Villain

by Shuichi Yoshida

  The shop sold what might be termed trendyish jeans and shirts, ish being the operative element. And there was a great difference between what was trendy and what was almost. For instance, she remembered coming across a shirt in a high-end store in Hakata that had the same design as one they sold at Wakaba, with prints of horses on it. Somehow the horses on the Wakaba knockoff shirt were ever so slightly larger, and that almost undetectable difference of a few millimeters was all it took to make the Wakaba shirts look kitschy.

  But she also remembered a junior high school student who bought one of these horse-print shirts, and how happy he was as he carefully put on his yellow helmet and pedaled off on his low-seat bicycle, the precious shirt under one arm. She knew it contradicted the earlier feelings she had when her manager transferred her out of casual wear, but when she saw this junior high school boy pedaling away down along the highway she felt like shouting out to him: That’s right—who cares if the horses are a little bigger. Be proud of your shirt! At that moment, Mitsuyo realized she was almost fond of her hometown.

  “Miss Magome! How ’bout taking a break?”

  Mitsuyo turned and saw the plump face of Kazuko Mizutani, the floor manager, peeking up above the rack of suits. From where Mitsuyo stood by the window, the rows of suits looked like waves rushing in to the shore. On a weekday morning like this they couldn’t expect many customers. Occasionally someone would rush in to buy a dark suit for a funeral, but there didn’t seem to be any tragedies in the neighborhood today.

  “Did you bring your lunch?” Kazuko asked as she weaved her way through the maze of suit racks.

  “These days making my lunch is the only thing I enjoy doing,” Mitsuyo replied.

  When the shop wasn’t busy, they took turns going for lunch during the morning. The shop was spacious, but there were only three employees. Quite often they outnumbered the customers.

  “I hate this winter rain. I wonder when it’s going to let up.” Kazuko came up beside her and went over to the window. Her breath clouded a tiny portion as she breathed on the pane. The heat was on in the shop but with no customers the place felt empty and cold.

  “Did you ride your bike to work again?”

  As Kazuko asked this, Mitsuyo gazed down at the large parking lot below, wet in the rain. They shared the lot with a fast-food place next door, and there were a few cars, but they were all parked close to the other store. Just her one little bike sat next to a fence near Wakaba, as if it were standing up alone to the cold winter downpour.

  “If it’s still raining when you get off, we’ll give you a ride,” Kazuko said, patting Mitsuyo’s shoulders and then heading off toward the checkout counter.

  Kazuko was forty-two this year. Her husband, one year older, was manager of an electric appliance store in the city and always came by to pick her up after work. He was a quiet man, and Mitsuyo found it cute how even after twenty years of marriage, he still called her Kazu-chan. The two of them had one child, a twenty-year-old son who was a junior in college. Kazuko was worried about him, calling him a hikikomori, a self-imposed shut-in. From what she said, though, he didn’t seem to be a hard-core shut-in. She was just worried that he preferred staying in his room and fooling around with his computer to going out, and that he still didn’t have a girlfriend. Using the buzzword hikikomori was, Mitsuyo felt, Kazuko’s way of convincing herself and those around her that her worries were justified.

  She wasn’t trying to explain away Kazuko’s son and his shut-in qualities, but really, there was so little to do in this town. Go out three days in a row and you were sure to run across someone you met the day before. It was like living in a continuous tape loop; it was much more fun to connect with the world through your computer than to live in the real world.

  After she took an early lunch, and before her evening break, three different customers came in. One was an elderly couple. The husband had no interest in buying a new shirt, but his wife kept holding up one shirt after another in front of him, apparently less interested in the color or design than in the price.

  Just before Mitsuyo’s evening break a man in his early thirties came in. The staff had been told to wait until the customers asked a question before approaching them, so Mitsuyo stood across the room, eyeing the man as he pawed through the racks of suits. Even from that distance, she spied the man’s wedding ring.

  “There’re just no good eligible men our age in this town,” her twin sister, Tamayo, once said. “I mean there are some good men, but they’re all married.”

