Tengo nodded. “You were. Doing that rewrite helped me learn a lot about fiction writing. I started noticing things I had never noticed before.”
“Not to brag or anything, but I know exactly what you mean. You just needed the right opportunity.”
“But I also had a lot of hard experiences because of it. As you are aware.”
Komatsu’s mouth curled up neatly in a smile, like a crescent moon in winter. It was the kind of smile that was hard to read.
“To get something important, people have to pay a price. That’s the rule the world operates by.”
“You may be right. But I can’t tell the difference between what’s important and the price you have to pay. It has all gotten too complicated.”
“Complicated it definitely is. It’s like trying to carry on a phone conversation when the wires are crossed. Absolutely,” Komatsu said, frowning. “By the way, do you know where Fuka-Eri is now?”
“I don’t know where she is at present, no,” Tengo said, choosing his words carefully.
“At present,” Komatsu repeated meaningfully.
Tengo said nothing.
“But until a short while ago she was living in your apartment,” Komatsu said. “At least, that’s what I hear.”
Tengo nodded. “That’s right. She was at my place for about three months.”
“Three months is a long time,” said Komatsu. “And you never told anybody.”
“She told me not to tell anyone, so I didn’t. Including you.”
“But now she isn’t there anymore.”
“Right. She took off when I was in Chikura, and left behind a letter. I don’t know where she is now.”
Komatsu took out a cigarette, stuck it in his mouth, and lit a match. He narrowed his eyes and looked at Tengo.
“After she left your place Fuka-Eri went back to Professor Ebisuno’s house, on top of the mountain in Futamatao,” he said. “Professor Ebisuno contacted the police and withdrew the missing person’s report, since she had just gone off on her own and hadn’t been kidnapped. The police must have interviewed her about what happened. She is a minor, after all. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an article in the paper about it before long, though I doubt it will say much. Since nothing criminal was involved, apparently.”
“Will it come out that she stayed with me?”
Komatsu shook his head. “I don’t think Fuka-Eri will mention your name. You know how she is. It can be the cops she’s talking to, the military police, a revolutionary council, or Mother Teresa—once she has decided not to say something, then mum’s the word. So I wouldn’t let that worry you.”
“I’m not worried. I would just like to know how things are going to work out.”
“Whatever happens, your name won’t be made public. Rest assured,” Komatsu said. His expression turned serious. “But there is something I need to ask you. I hesitate to bring it up.”
“How come?”
“Well, it’s very—personal.”
Tengo took a sip of beer and put the glass back on the table. “No problem. If it’s something I can answer, I will.”
“Did you and Fuka-Eri have a sexual relationship? While she was staying at your place, I mean. Just a simple yes or no is fine.”
Tengo paused for a moment and slowly shook his head. “The answer is no. I didn’t have that kind of relationship with her.”
Tengo made an instinctive decision that he shouldn’t reveal what had taken place between them on that stormy night. Besides, it wasn’t really what you would call a sex act. There was no sexual desire involved, not in the normal sense. On either side.
“So you didn’t have a sexual relationship.”
“We didn’t,” Tengo said, his voice dry.
Komatsu scrunched up his nose. “Tengo, I’m not doubting you. But you did hesitate before you replied. Maybe something close to sex happened? I’m not blaming you. I’m just trying to ascertain certain facts.”
Tengo looked straight into Komatsu’s eyes. “I wasn’t hesitating. I just felt weird, wondering why in the world you were so concerned about whether Fuka-Eri and I had a sexual relationship. You’re usually not the type to stick your head into other people’s private lives. You avoid that.”
“I suppose,” Komatsu said.
“Then why are you bringing something like that up now?”
“Who you sleep with or what Fuka-Eri does is basically none of my business.” Komatsu scratched the side of his nose. “As you have pointed out. But as you are well aware, Fuka-Eri isn’t just some ordinary girl. How should I put it? Every action she takes is significant.”
“Significant,” Tengo repeated.
