Villain a Novel (2010) (35 page)

“I’ll wait for you,” Mitsuyo said. “No matter how many years it takes.”

Yuichi’s shoulders began to shake, and he kept on violently shaking his head. Mitsuyo reached out and touched his cheek. She could feel his shaking through her fingers.

“I’m … scared. I might get the death penalty.”

Mitsuyo gently held his ear. It was burning up.

“If I hadn’t met you, Mitsuyo, I wouldn’t be this scared. I was kind of nervous before, thinking they’d arrest me, but I couldn’t give myself up. But I wasn’t this scared. I knew my grandparents would cry about it, and I’d feel sorry for all they’d done for me, raising me, but it didn’t hurt as bad as it does now. If I hadn’t met you …”

Mitsuyo listened as the words streamed out of Yuichi. She could feel his ear grow even hotter in her hand.

“But you still have to go,” Mitsuyo said. She felt him shaking, and could barely get the words out. “You have to give yourself up, and pay for what you did.…”

Yuichi nodded, as if all the energy had drained out of him. “I might get the death penalty.… Then I’ll never see you again.”

The phrase
death penalty
simply didn’t register with Mitsuyo. She knew what it meant, of course, but all the meaning had drained out of the term, and she could only comprehend it as
goodbye
.

Mitsuyo took his trembling hands. She wanted to say something but nothing came. The two of them were not simply saying goodbye, since
goodbye
still held the hope of a future. Mitsuyo felt she was making some huge mistake, and she desperately clutched Yuichi’s hands. Something was coming to an end, she knew. Right here, right now, something decisive was coming to an end.

That’s when the memory of a scene came to her. It came so suddenly she couldn’t recall where and when she’d seen it. She closed her eyes and tried to conjure up the details. Desperately she squeezed her eyes shut, and finally a vague, unfocused scene floated before her.

Where am I?
she murmured. But what she pictured, like a single photograph, was a frozen scene, and when she tried to see the other parts they wouldn’t materialize.

Two young girls were standing before her. Their backs were to her, and they were giggling happily together. Beyond them was an older woman, her back also turned, her face to a wall. She was talking. No, it wasn’t a wall. A kind of window. Beyond a transparent board there was man’s face, a man selling tickets.

Where am I?
she asked herself again. She kept her eyes shut and recalled a map of routes above the ticket window.

“Oh!” Mitsuyo suddenly called out. It was a map of bus routes. She was standing at the ticket window for the long-distance buses from Saga to Hakata.

The instant she realized this, the still scene came alive with sound and movement. From behind her was an announcement for the arriving bus. The girls were giggling. The old woman who’d just bought her ticket was putting away her purse as she left the ticket window, and was heading over to where the bus had just pulled in.

It had to be. There was no doubt about it. This was the bus to Hakata, the one that was hijacked.

Don’t get on that bus!
In her mind, Mitsuyo yelled out to the old woman. But no one heard her.

Don’t buy them!
she screamed again, but no sound came out. Her legs began to move forward in the line, and she was trembling all
over. If nothing stopped her, she was going to buy a ticket herself.
My cell phone!
she remembered. This was the moment that her friend called. When her friend informed her that her son was sick, could they reschedule?

Mitsuyo rummaged frantically through her handbag, but couldn’t come up with her cell phone. The young girls had bought their tickets and were happily traipsing over toward the bus.
I can’t find my cell phone. I can’t find it
. The man at the window said, “Next!” calling out to Mitsuyo. She didn’t want to, but her legs carried her forward. She struggled to run away, but her face approached the counter and her mouth moved on its own.

One adult for Tenjin
.

My cell phone’s gone. The one that’s supposed to ring right now
.

Almost ready to scream, Mitsuyo opened her eyes. In front of her was a rainy street, and beyond that a rainy police station. She looked over at Yuichi. And right then it happened. A patrol car was coming toward them from the opposite direction. It slowed down, put on its turn signal, then made a right turn into the grounds of the police station.

“No way!” Mitsuyo shouted. “No way! I don’t want to get on that bus!”

Her voice was loud enough to echo inside the car. Startled, Yuichi held his breath.

“Start driving!
Please
. Just for a while, just for a while is okay. Get us out of here!” Yuichi stared at her, wide-eyed.
“Please!”

