A Quiet Place Read online

  Kubo, suitcase in hand, looked as if he were being frogmarched by Asai along the narrow, faintly luminescent trail. Throwing furtive glances at his guard as he walked, he was clearly afraid of what Asai might say or do to him next. He reminded Asai of a weakened, trapped animal, looking for a chance to escape.

  Good. In that case, I’ll leave him to sweat a bit more before I ask him any more questions, thought Asai. It reminded him of being back at the ministry, taking advantage of the weaker status of some businessman just to keep him waiting.

  The two walked about fifty yards along the track, each deep in thought. It was Kubo who stopped first.

  “Mr Asai.”

  It was the voice of someone who desperately needed to break the silence.

  14

  “Mr Asai,” repeated Kubo, his voice low. They stood on the dark track, Kubo looking down at Asai. “Please say what you came to say.”

  Asai felt the bite of the frosty air on his cheeks; the temperature up here in the mountains was like late November in the city. The cold seeped through his layers of clothing and chilled his back. He looked around.

  “I see. No one around here to overhear our conversation.”

  The sanatorium wasn’t visible from where they stood. The Yatsugatake ridge formed a towering, black wall that blocked their view. Nothing was visible besides the scattering of lights that seemed to cascade down the base of the ridge. One side of the track was thickly wooded; on the other, beyond a narrow area of scrub, fields stretched away steeply into the distance. There was a scent of dried grass in the air.

  “Mr Asai, what’s all this about?”

  “I want to know what happened the day Eiko died. That’s what I’ve come to ask you about.”

  Kubo’s shoe made a small crunching sound on the gravel track.

  “The day she died? I’ve no idea. How would I know anything about that?”

  “And yet you and Eiko were on very intimate terms.”

  Kubo didn’t reply.

  “There’s no point in trying to deny it. Just now, when I told you I was Eiko’s husband, didn’t you panic and lead me away from the sanatorium and all the way out to the middle of nowhere just to talk? If you weren’t involved with Eiko, why would you behave this way?”

  “I’m not saying I didn’t know her. I’m not denying it, but… Is that why you followed me all the way up here?”

  “I didn’t follow you. I just created an opportunity for us to talk. I couldn’t just turn up at your office, or pay a visit to your apartment. That would have been incredibly humiliating for me.”

  “So you knew that I’d be coming to this sanatorium.”

  “Every fourth Saturday of the month you come here to visit your wife. I have my ways of finding out, Mr Kubo. I’ve already discovered quite a lot about you. I know all about you and Eiko. But I want to hear it directly from your own mouth. Ideally, I would have asked my wife to tell me herself, but unfortunately she can’t because she’s dead. You’re the only one who can tell me the truth.”

  “Didn’t Eiko – I mean, your wife – tell you anything before she died?”

  “I think you know perfectly well that she didn’t. If she had done, I’m sure she would have told you about it. Eiko used to visit you twice a week at your old home in Yoyogi, didn’t she?”

  Kubo made a movement. For a moment, Asai thought he was going to run for it, but he simply turned and stared out across the fields. Far off on the horizon, through a gap between the mountains, a tiny patch of starry sky was visible. Kubo placed his suitcase on the ground and got a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket. It felt as if he was playing for time. The lenses of his glasses and the end of his nose were briefly lit by the orange flame of his cigarette lighter, and then were instantly gone as the lighter clicked off. After that there was nothing but the tiny red glow of his cigarette. He exhaled smoke into the air, but made no move to speak.

  “It seems you’re having trouble coming up with a response, so shall I get it started for you?” said Asai with a sneer. Kubo nervously drew on his cigarette.

  “All right, then. Mr Kubo, Eiko wrote all about you and your relationship in her private diaries. I found them in a locked drawer after she died. She wrote about every single visit she paid to your house. I assume that if she ever planned to commit suicide, or found herself sick and close to death, she would have got rid of the books. But as she died suddenly, away from home, she never got the chance. The whole affair is laid out in those diaries.”

  Still, Kubo said nothing.

  “You have an interest in folk arts and crafts, don’t you? Kites and dolls and things? Wood carvings and stuff made out of paper, right? In your collection, you have a Yamaga lantern from Kumamoto Prefecture. And a Somin Shorai amulet. Eiko thought these things were unusual and interesting, and wrote about them in her diary.”

  Kubo shuddered slightly, as if the cold night air had suddenly invaded his body.

  “But there’s one thing I don’t know. How did you two become close? That was the only thing her diary didn’t mention. It sounded as if at the start she was a little afraid to write, and she left that part out. How and where did you first meet?”

  Kubo threw away his cigarette, half-smoked.

  “All right. I’ll tell you. It’ll explain why I don’t owe you any kind of apology.”

  His tall frame turned once again to face Asai.

  “I admit that Eiko and I were lovers. It began about two years ago. We met at an old temple in Fuchu. I’d heard that they sold Somin Shorai amulets and had gone to buy one. Eiko was there, walking in the temple grounds. The grounds were otherwise deserted – it was a very quiet place. I ended up speaking to her. Eiko told me she was there to get inspiration for her haiku.”

