‘Did he intend for you to kill her?’
‘Fuck you.’ His voice is soft and low, but his face has paled beneath the bruises on his skin. ‘I know what you think of me,’ he says. ‘You and your nameless flunkies.’
‘My name is Prosecutor Hideo Kurosawa.’
‘You won’t listen either.’
‘I want to understand.’
‘Prove it.’
Beneath the white heat of the lights the two men assess each other. Kaitarō’s eyes flicker to the stapled papers on the table in front of him, the prepared confession. Kurosawa follows his gaze and then reaches for the typed sheets, tucking them back into his portfolio and returning it to his briefcase, out of sight. Only his notebook is left on the table, open at a blank page. He looks back at Kaitarō. ‘How did it begin?’ he asks.
Kaitarō straightens a little in his seat, considering. Then he takes an uneasy breath. After a moment his voice filters out through the tape. ‘I followed Rina to the market,’ he says. ‘I had a photograph of her from your pal Satō, but she looked very young, very . . .’ He pauses as though the word eludes him. ‘I thought it might have been taken a long time ago.’ He glances up to see if Kurosawa is taking notes, but he isn’t.
‘From Satō’s description,’ Kaitarō says, ‘I had expected someone older – a bit more homely. He made it sound as though Rina were a lonely woman, bored with her life. My boss expected a quick result and, to be honest, so did I. When you have worked in this industry as I have, it becomes rather formulaic – love, that is.’ Kaitarō smiles as though daring Kurosawa to interrupt him, but the prosecutor doesn’t, and the silence stretches between them.
‘People think that what I do . . .’ Kaitarō says, ‘what I did, for a living is strange. They cannot imagine themselves in such a profession. And yet everyone goes through the motions of my job every day. It is as natural as breathing. We read those around us, their wants, their needs, and we make our move.’
‘Isn’t that a bit cynical?’ Kurosawa asks.
‘There isn’t a child on earth who doesn’t read his parents,’ Kaitarō replies. ‘Every toddler will gauge the emotions of those looking after him and act accordingly to get what he wants. That is the skill of living with others. We spend our lives in training, Prosecutor Kurosawa. You just use your knowledge differently.’
‘How?’
‘You investigate criminals and their crimes, but you can see what they need. You know what to do to elicit their help. You are capable of all manner of things to get what you want – either outside this room among the bureaucrats or at home with your wife. I think we operate very similarly.’ Kaitarō leans forward. ‘May I have a glass of water?’
‘No. Go on with what you were saying.’
‘When I came to Tokyo I had nothing, not even a camera. What else was I going to use but myself?’
Kurosawa nods, waiting.
‘What do people want? Approval? Praise? Affection? That is all attraction is: I like you because you like me and that’s how it’s done. You turn yourself into a mirror for each person. You pretend interest in their problems, radiate approval, and you reflect back to them the things they want to see.’
Kurosawa reaches for his Styrofoam cup of tea and takes a sip; the liquid is dark and stewed. ‘How many of these jobs have you worked on?’ he asks, but Kaitarō ignores him.
‘I watched Rina for weeks. She was always in a hurry, a mother running errands so she could get home to her child. But one night there was something about her, something in her expression, a sadness I had not seen before. She seemed lost, and I sensed an opening.
‘She was in the market, looking at a selection of nashi pears, reaching into her purse. Her hair had fallen over her face when I approached her, but I already knew that she was not the dumpy housewife her husband seemed to think her. Not some simple, lonely woman. When she looked up at me I saw that she possessed a confidence I had thought she would lack. She raised her eyebrow, challenging me. I asked her if she knew a good place to buy cheesecake.’
Kaitarō looks up startled as Kurosawa laughs.
‘I know, right? Because dessert is sexy?’ Kaitarō grins. ‘Rina laughed too. She gestured to a stall behind her . . . She was still laughing when I invited her out for coffee.’
‘Did she go with you?’ Kurosawa asks.
