Nan-Core (23 page)

There was a copious amount. It had spilled down from the driver’s seat to form a deep puddle on the plastic floor mat. No one could survive such massive blood loss. That was clear even to me. Someone must have stabbed him multiple times in the chest and gut while he was still in the driver’s seat, exactly as I’d been planning to. The blood spattered on the windows was still fresh and wet. The grisly event had probably transpired less than an hour ago.

I felt, more than fear, a powerful sense of disappointment.

I was rooted to the spot, half-entertaining the idea that my alter ego had broken free and killed Shiomi without my knowledge. Of course, such a thing was impossible. More than anything, I felt like I had been badly cheated. Not just cheated—it felt like some con man had tricked me out of a priceless treasure.

I had no way of releasing all the pent-up energy inside me. An emotional anchor—my Nan-Core—had been snatched away from me. What was I supposed to do?

If Shiomi’s corpse had been there, I would have pulled the knife from my belt without hesitation and stabbed him repeatedly. That was how important it had been to me to kill him. I needed to bring closure to my feelings towards my mother, to reinvent myself, to have a future with Chie …

What I ended up doing was to jump into the blood-soaked car, barely even registering as the soles of my shoes slid around in the gunk, and to step down on the accelerator. I frantically spun the steering wheel around, barely able to contain my heart as it pounded hard enough to burst, and
drove the car down the winding mountain road, going as fast as I possibly could. I was continuing with the rest of my plan, moving on to the next stage as though I had killed Shiomi myself.

It was the only choice I had.

I realized it was the yakuza. They’d beaten me to the very crime I was going to frame them with. Yet it was impossible to do nothing, to just leave the car and stroll nonchalantly back down the mountain.

It took twenty minutes to reach the bottom of the mountain road, and I didn’t pass a single car during that time. Halfway down, the choking stench became unbearable, and I rolled down all the windows a third of the way. The driver’s seat had sucked up the blood like a sea sponge, and as I sat there the blood soaked into my clothes until they clung to my back and rear. My white gloves were stained dark.

I used backstreets wherever possible, taking local roads for a while before switching onto the expressway for Osaka. Feeling the blood as it wet my skin, breathing in the smell of it, I began to feel intoxicated by a sense of victory. Inside the car with all that blood, it wasn’t hard to persuade myself that I’d been the one to kill Shiomi. I could somehow vividly sense in my hand the lingering feeling of the knife plunging deep between his ribs.

“Yes! Yes! Yesss!” I shouted with exhilaration at myself, banging the steering wheel with my gloved hands.

I exited the expressway at Minatomachi, knowing the area was surprisingly quiet once you moved away from the Namba JR train station. Low office buildings around four or
five stories tall were crammed alongside the tracks, and at this time of night the place would be devoid of people or traffic.

As I drove around in search of a place to dump the car, the fluorescent lights atop the telephone poles here and there made the streets look like a scene from a black-and-white movie. I felt a chill when I passed a vending machine, the only source of color, and a police car appeared from the right-hand side of a narrow intersection. Although we were nowhere near a collision we both hit our brakes, and then I crossed the intersection first, as the left side has priority. I kept my eyes ahead and drove slowly, but I was afraid they might think it suspicious that I was wearing a woolen cap when it wasn’t winter.

After I’d driven for a while I broke out in a cold sweat. If they’d stopped me for questioning, that would have been game over. That area had occasional violent crimes that got covered in the papers, so it was only natural that the police had a robust presence. I couldn’t keep roaming the area in case I came across the same cruiser again. I drove back to the tracks to get a better sense of the area, still heading away from the station. Then I crossed the tracks at a random junction and looped back towards the station.

A large, fenced-off plot of land appeared ahead on the left, and I pulled in without a moment’s thought. Luck was with me as the entrance wasn’t gated. I drove around the plot in a slow circle, using my headlights to illuminate the area.

