The Rope Artist by Fuminori Nakamura

Author:Fuminori Nakamura [Nakamura, Fuminori]
Language: spa
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press

WE GOT INTO the car. Mari Yamamoto got into the passenger’s seat, no sign of trepidation. Her eyes were locked on me. A little too obediently.

“I have a hard time with wide-open spaces,” she told me in a languid voice. “So sometimes, I’ll just grab a cab.”

I left the GPS transmitter in the room. It was possible someone might come looking for her. I knew it was excessive, but I called the precinct just in case and asked for them to have somebody keep an eye out.

“That’s you, right?”

I handed her a tablet and showed her the video. The one of her being tied up by the old rope artist, now dead. I stepped on the gas. First things first, we had to leave this place behind.

“. . . Yeah, this is me.”

“What do you think of this one?”

It was the second of the two scenes featuring Kazunari Yoshikawa. The one where Ami Ito, tied up in his careless knots, gets suspended in the air. Her shrieking voice rang through the car. A cry that could be read as either agony or joy.

“. . . I’ve done this sort of thing before.”

“You have?”

“Yeah. Or, someone did this to me once. I was shocked . . . it was totally different from normal kinbaku. I was blindfolded at the time, so I have no idea who he was.”

There was a strong chance it was Yoshikawa.

“While I was tied up, the rope artist kept saying this weird thing to me, in an excited voice. ‘You would be the ideal offering.’ Isn’t that weird?”

“. . . Offering?”

“He said that haniwa were a disgrace, but that the clothes were not enough. I have no idea what he meant by that . . . but it freaked me out.”

Haniwa were a disgrace. But the clothes were not enough.

“He said that?”

“Yes.”

I pulled the car onto the shoulder and called Ichioka.

“Do you know where Ami Ito was buried? She had no family, right?"

—Whoa, hold your horses.

“It’s fine, just tell me.”

Ichioka looked into her file and told me where to find her grave. It was a temple plot. As soon as the map opened on my phone, I decided. We were going. It was a little far from here, across the prefecture, but I spun the wheel at the next light and turned the car around.

“Hey . . . have you had plastic surgery?”

“Yep.”

“Who asked you to do that?”

“. . . I can’t tell you.”

I pressed the pedal to the floor. Even racing, though, we might not make it there today.

“Why?”

“It would cost me my life. Still . . .”

“What?”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Her whole body went lax as she sank into the seat. Like she was gazing up at something, but the only thing above her was the roof of the car: the roof of an E-Class Mercedes-Benz, emblematic of our consumer society. The roof of the car that I bought from a friend a while back, somewhat begrudgingly, knowing it was a bad look for a detective.

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