Villain.

by Shuichi Yoshida & Philip Gabriel.

CHAPTER 1.

WHO DID SHE WANT TO SEE?.

Route 263 runs north and south some forty-eight kilometers, connecting Fukuoka and Saga Prefectures and straddling Mitsuse Pass in the Sefuri mountain range. The highway begins at the Arae intersection in Sawara Ward in Fukuoka City, an ordinary intersection in an area that, since the mid-1960s, has become a bedroom suburb of Fukuoka with a mushrooming of large and medium-size condos, including, on the east side, the massive Arae housing complex. Sawara Ward is also an educational hub, with three well-known universities-Fukuoka University, Seinan Gakuin, and Nakamura Gakuen-within a three-kilometer radius of the intersection. Perhaps because of all the students living in the vicinity, everyone you see walking at the intersection, or waiting for buses-even the elderly-seems young and full of life.

Known at this point as Sawara Avenue, Route 263 runs straight south. Down the avenue there's a Daiei department store, a Mos Burger fast-food restaurant, a 7-Eleven convenience store, and one of those big-box suburban chain bookstores with a massive sign that proclaims, in no-nonsense fashion, Books Books. The first convenience store has an entrance directly facing the street, but after the Noke intersection the next one has a small parking space for one or two cars, the store after that enough space for five or six, then one with a larger parking lot to accommodate up to ten cars. Past the Muromi River, the convenience stores are surrounded by parking lots that can accommodate several huge eighteen-wheelers, the stores themselves like small boxes almost lost in the midst of massive parking lots.

Here the road begins to gently rise, and just before Suga Shrine curves sharply to the right. There are fewer houses along the roadside; just the brand-new asphalt road and white guardrails leading up toward Mitsuse Pass.

Mitsuse Pass has always had ghostly, otherworldly stories connected to it. In the beginning of the Edo period it was rumored to be a hideout for robbers. In the mid-1920s rumor had it that someone murdered seven women in Kitagata township in Saga Prefecture and escaped to the pass. More recently the pass has become infamous as the place where, so the story goes, someone staying at a nearby inn went crazy and killed another guest. Aware of this tale, young people liked to dare each other to drive over the pass. There have been supposed sightings of ghosts as well, usually near the exit to the Mitsuse Tunnel on the border between Fukuoka and Saga.

The road through the tunnel, a toll road known as Echo Road, was built to bypass the sharp curves and slopes that slow down traffic in the winter. Construction was begun in 1979 and completed in 1986. The toll road costs 250 for passenger cars and 870 for larger vehicles, and truck drivers on the route between Nagasaki and Fukuoka, weighing the trade-off between time and cost, often choose to drive over the pass.

Taking the regular expressway from Nagasaki to Hakata, a part of Fukuoka City, costs 3,650 in tolls for a passenger car, one way, so including the toll for the tunnel, taking the pass road saves nearly 1,000. The downside, however, is the drive over an eerie road that, even in daytime, is covered with thick, overhanging trees. At night no matter how fast you drive it feels as if you are tottering over a mountain path with only a flashlight to guide you.

Even so, cars setting out from Nagasaki that take the pass road to save money take the Nagasaki Expressway from Nagasaki to Omura, then to Higashi-Sonogi and Takeo, and get off at the Saga Yamato interchange. Intersecting this east-west Nagasaki Expressway at the interchange is Route 263.

Despite its reputation, until January 6, 2002, Mitsuse Pass was merely a road over a mountain pass, one long overlooked once the expressway was built. For those who lived in the area it was nothing more than a mountain road on the border of the two prefectures with a mammoth tunnel that had cost upwards of five billion yen to complete. But in the beginning of January 2002, an uncommon snowfall lay on the land. There, among the countless networks of artery-like roads spread out over the country, Route 263 and the Nagasaki Expressway linking Nagasaki and Fukuoka suddenly stood out, like a blood vessel bulging near the skin.

On this day, a young construction worker living outside Nagasaki was arrested by the Nagasaki police. The crime? He was suspected of strangling Yoshino Ishibashi, an insurance saleswoman who lived in Fukuoka, and abandoning her body.

On December 9, 2001, Yoshio Ishibashi was standing outside his barbershop near the JR Kurume station. Though he usually had a few customers on a Sunday, no one had visited his shop all morning, so he went out in front, hoping to lure some in. Dressed in his white barber's smock, he gazed down the road, the cold north wind rushing past. An hour had passed since he had finished the lunch his wife, Satoko, had prepared, and the scent of curry lingered even outside.

From the front of the barbershop he could see the JR Kurume station in the distance. Two taxis were parked in the deserted square in front of the station, waiting for over an hour for customers. Whenever Yoshio saw this deserted square, he thought he would have more business if only his shop were located near the other railroad station in town, the private Nishitetsu Kurume station. These two railroad lines-one state owned, the other private-basically ran parallel from Kurume to Fukuoka City, but while the JR special express train cost 1,320 one way and took twenty-six minutes, the Nishitetsu express took forty-two minutes but cost only 600.

You either spend sixteen more minutes or 720, one or the other.

Every time Yoshio gazed out from his shop at the JR station, it struck him how people would so easily sell sixteen minutes of their time for 720. Not that this applied to everybody, of course. It was highly unlikely that another Ishibashi who lived in this town, the world-renowned founder of Bridgestone Tires, and his descendants, would sell their precious time for such small change. But there was only a handful of people like that in this town, and on a late Sunday afternoon at the end of the year, most people were like him. The Nishitetsu station might be a bit farther away, but when they wanted to go to Fukuoka, that's where they headed.