The grass had been left to run wild but the land wasn’t completely vacant. It looked like a construction site abandoned in the middle of laying the foundation. There were a number of concrete pipes and other miscellaneous building
materials left exposed to the elements and even a pre-fab construction shed. I’d expected to find places like this in an area undergoing redevelopment, where construction on a project had been cancelled partway through when its prospects had dimmed. I would have probably found one straightaway, but at night it was harder to see long distances.

For some strange reason there was a fridge, an electric kettle, and some plastic storage bins jumbled in among a heap of abandoned construction materials off to one side. Next to that was a couple of vehicles parked nose to nose, one a station wagon, the other a sedan, both slightly blackened. They were half-buried with weeds up to the windows, so I supposed they had been abandoned as well.

It was exactly what I needed.

I picked out a suitable area and drove slowly into the undergrowth, letting the bumper plow through the grass. I rolled up the windows, turned off the engine, and got out of the car. I pulled my rucksack from the backseat and locked the doors.

Outside, I took a few deep breaths of the grass-scented air.

The blood was drying out like glue, making my clothes stick to me. It mingled with my sweat, creating a terrible smell. I wondered what kind of face Yohei would make if he saw me like this. My mouth twisted into a laughing sob as the thought came to me.

I stripped off my cap, shirt, pants, underwear, and shoes, then used all twenty of the plastic-wrapped wipes I’d brought from the cafe to scrub my body down, starting with my hands and face. I needed many more wipes, but it couldn’t be helped.
Anything with blood on it got bundled into a plastic garbage bag, ready to burn in the incinerator at the cafe. Once I was wearing the fresh change of clothes and a clean pair of sneakers, I started to feel a little better.

I had to call Ms. Hosoya since she would be waiting for me to report in. It was already well past eleven. I wasn’t too far from the train tracks, so I was afraid she might notice the sound if a train passed by. I called regardless.

“Oh, you’re okay! What on earth took you so long?” I’d never heard her sound so harsh.

“Sorry to call so late. Shiomi didn’t show. I waited all this time for nothing. I’ve been on edge the whole time, so I’m totally exhausted.” I didn’t have the energy to hate myself for lying. I was working under the illusion, even then, that I had killed Shiomi. I was still carrying out my plan as though that had been the case.

“Oh, he didn’t? What happened? He’d sounded so desperate for the money.”

“Don’t know. Maybe he found another way.”

Ms. Hosoya seemed to consider this, and when she spoke again her tone was more relaxed. “Well, anyways, we kept our side of the bargain. I don’t think there’s anything more to do at this point. We’ll just have to wait. No doubt he’ll be back with more threats very soon.”

If day after day came and went with no further contact from Shiomi, would Ms. Hosoya and Chie regain their peace of mind and gradually forget about him? As I considered this, a doubt crossed my mind for the first time—was that blood really Shiomi’s? I turned back without thinking, the phone still pressed to my ear, and regarded the car I’d left in the
middle of the flattened weeds. I hadn’t stabbed him, so I couldn’t be sure. There was a greater-than-zero possibility, in theory, that Shiomi had killed the yakuza who’d been following him. He might have used the other car to escape. I pondered this with a mind that felt like it was waking from a dream. If that was true, I would have inadvertently helped Shiomi cover up his own crime.

I felt on the verge of panic just for a moment, but managing to keep my voice calm I asked, “How is Chie doing?”

“Sleeping now, thanks to the pills. She ate all of her dinner, too. She should start getting better soon, physically at least.”

I asked if she was still happy to look after Chie for a few more days as we’d originally agreed. If we didn’t hear from Shiomi during that time, it was probably safe to assume he was dead. The negatives I’d failed to retrieve weighed heavily on my mind, but I couldn’t do anything about that for now.

“Are you still at the lookout?” she asked, just as I was about to hang up.

“Yes. I’m going to head back down now.”

“Be careful. And there’s no point in thinking about things too much. Have a bath or something, get some proper rest tonight.”

“I just might. Thank you.”

I checked the time again: just before midnight. It would be cutting it close, but if I sprinted I could just make the last train out of Namba.

Everything was suddenly peaceful again. Five days passed, then ten, and as I’d expected there was no word from Shiomi.