Kaitarō shakes his head, the smile fading from his lips. ‘She was married, she told me, and she had a child. That was meant to warn me off, to appeal to my decency.’ He swallows. ‘She was decent,’ he says, ‘and all I could think, after reading about her, following her, photographing her, was that I knew her. I knew her as I had no right to, and I knew what she was going home to.
‘I gestured to Rina’s wedding band and said that I knew she was married. This startled her. It was clear no one had flirted with her for a long time. I cannot believe how blind people can be.
‘I handed her my card, told her to contact me if she changed her mind, but when she shook her head, I walked away with relief. I was crossing the market, thinking about my boss and how I could persuade him to let this one go, when something awful happened. She followed me.
‘She stood before me looking so composed, both shy and alluring, and said that she did have time for coffee if I was still interested. ‘I’m Rina,’ she said with a small smile. ‘Rina Satō.’ It was the hope in her eyes that undid me. I told her to go home, that her first instincts had been right. I remember the look I gave her and the hurt on her face as I turned away, but I did not look back. It took weeks to approach her again.’
‘But you did?’ the prosecutor asks. ‘You did approach her again?’
‘I had to,’ Kaitarō replies.
‘Was there pressure from work?’
Kaitarō shakes his head. ‘That’s not why I went back.’
‘Was it the other agent, Haru?’
‘I wouldn’t have let him touch her.’
‘So what happened?’
Kaitarō looks down at his hands. ‘I returned to her neighbourhood, but she was always busy. I tried turning up at places I knew she would be, but I couldn’t approach her. I thought about her constantly. I had been in a relationship when I was young. I liked the companionship, enjoyed sex – even when I moved to Tokyo and took this job – but after a while, with all those people, I started to keep myself at a distance. With Rina, even looking at her file, I felt this pull towards her as though I wanted to be caught. I wanted to tell her about Satō. No more jokes, no mirrors. I could have suggested we go to a love ho and have a photo taken or she could have divorced him on her own terMs Then we could have met as real people and started again.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ Kurosawa asks.
‘Chemistry is a powerful thing,’ Kaitarō says, ‘but it can shatter. If I told her what I had been hired to do, the life that I sensed was there waiting for us would never have come into being.’
‘You still could have walked,’ Kurosawa says, but Kaitarō ignores him.
‘When I met Rina again she could sense my indecision. Emotions were always quite tangible between us. She could feel what I was thinking, but she took my reluctance for shyness, perhaps that decency she was hoping for. I knew then that our friendship, fragile as it was, would not survive my profession. There would be no starting again. She would have been disgusted with me; everything between us, would have meant nothing.’ Kaitarō pauses. ‘And I couldn’t leave her to Haru and Satō.’
Kurosawa is silent, then he gestures at the tinted glass panel. Soon afterwards a young man in police uniform enters with a plastic cup of water. He sets it down in front of Kaitarō whose mouth curves into a smile, but he does not drink.
‘I never had to act with Rina,’ Kaitarō says quietly. ‘None of the professional roles that I used on other women attracted her. Rina would call me on them; she could see through them. She observed other
people more closely than they did her. We were alike that way.’
‘So you told her about yourself?’
‘I was myself.’
‘Did you tell her about your childhood? Where you grew up? Where you’re from?’ Kurosawa persists. ‘Why risk it and have an abandoned target, a mark turning up in your hometown?’
‘I didn’t abandon her,’ Kaitarō says.
‘No,’ Kurosawa replies quietly. ‘You didn’t.’
‘She knew me,’ Kaitarō says, looking straight at his interrogator, ‘not my job, but the real me, and she wasn’t horrified by what she saw.’ He sits back and his gaze lifts beyond Kurosawa. For the first time there is a lightness in his expression, a memory of hope. ‘What I felt for Rina – she was my home, a woman who not only understood me, but liked me. She was like me.’
‘Did she want to get divorced?’
Kaitarō’s gaze shifts. ‘Not at first, no.’
‘Is that common?’
