Shingo Kurihara

Shingo Kurihara is 46 and speaks like someone apologizing for taking up space. He was born in Higashi-Osaka, the son of a carpenter and a weaver, and left school at 16 to work. He married late, was widowed early and has lived alone ever since. He has a brother in Kobe he talks to twice a year and an elderly neighbor who leaves soup at his door. Nobody in the neighborhood knows much more than that.

He lives in a two-room apartment in a two-story wooden building, with an old fan, a low little table and a glass ashtray that is always full. What remains of his salary goes to rent and a pack of cigarettes a day. At night he listens to the radio low and folds and refolds the same jacket, as if the gesture helped him think. He keeps few photographs and none in which he appears smiling.

He is thin, with drooping shoulders, a hollow face and stubble. He wears thin metal-rimmed glasses, a navy-blue baseball cap with no logo and a gray workman's jacket zipped to the neck, even in the heat of October. He has a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and a habit of looking at his own hands while he speaks. He answers slowly, weighing every word, and rarely holds the gaze of whoever is asking.

About that Wednesday, his account is simple. He says he went to the Hanabusa supermarket to buy cigarettes and the newspaper, around 9:20, and that he lives two blocks away. When the police closed the doors he was still waiting in the checkout line. He knows the Kansai Daily reporter only from reading his byline, and does not hide his opinion of newsstand papers.

Shingo is the kind of man who goes unnoticed in a line and whom the detective only notices when he declines a glass of water. When accused, the politeness disappears and he threatens to walk out the door. It may be the pride of an ordinary customer who refuses to be treated as a suspect. It may be someone who always knew when he would be looked at and trained himself to stay quiet. The detective will have to decide which.