Ju-On

by Kei Oishi

  The cat never returned, but then again, neither did the man . . .

  Hirohashi

  Relying on his vague memory and getting lost more than a couple of times, Yukio Hirohashi finally found the Tokunaga home. The nameplate on the old, brick gate told him just as much.

  I wonder what happened to Rika-chan …

  He’d heard nothing from Rika Nishina since the day before. He’d called her apartment as well as her cell phone several times, but was unable to get a hold of her. This had never happened with her before.

  He pressed the interphone on the brick gate, but no one answered. He opened the gate and headed to the front door, where he rang the doorbell. Still no answer.

  “Great,” he muttered.

  Hirohashi recalled Ayaka Takahashi, the social worker charged with taking care of Sachie Tokunaga. She had been absent from work since the week before, and no one could get a hold of her.

  He tried the doorknob and found it unlocked.

  “Hello! My name is Hirohashi, from the care center! Is anyone home?”

  He took off his shoes at the entrance and went in the house. It was the middle of the afternoon, but all of the lights were on. However, there was no sign of anyone being here.

  “Hello! Hello!”

  He had visited the Tokunaga home before, with Ayaka Takahashi. If his memory served him right, Sachie’s room was right next to the kitchen, at the end of the hall.

  He looked into the Japanese-style room just off the kitchen. He saw Sachie Tokunaga sleeping on top of the futon spread out in the middle of the room.

  Sleeping?

  No … she was not sleeping. No, Sachie Tokunaga, her eyes wide open, was dead.

  Hirohashi screamed. But then he remembered where he was. “Sachie-san! Sachie-san!” He kneeled above her, screaming her name, and violently shaking her yukata~cad body. Of course, there was no way he could have woken her up; she was not even alive.

  “Why?” he muttered to himself, as he looked up. Taking his cell phone from his chest pocket, he looked around the room. There, in the corner, was Rika Nishina. She was leaning against the wall, looking his way with blank eyes.

  “Ah, Rika-chan!”

  He hurried over to Rika’s side. He grabbed her thin, bony • shoulders and shook her, “Rika-chan! Rika-chan! What’s wrong?! What happened?!”

  Rika Nishina opened her big eyes and looked dully at Hirohashi. Her lips, red with rouge, moved slightly.

  “What? What did you say?”

  Hirohashi brought his ear close to Rika’s mouth. From her neck, he could smell a faint hint of sweet perfume.

  “Ka … ya … ko … “

  This time he heard what she said. But he had no idea what she meant.

  “Huh? Kayako? What’s that?” he asked. But Rika did not say any more. She just looked at him with those dull eyes.

  Shaking his head from side to side, Hirohashi dialed emergency on his cell phone.

  Nakagawa

  The police investigation was still going on inside the house.

  Kenichi Nakagawa, a veteran detective from the Nerima Ward police force stood in the Tokunaga kitchen looking down at the photograph on the table. The wrinkled picture showed a man and a woman who seemed to be a husband and wife, and a little boy, likely their son, holding a cat.

  The police coroner had come along, but the cause of death of Sachie Tokunaga was still unclear. In any case, Nakagawa did not see any evidence that it was a homicide. There were no wounds on her body, and no signs of strangulation on her throat.

  We probably don’t even need to be here …

  Nakagawa’s young subordinate, Daisuke Igarashi, handed him a slip of paper, saying, “Nakagawa-san, here.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It seems to be the cell phone number of Katsuya Tokunaga, the head of the household. It was saved in the speed dial of the house phone.”

  “I see. Did you try to call?” he asked in a low, raspy voice.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Well, what are you waiting for? Call,” ordered Nakagawa, a little annoyed. “You should be able to do that by yourself, without me telling you to.”

  “Uh, yes, sorry.”

  Nakagawa sighed heavily as he watched Igarashi dial the number into his cell phone. Even though he had been a detective for three years now, Igarashi still could not, would not move, unless ordered by Nakagawa.

