Journey Under the Midnight Sun Read online

  They reached the building, and Tagawa knocked on the door to No 103, calling out, ‘Mrs Nishimoto?’ There was no answer. ‘Looks like she’s still out,’ he said, glancing in Yukiho’s direction.

  The girl nodded. Again he heard the sound of a bell jingling.

  Tagawa slid the master key into the lock and turned it clockwise. There was a click as the door unlocked. That was the instant he first had a premonition that something was wrong. It started in his gut and spread through his chest. Still he grabbed the knob and pulled the door open.

  He’d only taken one step in before he saw the woman lying down in the far room. She was wearing a thin yellow sweater and jeans, asleep on the tatami mats. He couldn’t see her face, but he knew for certain it was Fumiyo Nishimoto.

  So she was home, he thought, when he noticed a strange smell in the air.

  ‘Gas!’

  He stopped Yukiho from coming in with one hand, and covered his mouth and nose with the other. His eyes went to the kitchen. A pot sat on the stove and the knob was turned on, but no flame came from the burner.

  Holding his breath, Tagawa quickly turned off the gas and opened the window over the kitchen counter. Then he rushed into the back and opened the window in the far room, taking a sidelong glance at Fumiyo lying next to the tea table before sticking his head out and taking a deep breath. He felt a tingling sensation in the back of his skull.

  He turned back to look at Fumiyo Nishimoto. Her face was a light blue and there was no warmth to her skin at all. We’re too late, was his first thought. He spotted a black telephone in the corner of the room, picked up the receiver, and put his finger on the dial when he hesitated, wondering if he should dial 119 for an ambulance or just 110 for the police to come and pick up the body.

  He stood for a moment, unable to decide. The only dead person he’d seen until then was his grandfather.

  He dialled 1, 1, then rested his finger on the 0.

  Just then, Yukiho’s voice asked from the doorway, ‘Is she dead?’

  He turned to look at her. The light from the door behind her meant he couldn’t see the expression on her face.

  ‘Is my mother dead?’ the girl asked again. There were tears in her voice.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tagawa said, his finger shifting from the 0 to the 9 before giving the dial a final twist.

  It was several minutes after the bell rang before he heard the sound of talking, giggling, and running feet.

  Camera cradled in his right hand, Yuichi Akiyoshi crouched and watched. Students were just beginning to spill from the front gate of the Seika Girls Middle School. He held his camera up to his chest and stared at each of them in turn.

  His hiding spot was in the back of a pickup truck parked along the side of the road about fifty metres away from the gate. It was a perfect location. Most of the students leaving the school would have to pass him on the way home and the tarp over the back of the truck provided good cover. Given his objective for the day, it was the best vantage point Yuichi could have hoped for. If he could get the shot he wanted it would be worth having skipped out on sixth period to come.

  The girls at Seika Girls Middle School wore sailor uniforms. In the summer the uniforms had white tops with a light blue collar and their neatly pleated skirts were the same light blue. Yuichi watched those skirts flutter around the legs walking by. Some of the girls still looked as if they could be in elementary school, but others had already taken that first step into womanhood. Whenever one of the latter came near the truck he wanted to take a picture, but he resisted. He didn’t want to run out of film before the main event.

  He’d been watching the girls pass by for about fifteen minutes before he spotted Yukiho Karasawa. Hurriedly he lifted his camera and began tracking her through the lens.

  As always, Yukiho was walking with her friend, a lanky girl with wireframe glasses. She had a pointed jaw, a pimpled forehead, and her body was lumpy in all the wrong places.

  Yukiho Karasawa, on the other hand, was a beauty with lustrous, chestnut brown hair down to her shoulders. She tossed it to one side with her fingers in an utterly natural motion. There was something luxuriously feline about her eyes and a winsome smile played across her slightly pouty lower lip. She was slender, too, except for the decidedly feminine curves of her chest and hips. This last aspect of her physique had been singled out by her many fans as a top selling point.

  For Yuichi, however, Yukiho’s nose was her best part and the most deserving of a close-up shot. He steadied his grip on the camera and smiled.

  Yuichi’s house was at the very end of a long line of terraced houses facing a narrow street. The place had been standing for thirty years already and an odd mix of miso soup, curry and other spices had infused the old roof and wall posts with their scent. Yuichi always thought of it as an embarrassingly working-class kind of smell.

  ‘Fumihiko’s upstairs,’ his mother called from the kitchen. He glanced down at the chopping board in front of her and sighed inwardly. Potato tempura again. Ever since one of her relatives back home had sent them potatoes they’d been eating them nearly every meal.

