At a certain point, the Volvo turned off the road and passed through a big, open steel gate. The gate was marked only by a very small sign. Someone could easily drive right by if they weren’t paying attention. It appeared to be an institution that didn’t feel compelled to announce its presence to the world. Masahiko stopped at the small guardhouse beside the gate and gave his name and the name of the resident he was visiting to the uniformed security guard on duty. The guard made a phone call to confirm the resident’s identity. Once through the gate, we entered a dense grove of trees. Most were tall evergreens, which cast a chilly shadow. We drove up the freshly paved road to the circle set atop the rise, where cars could be parked. A bed of ornamental cabbages surrounding a circle of bright red flowers sat at the center. The flowers were being tended with care.
Masahiko drove to the far end of the circle and parked his car in one of the visitor spots. Two other cars had preceded us. A white Honda minivan and a dark blue Audi sedan. Both were sparkling new—between them his Volvo looked like an aged workhorse. Masahiko, however, didn’t seem to mind a bit (his Bananarama cassette tape took clear precedence). Below, the Pacific Ocean gleamed dully in the early-winter sun. A few midsized fishing vessels were plying its waters. A small humped island sat just offshore, and beyond it the Manazuru Peninsula. The hands of my watch pointed to 1:45.
We got out of the car and walked toward the entrance. The building looked quite new. It was a clean and stylish concrete structure, yet nothing was distinctive about it. Perhaps the architect who designed it lacked imaginative oomph. Or else the client, considering its function, had demanded that the building be as simple and conservative as possible. It was three stories high, and quite square—a structure made up entirely of straight lines. The blueprints could have been drawn up with a single ruler. The ground floor was mainly glass, to create as bright an impression as possible. Jutting out from the front of the building was a large wooden balcony with about a dozen deck chairs, but it was winter, so no one would be sunbathing, however bright and pleasant the day. The cafeteria had glass walls that soared from floor to ceiling. I could see five or six people inside, all well along in years, from the look of them. Two were in wheelchairs. I couldn’t tell what they were doing. Perhaps watching television on the big screen on the wall. They weren’t playing leapfrog, that’s for sure.
Masahiko walked through the entranceway and up to a young woman stationed at the front desk. She was round-cheeked and friendly, with beautiful long black hair. A name tag was affixed to her dark blue blazer. She seemed to know Masahiko by sight, for the two of them chatted for a few minutes. I stood a short distance away and waited for them to finish. A large vase sat in the entranceway, overflowing with a lavish assortment of fresh flowers, arranged, I assumed, by an ikebana expert. At a certain point, Masahiko signed the guest register with a pen and, consulting his watch, added the precise time. He left the desk and walked over to me, hands in pockets.
“My father’s condition seems to have stabilized,” he said. “Apparently, he was coughing all morning and very short of breath, so they worried that he was developing pneumonia. But they got his cough under control a short while ago, and now he’s fast asleep.”
“Is it really okay for me to go in with you?”
“Of course,” Masahiko said. “You came all this way to see him, didn’t you?”
He and I took the elevator to the third floor. The corridor there was also simple and conservative. Decoration kept to a bare minimum. The one exception, as if by way of concession, was a row of oil paintings hanging on the long, white wall. All were coastal landscapes. They seemed to be a series by a single artist, who had painted spots along the same stretch of coast from a number of angles. They weren’t especially well done, but at least the artist had been generous in his use of paint, and I could applaud the way his paintings disrupted the strict minimalism of the architecture. The rubber soles of my shoes squeaked ostentatiously on the smooth linoleum floor. A little old white-haired lady in a wheelchair pushed by a male attendant passed us in the corridor. She stared straight ahead, her gaze so fixed and rigid it did not even flicker when we went by. As if she was determined not to lose sight of a crucial sign suspended in the air before her.
Tomohiko Amada was in a big room at the very end of the corridor. The name card on the door had been left blank. Most likely to protect his privacy. He was, after all, famous. The room was the size of a small hotel suite, with a basic set of living room furniture in addition to the bed. A folded wheelchair rested against the bed’s foot. A large southeast-facing window looked out over the Pacific Ocean. It was a magnificent, unobstructed view. A hotel room with a view like that would cost an arm and a leg. No paintings hung on the walls. Just a mirror and a round clock. A medium-sized vase filled with purple cut flowers sat on the table. There was no odor at all. Not of a sick old person, nor of medicine, nor of flowers, nor of sun-drenched curtains. Nothing. That’s what surprised me most—the room’s utter lack of smell. It was so striking I thought something had happened to my nose. How could odor be erased so completely?
Tomohiko Amada was fast asleep near the window, oblivious to the view outside. He slept on his back facing the ceiling, his eyes tightly shut. Bushy white eyebrows overhung his aged eyelids like a natural canopy. Deep wrinkles furrowed his forehead. His quilt was pulled up to his neck—I couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not. If he was, they were extremely shallow breaths.
I knew right away that this was the mysterious old man who had visited my studio. I had seen him for only a moment or two in the shifting moonlight, but the shape of his head and his wild, white hair left no doubt: it had been Tomohiko Amada. The fact didn’t surprise me in the least. It had been clear all along.
“He’s dead to the world,” Masahiko said to me. “We’ll just have to wait for him to wake up. If he wakes up, that is.”
“All the same, it’s a blessing that he’s sleeping peacefully,” I said. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It said five minutes before two. I suddenly thought of Menshiki. Had he called Shoko Akikawa? Had there been any developments in Mariye’s case? Right now, however, I had to focus on Tomohiko Amada.
Masahiko and I sat across from each other on matching chairs, sipping the canned coffee we had bought from the vending machine in the corridor, while we waited for Tomohiko Amada to wake up. In the meantime, Masahiko told me a few things about Yuzu. That her pregnancy was progressing nicely. That her due date was sometime in the first half of January. That her handsome boyfriend was thrilled about becoming a father.
“The only problem—from his perspective, anyway—is that she seems to have no intention of marrying him,” Masahiko said.
“Huh?” I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. “You mean she plans to be a single mom?”
“Yuzu intends to have the baby. But she doesn’t want to marry the father, or live with him, or share custody of the child…that seems to be the story. He can’t figure out what’s going on. He assumed they’d be properly married once the divorce was final, but she completely rejected his proposal.”
I thought about that for a moment. The more I thought, though, the more confused I got.
“I can’t wrap my head around it,” I said. “Yuzu always said she didn’t want kids. Whenever I said I thought the time was right, she said it was still too early. So why does she want a child so badly now?”
“Maybe she didn’t plan on a baby, but changed her mind once she got pregnant. Women can do that, you know.”
“Still, it’ll be tough to look after the child all by herself. Hard to hang on to her job, for one thing. So why not marry him? He is the child’s father, right?”
“Yeah, he doesn’t understand either. He thought they were getting along just great. And he was happy a child was coming. That’s why he’s so confused. He asked me about it, but I’m stumped too.”
“Have you talked to Yuzu directly?” I inquired.
Masahiko frowned. “To tell you the truth, I’m trying hard not to get too sucked in. I like Yuzu, but he’s my colleague at work. And of course you and I have been friends for ages. I’m in a tough spot. The more I become involved, the less I know what to do.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I always enjoyed seeing the two of you together—you seemed like such a happy couple,” Masahiko said, looking perplexed.
“You said that before.”