Харуки Мураками - Killing Commendatore

The woman didn’t tell me where we were going. She sat in the passenger seat and gave me clipped directions. She seemed to know the roads. She must have been from that town, or else had lived there a long time. I drove the Peugeot where she told me to go. We drove along the highway for a while out of town and came to a love hotel with a gaudy neon sign. I parked there as directed and cut the engine.

“I’m staying here tonight,” she announced. “I can’t go home. Come with me.”

“But I’m staying in another place tonight,” I said. “I’ve already checked in and put my luggage in the room.”

“Where?”

I gave the name of a small business hotel near the railway station.

“This place is a lot better than that cheap place,” she said. “Your room there must be shabby and no bigger than a closet.”

Right she was. A shabby room the size of a closet was an apt description.

“And they don’t like women checking in by themselves here. They’re on guard against prostitutes. So come with me.”

Well, at least she’s not a hooker, I thought.

At the front desk I paid in advance for one night (again, no word of thanks from her) and got the key. Once in the room she filled up the bathtub, switched on the TV, and adjusted the lighting. The bathtub was spacious. It was definitely a lot more comfortable than the business hotel. She seemed to have come here—or someplace like it—many times before. She sat on the bed and took off her cardigan. Then removed her white blouse and her wraparound skirt. And took off her stockings. She had on very simple white panties. They weren’t particularly new. The kind your ordinary housewife would wear when she went shopping at the neighborhood supermarket. She neatly reached behind her and unhooked her bra, folded it, and set it next to a pillow. Her breasts weren’t particularly big, or particularly small.

“Come over here,” she said to me. “Since we’re in a place like this, let’s have sex.”

That was the one and only sexual experience of my whole long trip (or wanderings). Wilder sex than I’d expected. She had four orgasms in total, every single one genuine, if you can believe it. I came twice, but oddly enough didn’t feel much pleasure. It was like while I was doing it with her, my mind was elsewhere.

“I’m thinking maybe it’s been a long time since you had sex?” she asked me.

“Several months,” I answered honestly.

“I can tell,” she said. “But how come? You can’t be that unpopular with women.”

“There’s a whole bunch of reasons.”

“You poor thing,” she said, and gently stroked my neck. “You poor thing.”

You poor thing, I thought, repeating the words to myself. Put that way I really did feel like I was a person to be pitied. In an unknown town, in some random place, with no clue what was going on, naked in bed with a woman whose name I didn’t even know.

We had a few beers from the fridge, in between rounds. It was about one a.m. when we finally slept. When I woke up the next morning she was nowhere to be seen. She left no note or anything behind. I was alone in the overly huge bed. My watch showed seven thirty, and it was light outside. I opened the curtain and saw the highway running alongside the ocean. Huge refrigerated trucks transporting fresh fish roared up and down the road. The world is full of lonely things, but not many could be lonelier than waking up alone in the morning in a love hotel.

A thought suddenly struck me, and I hurriedly checked my wallet in my pants pocket. Everything was still there. Cash, credit cards, ATM card, license, everything. I breathed a sigh of relief. If my wallet had been gone I would have freaked. These sorts of things did happen, and I needed to be careful.

She must have left early in the morning, while I was sound asleep. But how had she gotten back to town (or back to where she lived)? Had she walked, or called a taxi? Not that it made any difference to me. Pointless speculation.

I returned the room key at the front desk, paid for the beers we’d drunk, and drove the Peugeot back to town. I needed to get the luggage I’d left at the business hotel near the station, and pay for the one night. Along the way into town I passed by the chain restaurant I’d gone to the night before. I stopped and ate breakfast there. I was starving, and was dying for some coffee. Just before I pulled into the parking lot I saw the white Subaru Forester. Parked nose in, with that marlin bumper sticker. The same Subaru Forester from the night before. The only difference was where it was parked. Which made sense. No one spent the whole night in a place like that.

I went inside the restaurant. As before, hardly any customers. Like I expected, the same man from last night was at a table, eating breakfast. The same table as the night before, wearing the same black leather jacket. Like last night, the same black golf cap with the Yonex logo resting on the tabletop. The only difference from last night was the folded morning newspaper on top of the table. A plate of toast and scrambled eggs was in front of him. It was probably just served, steam still rising from the coffee. As I passed him, the man glanced up and looked me in the face. His eyes were even sharper and colder than the night before. There was a sense of criticism in them, or at least that’s what it felt like.

I know exactly where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to , he seemed to be telling me.

That’s the whole story of what happened to me in that small town along the seacoast in Miyagi. Even now I have no idea what that woman, with her petite nose and perfect teeth, wanted from me. And it was never clear to me if that middle-aged guy with the white Subaru Forester was really following her, or if she was running from him. Whatever was going on, I happened to be there, and through an odd series of events spent the night in a garish love hotel with a woman I’d just met, and had a one-night stand, the wildest sex I’d ever had. But I still can’t recall the name of the town.

“Could I get a glass of water?” my married girlfriend said. She’d just woken up from a short postcoital nap.

It was early afternoon, and we were in bed. While she slept I stared at the ceiling and recalled the events in that small fishing town. It was only a half a year before, but it seemed like events from the distant past.

I went to the kitchen, poured mineral water into a large glass, and returned to bed. She drank down half of it in a single gulp.

“Now, about Mr. Menshiki,” she said, placing the glass on the nightstand.

“Mr. Menshiki?”

“The new information I got about Mr. Menshiki,” she said. “What I said I’d tell you later?”

“Your jungle grapevine.”

“Right,” she said, and drank more water. “According to my sources, your friend Mr. Menshiki spent quite a long time in Tokyo Prison.”

I sat up and looked at her. “Tokyo Prison?”

“Yeah, the one in Kosuge.”

“For what crime?”

“I don’t know the details, but I imagine it had something to do with money. Tax evasion, money laundering, insider trading—something of that sort, or perhaps all of them. He was imprisoned six or seven years ago. Did Mr. Menshiki tell you what kind of work he does?”

“He said it was dealing with tech, and information,” I said. “He started a company, and some years ago sold the stock for a high price. He’s living now on the capital gains.”

“ ‘Dealing with information’ is a pretty vague way of describing it. Nowadays there’re hardly any jobs not connected with information.”

“Who told you about him being in prison?”