years, when she answered an ad for the new Dolphin Hotel. She was twenty-three. The move to Sapporo was good for her; her parents ran an inn near Asahikawa, about 120 kilometers away.
«It's a fairly well-known inn. They've been at it a long time,» she said.
«So after doing your job here, you'll take over the family business?» I asked.
«Not necessarily,» she said, pushing up the bridge of her glasses. «I haven't thought that far ahead. I just like hotel work. People coming, staying, leaving, all that. I feel comfortable there in the middle of it. It puts me at ease. After all, it's the environment I was raised in.»
«So that's why,» I said.
«Why what?»
«Why standing there at the front desk, you looked like you could be the spirit of the hotel.»
«Spirit of the hotel?» she laughed. «What a nice thing to say! If only I really could become like that.»
«I'm sure you can, if that's what you want,» I smiled back.
She thought that over a while, then asked to hear my story.
«Not very interesting,» I begged off, but still she wanted to hear. So I gave her a short rundown: thirty-four, divorced, writer of odd jobs, driver of used Subaru. Nothing novel.
But still she was curious about my work. So I told her about my interviews with would-be starlets, about my piece on restaurants in Hakodate.
«Sounds like fun,» she said, brightening up.
«'Fun' is not the word. The writing itself is no big thing. I mean I like writing. It's even relaxing for me. But the content is a real zero. Pointless in fact.»
«What do you mean?»
«I mean, for instance, you do the rounds of fifteen restaurants in one day, you eat one bite of each dish and leave the rest untouched. You think that makes sense?»
«But you couldn't very well eat everything, could you?»
«Of course not. I'd drop dead in three days if I did. And everyone would think I was an idiot. I'd get no sympathy whatsoever.»
«So what choice have you got?» she said.
«I don't know. The way I see it, it's like shoveling snow. You do it because somebody's got to, not because it's fun.»
«Shoveling snow, huh?» she mused.
«Well, you know, cultural snow,» I said.
We drank a lot. I lost track of how much, but it was past eleven when she eyed her watch and said she had an early morning. I paid the bill and we stepped outside into flurries of snow. I offered to have my taxi drop her at her place, about ten minutes away. The snow wasn't heavy, but the road was frozen slick. She held on tight to my arm as we walked to the taxi stand. I think she was more than a little inebriated.
«You know that expose about how the hotel got built,» I asked as we made our way carefully, «do you still remember the name of the magazine? Do you remember around when the article came out?»
She knew right off. «And I'm sure it was last autumn. I didn't see the article myself, so I can't really say what it said.»
We stood for five minutes in the swirling snow, waiting for a cab. She clung to my arm.
«It's been ages since I felt this relaxed,» she said. The same thought occurred to me too. Maybe we really did have something in common, the two of us.
In the taxi we talked about nothing in particular. The snow and chill, her work hours, things in Tokyo. Which left me wondering what was going to happen next. One little push and I could probably sleep with her. I could feel it. Naturally I didn't know whether she wanted to sleep with me. But I understood that she wouldn't mind sleeping with me. I could tell from her eyes, how she breathed, the way she talked, even her hand movements. And of course, I knew I wouldn't mind sleeping with her. There probably wouldn't be any complications either. I'd have simply happened through and gone off. Just as she herself had said. Yet, somehow, the resolve failed me. The notion of fairness lingered somewhere in the back of my mind. She was ten years younger than me, more than a little insecure, and she'd had so much to drink she couldn't walk straight. It'd be like calling the bets with marked cards. Not fair.
Still, how much jurisdiction does fairness hold over sex? If fairness was what you wanted, your sex life would be as exciting as the algae growing in an aquarium.
The voice of reason.
The debate was still raging when the cab pulled up to her plain, reinforced-concrete apartment building and she briskly swept aside my entire dilemma. «I live with my younger sister,» she said.
No further thought on the matter needed or wanted. I actually felt a bit relieved.
But as she got out, she asked if I would see her to her door. Probably no reason for concern, she apologized, but every once in a while, late at night, there'd be a strange man in the hall. I asked the driver to wait for a few minutes, then accompanied her, arm in arm, up the frozen walk. We climbed the two flights of stairs and came to her door marked 306. She opened her purse to fish around for the key. Then she smiled awkwardly and said thanks, she'd had a nice time.
As had I, I assured her.
She unlocked the door and slipped the key back into her purse. The dry snap of her purse shutting resounded down the hall. Then she looked at me directly. In her eyes it was the old geometry problem. She hesitated, couldn't decide how she wanted to say good-bye. I could see it.
Hand on the wall, I waited for her to come to some kind of decision, which didn't seem forthcoming.
«Good night,» I said. «Regards to your sister.»
For four or five seconds she clamped her lips tight. «The part about living with my sister,» she half whispered. «It's not true. Really, I live alone.»
«I know,» I said.
A slow blush came over her. «How could you know?»
«Can't say why, I just did,» I said.
«You're impossible, you know that?»
The driver was reading a sports newspaper when I got back to the cab. He seemed surprised when I climbed back into the taxi and asked him to take me to the Dolphin.
«You really going back?» he said with a smirk. «From the look of things, I was sure you'd be paying me and sending me on. That's the way it usually happens.»
«I bet.»
«When you do this job as long as I have, your intuition almost never misses.»
«When you do the job that long, you're bound to miss sometime. Law of averages.»
«Guess so,» the cabbie answered, a bit nonplussed. «But still, kinda odd, aren'tcha pal?»
«Maybe so,» I said, «maybe so.»
Back in my room, I washed up before getting into bed. That was when I started to regret what I'd done—or didn't do—but soon fell fast asleep. My bouts of regret don't usually last very long.
First thing in the morning, I called down to the front desk and extended my stay for another three days. It was the off-season, so they were happy to accommodate me.
Next I bought a newspaper, headed out to a nearby Dunkin' Donuts and had two plain muffins with two large cups of coffee. You get tired of hotel breakfasts in a day. Dunkin' Donuts is just the ticket. It's cheap and you get refills on the coffee.
Then I got in a taxi and told the driver to take me to the biggest library in Sapporo. I looked up back numbers of the magazine the Dolphin Hotel article was supposed to be in and found it in the October 20th issue. I xeroxed it and took it to a nearby coffee shop to read.
The article was confusing to say the least. I had to read it several times before I understood what was going on. The reporter had tried his best to write a straightforward story, but his efforts had been no match for the complexity of the details. Talk about convolution. You had to sit down with it before the general outline emerged. The title, «Sapporo Land Dealings: Dark Hands behind Urban Redevelopment.» And printed alongside, an aerial photograph of the nearly completed new Dolphin Hotel.
The long and the short of the story was this: Certain parties had bought up a large tract of land in one
