When Yuichi got up from the bed, his face was flushed. Fusae was sure he must be angry, but at the same time he looked relieved that they had identified the murderer.

“I wanted to ask you, where did you go last Sunday? You went out for a while at night, right?”

“Last Sunday?”

“Did you go to the service garage?”

Yuichi nodded at Fusae’s tone.

“The police asked me. They’re going around questioning all the girl’s friends. Mrs. Okazaki told them you didn’t go anywhere, and I didn’t mean to lie, but I went along with it. Even if you take your car out for an hour or two, she never counts that as your having actually gone out. Oh, would you like to take a bath before supper?”

As soon as she finished her monologue Fusae left the room, without waiting for a reply. Halfway down the stairs she turned around. With Katsuji in and out of the hospital, she thought, Yuichi was the only one she could rely on. Her eldest daughter wouldn’t come to see how her father was, let alone her second daughter.

After coming back down to the first floor Fusae reached into her apron pocket and took out the manila envelope. Inside was a single receipt that said:

For purchases: One set of Chinese herbal medicine. ¥263,500.

Dr. Tsutsumishita, the man who led the health seminars at the community center, had told her, “Come over to my office in town and we can give you a good price on some herbal medicine.” Yesterday, half out of curiosity, Fusae decided to stop by on the way home from the hospital. She hadn’t planned to buy anything. Traveling back and forth to the hospital had worn her out, and she just thought it might be amusing to hear some more of Dr. Tsutsumishita’s funny stories. But when she went there, a rough-looking bunch of young men suddenly surrounded her, intimidating her into signing a contract.

I don’t have this kind of money on me, she’d tearfully told them, and the men forced her to go with them to the post office, where she had a savings account. She was so frightened she couldn’t ask anyone for help. As they stood watch over her, she withdrew what little savings she had.

Mitsuyo Magome was staring out the window of the men’s clothing store Wakaba as the rain-swept cars went rushing by. The shop was on the outskirts of Saga City, next to Highway 34, a kind of bypass route around the city. There was usually a lot of traffic on the highway, but all the drivers saw was a monotonous repetition of the same scenery they’d seen a few minutes before.

Mitsuyo was in charge of the men’s suit corner on the second floor of Wakaba.

Until about a year before she’d run the casual-wear corner on the first floor, but her manager had decided to move her upstairs. “With casual wear it’s better to have the employees be around the same age as the customers,” he explained amiably. “That way they have the same sort of tastes.” And wasting no time, the next week he reassigned her to the suits corner.

If it had merely been a question of her age, Mitsuyo would have protested, but when it came to “tastes” there wasn’t much she could say. She was actually relieved to hear that her fashion sense didn’t match what was found in the casual-wear corner of the shop.

The shop sold what might be termed trendyish jeans and shirts, ish being the operative element. And there was a great difference between what was trendy and what was almost. For instance, she remembered coming across a shirt in a high-end store in Hakata that had the same design as one they sold at Wakaba, with prints of horses on it. Somehow the horses on the Wakaba knockoff shirt were ever so slightly larger, and that almost undetectable difference of a few millimeters was all it took to make the Wakaba shirts look kitschy.

But she also remembered a junior high school student who bought one of these horse-print shirts, and how happy he was as he carefully put on his yellow helmet and pedaled off on his low-seat bicycle, the precious shirt under one arm. She knew it contradicted the earlier feelings she had when her manager transferred her out of casual wear, but when she saw this junior high school boy pedaling away down along the highway she felt like shouting out to him: That’s right-who cares if the horses are a little bigger. Be proud of your shirt! At that moment, Mitsuyo realized she was almost fond of her hometown.

“Miss Magome! How ’bout taking a break?”

Mitsuyo turned and saw the plump face of Kazuko Mizutani, the floor manager, peeking up above the rack of suits. From where Mitsuyo stood by the window, the rows of suits looked like waves rushing in to the shore. On a weekday morning like this they couldn’t expect many customers. Occasionally someone would rush in to buy a dark suit for a funeral, but there didn’t seem to be any tragedies in the neighborhood today.

“Did you bring your lunch?” Kazuko asked as she weaved her way through the maze of suit racks.

“These days making my lunch is the only thing I enjoy doing,” Mitsuyo replied.

When the shop wasn’t busy, they took turns going for lunch during the morning. The shop was spacious, but there were only three employees. Quite often they outnumbered the customers.

“I hate this winter rain. I wonder when it’s going to let up.” Kazuko came up beside her and went over to the window. Her breath clouded a tiny portion as she breathed on the pane. The heat was on in the shop but with no customers the place felt empty and cold.

“Did you ride your bike to work again?”

As Kazuko asked this, Mitsuyo gazed down at the large parking lot below, wet in the rain. They shared the lot with a fast-food place next door, and there were a few cars, but they were all parked close to the other store. Just her one little bike sat next to a fence near Wakaba, as if it were standing up alone to the cold winter downpour.

“If it’s still raining when you get off, we’ll give you a ride,” Kazuko said, patting Mitsuyo’s shoulders and then heading off toward the checkout counter.

Kazuko was forty-two this year. Her husband, one year older, was manager of an electric appliance store in the city and always came by to pick her up after work. He was a quiet man, and Mitsuyo found it cute how even after twenty years of marriage, he still called her Kazu-chan. The two of them had one child, a twenty-year-old son who was a junior in college. Kazuko was worried about him, calling him a hikikomori, a self-imposed shut-in. From what she said, though, he didn’t seem to be a hard-core shut-in. She was just worried that he preferred staying in his room and fooling around with his computer to going out, and that he still didn’t have a girlfriend. Using the buzzword hikikomori was, Mitsuyo felt, Kazuko’s way of convincing herself and those around her that her worries were justified.

She wasn’t trying to explain away Kazuko’s son and his shut-in qualities, but really, there was so little to do in this town. Go out three days in a row and you were sure to run across someone you met the day before. It was like living in a continuous tape loop; it was much more fun to connect with the world through your computer than to live in the real world.

After she took an early lunch, and before her evening break, three different customers came in. One was an elderly couple. The husband had no interest in buying a new shirt, but his wife kept holding up one shirt after another in front of him, apparently less interested in the color or design than in the price.

Just before Mitsuyo’s evening break a man in his early thirties came in. The staff had been told to wait until the customers asked a question before approaching them, so Mitsuyo stood across the room, eyeing the man as he pawed through the racks of suits. Even from that distance, she spied the man’s wedding ring.