‘Most people are selfish; they love to have the distraction of a new romance in their lives, particularly when they’re bored and frustrated. Some are so desperate for attention that they latch on to an affair quickly without pausing to question it. Even those of us who think we are good can be ruthless when survival or our happiness is at stake. Rina was different. She valued the promises she had made to her family. She balanced everything: the needs of her father, her husband, her daughter. She prioritised them above herself, and she did not break with this lightly. One of her greatest strengths was that she was kind, but her way of living was stifling. She needed to make room for herself and so we did it together. We never did anything she didn’t want to do.’
‘What happened after the divorce?’
‘Rina moved to Meguro for a time and then she came to live with me,’ Kaitarō says. He looks at the camera and for a moment there is joy in his face.
‘Did you continue to work as an agent?’
‘No, I’ – Kaitarō shakes his head – ‘I found work at a photography shop. Rina met with some of her old contacts and she was close to exhibiting again. She had a series she was working on. One that she’d started that summer. We just needed a nest egg.’ Kaitarō pauses as Kurosawa looks at him in question. ‘Sumiko was living with her grandfather,’ he explains. ‘It was one of his conditions, that the child live with him until Rina could provide a stable home. Sumiko knew me as a friend and I didn’t get to see her much. Rina said Yoshi was testing her and me, but we wanted Sumiko so we did everything he asked.’
‘Did you usually work with children?’ Kurosawa asks.
‘No.’
‘But you involved this child, you knew her?’
‘I liked her.’ He pauses and smiles to himself. ‘She was precocious. She had these large dark eyes and a knack for getting her own way. I appreciated that.’
‘How did Rina die?’
The smile slides from Kaitarō’s face and for a time he is silent. ‘Do you know what it is like to find the one person who completes you?’ he asks. ‘Wherever you are, whatever your choices, they complete you? That is how I felt about her.’
‘How did she die, Kaitarō?’
‘String,’ he says. ‘It was on our bedside table. Kitchen string.’
His image blurred as I paused the tape. My nails had left crescents in the flesh of my palm. Prosecutor Kurosawa sat frozen in action, his hand paused over his notebook, although I could not remember when he had started to write. At the very edge of the page was a sketch of a parcel neatly tied with string. I closed my eyes. I could still see Kaitarō’s face behind my eyelids. I could hear his words, clear and sure. I wanted to reach into the interview and stop him. I wanted to press my fingers to his mouth and stop time.
In some homicide cases, there are security videos from shops or convenience stores that record the last moments of a person’s life. When you watch these, you want to call out to the figure on the screen and warn them not to take the path they’re already heading down. When I paused Kaitarō’s interview, I thought that if I did not let him finish speaking, if I did not listen to what had happened, then it would not be real. When I pressed play again he was sitting still in the silence, looking straight at the camera.
‘I loved her,’ he said. ‘I love her still.’
Pearls
That night I stood in my bedroom holding my mother’s pearls. They have always been a talisman for me. I turned them over in my hands, enjoying the gentle click of them between my fingers, watching my reflection in each curve. The pearls are old and heavy, something that should be passed down from mother to daughter. On my twelfth birthday, Grandpa drew these pearls from his pocket and gave them to me. He lowered them into my palm and told me of how once I had nearly lost them altogether.
We were at a party and I was sitting on Mama’s lap near a shallow pool. Mama had been chatting and entertaining some of my father’s colleagues. My grandfather told me that as a baby I had loved attention and wanted to be at the centre of things, so I had tugged on her pearls and, feeling the glossy orbs between my small fingers, tugged again. The thread snapped, and the pearls flew everywhere, rolling towards the pool. Mama stood up and ran after them, laughing, with me clasped in her arMs Together we scooped them up, one by one, lifting the last few out of the pool. When they had all been collected, my mother had pointed to our reflections in the shimmering water. Two heads close together, large dark eyes and pale cheeks. The images wavered, diving into each other – two women, where now there was just one.
