This procedure has remained unchanged for many years, except for one amendment. When the treatment of forgotten parties was finally revised and the Victim Notification System introduced, victims’ families were allowed to sign up to receive information about the criminals who had harmed them; they were entitled to know of their fate. So I realised the significance of the phone call I had received from the Ministry of Justice and what it had meant for Kaitarō Nakamura and me.
At the end of the file, there was one more document: a personal statement written by my grandfather. I could see him, still seated at his desk after all the legal arguments were done, finally removing his jacket and tie and draping them over the back of his chair. His tea, untouched while he worked, had developed a thin film which brushed his lips as he sipped from the cup. The liquid was cold, sharp, and he was glad of it. Before him was a clean piece of paper, but his hand shook; his fury was spent. The familiar cedarwood scent of his office enveloped him, reminding him of the trees lining the hills above Washikura. He could hear Rina’s footfalls as she ran between them. It was as though she were there with him now, watching him. And there was nothing, no law, no precedents, only overwhelming grief. He had lost the person he loved most in the world, the person he had failed to protect. Yoshi knew that he was alone in his office, that Rina was not really there, and the only thing he could do was write the truth as he saw it. The truth had to be enough.
Statement of Yoshitake Sarashima
My daughter, Rina, was my life. She was, until the birth of my granddaughter, my sole reason for living. There are so many things you fear as a parent; it is a state of almost constant terror. From the moment they take their first steps, you watch over them so carefully. You shelter them whenever possible. Your first urge is to protect them. As they grow up, you want to make sure their lives are perfect, that they will never face the hardships you have suffered, never be confronted with pain, never make your mistakes. And even when they make mistakes of their own you still want to save them, no matter how old they are.
Rina is dead. I will never hold her again. My girl is gone and through no fault of her own. We did not always see eye to eye, but she was a wonderful daughter and a wonderful mother. She loved her own child so much that she was trying to do what was best for her when she was killed.
Kaitarō Nakamura took her from us. He put his hands around her neck and strangled the life out of her. This was not a woman caught out late at night by a madman in the street; this was a mother in her own home, recovering from a divorce and choosing to put her daughter first. She wanted to leave him; she wanted to start again and remove her child from the influence of someone she could not trust. She wanted to make her world safe, and for that he took her from us.
I have many memories of Rina; they haunt me in the night and through every minute of the day. I am changed without her, broken. I will never hear her voice calling me through the rooms of our house, never feel her kiss on my cheek. I will never again watch her tucking Sumiko into bed at night or teaching her how to paint as my wife used to do with Rina. I cannot walk on the beach in front of our holiday home because with every step I expect to hear the click of her camera behind me, the fall of her footsteps as she runs across the sand. She will not age. She will not grow old with me. She will not see her daughter graduate from school or celebrate her coming-of-age day. She will not be there at Sumiko’s wedding, and, most likely, neither shall I.
We lost my wife to cancer when Rina was just fifteen. It was a loss she felt keenly. She knew what it was to grow up without a mother. She would never have wanted such pain for Sumiko. She had such hope for the life her daughter would lead and all the experiences they would share together. She would have wanted Sumiko to know how much she was loved, but this is something I cannot even express.
I hope that Rina knew she was loved too. For so long it was just the two of us. I tried my best to raise and guide her. I tried and failed to be both mother and father to her. Now history has repeated itself and I must be both parents again, for Sumiko, if I can manage it.
I cannot escape the fact that I too am guilty. I will never forgive myself for the role I played in arranging Rina’s marriage. I will never forgive myself for allowing her husband or Kaitarō Nakamura into our lives. I should have protected her. I should have saved her.
Incredibly, there are still moments when I experience happiness. I find myself smiling at something Sumiko has said, or enjoying a simple task, a meal. These are things I cannot forgive either. I cannot forgive that I am alive and Rina is not, or that she is dead because of me. I dream of her spirit in the rooms of our house, and I hope that she forgives me. I will raise her daughter in the best way I know how.
And I know this: Rina would not forgive the man who wilfully took her life, the man who did not love her enough to let her go. The man before you is a man who entrapped her, lied to her and finally killed her. He knew what he was doing. He has destroyed all our lives. And I implore you, I beg you, for the honour of my daughter and the faith I have in the justice of these courts, to impose on him the only sentence you can: the sentence of death.
I sat alone at his desk, alone as he was, and the only thing that separated us was that the ink of his statement had long dried, and the paper I was holding was a photocopy, which my meticulous grandfather kept on file. I was crying. I had lost her all over again, and my grandfather’s despair had morphed into my own as though it had always lived there in the fabric of this room waiting for me to find it. There was nothing left, only the remnants of those I loved. I tried to hold my memories of them close, but I could not; they had changed.
I thought of my grandfather, enjoying the hot springs, safe and warm in the comfort of knowing that I had secured my future; that it was all he had planned for me, that it would be bright. I thought of the man who taught me about justice, who held me on his lap and read me all the storeys he knew. The grief of that man was as unfathomable as mine, but it had changed him. I could no longer see the person I knew. I could not understand how his grief and perhaps even his feeling of culpability had led to this.