Once Yoshio calculated his own value based on the difference between the two stations. If you live to age seventy and your time is worth 720 per sixteen minutes, how much is a person's life worth? When he first saw the result on the calculator he was sure he had made a mistake. The bottom line was 1.6 billion. He hurriedly punched in the numbers again but came up with the same result. A person's life is worth 1.6 billion. My life, he thought, is worth 1.6 billion.

This might have been a meaningless figure, something he'd calculated to kill time, but to Yoshio, the owner of a little barbershop whose customers were deserting him, the number gave a brief moment of happiness.

Yoshio had one child, a daughter named Yoshino, who had graduated the previous spring from junior college and had started working as a door-to-door salesperson for an insurance company in Fukuoka City. When she took the job, Yoshio had argued for a solid two weeks that she should continue to live at home, as she'd done in college, and commute via the Nishitetsu line. Her job and their house were in the same prefecture, after all, and she shouldn't count on her salary, which was based mostly on commissions. Yoshino countered that her company gave its employees a housing allowance, and that if she lived at home it would interfere with work. So in the end she moved into an apartment building rented by her company, not far from her firm.

Perhaps there were other reasons, but after Yoshino moved to Fukuoka she rarely came home. Once, when Yoshio told her to come back on a Saturday, she'd flatly refused, saying she had to entertain customers. Yoshio was sure she'd at least come back for New Year's, but just the other day his wife had informed him that Yoshino planned to take a trip to Osaka with friends from her company at the end of the year.

"Osaka? What's she going there for?" Yoshio growled. What's she going there for?" Yoshio growled.

His wife half expected this reaction. "Don't yell at me. She said she and her girlfriends are going to some place called Universal Studio or something." She strode off to the kitchen to begin making dinner for the two of them.

"Why in the world didn't you let me know about this earlier?" Yoshio yelled at her as she shuffled away.

Pouring soy sauce into a pan, Satoko said quietly, "Yoshino's an adult. She hardly ever gets a vacation, so when she does we should let her do what she wants."

When Yoshio had first met his wife she'd been so pretty she could have been selected Miss Kurume, but after she'd had Yoshino she put on weight and now looked nothing like her former self.

"When did you find out about this?"

As he yelled this, the door chime at their shop rang. Clicking his tongue, Yoshio plodded out to the front. His wife hadn't replied, but he could well imagine his daughter telling her to keep it a secret from Dad that she'd already bought a plane ticket, and Satoko replying, as if it was all too much trouble, "Okay, okay, I get it...."

In the shop stood an elementary school boy from the neighborhood, who until recently always came with his mother. The boy was as cute as one of those chubby little helmeted samurai dolls, but the back of his head was as flat as a cliff, the result, no doubt, of his mother letting him lie too long on his back as a baby.

Still, Yoshio was happy that there were still a few neighborhood children like this who came to get their hair cut. Once they got into junior or senior high, boys started to care too much about their appearance and either let their hair grow long or stopped coming to his shop, claiming that the haircuts he gave were out of style. Before he realized what was happening, local boys were making appointments in salons in Fukuoka and traveling there on weekends to get their hair styled.

The other day there'd been a meeting of the local barber and hair-salon union and when Yoshio mentioned this trend, the female owner of the Lillie Salon, who was drinking shochu shochu, butted in. "You're lucky you work with boys," she said. "With girls, the ones in elementary school are already going to get their hair cut in salons in Fukuoka."

"I remember you were pretty precocious, too, back when you were a kid," Yoshio joked. "So you can't just say it's kids these days." Yoshio and the woman were the same age, so he felt comfortable kidding her.

"Back in my day, we didn't go to salons in Fukuoka," the woman replied. "We stood in front of the mirror, curling iron in hand, for two or three hours, doing it ourselves."

"The Seiko cut, I'll bet."

Yoshio laughed and several people sitting nearby, glasses in hand, joined the conversation. "You're talking twenty years ago, aren't you," one of them said.

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 gyoza at Tetsunabe?" at Tetsunabe?"

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

It was true that Keigo had contacted her. But she was the one who had to take the initiative. Still, if she sent him a message he'd always reply. I really want to go to Universal Studios I really want to go to Universal Studios, she'd e-mailed once, and he said that he did, too, adding, she noted, an exclamation mark. But this didn't lead to an invitation to go together. Despite the exchanged e-mails, since that first chance meeting at the bar, Yoshino had never laid eyes on Keigo Masuo.

They were still talking about Keigo even after they entered the gyoza gyoza restaurant in Nakasu and sat down to a meal of chicken wings, potato salad, and the main dish, grilled restaurant in Nakasu and sat down to a meal of chicken wings, potato salad, and the main dish, grilled gyoza gyoza, washed down by draft beer. Mako was envious of Yoshino for having a steady boyfriend, while Sari, half jealous, cautioned Yoshino to make sure he didn't play around with anyone else.

"Yoshino, you still okay on time?" Mako said, and Yoshino glanced at the wall clock. The hands behind the greasy glass face showed nine p.m.

"No problem," she replied. "He's going to see some friends afterward, so we can only see each other for a few minutes."

Mako sighed predictably. "Of course you want to see him, even if it's just for a short time."