  Asai knew that Eiko had often made trips to various places in Tokyo and its suburbs to find inspiration for her poems. However, he had never guessed that this was how her relationship with Kubo had begun. He’d had all kinds of theories about their first meeting, but he had never expected it to have been pure chance.

  “That day, the two of us walked about a mile back to the station together chatting about this and that, and then, about a week later, I ran into her again – this time in a department store in Shinjuku. I got on the escalator to go up to the first floor, and she was standing one step below me.”

  Asai guessed that coincidences like this one would strengthen the bond between two people. They went and had lunch together at a nearby restaurant. Kubo explained that they had such a good time talking that they planned to meet again the following week.

  “If Eiko wrote about me in her diary, then I can’t deny it. I don’t know what she wrote exactly, but let’s say I confirm everything that she said about us.”

  Kubo blurted this out, and then started over in a more measured tone.

  “That said, I don’t want you to misunderstand my motives. In the beginning, Eiko never told me that she was married. She said she was still single.”

  Asai gasped.

  “I only slept with Eiko because she told me she wasn’t married. How could I have done something like that if I’d known from the start that there was a husband in the picture? I was completely convinced that she was a single woman who’d somehow missed the boat on the marriage thing. Do you get it, Mr Asai? I was deceived by Eiko, just like you were.”

  Asai was left speechless.

  “Eiko finally told me the truth after we’d been together about a year. She cried when she admitted it, and – I have to tell you – I was horrified. But it was already too late. I was too involved with her to end things. She said that she had deceived me and she’d understand if I wanted to break it off, but that she wanted from the bottom of her heart to keep on seeing me. And that was how our love affair continued. That’s the truth, Mr Asai. I never stole another man’s wife away from him. I slept with Eiko believing that she was unattached. If I’d known she was your wife then I would have been guilty of adultery, and I’d owe you an apology. I’d
be morally to blame. But I didn’t know. I was tricked. And so I’ve no intention of getting down on my knees to ask forgiveness. I mean, I suppose what I did after Eiko had confessed the truth wasn’t exactly blameless – we did continue our affair for another year – but Eiko begged me in tears not to let her husband find out. I just got caught up and dragged along with the whole thing, and that’s the truth.”

  Kubo had told the whole story without a pause. He’d latched onto the excuse “From the beginning Eiko told me she was single” and based all of his logic around it. It sounded as if he’d constructed himself a fine argument. He’d regained all of his self-confidence. He was even beginning to sound aggressive.

  Asai was sure he was lying. He was convinced that Kubo had seduced Eiko. And that Eiko had told him from the outset that she was married. With someone like Kubo, it probably added to the attraction that he was toying with someone else’s wife. And now he was employing his usual cunning to talk Asai into believing the exact opposite. No doubt he’d been silent during their walk up here because he was busy concocting this cock and bull story.

  “So I’m to understand that you think you owe me no kind of apology whatsoever?” asked Asai, his tone rather less calm than before.

  Kubo glanced around him as if to check no one was around on the remote track. But Asai also guessed that Kubo felt confident because he was a few years younger and rather bigger than his adversary.

  “I don’t believe that I need to answer to anything. I’m nothing but the innocent victim of Eiko’s deceit. An apology is something you offer when you’re guilty of something, okay? Right then, say that for the sake of argument what Eiko and I did was adultery; you do realize that adultery is no longer illegal? Not even the law recognizes it as a crime any more. To say nothing of the fact that, as I’ve already said, I began sleeping with Eiko because she told me she wasn’t married. It doesn’t make any difference that she told me later – the responsibility is all hers!”

  “So you don’t feel any moral responsibility to me at all?”

  “I object to being forced to say it! I feel sorry for you, of course I do. But when somebody tails me all the way up to Nagano and gets me out into the middle of nowhere in the pitch dark just to intimidate me and extort some kind of apology, well… even if I was feeling like apologizing at one time, I certainly don’t feel like it any more!”

  “I see. Well, the only reason I followed you up here is that in Tokyo there is nowhere we could have this conversation. I already mentioned that. You complain that we’re in the pitch darkness in the middle of nowhere, but it’s because your train got in at this time. And it was you who chose a country road to have a conversation. I suggested we go and talk inside the sanatorium, but you were the one who told me it was impossible. You brought me out here, not the other way round.”

  “That’s right. Because you threatened to have this conversation in front of my wife. So tell me – what exactly are you after?”

  “After?”

