Masaru Ogiwara

Masaru Ogiwara is 54 and for twenty-two years has driven the bank's car without losing a single yen. Born in Kawagoe, north of the capital, the son of a clog maker, he joined an engine shop young, where he learned to recognize any machine by its sound. Quiet and proud, he speaks in short sentences and counts his years of service the way others count medals.

He lives with his wife and an unmarried daughter in a two-story house of dark wood, in a neighborhood of narrow streets west of the city. There is a tatami room with a kerosene heater in the middle, a household altar with his father's photo, a tiny yard with a plum tree and a clothesline where the uniform's white gloves dry every night. He drinks bitter green tea, listens to baseball on the radio and says the one thing money can't buy is regularity.

He is short and stocky, with a broad, wrinkled face, gray hair cropped close and a slightly clouded left eye that he squints when the light hits it. He wears a gray chauffeur's uniform, with the cap almost always in his hands, grimy white cotton gloves and shoes the rain always finds. He speaks with his back straight, slowly, the way he drives: both hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.

About that morning, his account is that of a professional: the policeman wore a white helmet, motorcycle goggles, a raised collar and rain on his face, the voice was young, that of someone shouting orders for the first time, and beyond that he won't swear. He stopped because a policeman told him to, and anyone would have. With the heavy rain and the narrow street, nobody can say for certain where each person was at the moment the car left.

Masaru knows the driver of a stolen car is always the first to be looked at sideways. When the detective suggests he handed the car over on purpose, the question wounds him where it hurts most: he recalls his twenty-two years of service and says to ask anything but that. It could be the pride of an old employee. It could be someone shielding something else with his honor. The detective will have to decide which.