The weather was hot and clear. For a few hours during midday the dog run was empty, but it was almost overfull in the mornings and evenings. With kids on summer vacation coming in as well, Shaggy Head was busier than at any other time of the year.

I read the papers carefully but had yet to find any articles on a suspicious, blood-soaked car being discovered around Namba. If, unluckily enough, someone noticed the car and reported it to the police, they would soon find out it belonged to Shiomi, and as Chie was his wife according to his family register, it was possible a detective would show up to ask questions. Or they might come to question me, since I was the one she was having an affair with.

None of this worried me. They could look anywhere, do whatever they liked—I was sure they wouldn’t find a single clue. That would be true even in the rare case that someone found his corpse floating in Osaka Bay. No evidence existed that could link us to the murder.

As for the car, I felt sure it would just stay there unnoticed
for a long time yet, as the grass gradually buried it. I imagined the blood of the man who had ruined Chie’s life roasting under a blazing sun, drying up, then starting to crack like blackened coal tar.

I felt a bizarre sense of accomplishment, as if I’d actually pulled off what I’d set out to do. I understood that I hadn’t killed Shiomi. Even though I hadn’t actually carried out the act, I couldn’t shake the feeling that by sheer force of will my desire to kill him had brought about the result. It wasn’t logical, I just wanted to believe it was true. I had to believe it. Who cared if it was a delusion? The physiological sensations were still there, branded into me: the smell of the blood, the tackiness as it stuck to my skin.

Ms. Hosoya only took three days off work but out of an abundance of caution let Chie stay for a week, until the cafe closed for the
O-bon
holiday. On the last night we had what felt like a celebratory dinner at her place.

I was stuffing my cheeks with Chie’s home-cooked pizza when I told them I suspected Shiomi had been killed by the yakuza, and that was why we hadn’t heard from him. Chie, who still hadn’t fully recovered from her absentminded state, put her raised glass back on the table and frowned a little.

Ms. Hosoya looked at us both in turn before letting out a sigh. “You’re probably right. He was scared out of his wits. Maybe he didn’t have the time to come and get the money. A pitiful end to a pitiful man.”

That was the last time the three of us ever spoke of Shiomi.

The bruises on Chie’s ribs, shoulders, and thighs yellowed
and started to fade, but it looked like it would be a long while before they vanished altogether. She began to apply a light amount of makeup again like before. We were in the kitchen nearly daily during the five-day holiday, preparing lots of food from time-consuming recipes. We gave the kitchen a thorough cleaning, even the corners we didn’t usually get to, and painstakingly polished the glass in all the cafe’s windows and doors.

At least for the holidays, I wanted to forget about stuff like cleaning Shaggy Head’s windows, not to mention all the cooking, but Chie seemed the most at ease when we kept ourselves occupied like that. When we did relax and listen to music, Chie usually fell asleep. Once asleep she would doze for a couple of hours, then sleep the whole night without taking any pills. It seemed to me that the more she slept, the more the color returned to her eyes, and the more her face looked tranquil.

We still didn’t say much to each other, except for discussing the steps needed for cooking or cleaning. We relied on simple gestures and looks to communicate the many things we couldn’t express in words, and for the most part it worked fine. I supposed we might talk someday, little by little, about the time we were apart, what had happened, what we had thought then. That clearly wouldn’t happen for a while. But when that time came I wanted Chie to know all about my mother and the notebooks she had left.

I doubted, however, that I would tell her about that night, about the blood-soaked midnight drive. It was my secret, something neither Chie nor Ms. Hosoya could ever know.

The last night of the holidays, Chie and I made love for
the first time since we’d been reunited. We were both nervous, awkward. For Chie it seemed to be a necessary formality, something to help her begin to move on.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a faint voice, and started to tremble. “Don’t you hate this? You know that I …”

I didn’t want to force her into anything and break the gentle equilibrium that still held between us. And yet I wanted her so badly it felt like I might burst into flames. Hardly able to control myself, I was at a loss for what to do. I held her closer, ignoring my urges as I stroked her back for a long time. I kept whispering “It’s gonna be all right” into her ear until her trembling subsided.