What kind of situation would lead a woman to sleep apart from her husband on New Year’s Eve? I thought about Setsuko and her husband after I returned to my room and ran a comb through my hair, trying to undo Yuki’s ministrations. Setsuko—it was funny how I knew her first name but had no clue about her husband’s. Not that I wanted to know. The way he had spoken to his wife last night was brutal, and I recalled him at the temple, making crude jokes to Hugh about a group of junior-high school girls. No, he hadn’t worried about her at all.
It was difficult to enjoy breakfast, even though it was straight out of my Zen vegetarian dreams: zni, a special New Year’s vegetable broth, plus steaming rice and saucers filled with colorful pickled vegetables. On the side was mochi, a glutinous rice cake.
“I asked for toast, but I don’t think she understood.” Mrs. Chapman stared miserably at her meal.
“Just try it. It’s really pretty good,” I offered before saying half-truthfully, “I missed you last night.”
“So what did you do, paint the town red?” Mrs. Chapman’s sharp gaze told me she wasn’t fooled.
“No, we just went to see the new year rung in at the temple. I knocked at your door, but you must have been—”
“Sound asleep,” said Mrs. Chapman. “Beer always goes straight to my head. I turned on a National Geographic special and must have nodded off. When I woke up they were doing some kind of crazy exercise program.”
Yamamoto and Nakamura came in wearing heavy sweaters and ski pants. A missing wife wasn’t enough to cancel the day’s sports. My anger surprised me, given that I didn’t even like Setsuko Nakamura. Breaking his chopsticks apart, Mr. Nakamura gave me a venomous look, which I returned. I hadn’t volunteered to hear the details of his problem—I’d been drafted. I continued eating my vegetables and invited Mrs. Chapman on my morning hike. She declined, saying something about souvenir shopping in town. I didn’t coax her further. I liked the idea of walking fast by myself, working off the troublesome feelings I couldn’t quite identify.
Ten minutes later I was outside admiring how the snow had blanketed the cars and turned the parking lot into a dazzling white field. There was a pattern in the snow, dainty tracks that could only be made by a cat. I followed the trail around to the back of the inn and found a bamboo gate, which I unlatched.
I entered a small space where snow had edged the branches of severely pruned trees like embroidery. Gusting winds shook a flurry of flakes downward, and I pulled up the hood of my down coat and trudged on, calling in a soft voice to the cat, who had to be crouching somewhere.
The paw prints ended at a heap of dead leaves and branches, a pile of rubbish out of place in the stylized garden. I fluttered my fingers in the pile, trying to encourage the animal out of hiding. As the leaves moved, I found something else.
What had looked like bark was a frozen length of human hair. And the pale, trailing branch was a slender forearm, hair shaved off in the super-feminine manner of many Japanese women. The last thing I took in before my feet gave out were glossy scarlet fingernails, one of them broken. A condition Setsuko Nakamura would not have tolerated, had she been alive.
4
Japanese police are obsessed with alien registration cards. Not having one handy is cause to be held for hours or even overnight, a misery that has befallen English teachers and bracelet-sellers alike. I wasn’t surprised the Shiroyama police demanded my card when they pulled up at Minshuku Yogetsu in a salt-streaked squad car, a petite ambulance behind.
I had the card ready in my wallet and ran upstairs to get my passport. When I returned, I found Mrs. Yogetsu still hadn’t moved from her courtesy kneeling position before the police.
“There’s no reason why this should have happened here, I beg you to understand. I took that woman’s reservation through a travel agent!” Her pleas went ignored as the officer in charge dispatched a trio of juniors outside.
Captain Jiro Okuhara appeared to have been pulled straight from home, dressed as he was in a beige V-neck and checked golf slacks. Still, he behaved as formally as if we were at headquarters, offering me his card with a grave expression. I handled it the way I was supposed to—looking it over with great interest, something that was in fact feigned. My command of Japanese was almost exclusively spoken—although I’d been studying kanji characters since college, I could read only about three hundred, which left me somewhere in the third grade.
Captain Okuhara whisked me from the crowd of guests and concerned neighbors spilling into the entryway. In Mr. Yogetsu’s kitchen, we faced off across a small table overloaded with a rice cooker, vegetable peelings, and other remnants of breakfast preparation. The kitchen wasn’t as clean as I’d expected, given the New Year’s scrubbing that most of the country happily took upon itself. Then again, Mr. Yogetsu hadn’t been expecting a crisis.