Journey Under the Midnight Sun

by Keigo Higashino

  He went down the stairs and out through the ticket gates. The main exit was right in front of him, and beyond that, a taxi stop. He was making a beeline for the first taxi when he heard a voice calling out his name. He stopped and looked around and saw a woman in her mid-twenties waving at him. She was wearing a dark navy suit with a T-shirt underneath. Her hair was in a long ponytail.

  ‘Thanks for making the long trip,’ she said, with a respectful bow that made her ponytail bob up and down like its equestrian namesake.

  Kazunari had seen her before. She worked at the boutique in South Aoyama.

  ‘I’m sorry, your name is?’

  ‘Natsumi,’ she replied, handing him a business card.

  ‘How did you know I was coming?’

  ‘Miss Karasawa told me. She said she thought you’d get in just before noon, but there was so much traffic, I’m afraid I was a little late.’

  ‘No, not at all. Where is Yukiho?’

  ‘Miss Karasawa is speaking with the funeral director at home. She asked me to take you directly there.’

  ‘Lead on, then.’

  Yasuharu must have called while I was on the train. He could hear him now, telling Yukiho, ‘I’m sending you my best man to lighten your load. Don’t you hesitate to order him around.’

  ‘This must have come very suddenly,’ Kazunari said as their taxi took off.

  Natsumi nodded. ‘We knew things were bad, which is why I came down yesterday, but no one thought it would happen quite as soon as it did.’

  ‘When did she pass away?’

  ‘We got the call from the hospital last night around nine o’clock. Her condition had taken a turn for the worse and the hospital wanted to let us know. She was gone by the time we arrived.’

  ‘How did Yukiho take it?’

  ‘Not well,’ Natsumi said with a frown. ‘She’s not the kind to wail and carry on, but I don’t know how many hours she sat there, pressing her face into the comforter on her mother’s bed. I’ve never seen her like that.’

  ‘I’ll bet she didn’t sleep much last night, then.’

  ‘Not at all, I think. I woke up once myself and walked down the hall past her room. The light was on and I heard her inside. I think she was crying.’

  Whatever Yukiho Karasawa was hiding in her past, or her present for that matter, her grief was probably very real. From what Imaeda had told him, being adopted by Reiko Karasawa had given Yukiho a freedom she had never known.

  Natsumi began giving specific directions to the driver and Kazunari noticed from her accent that the girl was originally from the area. He could see why, of her many employees, Yukiho had chosen to summon this one to help when the time came.

  They went past an old temple and into a quiet neighbourhood where the taxi came to a stop. Kazunari made to pay the fare, but Natsumi adamantly refused.

  ‘I was told that under no circumstances was I to let you pay,’ she said with a smile.

  Yukiho’s mother’s home was a traditional Japanese-style house with a tall wooden fence and proper gate. Kazunari pictured Yukiho as a high-schooler, waving to her adopted mother as she skipped, carefree, down the path. It was a beautiful image and one he wanted to hold on to, though he couldn’t say why.

  A small intercom hung by the gate. Natsumi pushed the button and Yukiho answered almost immediately.

  ‘I’ve brought Mr Shinozuka.’

  ‘Please bring him right in. The door’s open.’

  Natsumi looked up at Kazunari. ‘In we go.’

  He followed her through the gate. The front door was wooden with vertical slats, a standard in traditional construction. Kazunari couldn’t remember the last time he had gone into a house like this.

  He let Natsumi lead him down the hallway. His eyes took in the details. Everything was perfect. Even the wooden floorboards beneath his feet shone with a lustre that could only be the result of years upon years of polishing by hand. The wooden posts along the walls, too. He felt as though he was gaining, in a weird way, an insight into the person who had been Reiko Karasawa, the woman who had raised Yukiho.

  He could hear talking from up ahead. Natsumi stopped and turned toward a closed sliding door in the hallway. ‘Miss Karasawa?’

  ‘In here,’ said a voice from the other side.

  Natsumi opened the door part-way and he heard Yukiho saying, ‘Please show him in.’

  Natsumi motioned with her hand, and Kazunari stepped into a room that was a curious mix of Japanese and Western sensibilities. There were tatami mats on the floor, but a carpet had been spread over them on which sat a table and two sofas. A man and woman were sitting in one of the sofas and across from them sat Yukiho. She stood when Kazunari entered.

