It was just after two in the afternoon. A couple, the restaurant’s last customers, came out and walked down the stairs. Kusanagi waited for them to leave before going up. He opened the door, hearing a small bell jingle above his head.
The employee he’d seen on the stairs looked up from the cash register. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Lunch’s all over.”
“I know. I’m not a customer,” Kusanagi said. “Is Mr. Muroi here?” He looked around the place while he talked. The tables all had hot plates in the middle so customers could cook their own okonomiyaki. A white-haired man was sitting at the nearest one, facing away from the door, reading a newspaper. When he heard Kusanagi, he looked around. He had his fair share of wrinkles, but his skin was tan, making him look young for his age. He, too, was wearing a red apron.
“Who’re you?” the man asked.
Kusanagi flashed his badge as he walked over to the table. “Mr. Muroi?”
The man blanched. “Yeah. What do you want?”
“I was hoping I could ask you a few questions about your time at Bar Calvin.”
“Calvin? That’s ancient history. Haven’t been there in over a decade.”
“I know. I spoke to the manager last night.”
Calvin was a bar on a side street off of lower Ginza. The interior featured gaudy décor, with expensive-looking leather upholstery on the sofas, reminiscent of Japan’s economic boom days back during the bubble.
Bar Calvin was where Hidetoshi Senba and Nobuko Miyake had shared a drink the night before he killed her. Masao Muroi was the bartender who served them, and his statement led to Senba’s arrest.
When Kusanagi told him what he wanted to ask about, Muroi’s eyes went wide.
“Now that’s really ancient history. What could you possibly—” Muroi started. Then he quickly folded his paper and sat upright in his chair. “Wait a second. Is Senba out already? You think he wants revenge?”
Kusanagi chuckled. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Senba’s been out of prison for quite some time now. You haven’t seen him?”
“No. Okay. Wow. I didn’t realize he’d already done his time.”
“Did you know the two of them well?” Kusanagi asked.
“I wouldn’t say ‘well,’ but, yeah, I knew who they were. That night was the first time they’d been to Calvin in a while. I was pretty surprised when I heard what happened the following day.”
“The case report said they weren’t exactly getting along very well that night.”
“Well, they weren’t fighting or anything. But it was kind of an odd scene,” Muroi said, hesitating a bit before adding, “I mean, you don’t normally see a guy crying like that.”
Muroi asked Kusanagi whether he’d had lunch yet, and when he said he hadn’t, Muroi offered him some okonomiyaki and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“I was born up here,” Muroi told him. “But when I was in middle school, my family moved down south to Osaka. There was this fantastic okonomiyaki place down the street from us there, and it was always my dream to have a restaurant like that of my own.” Muroi stirred a bowl of batter while he talked. His hands moved with an effortlessness that bespoke long years of practice.
“How many years were you at Bar Calvin?” Kusanagi asked.
“Twelve, exactly. They took me on as a bartender when I was in my midthirties. I’d done my time at a few other places before then, but Calvin was the best. Still, I didn’t want to be someone else’s employee the rest of my life, so about ten years ago I left and started this place. I know it don’t look like much, but I’ve done all this without needing to borrow a single yen,” Muroi said, pouring the batter out on the hot plate in front of them. There was a loud sizzle as drops of oil began to dance on the plate.
“I understand Hidetoshi Senba used to be a regular there? Around what time was that?”
Muroi folded his arms across his chest. “I wonder,” he said. “I don’t think I’d been at Calvin a decade around the time he started coming, so I’d say that was about twenty-two, maybe twenty-three years ago?”
“Right,” Kusanagi said, doing some calculations in his head. “So about six or seven years before he was arrested.”
“Yeah, sounds about right. Senba was a big spender back in those days. Had his own company and all. But, after a certain point, he stopped coming altogether, and when I saw him next, well, it was clear he’d fallen on hard times. Cheap clothes, you know the look. That was the night.”
“What about Nobuko Miyake? Was that her first time to Bar Calvin in a while, too?”
“It was, but she hadn’t been away as long as Senba. Maybe only two or three years. Nobuko stopped coming when she quit her hostessing job. She used to bring customers from her place over for drinks at Calvin afterward. Senba was one of ’em.”
“Do you happen to know why she quit?” Kusanagi asked.
Muroi paused to check how the okonomiyaki was coming along before leaning forward in his chair. “Actually, I heard a rumor about that.”
“What kind of rumor?”
“I heard she got fired. Something about her causing trouble.”
“Any idea what that was?”
Muroi chuckled. “Borrowing cash from customers and not paying them back.”
“Yeah, that’d get a hostess sacked.”
“She’d have these lines, like she lost her wallet to a purse-snatcher, or one of her customers had rung up a big tab and gone missing and the restaurant wanted her to pay them back, and she’d borrow ten or twenty thousand yen from her regulars, just a little bit at a time, but it started building up, and customers started complaining.”
“Do you know how she made ends meet after that?”
“Good question. She wasn’t no spring chicken anymore. I figure she had it pretty tough.”
Nobuko Miyake had been forty when she was killed. If Muroi’s story was true, that would make her thirty-seven or thirty-eight when she got fired. If she had a lot of well-heeled regulars to keep her afloat she might have been okay, but without that, it would’ve been hard for her to find work as a hostess again.
“She was never too careful with money, so when I heard about what happened, I wasn’t too surprised. I’m guessing Senba would’ve been a prime target for her little loan scheme.”
“And you’re sure about what you told me earlier?” Kusanagi asked, lowering his voice. “He was really crying?”
Muroi flipped one of the pancakes and said, “It wasn’t just me who saw him. A few of the other guys at the bar were talking about it, wondering why he was so worked up.”
“But you don’t know what they were talking about?”
“Sorry, can’t help you there.” Muroi shook his head and chuckled. “If it was a pretty young girl who was crying, well, I might have gone up and asked what the trouble was, but when a middle-aged man is crying next to a woman, you keep your distance. I thought maybe that’s just what he did when he got drunk, you know.”
A scene began to form in Kusanagi’s mind: a man and woman meeting again for the first time in a long while. The man, a successful businessman who had lost everything, even his wife. The woman, a former hostess who’d reaped what she’d sowed and wound up broke. What could’ve possibly transpired between them that he would’ve cried over their drinks, then run up to her the following day and stabbed her to death?
“What about friends?” Kusanagi asked. “You know anyone close to them? Or maybe another bar they might’ve frequented?”
“Well, not really,” Muroi said, scratching his neck. “It was a long time ago. And we didn’t talk all that much.”
“Right,” Kusanagi said, putting away his notebook in his pocket. It was over twenty years ago, as it was. He hadn’t been expecting Muroi to even remember as much as he had.