Yoshi moved into the living room to the basket by the wood burner and selected some kindling for the fire; he searched through the bundles until he found some scented applewood and loaded it into the stove with the paper and kindling. He sat there long into the night, with his meal and his tea. He fetched his father’s old radio and placed it on the small side table next to his armchair. He struggled with the frequencies and wondered how his parents had managed with it during the war. And then, as the faint opening notes of Elgar slipped from the speakers, he closed his eyes and dreamed of the past.
Yoshi had come to Shimoda to consider what kind of life he could now lead with Sumiko. He needed time alone, to think and plan, but his grief was too raw, and the house felt desolate without Sumi. Its emptiness reflected his life back to him, showing him what he was: just one failed old man. Perhaps he and Sumiko could spend more time in Shimoda. He could teach her about his parents and how they used to live, tell her how the house came to be left to him and why it was so important. They could move down here; he could sell his legal practise and devote his time to Sumi. He would build the life for her that he had wanted for Rina. Keep her safe.
Upstairs in his briefcase was a set of arguments he had thought about sending to the public prosecutor leading the case against Kaitarō Nakamura. Yoshi would burn them. He would forget what he had done and what had been done to him. He would do this, he thought, for Sumiko.
The next morning, as the sun rose over the sea, Yoshi felt a modicum of his energy return. He phoned Tokyo and consulted with his secretary before breakfast. His thoughts of the new life he would build in Shimoda had given him a sense of purpose; they would help him push through his fear and his grief. He went to the market and spent a good while browsing until he found the perfect piece of halibut. He did not even haggle. At home he put the fish on the counter and set aside the herbs he would need for his supper along with a yuzu he would zest for garnish. In these fleeting moments, Yoshi felt as though part of his youth was with him again. He would cook properly and think of the future.
In the afternoon, he walked around his home with a notepad and pencil; he surveyed the house and thought of the changes he would have to make if they were to move down here. He would extend the porch so they could have barbecues. He should redecorate Sumi’s room and have a new set of bookshelves and a desk installed for her, so she could study. There was also the den off the dining room. Until now, it had been a storage space, a place to keep coffee-table books and garden shoes. The room looked out onto the garden and down to the sea, but it was unmodernised. Unlike the dining room, there were no sliding glass doors, only a window that leaked. Beneath the window, water stains visible in the wood, was a chest that doubled as a window seat. Rina used to sit there on the afternoons when she wanted to be alone; this was her room really. Perhaps he could convert it into a snug for Sumiko, so she would have her own space.
Yoshi set down his notebook and walked over to the chest. Over the years it had been the keeper of many things – Rina’s toys, Rina’s magazines, Rina’s gardening gloves for the greenhouse, Rina’s flip-flops and beachwear from when she took Sumi down to the sea. It would have to be cleared, and for a moment Yoshi looked at it with desolate apprehension. It would contain things of Rina’s that she had touched, loved and casually discarded, sure she could retrieve them again as soon as she needed to.
As Yoshi opened the chest, a faint odour of mould rose up to meet him. He looked down. The chest was filled with magazines that had got wet, Rina’s old sandals and Sumiko’s red bucket for the beach. Yoshi located a plastic bag and began to empty the magazines into it. The chest was not as full as he thought it would be; perhaps Rina had cleared it out the previous autumn. He found a couple of architecture books that he’d bought with Rina in Atami, years ago, when they had first thought of renovating the house. He set them aside, but as he did so the slipcover fell away from one of the books revealing the black hardback beneath. Yoshi opened the book to realign the flap but what he saw made him forget about the cover. There was an envelope wedged into the seam, sealed with one of Rina’s stickers, a red-crowned crane in flight.
His hands shaking, Yoshi sliced the crane in half with his thumb. There was no note inside, no letter, only a square Polaroid that slipped from the envelope. Yoshi turned it over in his hands. The picture could have been of a much younger Rina; she was radiantly happy, looking straight at the camera. She was also wearing an oversized shirt. As he looked closely he could see it was a man’s shirt, partially buttoned. Her legs, which she had curled beneath her, were bare. Around her shoulders was the arm of the photographer. His face too was young, deceptively so, and unmistakable. They were sitting in Yoshi’s armchair by the wood burner. Rina had lit the fire and you could see the glow of the flames beside them. The man was dressed in khaki pants and he was wearing Yoshi’s gardening fleece that had gone missing that summer. Rina must have fetched it for him from the den, perhaps in exchange for his shirt. Kaitarō was smiling as he held Rina. Their faces were close, inseparable. On the back she had written home in Shimoda.
Yoshi dropped the photograph to the floor. Rapidly he leafed through the rest of the book but there was nothing more. He fanned it through his fingers and lifted it up, shaking it, but there was nothing there, nothing else for him. He threw the book aside, not caring as it slid across the floor. He knelt down, looking at the picture of his daughter and the man who had killed her. As the evening drew on he did not move; the sun lowered on the horizon and still he sat. It was only when it became too dark to see that he got painfully to his feet.