As I sat alone with his papers, my fingers tracing them sentence by sentence, I wondered what else lay beneath his words. My grandfather had met Kaitarō Nakamura when he was free, when he had lived with my mother and loved her. Grandpa had known him, seen him through my mother’s eyes, and glimpsed, however fleetingly, the life they were planning with me. He had accepted Kaitarō into our family, and the more I read over his statement and the case he had built against him, the more this intimacy bothered me, until I wondered if there was something else there too, a demon driving my grandfather harder than grief.
When I looked up from his desk, the room was dark. The sun had set while I was reading. I turned on the desk lamp and began to gather up Grandpa’s papers and notes, putting them back in the file. It was then that I noticed the clear plastic folder underneath them, and the sight of it, jarring amid all I had read, actually made me smile. The label read: Yurie Kagashima. If my grandfather had prepared a case for the prosecution and supporting documents for Prosecutor Kurosawa, then he had also anticipated the defence. There were only a few pages inside and a typed letter.
I thought back to my first meeting with Yurie so many years before, when I’d been just a child. I still remembered her kindness, the eel bento and the Shogi set, but of course these memories had changed too, transformed into something else by my knowledge of events. Yurie Kagashima had met me, she had seen and touched my mother’s body, and she had spoken with my grandfather. She had in fact approached him several times.
There was something about this case that made her do that, something beyond the evidence and even the videotapes. She had met Kaitarō Nakamura in the flesh as I never would. She had sat with him, looked at the scars on his face and listened to his tale, before they took him back to the cells and set a date for his trial.
Her sympathy for Kaitarō enraged m
y grandfather, but it did not dilute his understanding of her case. By the time I encountered his papers, I had read over all the evidence that had been amassed. I wanted to evaluate the documents for myself, to read through the details closely and privately as the judges would do. I did not need the smoke screen of other people’s opinions and agendas. Because of this, although I had looked over all the documents Yurie Kagashima had referenced and used, I had not yet read her personal notes or her summation – the written opinion that she would submit to the court. When I finally did later that evening, I was surprised by how accurate my grandfather’s assumptions had been.
The young Yurie Kagashima was shrewd, but she was not as bold as her older self would be. It would take her twenty years to develop the confidence to act beyond the law as she had in giving me the files. During the trial, she accepted Kaitarō’s guilty plea and the prosecution’s case against him. Hers was a sympathetic but traditional defence. She spoke at length of his deep remorse, which she concluded was genuine. She repeated that he had loved my mother more than anything in the world. She repeated his claim that he did not want to live without her.
She knew what would appeal to the court, and so she documented Kaitarō’s offers of financial reparations to my family, all of which had been refused. She spoke of how Kaitarō had tried to set aside my mother’s belongings from their home on the night she died and had asked for them to be returned to the Sarashima household and kept, for me. How he had gathered her photographs, her work, together in a duffel bag. She spoke of his lack of criminal history and former convictions. She grouped all these factors together in an attempt to convince the court of his better nature, to reduce his sentence and save him from death.
Finally, she argued that the catalyst for the fatal events on March 23, 1994, was my mother’s discovery of Kaitarō’s true profession. At the heart of her case was the fact that Kaitarō had truly cared for my mother, loved her, but that once he started their relationship with a lie he had become trapped in a situation from which he could not extricate himself. His was not an act of cruel premeditation, but one of a desperate man who found his back to the wall. She described how my mother and Kaitarō were together, their mutual love and dependence. She wrote about the life they had planned together, of his intention to marry my mother and adopt me, and of his acceptance by my family.
Here, in his notes on Yurie Kagashima, my grandfather circled around and around this final point. So I discovered something as I had read over these papers that made my doubts and fears make sense. Yurie Kagashima was not imaginative, but she was thorough. She had the measure of my grandfather in a way I never have. She wrote to him, and this was the letter that I found in his file. It was a final petition to meet and discuss the compensation Kaitarō Nakamura had offered him. She said that in the interest of full disclosure, she should tell my grandfather that she had learned something about him. She knew he had hired a PI to investigate Kaitarō Nakamura and that he had been aware of his true profession and his role in our lives. She suggested that Yoshi’s decision not to tell my mother the truth supported his acceptance of Kaitarō, and that if he had embraced him as a son once and forgiven him for past sins, could he not do so now?
This knowledge about Kaitarō had come into my grandfather’s possession months before my mother’s death, but he had never told her what he knew. There are phone records indicating that he called her in the week before she died, witness statements that he had visited her with springtime sweets and some of my things in preparation for the move. He who could perhaps have broken the news to her most gently, who could have prepared her and helped her see past it, had chosen to remain silent.
The Sunflower and Scales
The Tokyo District Court is a sterile, dispassionate place. The sound of the hundreds of feet that pass through each day is muted by the grey linoleum floors, and the halls are filled with the somnolent whir of the ceiling fans. The rooms themselves are white chambers, an extension of the cells in which Kaitarō was interviewed, where bare strip lighting bleaches the skin. Even the air holds no trace of life; recycled through the vents it remains the same temperature from the sultry heat of summer through to the frigid chill of winter – dead and artificially generated, for a waiting room between one world and the next.