  “Well, I don’t imagine you’ve come all the way up here just to intimidate me into getting down on hands and knees and begging your forgiveness. There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”

  “Ha!” Asai stepped so far forward that Kubo must have felt his breath on his face. “I’d say you have plenty of other reasons besides me to feel intimidated.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Chiyoko Takahashi and the house in Yoyogi that she took from you. Yes, I found out just about everything from my investigations. Ha! It’s pointless to try to look so innocent. You asked your neighbour, Ms Takahashi, to help you get rid of my poor wife’s body after she died in your house, because you couldn’t face handing over her dead body to my family yourself. So to save your own reputation, instead of finding some empty land somewhere to dump her corpse, you had the brilliant idea of asking the owner of the cosmetics shop next door to deal with it. You came up with the story that Eiko had been walking in the street when she had suddenly felt ill and stumbled into a nearby cosmetics boutique, where she’d then passed away. Easy to believe it of someone like you – a man obsessed with appearances and with the morals of a snake. Getting a woman you barely know to agree so easily to such a sordid plan – well, you dug your own grave there, didn’t you? Chiyoko Takahashi turned out to be tougher than you thought. She took advantage of your dilemma and got your house and its plot of land for a bargain-basement price. But blackmail on this level must have been a collaboration. I know she had a hand from her patron – a certain wholesaler in the cosmetics trade. I’m not just making this stuff up. I hired a private detective to look into your business. These ex-police officers really know their stuff. Ms Takahashi spilled the beans about everything. She didn’t actually admit to having blackmailed you, but it was pretty clear from what she told them. Here you go – this is the report of their findings, in case you’re interested.”

  Asai produced the envelope from his jacket pocket, and pulled the pages halfway out to reveal some of the printed words. The white sheets of paper reflected the little bit of light out there on the track.

  Kubo stiffened. The appearance of the detective agency’s report from its manila envelope seemed to have dealt him quite a blow. He didn’t even have the energy to take a look at its contents and check if Asai was telling the truth. It must have been a shock to hear that Chiyoko Takahashi had admitted the whole thing to a private detective.

  “And the detectives also paid a visit to Komako Hanai. She gave them quite a lot of information as well. Komako Hanai – you remember her, right? The woman the maid service used to send to your house? The detective agency really did its job there. She’d quit the maid service and gone to live in the remotest part of Yamanashi Prefecture, but they managed to track her down, just to get her to talk to them.”

  This was another blow that Kubo wasn’t expecting. It may have just been the cold, but his whole body was shivering. He stood, rooted to the spot, as Asai continued. About the fusuma doors and the tatami that had burned in the 7 March earthquake; how Ms Hanai had mentioned that Kubo had used three buckets to put out the fire. He reconstructed the housekeeper’s account, and added how Eiko must have collapsed from the mixture of emotional shock and physical trauma.

  “You had no idea that Eiko had heart trouble, did you? Apparently, she didn’t confide in you about everything. She acted as if she didn’t know that she was ill, and went about her life normally, but in fact she was afraid to tell you about it, in case it scared you off. The one thing that was most dangerous for her weak heart was sex. But somehow she ended up so infatuated with you that she forgot all about that. You as good as killed Eiko yourself. In fact, what you did could be considered a criminal act.”

  “Wha—”

  “You transported a dead body, without due cause, to the house of an unrelated third party. I believe that’s enough to charge you with abandonment of a corpse.”

  Kubo stamped his foot in fury.

  “What the hell are you after? You’re no better than that Takahashi woman with your threats! What is it you want from me? Money?”

  He was bellowing now.

  “Money, is it? Yeah, I bet it is!”

  “Not money.”

  “Liar! Your whole plan was to follow me here and extort cash from me. But you’re not going to get one over on me that easily. I’ve got a little countermeasure that I can put into play.”

  “A countermeasure?”

  “Exactly. If you go ahead with this, I’m going to tell my wife everything. Chiyoko Takahashi has already cheated me out of my home; I’ve nothing more to fear. I heard from Eiko that you’re a section chief at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. A senior civil servant at a government ministry using his own wife’s adultery to blackmail someone? That’s an abuse of power, and it reeks of some kind of scam.”

  Asai was brought up as abruptly as if he had collided with a boulder in the dark.

  “It’s very funny to me,” continued Kubo. “Me –
a lowly salaryman in my uncle’s modest company. Really, none of this would have any effect on my reputation. My uncle’s not going to fire me. It looks like my wife has lung cancer, so she’s not long for this world. In other words, I really don’t have anything left to lose. You, on the other hand… If I brought a complaint against you for attempted blackmail… well, you wouldn’t be able to function as a civil servant any longer. I mean, I suppose you’d be able to continue until the result of the trial, but I’m sure they’d make you give up your position as section chief. But no, before it even got to that point, the gutter press – those weekly ‘news magazines’ – would be all over the story. You wouldn’t dare even show your face at work again, because you wouldn’t want to appear with egg on it in front of all those bosses and superiors you’ve been kowtowing to all these years.”

  What Tsuneo Asai had in common with all other non-career-track civil servants who had fought their way up to their positions was a fierce sense of pride, and loyalty to his own ministry, where he would do anything to hold on to his job. Now that his position was threatened, a powerful instinct for self-preservation kicked in. And that was the motive for what happened next.

  Asai was aided and abetted by the heavy darkness of the Fujimi plateau.

  15

  Asai had no memory of how he’d got from the track back on to the main road.

  The night enveloped him. It felt heavy, weighted. It was as if he were walking through deep water; the air was resisting him and his legs wouldn’t move the way he wanted them to. He had to force a path through the darkness. The woods and forest to the side of the road were vibrating. It was like a scene from a dark fairy tale, with the faint lights from distant habitations barely making it through the swirling fog.