Yoshi knew when the photograph had been taken. Their hair was damp and there was sand in it. She had lit the wood burner to dry off, but it was summer; you could not swim in the bay much past August. He thought back to that summer, to their last year as a family in Shimoda. There were only a couple of possible dates, short weekends he had spent at Mount Fuji with Sumi, when Rina would have been alone and could have let her lover into their home. He moved towards the trunk in the den and threw open the lid. In a rage, he tossed everything into the plastic bag. These were Rina’s things, but he did not care. He found a man’s shirt missing a few buttons, and his grief imploded. He picked up Rina’s red sun hat that she loved to wear to the beach and crumpled the red matting in his fist, tossing it aside. He kept going until he found a notebook, crisp with newness. He wanted to throw it away, but it looked innocent, untouched. She had only written on one page. Yoshi saw Sumi’s name and a list of schools in the Shimoda area. Beneath this was a list of alterations to the house –
snug for Sumi
barbecue pit
new deck?
Rina had been lying to him for a long time. She had lied about the state of her marriage, her affair, her plans. After all he had done for her, the care he’d taken, the love – she had lied to him and not trusted him with her life.
Once more, Yoshi looked at the photograph lying on the floor. He could not bear their ease, their happiness together. Rina had brought Kaitarō here; she had been planning to live with him in their family home as he now planned to live with Sumi. She had been building a life for herself and she had not told him. She had been building a life, perhaps even without him. His throat raw with pain, Yoshi realised that she was not the daughter he knew; she had been taken from him.
It was late by the time Yoshi rose to his feet. His knees protested as he climbed the stairs he had spent too long sitting on the floor of the unheated den. The halibut he had so carefully selected lay uneaten on the counter; the peeled skin of the yuzu had curled in on itself, dry and shrunken. Yoshi did not notice. He left everything out as he climbed into bed; it was many hours before he could sleep.
No Rest
In Tokyo, days later, in the heart of his firm, Yoshi opened a cabinet in his office where he kept the cases relating to himself and his family. Yoshi sifted through the files before finding the one he was looking for. Reaching into a separate
drawer, he pulled out the court guidelines for sentencing, a document he had read many times over the years. All around him were the trappings of his work: his tea set, his dictaphone.
Yoshi opened his file and set out each document. This was all the information he had amassed on the death of his daughter and the man who had killed her. One by one, he laid them across his desk. It was late. Outside he could hear the suppressed buzz of the office as the young attorneys made final calls and the assistants gathered their belongings to go home. There was the clink of crockery as one of them walked around the desks, collecting the cups.
Yoshi sat down. The task ahead of him was personal and it had to be done in privacy. Earlier, he had given several of his client briefs to the other attorneys; his secretary had been instructed to hold all calls and postpone his meetings for the next two weeks. His staff would not be involved in this case; it was a task for him alone and it would consume him.
There was a time when Yoshi had thought of burning this file. Back in Shimoda when he’d imagined that there could be a new life for him and Sumiko. But the past was relentless; it had been hiding in his sanctuary. Nowhere was safe; there was only the future and he had to finish what he had started. When he found a buyer for Washikura, he would put the funds into an account for Sumiko. He was too old to move from his life in Tokyo, too old to change course, but he could put the money aside for her. Perhaps Sumiko could start again, even if he could not.
His wrist ached as he reached for the final bundle of paper – these were his notes on the case, recommendations for sentencing, and, clipped to the front of the first page, the name and address of the lead prosecutor: Hideo Kurosawa. Yoshi ran his hands over the notes; he felt the paper under his fingers and his lips twisted. Normally, it was people with more than one death on their conscience who received the death penalty, but there were exceptions: this depended on the evidence, the motives of the killer and the arguments prepared by the prosecution. Yoshi pulled a fresh piece of paper towards him and reached for a pen.
Sumiko
The Trial of KaitarŌ Nakamura
The lawyers of my grandfather’s generation practised across the spectrum of the law. Rather than specialise from the very beginning, as we do today, they were able to apply themselves to a vast range of cases. My grandfather lived for this work. He was an exceptional attorney and a generalist; he could turn his hand to anything, even death.
In his office, I found a case built for the prosecution. It was there in the form of a dozen letters accompanied by a log of when they were sent. Letters from my grandfather to lead prosecutor Kurosawa containing Grandpa’s own legal arguments, each set out with his characteristic precision. There were no replies.
My grandfather began his case by addressing the wakaresaseya industry: legal but unregulated, and flourishing in Tokyo. He outlined the absence of any legislation or statutes to govern the industry (not even a licence was required to work as a private detective or agent), and summarised the dangers this line of work presented to the public. He drew particular attention to the freedom these agents felt they had to manipulate the lives of ordinary people, and how their actions often led to deeds that were against the law. Grandpa argued that because there was no strong evidence of psychological damage in Kaitarō or a previous history of violence, his manipulation of my mother and subsequent assault on her were both self-interested and calculated. He emphasised that a hard line was needed to crack down on the industry and communicate a warning, an example to those who might follow in the footsteps of Kaitarō Nakamura.
Grandpa wrote at length about my family, but not in the way you would expect. He added to his case by setting out the details of our life. He described his personal wealth, the financial protection he had provided for my mother. He listed the bank accounts in her name. He illustrated, clearly and concisely, the financial motive Kaitarō would have had for staying with my mother and all he stood to lose if she left him.