Of course, my grandfather attended the trial. He was no ordinary forgotten party to be kept away by ignorance or information denied him. As a legal professional he knew the system and was more than capable of ascertaining the court’s schedule. Indeed, he understood the effect his presence at court would have. He would have counted on it. He would have used his presence as the father of a murdered woman, the grandfather of an orphaned child, his status as a respected attorney in Tokyo, to hold a mirror up to the law and keep it there.
There is only one homicide statute in Japan – Article 199 of the Penal Code. It states that ‘a person who kills another shall be punished’. There is nothing more. The distinctions between calculated homicide, a crime of passion or manslaughter are applied by the panel of judges as they determine the sentence. In 1994, they did this alone in a closed room accompanied only by the paperwork of the trial. My grandfather would have used his presence in court to highlight the seriousness of the crime and the consequences, to keep Kaitarō’s profession and the brutality of Rina’s murder at the forefront of their minds.
I have attended plenty of trials so I can imagine it all too clearly. My grandfather would have been unyielding as he sat before the court, firm in his silent condemnation, his fury. He would have shown no sign of knowing Kaitarō Nakamura, no empathy, no compassion. If he did, it might have undermined the case – it might have set Kaitarō free, and so he campaigned doubly hard for his death.
When Kaitarō entered the courtroom he was clean-shaven, his hair and nails cut and clipped by the state. He wore the regulation beige shirt and matching trousers. His hands were cuffed but he was also bound with a thick orange rope, which wrapped around his waist and was held by the guards who stood on each side of him; tethered like an animal in our gleaming modern city. He wore plastic slippers on his feet to further impede escape.
At the head of the courtroom on a dais sat the judges, swathed in their voluminous robes, the high black backs of their chairs rising above their heads. They did not stir as Kaitarō was brought before them. Flanking the judges on a lower step were five trainees in their navy suits, hands folded in their laps. On the left and right sides of the court, facing each other at parallel desks, were Prosecutor Hideo Kurosawa and Defence Attorney Yurie Kagashima.
The junior judge, a thin young man with an unfortunate scattering of acne across his cheeks, spoke first. He read out Kaitarō’s name, address and the crime he was on trial for: the homicide of Rina Satō. The judge asked Kaitarō if this information was correct, and he confirmed it with a simple ‘yes’; it was the only thing he would say throughout his trial.
Prosecutor Kurosawa rose to read the indictment, concluding with the charge: murder. For a few seconds the court waited in silence. The junior judge glanced at his superiors and, after a nod from them, leaned forward towards Kaitarō. With each guilty plea a defendant is given the opportunity to speak to the charges and perhaps attempt to soften them. But here, Kaitarō, after a small shake of his head, said nothing.
An officer of the court approached Prosecutor Kurosawa, who handed him a thick paper file containing the signed confession. As the file was passed to the most senior judge, the prosecutor spoke: ‘Saiban chō, the state regards this crime as one of the utmost brutality. Although you will read my opinion in the report I have submitted, I wish to emphasise at this point that Rina Satō died by suffocation as a result of being strangled.
‘Such a death is singularly long and painful. The victim does not ever completely stop breathing, and so it requires a great deal of physical force over several minutes for cerebral hypoxia to occur. The defendant would have had to persist in the strangulation against
all the victim’s attempts to fight, the moments when she struggled and gasped for air. This in itself shows how malevolent her murderer’s intent was, how strong his need to kill her. In those long, sustained moments there would have been no mercy or hesitation, only his will to take her life.
‘We know that Kaitarō Nakamura is a supremely selfish man. He worked in a profession that is fundamentally destructive. He was paid to break up families and preyed upon a couple’s unhappiness. He took this young woman away from her husband, her father and her child. Their lives will never be the same.
‘Although Mr Nakamura’s relationship to Rina Satō and his emotional attachment to her have formed a basis for speculation at the heart of this trial, I am of the opinion that there was no love in his history or his actions. He is a killer and a danger to society, and we believe the most appropriate penalty would be the sentence of death.’
Kaitarō, standing in the middle of the court, suddenly turned, looking not at Kurosawa and the team for the prosecution but at Yoshi Sarashima, sitting in the front row of the public gallery. Kaitarō’s look was long and direct, and Yoshi did not disappoint; he matched him gaze for gaze.
With a slight cough, the defence counsel stood up to speak. Young Yurie Kagashima was dressed simply in a white shirt and black cardigan. Her hair was long and pulled back from her neck in a ponytail. She was holding in her hands a piece of paper from which she read.
‘Saiban chō, my client signed a full confession and agreed to the charges,’ she said. ‘Today he is here to be judged, and I would ask you, with your indulgence, to peruse the material I have compiled on my client’s remorse, his genuine atonement for the grief he has caused Mrs Satō’s family, his relationship with members of that family, and the circumstances of this case. In light of this material, I ask for a more lenient sentence than that proposed by the state.’
What's Left of Me is Yours Page 24