“Logically speaking, all the actions that everybody takes have a certain significance,” Komatsu said. “But in Fuka-Eri’s case they have a deeper meaning. Something about her is different that way. So we need to be certain of whatever facts we can.”
“By we, who do you mean, exactly?” Tengo asked.
Komatsu looked uncharacteristically nonplussed. “Truth be told, it’s not me who wants to know whether the two of you had a sexual relationship, but Professor Ebisuno.”
“So Professor Ebisuno knows that Fuka-Eri stayed at my apartment?”
“Of course. He knew that the first day she showed up at your place. Fuka-Eri told him where she was.”
“I had no idea,” Tengo said, surprised. She had told him she hadn’t revealed to anyone where she was. Not that it mattered much now. “There’s one thing I just don’t get. Professor Ebisuno is her legal guardian and protector, so you would expect him to pay attention to things like that. But in the crazy situation we’re in now you would think his top priority would be to make sure she’s safe—not whether she’s staying chaste or not.”
Komatsu raised one corner of his lips. “I don’t really know the background. He just asked me to find out—to see you and ask whether the two of you had a physical relationship. That is why I asked you this, and the answer was no.”
“That’s correct. Fuka-Eri and I did not have a physical relationship,” Tengo said firmly, gazing steadily into Komatsu’s eyes. Tengo didn’t feel like he was lying.
“Good, then,” Komatsu said. He put another Marlboro between his lips, and lit a match. “That’s all I need to know.”
“Fuka-Eri is an attractive girl, no question about it,” Tengo said. “But as you are well aware, I have gotten mixed up in something quite serious, unwillingly. I don’t want things to get any more complicated than they are. Besides, I was seeing somebody.”
“I understand perfectly,” Komatsu said. “I know you’re a very clever person when it comes to things like that, with a very mature way of thinking. I will tell Professor Ebisuno what you said. I’m sorry I had to ask you. Don’t let it bother you.”
“It doesn’t especially bother me. I just thought it was strange, why such a thing like that would come up at this point.” Tengo paused for a moment. “What was it you wanted to tell me?”
Komatsu had finished his beer and ordered a Scotch highball from the bartender.
“What’s your pleasure?” he asked Tengo.
“I’ll have the same,” Tengo said.
Two highballs in tall glasses were brought over to their table.
“Well, first of all,” Komatsu began after a long silence, “I think that as much as possible we need to unravel some things about the situation that we’ve gotten entangled in. After all, we’re all in the same boat. By we I mean the four of us—you, me, Fuka-Eri, and Professor Ebisuno.”
“A very interesting group,” Tengo said, but his sarcasm didn’t seem to register with Komatsu.
Komatsu went on. “I think each of the four of us had his own expectation regarding this plan, and we’re not all on the same level, or moving in the same direction. To put it another way, we weren’t all rowing our oars at the same rhythm and at the same angle.”
“This isn’t the sort of group you would expect to be able to work well together.”
“That might be true.”
“And our boat was headed down the rapids toward a waterfall.”
“Our boat was indeed headed down the rapids toward a waterfall,” Komatsu admitted. “I’m not trying to make excuses, but from the start this was an extremely simple plan. We fool everybody, we make a bit of money. Half for laughs, half for profit. That was our goal. But ever since Professor Ebisuno got involved, the plot has thickened. A number of complicated subplots lie just below the surface of the water, and the water is picking up speed. Your reworking of the novel far exceeded my expectations, thanks to which the book got great reviews and had amazing sales. And then this took our boat off to an unexpected place—a somewhat perilous place.”
Tengo shook his head slightly. “It’s not a somewhat perilous place. It’s an extremely dangerous place.”
“You could be right.”
“Don’t act like this doesn’t concern you. You’re the one who came up with this idea in the first place.”
“Granted. I’m the one who had the idea and pushed the start button. Things went well at first, but unfortunately as it progressed I lost control. I do feel responsible for it, believe me. Especially about getting you involved, since I basically forced you into it. But it’s time for us to stop, take stock of where we are, and come up with a plan of action.”
