A Quiet Place (5 page)

“I suppose if he's already amenable to the idea, then I could sort something out.”

“Do you think you'd be able to accompany him again?”

“Me? I don't think so. It was my turn last time. It's bound to be someone else the next time. There are other section chiefs, you know. And then there are assistant division chiefs, division chiefs and so on… There's no shortage of qualified people.”

“I'll make sure that the manufacturers' association puts in a request for you to come too. And I think it's good for Mr Shiraishi to have someone he already knows. I mean, you'd been right there by his side the whole time up until that dinner party. And besides, I gave him the heads-up that we were the ones who arranged that geisha for him.”

Asai grimaced. “You told him about that?”

“If I hadn't told him, he would have hesitated to go with her.”

“You think so?”

“Of course. And hearing that, he knows you were taking good care of him. I'm sure he sees you in a more favourable light now.”

“Thanks for looking out for me.”

“So next time Mr Shiraishi needs to appoint himself an assistant, he'll think of you straight away. I'll set it up with the manufacturers' association.”

Before Asai could reply, Yagishita's balding forehead leaned in closer.

“Mr Asai, why don't you visit Kobe for a bit of fun? I'm sorry if it's inappropriate to make that kind of suggestion right after your wife has passed away.”

Asai didn't know what to say.

“These kinds of trips don't come along every day. And last time you had to leave before things really got interesting. That was such a pity.”

“I'll think about it.”

“Here everyone's watching you, but down in Kobe you'll be away from prying eyes. And it's not as if you sleep with a woman at the restaurant or your own hotel; you go by car to an out-of-the-way place – an inn or a couples' hotel. Then no one's around to see you.”

“Are there a lot of hotels like that in Kobe?”

“Sure. There are plenty of quiet places around Suma or Akashi. It's handy – you can even rent a room in the daytime.”

“Do you go to places like that?”

“No. Me, I only do it at night.”

Asai couldn't look at Yagishita's laughing face without seeing the gateway to the Hotel Tachibana.

5

It wasn't Yagishita's description of the couples' hotels near Kobe that put the idea into Asai's head. Since Eiko's death, there had been the little germ of an idea attached to the inner wall of his brain. Ever since he had seen the Tachibana's neon sign on top of that hill in Yoyogi, the germ had detached itself and begun to spawn, the black specks swirling around his brain and finally coming to rest right behind his eyes. These shadows blocked all outside light. The moment he heard Yagishita's story, they began to crawl over his eyes like squirming black insects, and he was spurred into action.

Eiko's weak heart had barely caused her any problems in her day-to-day life. As long as she didn't overexert herself, there were no noticeable symptoms, and she had been able to forget there was anything wrong with her at all. Still, she'd taken it upon herself to be careful not to break into a run, pick up very heavy objects, or to get upset enough to fly into a rage. She was afraid that if she had an unexpected traumatic experience or heard shocking news, or even resumed her sex life, any of these might have caused her to have a heart attack.

The road in Yoyogi was an uphill slope, and Eiko had hated walking uphill. Asai knew this, and knew it had been
one of her ways of protecting her heart. So why had she been there? The proprietor of Takahashi Cosmetics had been certain that she had been heading in that direction when she'd staggered into the shop, her face white as a sheet.

Normally, Eiko would have talked to him about all of her outings, but she'd never mentioned that part of the city. So perhaps that day had been the first time she'd ever been there. Or she'd been there before but purposely not told him about it.

If Eiko had been trying to hide something, it might explain why she'd been walking up that street. At the top sat the Hotel Tachibana, with the neon sign on its roof. If she'd been heading there, she would have had to take that route – the kind of uphill road that she normally avoided. There was no other way up to the hotel.

Eiko's trips had lasted three to four hours, and had taken place in the middle of the day. Sometimes twice, sometimes three times a week. Not all these trips were to her haiku teacher's home in Suginami Ward. She'd told Asai that sometimes she visited friends and acquaintances from her haiku circle, and occasionally she would go for a stroll somewhere that might inspire a poem. Asai had heard this so many times that he'd let the information wash over him. Now he realized that he should have listened more carefully; three to four hours was just about the perfect length of time to meet a lover.

When the insects had begun to swarm, he'd grabbed Eiko's haiku notebook in an attempt to discover some written clue, but there was nothing that suggested a love affair. This was the very same notebook that Eiko had been
carrying in her handbag at the time of her death; the one she'd desperately tried to show to Chiyoko Takahashi.

