asako was walking along a passageway in Shinjuku Station, though she barely knew what she was doing. She seemed to move automatically, planting one leg in front of the other. She let herself be drawn into the flow of the crowd, and eventually found herself heading out of the station. Once she had passed the ticket gate, she made her way down into the underground arcades. She caught sight of her reflection in a shoe-store mirror. The sunglasses hid most of the swelling, but she watched the woman in the mirror pull her jacket tightly about her, trying to hide the pain inside. She stopped there for a moment and took off the glasses to look at her face. The puffiness in her cheeks where Satake had beaten her wasn't so bad any more, but her eyes were swollen from crying. She put on the glasses again and looked up to find that she was standing in front of the elevator for the shopping floors upstairs. A moment later she had pushed the button for the top floor and was riding up. She had nowhere to go, nowhere she had to be.

When the doors opened, she was facing a line of restaurants. All she wanted was somewhere she could rest for a while, away from prying eyes. She lowered herself on to a bench by the window and put the black nylon bag between her knees. It held Satake's fifty million and six more of her own. Lighting a cigarette, she remembered how he had asked to smoke at the end. Her eyes swam behind the sunglasses. She dropped the cigarette into the grey steel ashtray. It sputtered softly as it hit the water inside, like the sound his cigarette had made in the pool of blood.

Wanting suddenly to get away, she stood and picked up the bag. All of Shinjuku was visible from the large windows. Beyond Yasukuni Avenue lay Kabuki-cho. She put her hand against the window and stared out at the unlit neon signs and gaudy, faded billboards, pale in the weak afternoon sunlight. The streets were quiet, like a sleeping beast that only hunts at night. This was Satake's town, a chaotic and seamily hedonistic place. The door she had opened when she went to work on the night shift had led here, to a place she'd never known before - his place.

She decided to take a look at the building where his casino had been; but the decision brought the other emotions to the surface again. For the past two days she had lain in a hotel bed, miserable and empty. Those feelings came back to her now, and with them the memory of how his body had felt. She gave a small moan she couldn't help it - wishing she could see him one more time. She would go to Kabuki-cho to breathe the air he'd breathed, see the things he'd seen. Maybe she would find another man like him, and pursue his dream? The hope that she had lost was beginning to stir in her again.

Masako turned away from the view and hurried off, but the soles of her tennis shoes on the polished tiles sent a loud squeak echoing down the corridor. She stopped after only a few paces, startled by the noise, and turned back to the window. For a moment, the world outside seemed filled with the darkness of the abandoned factory.

No, she wouldn't go. She couldn't live her life as someone's prisoner the way he had lived his, caught up in a dream of the past, with no way forward and no way back, forced to dig down inside oneself.

But she'd come this far; where could she go now? She stared at her fingernails, kept short for the past two years for the factory. Her hands were chapped from the constant soaking in disinfectants. She thought about her twenty years at the credit union, about giving birth to a son and making a home for her family. What had it all meant? In the end, she was no more or less than the reality of all those years, with all the marks they'd left on her. And, unlike Satake, she had faced everything reality had brought her way. His idea of freedom had been different from hers.

She punched the elevator button. She would go and buy an airplane ticket. The freedom she was seeking was her own, not Satake's, or Yayoi's, or Yoshie's, and she was sure it must be out there somewhere. If one more door had closed behind her, she had no choice but to find a new one to open. The elevator moaned like the wind as it came to meet her.

THE END