After getting all this out, Komatsu took a breath and drank his highball. He picked up the glass ashtray and, like a blind man feeling an object all over to understand what it is, carefully ran his long fingers over the surface.
“To tell you the truth,” he finally said, “I was imprisoned for seventeen or eighteen days somewhere. From the end of August to the middle of September. The day it happened I was in my neighborhood, in the early afternoon, on my way to work. I was on the road to the Gotokuji Station. This large black car stopped beside me and the window slid down and someone called my name. I went over, wondering who it could be, when two men leapt out of the car and dragged me inside. Both of them were extremely powerful. One pinned my arms back, and the other put chloroform or something up to my nose. Just like in a movie, huh? But that stuff really does the trick, believe me. When I came to, I was being held in a tiny, windowless room. The walls were white, and it was like a cube. There was a small bed and a small wooden desk, but no chair. I was lying on the bed.”
“You were kidnapped?” Tengo asked.
Komatsu finished his inspection of the ashtray, returned it to the table, and looked up at Tengo. “That’s right. A real kidnapping. Like in that old movie, The Collector. I don’t imagine most people in the world ever think they will end up kidnapped. The idea never occurs to them. Right? But when they kidnap you, believe me, you’re kidnapped. It’s kind of—how shall I put it?—surreal. You can’t believe you are actually being kidnapped by someone. Could you believe it?”
Komatsu stared at Tengo, as if looking for a reply. But it was a rhetorical question. Tengo was silent, waiting for him to continue. He hadn’t touched his highball. Beads of moisture had formed on the outside, wetting the coaster.
CHAPTER 16
Ushikawa
A CAPABLE, PATIENT, UNFEELING MACHINE
The next morning Ushikawa again took a seat by the window and continued his surveillance through a gap in the curtain. Nearly the same lineup of people who had come back to the apartment building the night before, or at least people who looked the same, were now exiting. Their faces were still grim, their shoulders hunched over. A new day had barely begun and yet they already looked fed up and exhausted. Tengo wasn’t among them, but Ushikawa went ahead and snapped photos of each and every face that passed by. He had plenty of film and it was good practice so he could be more efficient at stealthily taking photos.
When the morning rush had passed and he saw that everyone who was going out had done so, he left the apartment and slipped into a nearby phone booth. He dialed the Yoyogi cram school and asked to speak with Tengo.
“Mr. Kawana has been on leave for the last ten days,” said the woman who answered the phone.
“I hope he’s not ill?”
“No, someone in his family is, so he went to Chiba.”
“Do you know when he will be back?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t asked him that,” the woman said.
Ushikawa thanked her and hung up.
Tengo’s family, as far as Ushikawa knew, meant just his father—the father who used to be an NHK fee collector. Tengo still didn’t know anything about his mother. And as far as Ushikawa was aware, Tengo and his father had always had a bad relationship. Yet Tengo had taken more than ten days off from work in order to take care of his sick father. Ushikawa found this hard to swallow. How could Tengo’s antagonism for his father soften so quickly? What sort of illness did his father have, and where in Chiba was he in the hospital? There should be ways of finding out, though it would take at least a half a day to do so. And he would have to put his surveillance on hold while he did.
Ushikawa wasn’t sure what to do. If Tengo was away from Tokyo, then it was pointless to stake out this building. It might be smarter to take a break from surveillance and search in another direction. He should find out where Tengo’s father was a patient, or investigate Aomame’s background. He could meet her classmates and colleagues from her college days and from the company she used to work for, and gather more personal information. Who knows but this might provide some new clues.
But after mulling it over, he decided to stay put and continue watching the apartment building. First, if he suspended his surveillance at this point, it would put a crimp in the daily rhythm he had established, and he would have to start again from scratch. Second, even if he located Tengo’s father, and learned more about Aomame’s friendships, the payoff might not be worth the trouble. Pounding the pavement on an investigation can be productive up to a point, but oddly, once you pass that point, nothing much comes of it. He knew this through experience. Third, his intuition told him, in no uncertain terms, to stay put—to stay right where he was, watch all the faces that passed by, and let nothing get by him.