The notebook contained a list of addresses; a list that the haiku teacher had collected and distributed as a way of identifying all her students. There was nothing suspicious about it at all. There wasn't a single sentence written in the whole book that could be interpreted as a message of love. Eiko's own poems were in the style of the Hototogisu School of haiku, relating to the beauty of nature and the harmony between man and the natural world. Every poem was about nature. And yet not one of the locations described seemed to evoke Yoyogi. Maybe somewhere, buried deep in these poems, was a secret.

Even if Asai was on the right track, he had absolutely no idea who the lover could be. What kind of man could make Eiko burn with such desire that she forgot about her weak heart? In the whole seven years that Asai had been married to her, he'd never once seen Eiko show any interest in other men. She'd always seemed to him to have a rather bland personality – she despised romantic novels and never read them, and he'd never heard her discuss love or sex. If there was any hint of a love scene on a TV programme she would immediately change channels or turn it off.

Similarly, Eiko had shown no interest in her husband's job. She'd never made an effort to understand what kind of work he did, and never asked questions about it. She'd wanted to hear how many days he'd be away on his business trips, but never asked where he was going, who he was going with, or the purpose of the trip. She had simply checked what day he'd be home so she could get the house
ready for his return. She'd been so indifferent that it didn't matter how late he came home on any given working day, she'd never bothered to ask him where he'd been.

Eiko had never been fond of spending time with the wives of his colleagues at the ministry. Asai understood it could be tedious, but all the other wives put up with it, didn't they? Surely that was their contribution to their husbands' careers. She really ought to have made more of an effort to cosy up to the wives of his superiors, but she'd never even tried. That was the kind of person Eiko had been: completely unconcerned with Asai's career advancement.

Generally, when a wife is completely disinterested in her husband's social standing, he is forced to dig deep and find his own source of motivation. This depends, of course, on the personality of the husband in question, but Asai believed he had what it took. Because he'd never enjoyed the cooperation and support of his wife, Asai knew that he'd been given the opportunity to pour all his energy into his work. If things had been different, and Eiko had been too involved in his career – if she either henpecked or overprotected him – it would have weakened his own motivation. Asai saw plenty of men like that around the ministry.

A wife who was passionately involved in her husband's career didn't necessarily love her husband any better than a wife who had no interest in it at all. Every woman was different. Actions did not necessarily speak louder than words. After seven years of marriage Asai and Eiko had a relationship as natural as air or water. Even the wives who had the deepest involvement in their husbands' careers
would never have a complete understanding of their jobs. That was how Asai had always seen it.

But the wife who felt that all passion was gone from her daily life, who looked for a way to rekindle that passion with some other man besides her husband… well, he'd read about this kind of thing in novels and the advice column in the newspaper, but he'd never imagined it actually happening to him.

And yet something occurred to him when he really thought about it. Perhaps he had adjusted his own personality too easily to Eiko's. If he'd paid her a little more attention, maybe she would have been less passive. Her sensuality may have been right there under the surface waiting to blossom. But he'd been lacking as a partner. He'd been too concerned with her health problems, held back too much. The doctor had emphasized that all his warnings were just standard textbook, so there must have been some other way to continue making love. Perhaps they should have gone to other doctors, asked for more advice.

Eiko had never been assertive and definitely hadn't been the type to take the initiative in the bedroom. It seemed that she'd been unable to break the habits they'd fallen into at the start of their marriage. Perhaps she didn't have the courage. The rigidity of their seven years of marital relations had gradually formed a protective shell into which she had retreated.

This other man would have had to work on breaking that shell and overcoming the modesty that she had always shown around her husband. And it looked as if he had found a way in. She had apparently undergone a complete transformation.

Asai recalled something the doctor had said, way back.

“Heart disease is an invisible illness, undetectable in everyday life, so people tend to become careless. Let me give you an example. One of my friends, a doctor who suffers from heart disease himself, was out one day driving his car to a house call when his tyre got stuck in the drainage ditch by the side of the road. He got out, tried to lift the car out of the ditch, and instantly suffered a heart attack. He died on the spot. Even though he was a doctor, he completely forgot about his own illness. You need to take care.”

Who was this object of Eiko's obsession? Who had made her forget about her disease? This man who had given her a shock strong enough to paralyse her coronary artery – where was he?

It struck Asai now that the reason Eiko never read romantic fiction or watched soap operas or other TV dramas wasn't because she'd disliked them. She'd been avoiding them. She didn't want to stir up all those feelings and sensations that she'd been trying to repress. And he'd taken it for a lack of interest!

