Sendai

Sendai is more than a destination in the investigation: it is where Yuriko Tajima found work and a welcome, where Kyoichiro Kaga’s mother’s past came into view, and where the detectives pursued the identity of Shunichi Watabe. The city’s domestic and professional settings supply a counterweight to the case’s uncertainties, while its connections to Tokyo and Ishinomaki help turn scattered personal histories into investigative leads.

Setting and First Connections

The account of Yuriko’s arrival in Sendai begins with a phone call received by Yasuyo Miyamoto at the start of September. A friend who ran a hot-spring resort outside the city had heard from a woman seeking a live-in maid’s position. The applicant lacked relevant experience and was considered somewhat old for the work, so the friend could not hire her; she nevertheless sought another possibility rather than sending her away empty-handed. The recollection establishes Sendai through a chain of personal assistance, not through an official institution or a dramatic arrival.

Yasuyo offered Yuriko work in her bar, Seven. Her guess that Yuriko would be popular proved right: customers took to her, and the bartender told Yasuyo that her mere presence had changed the atmosphere. He described her as not especially brilliant in conversation, but possessing a hard-to-define mystery and a balance between formality and frankness that gave the bar a sense of glamour. This response helps explain why the job became more than a temporary opening: Yuriko’s place in the bar was recognized by the people who spent time there.

The welcome also had a practical future attached to it. Yasuyo told Yuriko that if the work became full-time, she would need a place of her own and Yasuyo had a friend who worked as a real-estate agent. Yuriko responded with tears and repeated bows, promising not to disappoint her. The exchange gives Sendai’s hospitality concrete form: employment, the prospect of housing, and the personal relationships needed to make both possible.

Yuriko, Yasuyo, and the Bar

Yasuyo’s memory of Yuriko persists long after the period of her employment. At home, Yasuyo keeps an urn containing Yuriko’s ashes and a framed photograph taken in the bar. The photograph is unusual in showing Yuriko with a broad smile; a regular customer gave it to Yasuyo before the funeral. The object binds the bar’s public life to private remembrance, preserving a version of Yuriko that customers and Yasuyo knew alongside the sorrow of her death.

When Kaga later visits, Yasuyo looks at that photograph and thinks with relief that Yuriko’s son is coming to collect her. About three hours after calling, Kaga reaches Sendai Station and prepares to take a taxi. Yasuyo gives him landmarks near her house and puts water on to boil. By the time he arrives, she is preparing green tea. The visit brings the investigation into the same household where Yuriko’s photograph and ashes remain: the detectives’ inquiries encounter not just information, but a life that Yasuyo continues to hold in memory.

Kaga presents a card identifying him with the homicide division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and apologizes again for the trouble Yasuyo has taken. His arrival establishes Sendai as a point of contact between a local witness and an investigation operating across jurisdictions. The sequence is modest, but its details matter: a station, a taxi, directions by nearby landmarks, tea, and an apology make the investigative encounter an extension of the trust Yasuyo had already shown Yuriko.

The Detectives’ Visits

The investigation also brings Kaga and Shuhei Matsumiya to a quiet residential district in Sendai. Because they do not plan to speak with anyone within the city limits, their superiors tell them they can omit the usual courtesy call to local law enforcement. The detectives change trains and walk from the station nearest their destination. The climb is steep enough that Matsumiya wonders how residents manage it, until he sees elementary-school children sauntering ahead and realizes the incline is ordinary to them. Kunimigaoka is described as quiet, with large, grand detached houses lining its streets.

That landscape sets the tone for a visit conducted away from the obvious momentum of a police operation. On a later trip, Matsumiya returns alone. It is his second visit to Sendai, and he knows the route, but the hills remain tiring; without Kaga beside him, the distance seems longer. The houses are lit, and the neighborhood is peaceful as he reaches Yasuyo Miyamoto’s home, having called ahead. Yasuyo welcomes him just as warmly as she welcomed Kaga, and leads him into the living room. She offers beer, which Matsumiya quickly declines in favor of tea. The repeated journey makes Sendai a place the detectives must revisit, while the difference between traveling together and traveling alone lends the return a quieter, more solitary character.

Clues Across the City and Beyond

Sendai is linked to the investigation by more than the testimony of its residents. In a paperback book, investigators find a page listing times for the Sendai Line, which runs from Sendai to Ishinomaki. Forensic examination reveals a particularly high concentration of fingerprints at Ishinomaki Station. The railway page gives the inquiry a concrete geographic route outward from Sendai and toward a specific station; it is evidence of contact with the timetable, though the passage does not establish by itself who used it or why.

The city also anchors the detectives’ effort to understand Shunichi Watabe. Kaga tells his superior officers that his mother had been in a long-term relationship with Watabe, and says he suspects Watabe may have written a list of bridges found among her effects. The list’s bridge names and months match those on Mutsuo Koshikawa’s calendar. Kaga admits he knows almost nothing about Watabe and cannot make sense of the note, so he asks for a handwriting analysis. The matching lists turn a personal mystery connected to Kaga’s mother into a line of inquiry that the task force can test.

Initially, the investigation has struggled to connect the murders of Michiko Oshitani and Mutsuo Koshikawa. The burned body found on the Shinkoiwa riverbank is identified as Koshikawa, who had occupied the Kosuge apartment and had previously lived as Shunichi Watabe. Although the detectives suspect the murders are connected, they lack the link between them and seek background from the Miyagi Prefectural Police; at that stage, no leads have come back. Sendai’s importance therefore lies partly in what remains unknown: it is the home of witnesses and memories that might illuminate a man whose changing identity frustrates the inquiry.

Sendai and the Uncovered Identity

The later reconstruction of Watabe’s identity makes the Sendai material part of a larger relationship network. The investigators had concentrated on Seizo Naemura as a missing person known to both Hiromi Asai and Michiko Oshitani, but Yasuyo’s testimony showed that Naemura was not the man they sought. Kaga then reconsidered the evidence: Watabe had been connected to Hiromi for at least ten years, had little apparent connection to anyone else, and may have received financial support from her. Given Watabe’s estimated age, disappearance, and knowledge of Michiko, Kaga concluded that the relationship most plausibly pointed to someone close to Hiromi.

Kaga’s deduction was that Shunichi Watabe was in fact Hiromi’s father, Tadao Asai. The account of Tadao’s supposed suicide contained anomalies: the only record was in the files of Biwa Gakuen Orphanage, there was no confirming official record, and Hiromi’s former classmates did not remember her father’s death. Kaga inferred that the death had probably taken place elsewhere and that the person who died was not Tadao. On this reading, Tadao used another person’s death to erase his own identity. Sendai’s earlier traces of Watabe thus acquire a changed significance: what had seemed to be an obscure relationship and an unresolved missing-person inquiry becomes a route toward uncovering a family connection and a fabricated death.

As a setting, Sendai holds together contrasting forms of evidence. In Seven and Yasuyo’s home, its story is carried by work, welcome, memory, and a photograph kept beside an urn. In the police inquiry, the same city is connected to a railway line, a witness’s recollections, and a name that conceals another identity. Its narrative force comes from that overlap: the people who remember Yuriko and Watabe make the past accessible, while the detectives’ repeated journeys turn those memories into steps toward a revelation extending far beyond the city.