Seizo Naemura, their homeroom teacher, was another of Hiromi’s staunchest allies. After Naemura heard about Atsuko walking out on them, he began dropping by the house from time to time to see how things were. Hiromi had a bit of a crush on him. He was over forty, but there was nothing middle-aged about his face or physique, and he spoke and carried himself like a much younger man. Having been to university, he spoke Japanese without an accent. Hiromi liked that about him too.
The relative calm Hiromi managed to enjoy under the solicitous eye of Naemura and others like him didn’t last very long.
One day, Tadao had gone to visit a wholesaler and Hiromi was minding the store alone when two men in suits came in. She was surprised because the store rarely had male customers. The two of them also had hard, nasty faces.
“Your daddy here?” one of them asked. When she told him that he was out, the man announced that they would wait, plopped himself down in a chair, and lit a cigarette. The two men started ogling Hiromi, inspecting every part of her body as they whispered to one another and exchanged grins.
Eventually, Tadao came back. He knew something was wrong the minute he spotted the two men. A look of alarm spread over his face.
“Go into the back,” he ordered Hiromi. From the back room, she strained to listen.
The conversation she overheard was shocking. The men were there to collect a debt. Of course, it was not Tadao who had borrowed the money. Atsuko had done that. A few days before leaving them, she’d managed to get her hands on Tadao’s registered seal and used it to take out a sizable loan. Tadao protested that it had nothing to do with him but the two thugs simply weren’t interested.
That night, Hiromi witnessed her father getting drunk for the first time in a long time. He drank cheap whiskey, straight up, moaning and wailing loudly, until he threw up into the toilet. He had tearstains on his cheeks.
The thuggish debt collectors began coming around every day. It was Hiromi they were after. She later learned they had been threatening Tadao. If you don’t pay us back, we’ll take your daughter instead.
One day, Hiromi was walking home from school when a car slid up beside her. “Come on, hop in,” a man in the passenger seat said. “We’ll give you a lift.”
Knowing that she was in danger, Hiromi took off at full speed. The men in the car didn’t come after her, but the terror she felt was a pure physical sensation.
Safely back at home, she told Tadao what had happened. A gloomy expression on his face, he sank into silent thought for a long time. Hiromi guessed that he was trying to think of a way out of their difficulties, a way for them to survive.
Her guess was incorrect. Not much later, she discovered what she saw in her father’s eyes was a yearning for death.
5
Matsumiya checked his watch as he left the Meijiza Theater. He’d been visiting the offices in order to speak to the theater employees who had interacted with Michiko Oshitani. He wanted to corroborate what Hiromi Asai had told him.
Since Michiko Oshitani and Hiromi Asai had met in private, there were no witnesses as to what had passed between them. There were, however, several people who had seen Hiromi Asai escorting Michiko Oshitani to the stage door. Without exception, they described the two of them as looking very relaxed and getting on like a house on fire.
For the most part, Hiromi Asai’s personal history was straightforward enough. She’d attended elementary school and junior high school in the town of her birth. Her parents had gotten divorced in her second year of junior high and her father had assumed sole responsibility for her. He’d died soon after — driven to suicide by debt problems, supposedly throwing himself off of one of the taller local buildings — and Hiromi had been sent to an orphanage. After graduating from her new junior high school, she went to a prefectural high school and subsequently moved to Tokyo to join the Balalaika theater troupe. The orphanage had records for Hiromi’s life up to this point. Everything that followed was freely available on the internet. Having worked as an actress in her twenties, she really started getting noticed after switching to writing and directing in her thirties and had a number of hits. That brought things up to the present. Hiromi had been married once at the age of twenty-eight to Takeo Suwa, the founder and artistic director of Balalaika. They had gotten divorced after three years and had no children.
The purpose of Michiko Oshitani’s visit to Tokyo was to see Hiromi Asai. That was indisputable. It was impossible to find any plausible motive for Hiromi Asai to murder Michiko Oshitani. Nor could the task force find anything to link Hiromi and the apartment in Kosuge, the scene of the murder.
Some on the task force were convinced that Michiko Oshitani had to have another reason for coming to Tokyo. They were looking into whether Michiko Oshitani knew anybody apart from Hiromi Asai in the capital. The list of contacts on her cell phone had not turned up anyone.
The occupant of the apartment where Michiko Oshitani’s body was found was a certain Mutsuo Koshikawa. Although he had not yet been located, some of the investigators thought that he might have forcibly brought Michiko Oshitani to his apartment in order to rape and rob her. If Koshikawa was a violence-prone individual, however, then surely he would have been involved in some sort of prior incident? But all their canvassing in the neighborhood hadn’t turned up anything of that kind. And if Koshikawa had brought her to his apartment against her will, it would have to be from somewhere relatively close by, which begged the question: what would Michiko Oshitani have been doing in that part of town in the first place?
Ten days had passed since the discovery of the body and the investigation was going nowhere.
As he walked along the street, Matsumiya consulted his watch for a second time. It was a little past seven, their arranged meeting time. No big deal; the other person wasn’t the kind of guy to get upset by someone showing up a few minutes late.
They’d agreed to meet in a traditional Japanese restaurant in Amazaké Alley. The place had its name engraved on the glass sliding door behind the noren half curtain. Matsumiya opened the door and looked around. A passageway ran between the tables; two tables for four and four tables for six people. The place was about half-full.
Matsumiya spotted the person he was meeting at one of the four-person tables. He was reading a newspaper with an oshibori hot towel and a cup of green tea pushed off to one side of the table. He was in his shirtsleeves with his jacket draped over the back of the chair.
“Sorry I’m late,” said Matsumiya, pulling out a chair opposite.
Kaga looked up and folded his newspaper. “Work done for the day?”
“For now at least.” Matsumiya slipped off his jacket and sat down. He placed his jacket on the chair beside him.
The proprietor came to take their order. Kaga ordered a beer as he handed his empty teacup back to her.
“Not been here for ages. It’s good to be back. Hasn’t changed.”
“Nothing changing is what this part of town does best.”
“Amen to that.”
The woman brought them a bottle of beer, two glasses, and boiled broad beans, the appetizer of the day. Kaga poured the beer for both of them. Matsumiya thanked him with a duck of the head.
Kaga was Matsumiya’s cousin. He had previously been in the TMPD Homicide Division but he was now in the detective bureau of the Nihonbashi Precinct. The cousins had worked together on an investigation a few years ago.
Matsumiya had something he wanted to run by his cousin.
“You said you had something to do near here? Where exactly?” Kaga asked.