Eiko had studied singing and painting, so she must have had a sensitive side. She'd been interested in romance novels and TV soaps after all. She avoided them so that they wouldn't awaken her sexual desire. Taking singing then giving it up, switching to painting and giving that up too, never sticking with anything for long – she was seeking something elusive, something that she needed. Did those ballads stir something tremendous in her soul? Traditional Japanese-style painting was probably far too tame. But in order to express the true beauty of nature in
a haiku poem, she needed to go outside, take walks: that was when the opportunity had presented itself.

Yes, her lover was someone she'd met since taking up haiku. Sometime in the past couple of years, not before.

But here was the mystery: why had Eiko been
walking
up that hill? In other words, why hadn't she been in a taxi or some other vehicle? All the other people that he and Miyako had seen that Sunday – the couple leaving the hotel and others who looked as if they were on their way in – had all been in cars. It was the natural way to travel when you were going to a place like that. No one wanted to show their face – best to simply drive in.

What's more, Eiko hated steep hills. It wasn't like her to walk when she could have been driven. So why had she been on foot?

Asai spent the next few days mulling over this puzzle, not only at home in his spare time but at work too. He checked over documents, drafted proposals, issued orders to his junior staff, consulted with his senior managers, met with visiting manufacturers, attended meetings and coordinated with staff in other departments, all the while absorbed by this conundrum.

Eventually all the little threads of ideas and conjecture came together in his mind and formed a viable hypothesis…

Eiko had suffered a heart attack while she was at a hotel with her lover. How should the man have reacted? Normally, he would have called a doctor, but this hotel was decidedly dodgy. It would have been impossible to remain anonymous. A heart attack was serious. You couldn't get away with giving a false name.

The man must have decided he had to get out of the hotel before calling for help. He got the hotel to call a taxi, and somehow got Eiko into it. Unfortunately, the pain had got worse, and he'd let her out of the taxi somewhere down the hill – probably near the bottom, a little way beyond Takahashi Cosmetics. That would explain why Chiyoko Takahashi had seen her come up the hill from the left.

How could Eiko's lover have made her get out of the taxi like that? Maybe he was taken by surprise by the seriousness of her condition; maybe he realized she needed the attention of a doctor right away. But why didn't he drop her in front of a hospital, then? Because the hospital would have questioned the identity of a man who turned up with a half-dead woman in his arms. After arriving like that, it would have been difficult for him to make his escape. Time was running out, so the man had dropped Eiko off. He'd left her to run into the nearest house so she could get them to call an ambulance. Someone had been bound to help. He'd decided this was the best way to deal with the situation. He had never needed to give a name or address. He'd simply offloaded his problem on the side of the road and fled. Writhing in agony from the heart attack, Eiko couldn't protest.

Asai's investigation began with the Tachibana.

On his way home from work, he stopped in at an
oden
restaurant for a drink, then took a taxi up to Yoyogi. As the car drove past Takahashi Cosmetics, he peered out at the shopfront, but the brightly lit boutique was empty
and there was no sign of Chiyoko Takahashi. Miyako had confessed that she was intrigued by the female shopkeeper and the fact that she seemed to be living there in that house all alone. The shop was probably empty right now because she had no family members to help out. But there were no customers either. It wasn't exactly a thriving business. Anticipating good sales from this upmarket residential neighbourhood, she'd stocked only the most expensive brands – an amateurish mistake. She was like a widow who'd tried to go it alone after the death of her husband. Miyako had assumed right away that Ms Takahashi was a widow, and that had piqued her interest even more. Asai had an uncomfortable feeling that inside his sister-in-law's head there was already a match being made between the cosmetics shop owner and himself.

The taxi sped by the family homes, which looked more sinister now in the darkness.

Asai got out right in front of the hotel. As usual, the sign on the roof was switched on; a red neon
HOTEL TACHIBANA
floating in the pitch-blackness of space.

He entered through the gate he'd seen the previous Sunday. Guided by the light of the stone lanterns, he made his way across the stepping stones. Once he had navigated the front garden, he expected to arrive at the hotel entrance, but all he discovered was the side of the building and more stepping stones leading off in two different directions.

As he wondered what to do, a female employee emerged from out of the shadowy building next to him. She bowed politely but at the same time eyed him a little suspiciously. After all, he had no companion with him.

“Do you have any rooms available?”

“We do. Would you prefer one in the western style, or should I show you to a Japanese room?”