainly obvious to everyone but her. Someone a week away from getting married isn’t going to think of a temp as anything more than a co-worker, if they think of them at all. The only reason he was nice to me is because he’s nice.

  She decided it was better not to think about him any more. Sitting up with some effort, she reached for the phone by her pillow to call her parents in Sapporo. She wondered how they’d react when she told them she was coming home.

  A crisp breeze blew in through the bay window. It had been deep into the rainy season when he’d first come to see the place, Makoto thought, but that was already three months ago. ‘Perfect day for moving,’ his mother said, pausing from wiping the floor. ‘I was worried about the weather, but the movers will certainly be happy with this.’

  ‘They’re professionals,’ Makoto said. ‘They don’t care about the weather.’

  ‘I doubt that. Didn’t Yamashita’s new wife move in last month during the typhoon? They said it was hell.’

  ‘Well, a typhoon is another matter. Besides, it’s already October.’

  ‘It can rain in October,’ she said. She’d gone back to wiping when the doorbell rang.

  ‘Who could that be?’ Makoto wondered out loud.

  ‘Isn’t it Yukiho?’

  ‘But she has a key,’ he said, picking the intercom off its hook on the wall. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Oh, hey. You forget your key?’

  ‘Well, no —’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll buzz you in.’

  Makoto pressed the button to unlock the front door to the building, then he went to make sure the door to their unit was open and waited there for Yukiho to arrive. He heard the door open and footsteps before she came around the corner in a green cardigan and white cotton trousers. She had her jacket over one arm – it was particularly hot for autumn.

  ‘Hey.’ Makoto smiled at her.

  ‘Sorry I’m late. I had some shopping to do.’ Yukiho showed him the supermarket bags in her hands. He saw cleaning products, sponges, and rubber gloves.

  ‘I thought you finished cleaning last week?’

  ‘Well, yes, but it’s already been a week, and once the furniture gets in, there’s going to be new dirt everywhere.’

  Makoto shook his head. ‘Exactly what my mother said. She’s got a whole truckload of sponges and soap in there already.’

  ‘I’d better get helping, then!’ Yukiho hurriedly took off her sneakers.