For a moment, Yuichi didn’t know what to do. Mitsuyo kept on shouting, and her panic finally infected him. He hurriedly released the parking brake and stepped on the gas.

They roared past the police station, and soon turned left. The road ran along a concrete embankment. Ahead was the prefectural yacht harbor, its large sign dripping in the rain. Yuichi stopped the car there. The police station was still visible.

As soon as they had started driving again, Mitsuyo began to sob. Having to say goodbye to Yuichi meant she had to get on that bus. Get on that bus and have that boy come at her with a knife.

Yuichi kept the engine running, but switched off the wipers. In an instant the windshield was wet, the scenery before them a blur.

“No! No way!” Mitsuyo shouted as she stared at the blurry windshield. “No way! If I have to leave you now, I have nothing left.… I thought I was going to be happy! After I met you I thought I was finally going to be happy! Please don’t take that away from me!”

Yuichi wavered, then reached over to Mitsuyo, touching her shoulder, and swiftly pulled her close. Mitsuyo roughly tried to break free, but Yuichi held her even tighter, and all she could do was stay still and cry in his arms.

“I’m so sorry … so very sorry.…” His voice sounded as if it were biting her neck. Mitsuyo shook her head as hard as she could. Her cheek struck his with each shake of her head. “I’m so sorry … so sorry I couldn’t do anything for you.…” Mitsuyo couldn’t tell if she was crying, or if it was Yuichi.

“Please!”
she pleaded into his shoulder. “Don’t leave me behind! Don’t ever leave me alone!” She knew they couldn’t run away, but still she shouted for them to do exactly that. “Let’s run away!” she cried. “Let’s run away together!” She knew she was never going to be happy now, but still she shouted out, “Stay with me! Don’t leave me behind—ever!”

Never before had Fusae cursed the passing of time. But it had been six days since she’d heard from Yuichi, and she suddenly noticed that the rest of the world was about to celebrate the end of the year.

Fusae was born the third child of a tatami craftsman from the outskirts of Nagasaki City. When she was ten, her father—about to depart for the war front—died of tuberculosis, and that same year, her mother had given birth to her second son. Now she was left to care for four children: her fifteen-year-old elder daughter, ten-year-old Fusae, her four-year-old older son, and the newborn infant boy.

Through some relatives, Fusae’s mother found a job working at a restaurant in the city called Seyokan. Her fifteen-year-old daughter was working in a factory as part of the wartime student work corps, so it fell to ten-year-old Fusae to take care of her two brothers.

Occasionally her mother would steal eggs from the restaurant and bring them home. This was the best food they had. Late one evening, her mother still had not come home, so Fusae and her older sister went to the restaurant to find her. The head clerk had discovered her mother stealing eggs, and had tied her to a pillar in the kitchen. The two girls, in tears, apologized for their mother. When their mother saw them, she quietly sobbed, still tied to the pillar.

The rationing system had started by then, and Fusae had to line up with the adults to get her family’s share, her four-year-old brother
in hand, the baby on her back. When rations were plentiful, the adults would sometimes let her go to the front of the line, but when commodities were in short supply the frenzied housewives kept pushing her out of the way. The arrogant man in charge treated Fusae and her brothers like stray dogs. He’d shove them aside, tossing their ration of potatoes and corn at them. Fusae and her brother desperately scrambled in the dirt to pick up their potatoes.

How dare you! How dare you make fun of me!
Fusae wanted to scream, holding back tears as she grabbed for the potatoes.

Life didn’t get any easier after the war. Miraculously, their family didn’t lose a single member to the atomic bombing, the one stroke of luck they had, her mother said. Fusae graduated from junior high and began working at a fish market. There she met Katsuji, and they were later married. It took her some time to have a child, and her mother-in-law occasionally abused her, but gradually life got easier, and before she knew it she had two daughters and they were able to take a yearly vacation at a hot-springs resort. Fusae kept on working at the fish market even after she got married.

Until now she’d never wished for more time, but waiting in vain for the past few days for word from Yuichi, she’d felt a bitterness about the way time slowed down, something she’d never experienced.

Usually Fusae was busy on New Year’s Eve preparing
osechi ryori
, the special New Year’s dishes, putting up festive decorations at their door, and getting the New Year’s rice cakes ready, but this year she sat alone in her kitchen.