  Upstairs he found his friend Fumihiko Kikuchi sitting in the middle of his bedroom, flipping through a movie pamphlet from a trip Yuichi had made to the cinema a few days earlier.

  ‘You saw Rocky, huh. Any good?’ Kikuchi asked, looking up at Yuichi. The pamphlet was open on a close-up of Sylvester Stallone’s face.

  ‘Yeah, it was cool.’

  ‘Cool. Everyone says it’s pretty good.’

  Kikuchi resumed looking at the pamphlet. Yuichi figured he probably wanted it but didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to give the pamphlet to Kikuchi – if he wanted it, he could go and see the movie and get one himself.

  ‘I wish movies weren’t so expensive,’ his friend mumbled.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Yuichi pulled his camera out of his duffel bag and put it on the desk, then sat down on his chair, hugging the back. Kikuchi was a good friend, but he didn’t like talking about money with him. Kikuchi lived alone with his mother, and you could tell just by looking at him that they had it pretty rough. Yuichi felt lucky that his dad was still healthy and working with the railroad company.

  ‘You taking pictures again?’ Kikuchi asked, looking at the camera. By his grin, it was clear he knew exactly what Yuichi’s subject had been.

  ‘Yeah,’ Yuichi said, grinning back.

  ‘Get any good ones?’

  ‘I hope so. Actually, I’m pretty sure I did, yeah.’

  ‘Big bucks,’ Kikuchi said with an arch of his eyebrows.

  ‘I don’t know. They don’t sell for that much. And it costs money to print them. I’ll be lucky if I come out ahead.’

  ‘Hey, man, cash is cash. You got yourself a marketable skill there. I’m jealous.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it a skill, really. I don’t even know how to use the camera, at least not how you’re supposed to. All this stuff just fell into my lap.’

  The room that Yuichi was now using as his own had previously belonged to his uncle, his father’s younger brother. His uncle was into photography, and as a result he owned a lot of cameras. He even had the equipment to develop and print black-and-white photos. When his uncle got married and left, he’d given some of his stuff to Yuichi.

  ‘Cool that you have someone who gives you things like that.’

  Yuichi’s mood darkened as he anticipated more envy from Kikuchi. He didn’t know why Kikuchi always steered their conversation to money – except this time, Kikuchi changed the topic on his own.

  ‘Remember those photos your uncle took that you showed me the other day?’

  ‘The ones from around town?’

  ‘Yeah. You still got those?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Yuichi reached for the album at the end of the bookshelf. This was another of the things his uncle had left. It had a few photographs inside, all of them black-and-white scenes taken on the streets near his house. He handed Kikuch
i the album and Kikuchi began to pore over each photograph with great interest.

  ‘What are you so into those for?’ Yuichi said, looking down at his slightly chubby friend where he sat on the floor.

  ‘No reason, really,’ he said, pulling one of the photographs from the scrapbook. ‘Hey, think I can borrow this one?’

  ‘Which one’s that?’

  Yuichi looked at the photograph in Kikuchi’s hand. There was a narrow street with a couple walking down it. A poster taped to an electrical pole hung loose in the wind, and there was a cat curled up on a plastic bucket in the foreground.

  ‘Whatcha want that for?’ Yuichi asked.

  ‘There’s a friend I want to show it to.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’ll tell you once I show it to him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Come on, let me borrow it. You’re not using it, are you?’

  ‘No, it’s cool, it’s just a little weird,’ Yuichi said, looking at his friend’s face as he handed him the photograph.

  After dinner that night, Yuichi went up to his room and began developing the photographs he’d taken that afternoon. Using his closet as a darkroom, he could take the film out of the camera in there and place it in a special container so he could do the rest out in the light. Once the photos were fixed, he took the film out of the container and took it down to the sink on the first floor to wash it.

  As he washed the film, Yuichi held it up to the fluorescent light over the sink. He smiled when he saw that the negative perfectly captured the sheen of Yukiho Karasawa’s hair. Good, he thought. This will make the customers happy.

  Eriko Kawashima made a habit of writing in her diary each night before she went to bed. She’d started at the beginning of fifth grade, which meant she had been at it for a whole five years now. The trick to keeping a diary was not to pressure yourself into always being dramatic. Simple was OK. Even if all you wrote was ‘nothing much happened today’, that was fine.

  But today she had lots to write about. For the first time she’d gone to Yukiho Karasawa’s house after school.

