Кэйго Хигасино - The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping

Juri warned before I could finish, “Just don’t say it looks like a planetarium.”

I grinned, still looking up. She was right, I should stay away from that simile. “I don’t know much about constellations. I’m regretting it.”

“I just know Orion, pretty much. But that doesn’t matter.” She raised both her arms, stretched, and breathed deeply. “This feels great. It feels like it’s not Japan.”

I looked at our surroundings anew. The hills and valley were submerged in darkness. There seemed to be fields spread out in front of me.

“I wonder which way the ocean is,” the words slipped out of my mouth though I didn’t particularly need to know.

“That, that, and even that’s the ocean.” Juri pointed to three sides. “Because this is around the tip of the Miura Peninsula.”

I nodded. The impressions I’d had as I’d driven agreed with what she said.

“Well, do you feel a little better?” I asked her.

“Yeah, thank you.” Juri looked at me with a beaming smile. She blinked twice. “Is it okay if I ask you something?”

“What is it this time?”

“You tried to get closer to me back there, didn’t you?”

For a moment, my breathing stopped. I averted my eyes from her and slowly breathed out. “You’re the one who hugged me.”

“That’s not what I mean...” After pausing, she repeated, “You know that’s not what I meant.”

I didn’t answer. I put my right hand on the steering wheel and fluttered my fingertips.

“Why did you stop? Because it’d be dangerous if we stayed there too long? In that case, would you have gone ahead if we did have the time?” she asked in a near whisper.

I hadn’t seen these questions coming. “Then let me ask you.” I turned to her, wearing a smile. “Why did you hug me? You might have gotten scared calling home, but I’m supposed to be nothing more than an accomplice to you.”

She cast down her eyes before looking up at me again. “Because I decided to trust you. Because now that it’s like this, I thought the only person I could trust was you.”

The gleaming sincerity in her eyes confounded me. The tricky emotions that had threatened to sprout back at the love hotel were crawling into my heart again.

“Stockholm syndrome,” I said.

Her lips opened as though to say, Huh? It was an incredibly childish expression that she hadn’t shown until now.

“When a terrorist and hostage are together for a long time, supposedly a sense of solidarity will develop between them. Both parties do want the situation to be resolved quickly. It’s a term for that state of mind. They mentioned it in a Bond movie.”

“I’m not a hostage. You’re not a terrorist.”

“It’s the same. You’re isolated under abnormal circumstances. Even though it’s staged, we’re both hoping that the ransom exchange goes well, and that’s just like the terrorist-hostage relationship.”

Juri shook her head. “There’s something that’s completely different.”

“What?”

“The solidarity that develops between the hostage and the terrorist is originally unnecessary, right? You can even say it’s unnatural. But that’s not the case for us.”

I licked my lips and gave a small nod. “Certainly, our solidarity is a must.”

“Right? So I wanted to feel it. My solidarity with you.”

Juri’s eyes caught me and wouldn’t let go. I was growing weary of putting on the brakes. They even started to seem superfluous.

I drew her face closer with my left hand and our lips came together. Just before they did, she closed her eyes.

It’s called flow. If you kiss, you want to put your tongue in. If the woman doesn’t put up any resistance, you also want to touch her breasts, and if that continues, next you want to reach your hand into her underwear.

I wanted a change of venue but never got the chance to suggest it. Saying something like that could cool her passion. While I indulged in her lips, I thought this was a case of the syndrome after all. The act of calling home and talking to her father had wrecked something in Juri. As a result she was feeling hopelessly anxious. She couldn’t deal with it without telling herself that she needed the man who was with her.

Well, what about me? Did I love the girl? No, that would have been stupid. It wasn’t why I’d become interested in Juri, and my motive for staying with her belonged to a completely different dimension. I felt a very natural sexual desire simply because she was a young woman. I knew pursuing that was foolish, so I hadn’t let it show in my behavior, and I still didn’t mean to give that away to the very end.

But things turning out this way wasn’t something that I could never welcome. I needed to dispel my anxiety no less than she did. Completing a game as big as this required absolute trust. For a man and woman to establish that, a physical connection was perhaps essential. It could even be an illusion, actually. It didn’t matter if the emotions were momentary or false. Stockholm syndrome was precisely such a phenomenon.

When Juri brought out a condom from somewhere, I was fairly flabbergasted. It seemed she had brought it from the love hotel, but that meant she’d been expecting this to happen. I had to wonder if having a physical relationship was a standard way of establishing solidarity for her.

Inside the cramped car, we brought our bodies together and stimulated each other’s membranes. To me, Juri seemed accustomed to sex. She also seemed to know how to enjoy it, too.

After the act, Juri said she was throwing out the trash and got out of the car. She didn’t come back right away, so I put on my pants, too, and opened the door.

She was lingering at a spot not too far away. I called out to her back, “What are you doing?”

“Oh, nothing. I was just looking at the scenery a little.”

I looked where she was facing. I could faintly see the ocean. When I moved my line of sight to the foreground, it entered my vision. I had to laugh.

“What is it?”

“Look. There’s a jizo right there.”

She turned around and recognized the small stone Buddhist statue and its miniature shed. “You’re right. I didn’t notice.”

“And you just said it feels like it’s not Japan.”

“Yeah.” Juri’s eyes were smiling, and she hugged my arm. “I feel a little cold. Let’s go home.”

“Sure,” I agreed and kissed her one more time.

By the time we got back to the condo, it was nearly three a.m. In one night we had made a round trip to Yokosuka, had Juri make a phone call, and had car sex as a bonus. It was no wonder my body was tired, but oddly I didn’t feel sleepy. Fortunately tomorrow was Saturday. When my focus had been on the automobile park plans, holidays weren’t relevant, but now I didn’t have any work to go in to the office for.

I booted my computer and visited the CPT website. Sure enough, there was a new post on the bulletin board.

I confirmed the quality of the product (Julie)

Excuse me again, I’m the newbie Julie.

Maniac, thank you for your valuable advice. Just earlier, I checked it. It seems there’s no problem with the CPT’s quality.

The agreement is next, at last. But I haven’t been able to prepare the money and am in trouble. The banks are closed tomorrow so it might take some more time. Plus, I still don’t know exactly how I’ll be paying.

It seemed Maniac was the handle of some helpful person who didn’t know the true meaning of the posts and had given Julie advice. Whoever it was had to be wondering how Julie had checked the car’s quality in the middle of the night and scratching his head after seeing this message.

“Imagining Mr. Katsuragi’s face as he writes these is kind of hilarious.” Having said that, I thought it might actually be the detectives.