  Mitsuyo’s friends who worked in town said the same thing. These friends, though, were all married, so their tone was different from that of her unmarried sister. “There’s a guy I’d love to introduce you to,” they’d tell her. “But unfortunately he’s already married. It’s a real shame.…”

  Not that she’d even asked them to introduce her to someone, but the truth remained that it took some courage, in a town like Saga, to be turning thirty next year and to still be single. Her three best friends from high school were all married, with children. One of them had a son who had already started elementary school this year.

  “Excuse me,” the customer looking through the suits suddenly asked. He was holding up a mocha-colored suit.

  “Would you like to try it on?” Mitsuyo smiled as she approached.

  “So is this suit one of the ones that are thirty-eight thousand nine hundred yen for two?” he asked, pointing to the poster hanging from the ceiling.

  “Yes. All of them are.” Mitsuyo smiled again and led him to the fitting room.

  The man was tall, and must work out, she figured. After he put on the suit and opened the curtain Mitsuyo could see his muscular thighs bulging through the tight slacks.

  “Don’t you think they’re a little tight?” the man asked as he looked at her in the mirror.

  “Most slacks are styled that way these days.”

  She crouched down in front of him to measure the length of the legs. The man smelled slightly milky, as if he might have a baby at home.

  A man’s large legs were right in front of her. He was wearing socks, but still she could see the outlines of his toenails. Mitsuyo wondered how many men she’d knelt down in front of. When she first started doing this, measuring trouser legs, she’d hated it, feeling as if she were kneeling in submission.

  All those men’s legs. Legs with dirty socks, with clean socks. Thick ankles, thin ankles, long calves, short calves. Sometimes men’s legs looked brutal to her, at other times strong and reliable.

  Back when she was twenty-two or twenty-three and was called on to help measure trousers, she had the illusion that among all these men whose trouser legs she was taking up would be her future husband. She laughed at this memory now, but back then she held on to the hope that as she knelt before a man, pinning up a trouser leg, she’d look up and there would be the face of her future husband, gazing gently down at her. For a while she had this fantasy about each customer she served.

  This was her first period of expectation about marriage, she realized now. But no matter how many trouser legs she shortened, she never saw the face of the man she was to marry.

  The winter rain kept on falling, even after dark.

  Mitsuyo closed out the register, turned off the lights in the spacious shop, and went to the locker room to change out of her uniform. Kazuko, already in her street clothes, said, “You can’t go home on a bike in this rain. We’ll give you a ride.”

  Mitsuyo glanced at her tired face in the locker-room mirror. “That would be nice,” she said. But then she worried that the next morning she’d have to take the bus to work.

  They left through the employee entrance, the rain continuing to pound down on the large parking lot. Behind the store, a fallow field beyond a fence smelled wet and earthy.

  Cars hissed by on the wet highway, spraying water. The mammoth, brightly lit sign for the store with the name Wakaba was reflected on the rainy pavement and flickered in a dreamy way.

  M
itsuyo heard a car horn and turned toward the sound. Kazuko was already in the passenger seat of her husband’s minicar, which was edging toward Mitsuyo.

  Mitsuyo ran out from under the eaves, leaving her umbrella closed. “Thank you so much,” she said as she clambered into the backseat. It took only a few seconds, but her neck was wet and the rain was so cold it hurt.

  “Another day, huh?” Kazuko’s husband, who wore thick glasses, said.

  “Thank you for always helping me out,” Mitsuyo replied.

  Mitsuyo’s apartment was in a corner of a rice field that had a watercourse running through it. It was fairly new, but had that tacky, instantly obsolete look of a place that was built only to be torn down in a few years. Drenched in the rain this evening, the building looked even more dreary than usual.

  As they always did, Kazuko and her husband dropped her off right in front of her building. As Mitsuyo climbed out of the backseat, her sneakers sank with a squish into the mud.

  Mitsuyo waved goodbye and splashed through the mud up the stairs. She was only on the second floor, but when she got upstairs the view made her feel as if she were at some scenic overlook. The scent of drenched soil, blown toward her by the wind, tickled her nose.