  Eriko had known who she was since their first year in middle school. Yukiho had the face of an intellectual and an elegant, trim figure. Eriko saw something in her that she didn’t see in any of the other girls, or even in herself. What she felt when she looked at her was almost longing. She’d often wondered if there was some way they could be friends.

  Which was why Eriko felt like celebrating when they were finally put in the same class in their third year of middle school. Mustering her courage, she had approached Yukiho right after the opening ceremony and introduced herself.

  She’d been so afraid of a dirty look, or even worse, silence, that the girl’s reaction startled her.

  Yukiho smiled. ‘Yukiho Karasawa,’ she said.

  Yukiho was even more womanly close up. And she was sensitive. Just being with her opened Eriko’s eyes to all kinds of things she’d never noticed before. Yukiho had a natural talent for making conversations interesting, which made Eriko feel like she was more interesting, too. Though Eriko thought of herself as still a girl, in her mind and in numerous diary entries, Yukiho was always a ‘woman’.

  As always with someone so popular, Eriko had competition for Yukiho’s friendship. At times she would feel a slight pang of jealousy, as though they might take something very important away from her.

  Worst of all was when the boys at a nearby middle school noticed Yukiho and started following her around like she was some kind of celebrity. The other day during gym class some of the boys had climbed up the chain-link fence by the sports field to watch them. When they spotted Yukiho they hooted and hollered until the teacher made them leave.

  And today, on their way home from school, there had been someone hiding in the back of a truck by the school gate taking pictures of her. Eriko had only caught a glimpse of him: an unhealthy-looking boy with a pimply face, the type of guy whose head was always filled with vulgar fantasies. When Eriko thought that the pictures he was taking of Yukiho might be fuelling those fantasies it made her want to puke, but Yukiho didn’t seem to pay any mind at all.

  ‘I just ignore them. They’ll soon find better things to do.’

  Then she ran her fingers through her hair, almost as if she was doing it on purpose.

  ‘But doesn’t it make you feel gross? I mean, they’re taking pictures of you without even asking.’

  ‘It is a little gross, but it’s better than calling them out because then you end up having to talk to them and then it’s like you know them.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘It’s really better to just ignore them entirely.’

  Yukiho walked right past the truck while Eriko stayed as close by her side as she could in hopes that she might get in the way of a photograph or two.

  It was soon after this that Yukiho invited Eriko to her house. Yukiho had forgotten to return a book she’d borrowed and thought Eriko might want to come and pick it up. Eriko didn’t care about the book, but she wasn’t about to pass up a chance to visit Yukiho’s home.

  She got off the bus at the fifth stop and walked for about two minutes. Yukiho Karasawa’s house was in a quiet residential area. It wasn’t large, but it had a very nicely tended garden in front.

  Yukiho lived alone with her mother, who came out to greet Eriko. The woman looked old enough to be Yukiho’s grandmother, and it put Eriko in mind of an unpleasant rumour she’d recently heard.

  ‘Please make yourself at home,’ the woman said softly, leaving them in the living room.

  ‘Your mom seems nice,’ Eriko said when they were alone.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I saw the sign by the door. Does she teach the tea ceremony?’

  ‘Yeah, flower arranging too. I think she even gives koto lessons.’

  ‘Wow,’ Eriko said. ‘She’s a superwoman. Is she teaching you all of that?’

  ‘Just tea and flowers,’ Yukiho said.

  ‘That’s so cool. It’s like you get to go to finishing school for free.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Yukiho said. ‘She might not look it, but she’s a pretty strict teacher.’ She poured a little milk in the tea her mother had brought them and drank.

  Eriko followed suit. It was a fragrant black tea, not the kind that came in those little teabags at the corner store.

  ‘Say, Eriko,’ Yukiho said, staring at her with her big eyes. ‘Have you heard anyone saying things lately about me. About my elementary school.’

  Eriko blinked. ‘Um, well…’

  A little smile came to Yukiho’s lips. ‘You have heard, then, haven’t you.’

  ‘No. I mean maybe I heard a little, but —’

  ‘It’s OK, you don’t have to hide it. I guess the stories are really making the rounds, huh,’ she said.

  ‘N-not really. Hardly anyone’s heard. That’s what the girl who told me said.’

  ‘Yeah, but the fact that she told you means that it’s out there. Eriko?’ Yukiho put her hand on the other girl’s knee. ‘Can you tell me what you heard?’

  ‘Nothing much, really. Nothing interesting, at least.’

  ‘I bet they said I used to be really poor and I lived in a dirty little apartment in Ōe?’

  Eriko swallowed.