“Kita Shinagawa, please.”
Hearing the destination, Kimura felt like doing a little dance. Kita Shinagawa was just past his company’s garage in Higashi Gotanda, and since it was the end of his shift, he was planning to go in that direction anyway. Moments like this, when he guessed right and things went his way, reminded him that he liked driving a cab. Suddenly he felt like talking.
“You covering a story?”
His eyes bloodshot with fatigue, Asakawa was looking out the window and letting his mind drift when the driver asked this.
“Eh?” he replied, suddenly alert, wondering how the cabby knew his profession.
“You’re a reporter, right? For a newspaper.”
“Yeah. Their weekly magazine, actually. But how did you know?”
Kimura had been driving a taxi for nearly twenty years and he could pretty much guess a fare’s occupation depending on where he picked him up, what he was wearing, and how he talked. If the person had a glamorous job and was proud of it, he was always ready to talk about it.
“It must be hard having to be at work this early in the morning.”
“No, just the opposite. I’m on my way home to sleep.”
“Well, you’re just like me then.”
Asakawa usually didn’t feel much pride in his work. But this morning he was feeling the same satisfaction he’d felt the first time he’d seen an article of his appear in print. He’d finally finished a series he’d been working on, and it had drawn quite a reaction.
“Is your work interesting?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Asakawa, noncommittally. Sometimes it was interesting and sometimes it wasn’t, but right now he couldn’t be bothered to go into it in detail. He still hadn’t forgotten his disastrous failure of two years ago. He could clearly remember the title of the article he’d been working on:
“The New Gods of Modernity.”
In his mind’s eye he could still picture the wretched figure he had cut as he’d stood quaking before the editor-in-chief to tell him he couldn’t go on as a reporter.
For a while there was silence in the taxi. They took the curve just left of Tokyo Tower at a considerable speed. “Excuse me,” said Kimura, “should I take the canal road or the No. 1 Keihin?” One route or the other would be more convenient depending on where they were going in Kita Shinagawa.
“Take the expressway. Let me out just before Shinbaba.”
A taxi driver can relax a bit once he knows precisely where his fare is going. Kimura turned right at Fuda-no-tsuji.
They were approaching it now, the intersection Kimura had been unable to put out of his mind for the past month. Unlike Asakawa, who was haunted by his failure, Kimura was able to look back at the accident fairly objectively. After all, he hadn’t been responsible for the accident, so he hadn’t had to do any soul-searching because of it. It was entirely the other guy’s fault, and no amount of caution on Kimura’s part could have warded it off. He’d completely overcome the terror he had felt. A month … was that a long time? Asakawa was still in thrall to the terror he’d known two years ago.
Still, Kimura couldn’t explain why, every time he passed this place, he felt compelled to tell people about what had happened. If Kimura glanced in his rearview mirror and saw that his fare was sleeping then he would give up, but if not, then he’d tell every passenger without exception everything that had occurred. It was a compulsion. Every time he’d go through that intersection he was overcome by a compulsion to talk about it.
“The damnedest thing happened right here about a month ago …”
As though it had been waiting for Kimura to begin his story, the light in the intersection changed from yellow to red.
“You know, a lot of strange things happen in this world.”
Kimura tried to catch his passenger’s interest by hinting in this way at the nature of his story. Asakawa had been half-asleep, but now he lifted his head suddenly and looked around him frantically. He had been startled awake by the sound of Kimura’s voice and was now trying to figure out where they were.
“Is sudden death on the increase these days? Among young people, I mean.”
“Eh?” The phrase resonated in Asakawa’s ears. Sudden death … Kimura continued.
“Well, it’s just that … I guess it was about a month ago. I’m right over there, sitting in my cab, waiting for the light to change, and suddenly this motorbike just falls over on me. It wasn’t like he was moving and took a spill—he was standing still, and suddenly, wham! And what do you think happened next? Oh, the driver, he was a prep school kid, 19 years old. He died, the idiot. Surprised the hell out of me, I can tell you that. So there’s an ambulance, and the cops, and then my cab—he’d banged into it, see. Quite a scene, I tell ya.”
Asakawa was listening silently, but as a ten-year veteran reporter he’d developed an intuition about things like this. Instinctively, he made note of the driver’s name and the name of the cab company.
“The way he died was a little weird, too. He was desperately trying to pull off his helmet. I mean, just trying to rip it off. Lying on his back and thrashing around. I went to call the ambulance and by the time I got back, he was stiff.”
“Where did you say this happened?” Asakawa was fully awake now.
“Right over there. See?” Kimura pointed to the crossing in front of the station. Shinagawa Station was located in the Takanawa area of Minato Ward. Asakawa burned this fact into his memory. An accident there would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the Takanawa precinct. In his mind he quickly worked out which of his contacts could give him access to the Takanawa police station. This was when it was nice to work for a major newspaper: they had connections everywhere, and sometimes their ability to gather information was better than the police bureau’s.
“So they called it sudden death?” He wasn’t sure if that was a proper medical term. He asked in a hurry now, not even realizing why this accident was striking such a chord with him …
“It’s ridiculous, right? My cab was totally stopped. He just went and fell on it. It was all him. But I had to file an accident report, and I came this close to having it show up on my insurance record. I tell ya, it was a total disaster, out of the blue.”
“Do you remember exactly what day and time this all happened?”
“Heh, heh, you smell a story? September, lemme see, fourth or fifth must’ve been. Time was just around eleven at night, I think.”
As soon as he said this, Kimura had a flashback. The muggy air, the pitch-black oil leaking from the fallen bike. The oil looked like a living thing as it crept toward the sewer. Headlamps reflected off its surface as it formed viscous droplets and soundlessly oozed into the street drain. That moment when it had seemed like his sensory apparatus had failed him. And then the shocked face of the dead man, head pillowed on his helmet. What had been so astonishing, anyway?
The light turned green. Kimura stepped on the gas. From the back seat came the sound of a ballpoint pen on paper. Asakawa was making notes. Kimura felt nauseated. Why was he recalling it so vividly? He swallowed the bitter bile that had welled up and fought off the nausea.
“Now what did you say the cause of death was?” asked Asakawa.
“Heart attack.”
Heart attack? Was that really the coroner’s diagnosis? He didn’t think they used that term anymore.
“I’ll have to verify that, along with the date and time,” murmured Asakawa as he continued to make notes. “In other words, there were absolutely no external injuries?”
“Yeah,