  ‘Thanks for coming all the way down here,’ she said, bowing her head to him. She was wearing a dark grey dress and looked a great deal thinner than when he had last seen her, the picture of a woman in mourning. But although her make-up was light, and her face hung with weariness, there was an undeniable allure to her. Genuine beauty never takes the day off.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said.

  She nodded, but if she said anything, her voice didn’t reach his ears.

  Yukiho turned to the couple on the sofa and introduced Kazunari as a business associate. The couple, as Natsumi had told him, were from the funeral parlour.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Yukiho told him. ‘We’ve been discussing arrangements for hours now and it’s really all too much for me to decide.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t have much experience in this sort of thing either,’ Kazunari said.

  ‘All the same, two heads are better than one.’

  ‘Then my head’s all yours for what it’s worth.’

  The meeting stretched another two hours. Kazunari learned that they were planning a wake and that both the wake and the funeral itself would take place at the funeral parlour, a seven-storey building only ten minutes away by car.

  When all the details had been decided upon, Natsumi and the funeral directors left for the funeral parlour, leaving Yukiho at home to wait for a package to arrive from Tokyo.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ Kazunari asked her once they had gone.

  ‘Mourning clothes,’ Yukiho told him. ‘I’m having one of the girls from the shop bring some down. She should be arriving at the station any time now.’ She glanced at her watch.

  ‘Have you told anyone from school yet?’

  ‘No. I don’t think I will, either. I hardly see any of them any more.’

  ‘Not even anyone from dance club?’ Kazunari asked.

  Yukiho’s eyes widened for a moment, as if he’d touched a sore spot. But the look faded quickly. ‘No, nobody needs to come for this.’

  ‘Right,’ Kazunari said, crossing off an item in the list he had made in his notebook in the train on the way down.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Yukiho said suddenly, ‘I haven’t offered you tea. Something cold, or coffee perhaps?’

  Kazunari waved a hand dismissively. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘It’s no trouble at all. I have beer if you prefer?’

  ‘Tea’s fine. Cold if you have any.’

  ‘I’ll get you some oolong.’

  Alone, Kazunari stood and looked around. Though the furnishings were mostly Western, he spotted a Japanese tea chest in one corner. He was no interior designer, but somehow it all seemed to fit.

  There was a sturdy wooden bookcase along one wall filled with books. In between books on the tea ceremony and flower arrangement he spotted some old textbooks and a beginner’s piano book. He imagined Yukiho sitting in the room, studying, and looked around for a piano but there was none to be found.

  Spotting some sliding doors on the opposite side of the room from where he had entered, he opened them and peeked out into a small sunroom. A pile of old magazines sat in the corner. Kazunari stepped out into the sunroom and looked out at the garden. It wasn’t very large, but the few twisted trees and rustic stone lantern we
re perfectly placed to create a little self-contained scene, the quintessential Japanese garden. It looked as if grass had once carpeted the space beneath the trees, but this had all withered. Tending to even a small garden was no mean feat for an elderly woman.

  Several potted plants sat close to the house, most of them cactuses, the round ball-like ones, bristling with spikes.

  ‘Isn’t it miserable? I haven’t done a thing with it,’ he heard a voice say behind him. Yukiho had arrived carrying a tray with glasses.

  ‘It’s not too far gone,’ Kazunari said. ‘That’s an impressive lantern you’ve got out there.’

  ‘Too bad there’s no one left to look at it,’ Yukiho said, putting the tea down on the table.

  ‘Have you decided what you’re going to do with the house?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said with a sad smile. ‘I don’t want to just let it go, though. Or let someone tear it down,’ she said, resting her hand on a part of the sliding door where the frame had been scratched, giving it a thoughtful rub with her thumb. Then she looked up at Kazunari as though she had only just noticed him standing there. ‘Thank you so much for coming down. I was afraid you might not.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  ‘I mean…’ She looked down at the floor before returning to meet his gaze and when she did, her eyes were red, and bright with tears. ‘I mean, I know you don’t particularly like me.’

  Kazunari tensed. ‘What possible reason would I have to not like you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe you’re mad that I divorced Makoto. Maybe you have another reason. I just sense it. You don’t like me. You try to avoid me.’

  ‘You’re imagining things,’ Kazunari said with a light laugh.

  ‘You honestly mean that?’ she said, taking a step in his direction so that the two were almost uncomfortably close.

  ‘Really. I have no reason to dislike you.’

  ‘I’m glad, then,’ she said, closing her eyes. She gave a sigh of relief and Kazunari found himself disarmed by her nearness. She was standing close enough that he could feel the warmth of her breath on his skin. She opened her eyes. The redness had gone, leaving nothing but the impossibly deep brown of her irises, so deep he felt like he might topple and fall into them.