  She opened the door to No. 201 and light filtered out from inside.

  “Hey, I thought you were going to that party with the Chamber of Commerce,” Mitsuyo called out as she tugged off her wet, muddy skirt. The smell of the kerosene stove hit her, along with the voice of her sister: “It wasn’t mandatory, so I didn’t go.”

  In the six-mat living room, her sister, Tamayo, was toweling off her wet hair. She must have just lit the stove, for the room was still cold and had the acrid stink of kerosene.

  “I used to hate having to pour drinks for the men, but now the younger girls are pouring me drinks. Kind of makes me uncomfortable,” Tamayo said, standing in front of the stove.

  “Did you buy anything?” Mitsuyo asked her, speaking to her back.

  “No, nothing. It was raining and everything.”

  Tamayo tossed her the damp towel.

  “Anything in the fridge?” As she wiped her wet neck Mitsuyo opened the refrigerator.

  “Did Mrs. Mizutani give you a ride again?”

  “Yeah, I left my bike, so tomorrow I’ll have to take the bus.”

  There was half a cabbage in the fridge, and a bit of pork, so she decided to sauté these and make some udon as well. She shut the fridge.

  “Your skirt’s going to get wrinkled,” Mitsuyo cautioned Tamayo, who was sitting on the tatami in her damp clothes.

  “So you think it’s really okay for a couple of twin sisters turning thirty next year to sit here enjoying udon?” Tamayo said, twirling some tororo konbu around her noodles.

  Mitsuyo sprinkled some pepper flakes in her bowl. “These noodles are a bit overcooked,” she said.

  “Twenty years ago the neighbors would have definitely looked at us like we’re weird.”

  “Why?”

  “Two women, twins, living alone in an apartment? Think they wouldn’t gossip about that?”

  Tamayo, her long hair pulled back and fastened with a rubber band, noisily slurped down the noodles.

  “Plus we have names that make us sound like a comedy team—Mitsuyo and Tamayo. The kids in the neighborhood would definitely have called us the Witch Twins.”

  “The Witch Twins …” Half laughing, Mitsuyo felt a shudder of dread at the thought. This didn’t hurt her appetite, though, as she continued to down the noodles.

  They lived in a 2DK apartment, two bedrooms plus a dining room–kitchen that rented for ¥42,000 a month. On paper it sounded like a nice place, but the two bedrooms actually consisted of two identical six-mat tatami rooms separated by a sliding door. The other residents of this cheap apartment building were all young couples with small children.

  After graduating from a local high school, the twins had worked at a food-processing plant in Tosu City. They hadn’t planned to work in the same factory, but after they’d applied at several places only one had hired them. They both worked on the production line. They were assigned to various stations on the line over the three years they worked there, and over this time had watched tens of thousands of instant-noodle cups flow past.

  Tamayo was the first to grow sick of it and she quit to work as a caddie at a nearby golf course. But she soon hurt her back and took an office job at the Chamber of Commerce. Around the time she quit the caddie job, Mitsuyo was let go by the food factory. The company was downsizing, and the first to be fired were the girls like Mitsuyo who’d only graduated from high school.

  The employment office at the factory introduced her to the menswear shop. She wasn’t good at dealing with customers, but wasn’t in a position to wait for something that suited her better.

  They rented this apartment around the time that Mitsuyo first started working at Wakaba. Tamayo claimed that if they kept living at home, they’d never get married, and so she half forced Mitsuyo into the idea of moving in with her.

  The twins always got along well and continued to do so after living together. Their parents were glad to get the two nagging older sisters out of the house, for it gave them the chance to seriously start preparing for the girls’ younger brother, their eldest son, to get married. And sure enough, three years later he married a former high school classmate. The girl was twenty-two at the time, three years younger than the twins. In attendance at the wedding were several of their brother’s friends, themselves already married with babies—not an uncommon scene at this suburban wedding hall.

