Chiyo Ishida

Chiyo Ishida is 22 and the youngest teller at the Shiinamachi branch. She was born in Ikebukuro, the daughter of a cabinetmaker who lost his workshop in the bombings and a mother who mends clothes for the neighbors. She studied accounting at a night school, joined the bank at 19 on an aunt's recommendation and counts coins and banknotes with a speed the deputy manager praised aloud, which made her blush.

She lives with her parents in a cramped two-story house, in a tatami room she shares with her older sister. A futon is folded in one corner, there is her mother's sewing box and a paper window that lets in the January cold. Chiyo folds her handkerchief every morning, eats her meals in silence and leaves the house with her bag clutched to her arm, as if the way to the bank were a border.

She has a thin, pale face with short, wavy black hair held by pins on both sides. She wears a white round-collared blouse, a gray wool cardigan and a navy-blue skirt, and a black mourning armband on her left arm. Her hands tremble when she holds the handkerchief. She apologizes in every sentence, even when no one accuses her of anything, and speaks with the formality of someone who learned never to be a bother.

About that Monday, her account is that of a witness who carries the weight of having walked out. She recalls that the man showed the armband, drank first from the vial to calm his colleagues and poured the medicine into each cup of tea, and that the second dose came a minute later. She also said he took one hundred sixty thousand yen and a seventeen-thousand check. Tomorrow she buries three colleagues.

Chiyo cries easily and blames herself without anyone asking. When the question turns direct, she shrinks back and her voice nearly disappears, and the detective must lean in to hear the end of her sentences. It may be the grief of a young woman who does not know why she survived. It may be someone keeping a small detail who fears what her family will say. The detective will have to decide which.