  Kazunari looked away, and took a step back. Too close, and he could feel her latching on to him, unseen hooks burrowing into his skin.

  ‘So,’ he said, looking out at the garden. ‘Your mother liked cactuses, did she?’

  ‘She did, despite the fact they don’t fit in at all. She used to give them away as presents.’

  ‘What will you do with them?’

  ‘Good question. They’re pretty low-maintenance, but I can’t just leave them there.’

  ‘I’m sure you can find a home for them.’

  ‘Care for a cactus, Mr Shinozuka?’

  ‘I’ll pass.’

  She smiled. Then she crouched to better look out over the garden. ‘They’re like sad little children without their mother.’

  A tremble passed through her shoulders. Soon, her whole body was shaking. He heard her sob. ‘I don’t have anyone either,’ she said in a choked voice, and Kazunari felt a flutter in his chest as he stood behind her. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder.

  Her white fingers moved up till they lay across his hand. Her skin was cold to the touch. The quaking in her shoulders grew softer.

  Then Kazunari felt a sudden, inexplicable rush of emotion, something that had been locked inside until now, unknown and inaccessible even to him. It grew, changed, becoming an impulse. His eyes went to the porcelain-white skin at the nape of her neck.

  Just when it felt as if his last defences might come tumbling down, the phone rang. He took his hand from her shoulder, her fingers slipping away.

  Yukiho stayed there for several seconds before she stood and walked over to the table.

  ‘Hello? Junko? You just get in? Thanks for doing this. Could I have you take them by taxi?’

  Kazunari listened, half in a daze, as Yukiho gave her assistant directions.

  The funeral parlour was on the fifth floor. Just outside the elevator was a small space like a studio, with an altar at the back. Folding chairs waited in neatly arranged rows.

  The woman from the shop in Tokyo had arrived there before them with Yukiho and Natsumi’s mourning clothes. Natsumi had already changed.

  ‘I’d better get changed myself,’ Yukiho said, taking the hanger with her clothes on it and disappearing into the dressing room.

  Kazunari sat on one of the folding chairs and looked up at the altar. He had overheard Yukiho request the best that money could buy, but Kazunari was hard-pressed to see how the altar in this room was different from any other he’d seen.

  He thought back to earlier at Yukiho’s mother’s house and felt a trickle of sweat run down his spine. If the phone hadn’t rung precisely when it had, he almost certainly would have put his arms around her, and who knew what would have happened then? He didn’t even understand where the impulse to hold her like that had come from. How could he have let his guard down so completely after months of telling himself that Yukiho was bad news?

  He resolved to not let himself slip again. He couldn’t let her draw him in. Yet, a whisper in the back of his mind said what if? Maybe, just maybe, he had her all wrong. Those tears and those trembling shoulders weren’t for show, he was sure of that. This was a person who could feel, who had felt, genuine emotions. He was forced to admit that the picture of her weeping over the cacti was utterly different from the one he had been carrying around for so long.

  Maybe she really was that teary-eyed girl. Maybe that was the true Yukiho, and the one in his mind was just a warped image, grown out of years’ worth of misunderstandings. Maybe Makoto and his cousin Yasuharu had been looking at the true woman all this time, the Yukiho he had never really seen until today.

  Something moved in the corner of his vision. Kazunari looked up to see her walking towards him, resplendent in her mourning gown.

  A black rose, he thought. That’s what she is. He’d never seen a woman so vibrant, so brilliant. The black frame of her dress only served to increase her enchantment.

  When she noticed him, a faint smile came to her lips. But her eyes were moist with tears – dewdrops on a black flower petal.

  Yukiho drifted over to the reception counter that had been set up near the back of the hall. She exchanged a few words with the other women, who were going over the routines for greeting guests. Kazunari watched from a distance.

  People started showing up to attend the wake. By and large they were middle-aged women, Reiko Karasawa’s students in the tea ceremony and flower arranging, Kazunari surmised. One by one they came up and stood by the photograph of the deceased that had been placed on the altar. There, they pressed their hands together and, almost without exception, they cried.

  Those who knew Yukiho came over to clasp her hands and share stories of her mother. And each time, in the middle of the telling, they would have to stop to weep. But Yukiho listened to every one of them, never hurrying them away, until it was hard for Kazunari to tell exactly who was comforting whom.