Yoshi
Butsudan
Yoshi Sarashima stood alone in his home in Meguro, looking down at a photograph of his daughter, Rina. It was his favourite picture of her. She was on the beach in Shimoda and she was looking straight at the camera, the sun shining down on her face. He could see the girl she was and the woman she would become, the mother she would be to Sumiko.
Candles flanked the photograph where it sat within an open rosewood cabinet, a butsudan, the family altar in the tatami room. The scent of incense lingered in the air, although that morning’s sticks were now nothing more than grey powder in the trays.
In the months since his daughter’s death, Yoshi would come downstairs each day to find fresh flowers upon the altar, the candles and incense already lit. Hannae was very attentive. But lately he had found Sumiko kneeling on the carpet, her back to him as he stood in the doorway; she did not notice him as he turned and walked quietly from the room. Hannae was usually in the kitchen packing Sumiko’s bento, but when the clock struck 7 a.m., she would go into the tatami room with a fresh handkerchief to wipe Sumi’s face before school.
Yoshi lifted the photo from its shrine and gazed down at Rina. He had never thought to see those eyes again, those high, delicate cheekbones. There was a cry from the garden, a shriek, and he looked outside. Sumiko was playing with Hannae. She ran into the sunlight, leaping into the air, her white cotton dress flying above her knees. She jumped again, her fingers snatching at the Frisbee. Yoshi watched her play, her eyes wide with excitement and joy. Her face was upturned to the sun and she was swift as she ran over the grass. He saw her for what she was – a child, just a normal child; he wanted her to remain that way. Slowly, Yoshi bent to the candles on the altar and, using a small folding fan, extinguished them one by one. He removed Rina’s photograph from the family shrine and did not put it back.
part two
There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.
– Attributed to Sartre (possibly from the introduction to Les Temps Modernes, October 1945)
Rina and Kaitarō
Razor Fish
A woman is born with all the children she will ever carry, all those tiny souls, like shells embedded in the coral of her womb. In a hospital room, astringent with antiseptic and starched sheets, Rina was shown a picture on a screen, an underwater cave flickering with phosphorescent light. And
then, at the centre of this space, swept clean, a knot of cells like a new world beginning: the child she had prayed for.
They communicated differently, Rina knew. Not through scans and blood tests, but through marks and skin, the push and pull of one life inside another. There was the first stretch mark that appeared on her stomach and grew, broad and deep, like a vein. Her pelvis widened and you, she thought, you tumbled within me, stretching me, carving a home for yourself out of my core. You. There was no need to say it aloud.
In the early months, Rina would lie awake in the night waiting for the shift and drop of liquid in her belly, the pull of currents in a pool, but soon she was awakened by a curl within her like the crest of a wave, and suddenly a bump on her stomach. You, she thought. Kicking. Tap, tap, tapping your way out of me.
These were the moments Rina would never forget, the hours of gestation. Waking each dawn, Rina would lie very still to feel her. If there was no movement she would grow afraid, worried that something had happened to the baby, but then there would be a deep pulse within and Rina would fold her hands over her stomach and smile; movement meant that they were safe, they were alive.
In these moments too Rina thought of her mother, who had died of cancer when she turned fifteen and now lay in the family tomb. There was never a time when Rina did not miss her, did not wish for her. But it was here, in the physical experience of new life, that it seemed if only for the briefest of seconds that her mother was there, as she needed her to be.
In the silence of her home, as she felt her child inside her, Rina looked around at the world she had created. She thought of the choices she had made and her early courtship with Satō. He had taken her to Tokyo Disneyland. From those months, their short time alone together, all she could remember was the theme park: his hand warm on her arm as he tugged her into Cinderella’s castle; the light glinting off the coloured towers and costumes; the chatter in the air as they stood in line with other couples, waiting to buy milk-chocolate popcorn, which came in plastic fairy-tale carriages with handles so that you could carry them like handbags. It was such a popular destination for dates that adults outnumbered the children. She remembered the rides and the whirlwind, the sugar on her tongue, and behind it all the clamour of expectation: fear drowned out by a smile, the sudden foreign taste of a kiss.
What's Left of Me is Yours Page 8