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If only I had been born like that
, he wondered,
what sort of life would I have
led?
But this was a supposition that exceeded his powers of imagination. Ushikawa
was too Ushikawa-like, and there was no room in his brain for such hypotheses. It
was precisely because of his large, misshapen head, his bulging eyes, and his short,
bandy legs that he was who he was, a skeptical young boy, full of intellectual
curiosity, quiet but eloquent.
As the years passed the ugly boy grew up into an ugly youth, and before he knew it,
into an ugly middle-aged man. At every stage of his life, people continued to turn and
stare. Children would stare unabashedly at him.
When I become an ugly old man
,
Ushikawa sometimes thought,
then maybe I won’t attract so much attention
. But he
wouldn’t know for sure. Maybe he would end up the ugliest old man the world had
ever seen.
At any rate, he was not equipped with the skills needed to blend into the
background. And to make matters worse, Tengo knew what he looked like. If he was
discovered hanging around outside Tengo’s building, the whole operation would
come crashing down.
In situations like this, Ushikawa normally hired someone from a PI agency. Ever
since he was a lawyer, he had made use of these sorts of organizations, which mostly
employed former policemen who were adept at digging up information, shadowing
people, and conducting surveillance. But in this case, he didn’t want to involve any
outsiders. Things were too touchy, and a serious crime—murder—was involved.
Besides, Ushikawa wasn’t even sure what he might gain by putting Tengo under
surveillance.
What Ushikawa wanted was to make clear the
connection
between Tengo and
Aomame, but he wasn’t even sure what Aomame looked like. He had tried all sorts of
methods but had yet to come up with a decent photo. Even Bat hadn’t been able to
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obtain one. Ushikawa had looked at her high school graduation album, but in the class
photo her face was tiny and somehow unnatural-looking, like a mask. In the photo of
her company softball team she had on a wide-brimmed cap and her face was in
shadow. So even if Aomame were to pass him on the street, he would have no way of
knowing if it was really her. He knew she was nearly five feet six inches tall and had
a trim body and good posture. Her eyes and cheekbones were distinctive, and she
wore her hair down to her shoulders. But there were plenty of women in the world
who fit that description.
So it looked like Ushikawa would have to undertake the surveillance by himself.
He would have to keep his eyes open, patiently waiting for something to happen, and,
when it did, instantly react. He couldn’t ask someone else to handle such a delicate
undertaking.
Tengo was living on the third floor of an old, three-story concrete apartment building.
At the entrance was a row of mailboxes for all the residents, one of them with a name
tag on it that said
Kawana
. Some of the mailboxes were rusty, the paint peeling off.
They all had locks, but most of the residents left them unlatched. The front door of the
building was unlocked, and anyone could go inside.
The dark corridor inside had that special odor you find in older apartment
buildings. It is a peculiar mix of smells—of unrepaired leaks, old sheets washed in
cheap detergent, stale tempura oil, a dried-up poinsettia, cat urine from the weed-
filled front yard. Live there long enough and you would probably get used to the
smell. But no matter how used to it you got, the fact remained that this was not a
heartwarming odor.
Tengo’s apartment faced the main road. It wasn’t all that noisy, but there was a fair
amount of foot traffic. An elementary school was nearby and at certain times of day
there were large groups of children outside. Across from the building was a clump of
small single-family homes, two-story houses with no garden. Just down the road were
a liquor store and a stationery store catering to elementary school children. And two
blocks farther down was a small police substation. There was nowhere to hide, and if
he were to stand by the road and look up at Tengo’s apartment—even if Tengo didn’t
discover him—the neighbors would be sure to cast a suspicious eye his way. And
since he was such an
unusual
-looking character, the locals’ alert level would be
ratcheted up a couple of levels. He might be mistaken for a pervert waiting for the
kids to get out of school, and neighbors might call the police.
In surveillance the first requirement is finding a suitable place from which to
watch, a place to track your target’s movements and maintain a steady supply of water
and food. The ideal situation would be to have a room from which Ushikawa could
see Tengo’s apartment. He could set up a camera with a telephoto lens on a tripod and
keep watch over movement in the apartment and who came in and out. Since he was
alone on the assignment, twenty-four-hour coverage was impossible, but Ushikawa
figured he could cover it for ten hours a day. Needless to say, however, finding a
suitable place was going to be tricky.
Even so, Ushikawa walked the neighborhood, searching. He wasn’t the type to
give up easily. Tenaciousness was, after all, his forte. But after pounding the
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pavement of every nook and cranny of the neighborhood, Ushikawa called it quits.
Koenji was a densely populated residential area, flat with no tall buildings. The
number of places from which Tengo’s apartment was visible was very limited, and
there was not a single one he thought he could use.
Whenever Ushikawa had trouble coming up with a good idea, he liked to take a
long, lukewarm soak in the tub, so he went back home and drew a bath. As he lay in
the acrylic bathtub, he listened to Sibelius’s violin concerto on the radio. He didn’t
particularly want to listen to Sibelius—and Sibelius’s concerto wasn’t exactly the
right music to listen to at the end of a long day as you soaked in the tub. Perhaps, he
mused, Finnish people liked to listen to Sibelius while in a sauna during their long
nights. But in a tiny, one-unit bathroom of a two-bedroom condo in Kohinata, Bunkyo
Ward, Sibelius’s music was too emotional, too tense. Not that this bothered him—as
long as there was some background music, he was fine. A concerto by Rameau would
do just as well, nor would he have complained if it had been Schumann’s
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