Grandpa took pains to highlight that within months of meeting her, Kaitarō had been fired from his job and was forced to live with no real source of income, save sporadic earnings from his photography. It was clear, my grandfather said, that Kaitarō had invested a great deal of his life and his future in my mother, and that this was what was at stake.
Finally, Grandpa researched and cited several homicide cases in which the murderers were driven by selfishness and financial motives. He profiled the victims and the accused and detailed each of the sentences imposed, establishing a pattern. He chose trials that were as recent as possible. In all of them the courts had been unforgiving.
I have described to you how a prosecutor will present his view of a case to the court, and how an attorney will prepare a defence. So too do the courts establish a narrative of their own. The purpose of these narratives is to get to the heart of the events, to understand the true motivation of the accused, whether he has lied to the state, and the extent to which he feels any remorse.
When Kaitarō Nakamura was tried, it was not one judge who presided over his trial, but three. Public juries were not part of the legal system at that time, so the court’s interpretation of events, the verdict and sentencing, relied solely on the men at the head of the courtroom, seated in ascending order by age and experience.
The youngest would have been just like me, a protégé fresh out of the Supreme Court training facility in Wakō. He would have been tasked with drafting the initial narrative and proposing a verdict and sentence. His work would then be revised by the second judge, a man in the middle of his career, perhaps on a three-year rotation to Tokyo. Finally, the dossier would be edited and approved by the third judge – a senior member of the establishment, there to represent the institution of the law.
My grandfather was well aware of the judicial temperament. Judges are human, just as a public juror would be, but they are not as unpredictable. Immersed in the system, reliant on prosecutors, and in charge of hundreds of cases at a time, judges mostly preside over guilty pleas. Their courtrooms become places where bad people are tried and their job is to root out the liars, to correct and teach. The role of the triumvirate still exists today, and it is in place to provide consistency in judgements – to ensure that the unilateral values of the legal system are upheld. Grandpa understood this. He knew that patterns of sentencing are set down much like patterns of thought. The more these patterns are repeated, the more their worth is reinforced. Judicial opinions evolve slowly. They do not shift much from generation to generation, and they can be predicted and tracked. By a skilled prosecutor they can be shaped, and that was what my grandfather aimed for.
Within Grandpa’s papers was a sense of regret. Regret that he had arranged the match between my mother and father. In their divorce settlement my grandfather paid my father to get out of my mother’s life. And it appeared that this money bought Yoshi one more thing.
Among the witness statements given to the prosecutor about Kaitarō Nakamura was a voluntary deposition written in the hand of Osamu Satō. He did this at my grandfather’s urging, but also to spare himself the public shame and spectacle of being questioned before the court. In his testimony, my father admitted to hiring Kaitarō Nakamura. He said that he asked Kaitarō to seduce my mother and provide him with grounds for divorce. He described Kaitarō as a man who was difficult to control from the outset – a renegade who exceeded his brief from the very beginning and who later both stalked and threatened Satō.
It was clear, my father said, that Kaitarō had his eye on my mother’s fortune; he claimed to love her, but he moved in with her so that she could support him. At their last meeting, my father stated that Kaitarō had shown every intention of continuing to deceive Rina and her family into the future. My father claimed that he had wanted to speak out, but that having hired Kaitarō he felt too ashamed. He said that he came close at several points to telling the truth but that Kaitarō had blackmailed him, threatening to expose him to his family
. My father attempted contrition. He said he could not forgive himself for his selfishness, his cowardice. He concluded that if Kaitarō and men like him could be prevented from doing any further harm, then my mother would not have died in vain.
The court gave my father a civil responsibility fine for his actions, but the prosecutor chose not to press charges. His deposition was filed away to form part of the overall narrative, and when Kaitarō Nakamura confessed, his statement became the most important testimony. So my father, who began it all, was free to go. Justice in the eye of the beholder.
There was no sign of what Grandpa really thought of my father’s statement or his escape, but as I read on I could see that he used this deposition to reinforce his portrait of Kaitarō as a man whose refusal to speak to the police once in custody demonstrated his disregard for the truth and his lack of remorse. Grandpa stated that Kaitarō’s delay in signing the confession presented by the prosecution had drawn out the misery of those he had already hurt and opened them up to the persecution of the press. He was a man who did not understand love or family and would never repent for what he had done. The emergence of an eventual signed confession did not indicate repentance, but rather a tired, guilty man’s acceptance of the inevitable.
If confessions are a measure of ‘correctability’ – an offender’s potential to be educated and reintegrated into society – then my grandfather was determined that Kaitarō should not be rehabilitated. Redemption was and is reserved only for those who display genuine remorse. By detailing the absence of it in Kaitarō, my grandfather hoped to draw down the harshest punishment upon him, to ensure his death.
Capital punishment can take years to enact. It occurs without warning. People spend an eternity in cells waiting for the axe to fall, and then one day it does. Only when a person is dead will the family be notified and invited to collect the body.
What's Left of Me is Yours Page 23