So he decided that, with or without Tengo, he would continue to stake out the building. If he stayed put, by the time Tengo came back Ushikawa would know each and every face. Once he knew all the residents, then he would know in a glance if someone was new to the building. I’m a carnivore, Ushikawa thought. And carnivores have to be forever patient. They have to blend in with their surroundings and know everything about their prey.
Just before noon, when the foot traffic in and out of the building was at its most sparse, Ushikawa left the apartment. He tried to disguise himself a bit, wearing a knit cap and a muffler pulled up to his nose, but still he couldn’t help but draw attention to himself. The beige knit cap perched on top of his huge head like a mushroom cap. The green muffler looked like a big snake coiled around him. Trying a disguise didn’t work. Besides, the cap and muffler clashed horribly.
Ushikawa stopped by the film lab near the station and dropped off two rolls of film to be developed. Then he went to a soba noodle shop and ordered a bowl of soba noodles with tempura. It had been a while since he had had a hot meal. He savored the tempura noodles and drank down the last drop of broth. By the time he finished he was so hot he had started to perspire. He put on his knit cap, wrapped the muffler around his neck again, and walked back to the apartment. As he smoked a cigarette, he lined up all the photos that he had had printed on the floor. He collated the photos of people going out in the morning and the ones of people coming back, and if any matched he put them together. In order to easily distinguish them, he made up names for each person, and wrote the names on the photos with a felt-tip pen.
Once the morning rush hour was over, hardly any residents left the building. One young man—a college student, by the looks of him—hurried out around ten a.m., a bag slung over his shoulder. An old woman around seventy and a woman in her mid-thirties also went out but then returned lugging bags of groceries fro
m a supermarket. Ushikawa took their photos as well. During the morning the mailman came and sorted the mail into the various mailboxes at the entrance. A deliveryman with a cardboard box came in and left, empty-handed, five minutes later.
Once an hour Ushikawa left his camera and did some stretching for five minutes. During that interval his surveillance was put on hold, but he knew from the start that total coverage by one person was impossible. It was more important to make sure his body didn’t get numb. His muscles would start to atrophy and then he wouldn’t be able to react quickly if need be. Like Gregor Samsa when he turned into a beetle, he deftly stretched his rotund, misshapen body on the floor, working the kinks out of his tight muscles.
He listened to AM radio with an earphone to keep from getting bored. Most of the daytime programs appealed to housewives and elderly listeners. The people who appeared on the programs told jokes that fell flat, pointlessly burst out laughing, gave their moronic, hackneyed opinions, and played music so awful you felt like covering your ears. Periodically they gave blaring sales pitches for products no one could possibly want. At least this is how it all sounded to Ushikawa. But he wanted to hear people’s voices, so he endured listening to the inane programs, wondering all the while why people would produce such idiotic shows and go to the trouble of using the airwaves to disseminate them.
Not that Ushikawa himself was involved in an operation that was so lofty and productive—hiding behind the curtains in a cheap one-room apartment, secretly snapping photos of people. He couldn’t very well criticize the actions of others.
It was not just now, either. Back when he was a lawyer it was the same. He couldn’t remember having done anything that helped society. His biggest clients ran small and medium-sized financial firms and had ties to organized crime. Ushikawa created the most efficient ways to disperse their profits and made all the arrangements. Basically, it was money laundering. He was also involved in land sharking: when investors had their eyes on an area, he helped drive out longtime residents so they could knock down their houses and sell the remaining large lot to condo builders. Huge amounts of money rolled in. The same type of people were involved in this as well. He also specialized in defending people brought up on tax-evasion charges. Most of the clients were suspicious characters that an ordinary lawyer would hesitate to have anything to do with. But as long as a client wanted him to represent him—and as long as a certain amount of money changed hands—Ushikawa never hesitated. He was a skilled lawyer, with a decent track record, so he never hurt for business. His relationship with Sakigake began in the same way. For whatever reason, Leader took a personal liking to him.
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