Yumiko Hosoda

Yumiko Hosoda is 34 and the shift manager at Hanabusa, the supermarket where she began as a cashier at 19. She was born in Sakai, the daughter of a taxi driver and a seamstress, and studied at night to be promoted. She married young and separated at 30, and today shares an apartment with her younger sister. Work has become the part of life she controls entirely.

She lives two trains from the store, in a clean apartment where every dish has its place in the drying rack. A wall calendar, marked in pencil, tracks each shift of the week. She wakes at five, reaches Hanabusa before seven and knows every aisle by the sound of the carts. She speaks in numbers and times, and thinks whoever doesn't write things down forgets. She is proud of the candy aisle, which she has arranged for eight years.

She has an oval, serious face, with shoulder-length black hair held by a clip. She wears the supermarket's green apron over a white collared blouse, the plastic badge on her chest, a pen behind her ear and discreet lipstick. Her tired gaze is that of someone who lives on her feet. She speaks firmly, but without raising her voice, and corrects the detective when he gets a time wrong.

About that morning, her account is a professional's. She restocked the chocolate shelf at 8:30 with the lot that arrived the day before, checked the boxes one by one and opened the store at 9. At 9:50 a grandmother screamed in the aisle. She says the store has a single camera, at the entrance, which the owner bought after a robbery, and that the candy aisle has its back to it.

Yumiko answers everything precisely, but there are questions where precision becomes defense. When the detective insinuates that she let someone in, her voice drops a degree and the aisle stops being hers and becomes a personal insult. It may be the pride of a manager who never lost a box. It may be someone who measures every sentence so that no slack is left. The detective will have to decide which.