  “Without talking to that girl they found by the body, what was her name, Rika Nishina, I won’t be able to say for sure, but my gut tells me there was no crime here,” Nakagawa said, like he was speaking to himself. Just then, a cell phone rang somewhere in the house.

  Rriiinngg … Rriiinngg… Rriiinngg …

  “Hey, be quiet for a second,” Nakagawa called out. The officers on the scene stopped what they were doing.

  He could hear it. Clearly, a phone was ringing somewhere in the house.

  He stepped out into the hall and listened intently. He thought the phone might be ringing somewhere upstairs.

  Rriiinngg… Rriiinngg… Rriiinngg…

  “Hey, Daisuke. Let’s go,” Nakagawa said to Igarashi as he headed toward the stairs.

  The sound of the phone ringing became louder, more distinct, as they reached the landing in the middle of the stairs, where the stairs bent ninety degrees.

  Rriiinngg… Rriiinngg… Rriiinngg …

  There looked to be only two rooms on the second floor. The steady ringing oi the phone sounded as if it was coming from the room in the back of the hallway.

  “It sounds like it’s coming from the back room.”

  “Ah, yeah, it does.”

  They opened the door. It looked like this room was the master bedroom. They saw the large bed, and noticed that all of the lights were on here, just like they were downstairs.

  Rriiinngg … Rriiinngg . . . Rriiinngg . . .

  “Above us,” said Nakagawa, looking up at the ceiling. “You got a flashlight?”

  “Ah, yes, just a moment,” Igarashi said, as he hurried out of the room.

  Nakagawa, without waiting for Igarashi to come back, opened the closet door. He saw the clumps of sticky tape on the floor in front of the closet.

  He put his upper body into the closet, and wrinkled his nose.

  What’s that smell? he asked himself.

  Decay—no doubt about it. The closet was filled with the smell of something rotting.

  Nakagawa jumped onto the top shelf of the closet, where a small pile of folded futon was, and moved one oi the ceiling panels to the side. Slowly, he stuck his head up into the attic. Here, the stench of decay was much stronger, making him nauseous. He held his breath and listened intently.

  Rriiinngg … Rriiinngg . . .

  The phone was ringing from somewhere very nearby. Nakagawa squinted his eyes, but the attic was pitch black, and he could not see anything.

  “Hey, Daisuke, where’s that flashlight?” yelled Nakagawa, sticking his head out of the closet. Igarashi finally came back with a flashlight.

  “Wah, what’s that smell?” Igarashi leaned his head back away from the odor as he handed the flashlight to Nakagawa.

  Nakagawa said nothing as he roughly grabbed the flashlight from Igarashi’s hand and stuck his head back into the attic. The dusty darkness was cut by the flashlight.

  Rriiinngg … Rriiinngg …

  Fighting back the urge to vomit, he slowly swung the light, searching for the source oi the ringing.

  “Ah!”

  Nakagawa screamed as he dropped the flashlight. He hurriedly picked it back up and shone it into the corner of the attic.

  There, he saw a man and a woman.

  Even in the weak light from the flashlight, he could tell they were no longer living. Both of them sat bloody, in that smell of decay. The bodies were leaning on each other, like lovers, their eyes closed.

  Nakagawa had been a detective for nearly thirty years. He had seen his share of unsolved crimes, of course, but this was the most
mysterious case by far.

  The bodies found in the attic were those of the homeowners, Katsuya Tokunaga and his wife Kazumi. Kazumi’s body was covered with numerous incisions from a sharp instrument. The weapon was determined to be a box cutter found at the scene. Katsuya was stabbed through the back with a kitchen knife, the point coming out through his abdomen. Both had been dead for about a week.

  The investigation at the scene clearly showed that Katsuya had killed Kazumi with the box cutter, and then hidden her body in the attic. Katsuya’s fingerprints were all over the box cutter. But… they could not figure out who had killed Katsuya and placed his body in the attic. Fingerprints, likely female, were found on the handle of the knife that was stuck into Katsuya’s body.

  Later, after the fingerprints had been run, an unbelievable fact came to light.