In the morning, Norio’s wife had brought over a small lacquered box of
osechi ryori
. “I thought you probably hadn’t done any cooking,” she said. “I noticed the detectives aren’t outside today,” she added.

“The last few days the local patrolman’s been coming by to check on me, but that’s all,” said Fusae. Still, Norio’s wife just had a quick cup of tea and then left, perhaps concerned that the house was still under surveillance.

Katsuji was still in the hospital, but initially he’d been given permission
by his doctor to go home for the three-day New Year’s holiday. That was the plan until he complained of pain and nausea, so they decided he would stay in the hospital after all.

Norio, not Fusae, was the one who updated Katsuji on Yuichi. Fusae didn’t know what Norio told him, but when she went to visit her husband there were times she was so uneasy that she started to cry. Katsuji didn’t ask her a thing. Instead, he just complained as usual. A few days before, though, after she’d given him his sponge bath and was getting ready to leave, Katsuji muttered, “Why, when I have one foot in the grave already, do I have to go through something like this?”

Fusae left the hospital room without replying. She didn’t get right on the elevator, but went to a restroom, where she broke down. Katsuji had had a hard life, she thought. They’d both gone through a lot to get to where they were now as a couple.

Fusae vaguely reached out for the box of
osechi ryori
that Norio’s wife had brought and slid it closer. When she opened the lid, the bright colors of the shrimp leaped out at her. She picked up one of them and realized she hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast.

It was already past twelve. Fusae planned to visit Katsuji in the afternoon, so she picked out some of the foods she knew he could eat and got a plastic container down from the shelf.

She was just transferring the
konbu
to the container when the phone rang. For a second, she hoped it was Yuichi, though over the last few days she’d been let down dozens of times. Maybe, she thought, it was Norio, who was worried about her, or perhaps her elder daughter, always concerned about her own children’s future.

Chopsticks still in hand, she answered the phone and heard a familiar young man’s voice.

“May I speak with Mrs. Fusae Shimizu, please?”

He spoke so politely that Fusae replied, “Yes, this is she.”

“Mrs. Shimizu?”

As soon as she said yes, the man turned haughty. Fusae had a bad feeling and clenched the chopsticks tightly.

“Thank you for signing the contract with us the other day. I’m calling about next month’s delivery.”

As the man rattled on, Fusae tried desperately to interject. “What? What are you talking about?”

“Excuse me? As you recall, Mrs. Shimizu, you signed a contract at our office for health foods.”

The man’s words remained polite, though she could sense how irritated he was.

“You do remember this, I hope.”

Fusae was overwhelmed. “Yes, I suppose,” she said. Her knees were shaking. She remembered the young men at the office and how they threatened her. Her hand holding the phone was trembling, too, and the hard receiver banged against her ear several times.

“The contract, as you know, is a yearly contract.”

“A year—a yearly contract?” Fusae said in a low voice, trying to hide her trembling.

“A yearly contract is exactly that. We received your first payment, so next month will be the second. The second payment doesn’t require a membership fee, so it comes to exactly two hundred and fifty thousand yen. How will you be paying? By bank transfer? Or shall we come to collect it? By the way, if you do a bank transfer, the fee for that is your responsibility.”

It wasn’t the man’s voice that scared her. But as she listened, she had the illusion that she was back in that office, forced to sit there, surrounded by those agitated, intimidating men. They’d told her she had to sign and then they’d let her go home, and with a trembling hand she’d picked up the pen. In her mind now, this scene overlapped with the one from years ago, of scrambling to pick up her ration of potatoes that had been flung to the ground.

In a small voice Fusae said, “I … I can’t do that.”

“What? Old woman, what did you say?”

Shaken, Fusae hung up. Almost as if to crush the receiver under her, she leaned into it as she hung up. Silence returned to the kitchen. Fusae collapsed into her chair. The instant she sat down,
the phone rang again, shrilly. She didn’t pick up the receiver again, but it was as if she had. She could clearly hear the angry shouts of the man: “Listen, old woman! What the hell do you think you’re doing? You can’t run away! We’re gonna pay you a little visit right now!” Fusae put her hands over her ears, but no matter how much she tried to block out the sound, the phone kept on ringing.