  “Hey, what d’you think one of the girls at the Chamber of Commerce asked me?”

  After they finished their udon, Mitsuyo was washing the dishes in the kitchen, Tamayo sprawled out in front of the TV.

  “‘What’re you doing for Christmas?’ she asked. How am I supposed to answer a nineteen-year-old who asks me that?” Tamayo was watching a show on dieting and doing leg lifts as she watched.

  “But weren’t you going to take some vacation time and go on a trip?”

  “Yeah, but taking a bus trip around the Shimanami Kaido Expressway with a bunch of women seems kind of sad, don’t you think? Hey, do you want to go with me?”

  “No way. We’re together every day. Just the thought of taking a trip with you on my vacation makes me tired.”

  Mitsuyo added a little dishwashing liquid to her sponge. In the kitchen hung a calendar from the local supermarket. Other than notations of garbage days and her days off, the calendar was blank.

  Christmas, Mitsuyo murmured as she squeezed the sponge. The last few years Mitsuyo had spent Christmas with her parents. Her brother’s little boy, born not too long after the wedding, had his birthday on Christmas Eve, so he’d always go home with an armful of presents.

  She’d been squeezing the sponge too hard and the suds had dripped down on her rubber glove. She stood there, watching as the suds slid down the glove to her elbow and then, once enough suds accumulated, into the sink with all the dirty dishes. The soapy suds made her elbow itch. Her whole body felt itchy.

  Yuichi rolled over several times in bed, as if to test how creaky the springs were.

  It was 8:50 p.m. Too early to sleep, but these past few days he’d tried to fall asleep as soon as he could, so right after taking a bath and having dinner he went to bed, even though his eyes remained wide open.

  He’d toss and turn, and start to notice the smell of his pillow, and the feel of his blanket and how it rubbed against his neck the wrong way.

  And most nights, before he knew it, he had an erection. His hard penis under the blanket was nearly as hot as the infrared space heater next to his bed.

  Nine days had passed since the murder. The TV talk shows had all reported how the Fukuoka college student sought as a material witness was still missing, but the last couple of days, the shows had been silent about the murder at Mitsuse Pass.

  As the local patrolman had told Fusae, the only lead the poli
ce were pursuing was to find the missing college student. Since then, the police hadn’t contacted Yuichi’s home, or tried to question him. Nothing at all happened, as if he’d disappeared from their radar.

  When he closed his eyes, he felt as if he were driving over the pass again, holding on to the steering wheel so tightly he nearly spun out on some of the curves. The headlights of his car lit up the forest as the white guardrails drew closer.

  Yuichi rolled over again. Go to sleep! he commanded himself, burying his face in the pillow, smelling its mixture of sweat, body odor, and shampoo.

  Right then his phone beeped, signaling an e-mail. Suddenly freed from being forced to go to sleep, he reached out for the cell phone, which lay inside the pocket of the pants he’d tossed on the floor.

  It has to be Hifumi, he thought, but he didn’t recognize the number.

  He got up and sat cross-legged. Though it was winter, he still slept just in his underwear, and his back facing the heater soon got hot.

  Hello. Remember me? We exchanged a few messages a couple of months ago. I’m the elder of twin sisters who live in Saga, and you were going on and on about some lighthouse. Have you forgotten? Sorry for the sudden e-mail.

  After he read the message Yuichi scratched his back, which was still facing the heater. In just a short time, it felt as if he’d been burned.

  He got out of bed and sat on the tatami. As he slid forward his trousers and sweatshirt got twisted in his knees.

  Yuichi remembered the girl. Two months ago he had registered his address on a dating site and gotten five or six replies. Hers was one of them, and they’d e-mailed for a while, but when he invited her to go for a drive she suddenly stopped replying.

  Hey, it’s been a while. So what’s up all of a sudden?

  His fingers worked smoothly over the keys. Usually when he spoke, something in his mind interfered before he could get the words out, but when he sent e-mails, the words flowed easily.

  You remember me? I’m happy. No, nothing’s really going on. I just felt like e-mailing you.