  The fingerprints on the handle of the knife stuck into Katsuya’s body matched those found on the handle oi an identical knife stuck into the back o( a man named Takeo Saeki, whose body was found five years ago at a nearby apartment complex. They belonged to a woman named Kayako Saeki, the wife oi Takeo, who had also been killed in this very house five years ago!

  “What the hell is going on here?” Nakagawa shrugged. “How can a dead person kill someone?”

  Five years ago, Takeo Saeki murdered his own wife as well as the wife o{ his son’s school teacher before being killed … According to the fingerprints on the weapon, he was killed by his wife, whom he had already murdered and stuffed in the attic of that house.

  Bodies in the attic, a box cutter, a knife stuck into the back, the fingerprints on the handle of the knife, tape on the closet door … there were too many similarities between this case and the case five years ago. It was hard to believe that someone had not done it that way on purpose.

  Who, then?

  “What the hell is going on here?” Detective Kenichi Nakagawa crooked his thick neck in confusion again.

  Rika

  Rika Nishina was staring at the wall in her hospital room. Nothing seemed real, as if she was stuck in a dream.

  “Rika … Rika?”

  She looked up. She saw a longhaired woman standing there.

  Rika stiffened.

  “Rika? Rika!”

  After looking at the woman for a while, she realized that it was her best friend since high school, Mariko Nakata.

  “Oh, Mariko!”

  “What’s wrong? You were spacing out. Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. Mariko, you came to see me.”

  “Yep. I got a call from Hirohashi-san from the care center. I was so surprised… are you sure you’re okay, Rika?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, Mariko. Thanks for coming. I hope you didn’t miss any classes on my account?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Rika, what happened?”

  Mariko, made-up prettily, wrinkled her thin eyebrows in worry.

  “I … I really don’t know myself.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Yeah.”

  She wasn’t lying. She remembered going to that house, after being pestered into it by Hirohashi, to check up on Sachie Tokunaga … she remembered finding Sachie dead, her eyes still open … But, she couldn’t remember what happened next. Every time she tried to recall, it was as if her mind was ordering her not to remember.

  [Don’t remember. Dont you dare remember. ]

  She felt as if she had seen something unspeakably terrible, unspeakably horrifying. But, she could not remember what.

  “Rika, snap out of it. You’re a caretaker, you shouldn’t be the one receiving care, right,” Mariko smiled, gently.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Rika smiled back.

  “Oh, yeah, Rika, want something to drink? I’m getting thirsty, want me to grab something for you, too?”

  “Thanks! Could you get me a cola?”

  “Are you sure? Cola’s not good for your figure, you know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, okay! I’ll be right back.”

  The tall, slender Mariko left the room, and, almost as if he was taking her place, a solidly built middle-aged man in a suit came into Rika’s room.

  “Rika Nishina?”

  The man bent down in front of Rika, confirming her name in his low, husky voice, a stern look on his face.

  “Yes, that’s right. Urn … “

  “My name is Nakagawa, with the police.”

  The man’s stern face contorted into a smile. His breath smelled of cigarettes, but he seemed surprisingly kind when he smiled.

  “Nishina-san, I hate to keep asking you the same thing, but you’re saying that the closet was taped shut when you got there, and that you peeled the tape off yourself?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “You’re positively sure about that,” the middle-aged Nakagawa asked, as if he was making a final confirmation.

  “Yes, absolutely positive,” replied Rika.

  This was the second time she was interviewed by the police. The first time, a young detective named Igarashi had asked about the

  tape on the closet door many times, just as Nakagawa was now. But, Rika had no idea why that tape was so important.

  Rika still had not been told about the two bodies found in the attic of the Tokunaga house, nor was she told that the only fingerprints on that tape were hers and Katsuya Tokunaga’s. She was not told that the fingerprints on the handle of the knife stuck deep into Katsuya Tokunaga’s back were those of a woman who had died five years ago.

  “Really,” Nakagawa wrinkled his stern face and cocked his well-muscled neck in confusion. “I see . .. Um, now, about the boy you claimed you saw at the Tokunaga home …”

  “Oh, did you find him?” asked Rika. She had been told by Igarashi that the boy was nowhere to be found in the house.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Really? I know I saw a boy in that house. He had been shut in the closet, with the tape on the door.”

  “In the closet, eh? Are you sure you weren’t just seeing things?”

  “What? Seeing things? No, I’m sure. I am sure that there was a little boy, six or seven, his skin was white, and he was naked,” said Rika, recalling the boy’s appearance.

  “Really …”

  Nakagawa crossed his arms, the sleeves of his suit looking like they were going to burst under the pressure of his thick muscles.

  “Ah,” Rika suddenly remembered something. “Toshio …”

  “What?”

  “Toshio. That’s the little boy’s name. He told me himself.”

  “Toshio?”

  Nakagawa looked up at the ceiling, closed his eyes, and let out a long sigh. He returned his gaze to Rika, but remained silent. It

  looked to Rika like he was deciding whether or not he should say something.

  “Urn, Detective?”

  “Listen, Nishina-san,” Nakagawa finally broke his silence. “The Tokunagas did not have a child.”

  “They don’t have a child? Wh … what was that photograph, then?”

  “Photograph?”

  “Yes, there was a family photo in the house. The little boy that I saw was in that picture.”

  Nakagawa stared into Rika’s eyes.

  “Yes, we found a family photo. But, that was not a picture of the Tokunaga family.”

  “Wh … who was it then?”

  “We’re still looking into that right now.”

  Rika suddenly felt like she was about to remember something— something terrible and frightening. Yes, something about the woman in that picture. That woman … but her mind ordered her not to remember.

  [Don’t you remember that, Rika. Don’t you ever remember that. ]

  Rika gave up on remembering.

  “Urn, Detective?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did something happen in that house?”

  As Rika asked this, Nakagawa’s cell phone rang from inside his suit pocket.

  “Ah, excuse me,” Nakagawa said as he hurried out of the hosp
ital room. He didn’t come back.

  What’s going on … ?

  Rika sat, staring at the wall.

  “Ka … ya … ko … ” she mumbled, unconsciously. But, Rika had no idea why she would be muttering that word.

  Kyoko

  Kyoko Toyama was reading the morning paper, when her eyes stopped on an article in the general news page.

  “Ah,” she cried out involuntarily.

  Her heartbeat quickened and her breathing became ragged. Her hand holding her coffee cup began to tremble and a wave of nausea came over her.

  “Husband and Wife Found Dead of Unnatural Causes in Attic.”

  “Mother Found Dead on First Floor.”

  She checked the address. No doubt about it.

  That house.

  The bodies of the husband and wife leaning against each other in the attic; the box cutter the husband used to murder his wife; the knife in the husband’s back with another woman’s fingerprints; the tape on the closet door.

  It was the same. It was exactly the same as five years ago.

  “Kayako …” she muttered unconsciously, and shuddered violently at the sheer terror that name invoked.

  She couldn’t read anymore. She folded the paper, pushed it to the far corner of the table, and drained the last of the bitter coffee in her cup. She scraped the trace o{ lipstick on the cup with her fingernail and wiped it away with her fingertips. Trying to forget what she’d just read, she shook her head from side to side. She felt her earrings jingle with the motion.

  “I don’t care … It’s not my problem anymore,” she muttered as she picked up her bag from the table, and stood up. As usual, she

  checked herself in the full-length mirror in the corner, to see if her clothes were all right or not.

  Her purse was beige; her knee-length skirt-suit a light cream color. A thin, black, enamel belt was cinched at her waist, and her natural-color pantyhose had no seams at the toes. Her silk scarf was black with white polka dots. Her watch and other jewelry were all silver. She wondered if she should go with her cream pumps, or wear shoes to match her bag or belt.

  Kyoko was still not sure of the small details. Once she was unsure about one thing, this insecurity quickly spread to the rest of her outfit. Did the color of her nail polish go with her clothes? Did she have on too much jewelry? Her bag was a brand name, but did her shoes look too cheap? Did the color of her scarf match the season?