Masquerade and the Nameless Women

by Eiji Mikage

  Then I spotted the corpse just beyond Forensics Division’s Sergeant Omori.

  “Ah…” I muttered. The moment I saw the faceless corpse, my legs started to buckle. I narrowly managed to avoid falling by reaching out and grabbing the tetrapod with my right hand.

  “Huh?” Yamaji said incredulously. “You’re so green you can’t look at a mangled body?”

  What…I couldn’t help it. This wasn’t just any old dead body. The flesh from the nose and below had been exposed, and the bones were sticking out.

  “The corpse belongs to one Reina Myoko,” Yamaji rattled off. “She didn’t have a wallet or cell phone, but there did happen to be a gym membership card in her pocket.”

  “W-Wait a second,” I said.

  “What? If you’re gonna puke, go do it where there’s nobody around.”

  “Not that! Tell me her name again.”

  “Reina Myoko.”

  I looked at the corpse again. A stylish woman my age wearing a nicely-cut dress. There was a beauty mark on her collarbone.

  I’d seen her before.

  “I think she might be my high school classmate.”

  Yamaji itched at his head like he was confused. “Well, damn…I guess I’m sorry to hear that. Looks like you might actually have a connection to Masquerade after all, Princess.” He composed himself and then focused his gaze. “So, what’re you gonna do? If she’s your classmate, do you plan to run home and curl up in bed like a scaredy cat?”

  “What?” I asked.

  Yamaji would usually never say something so harsh.

  I could feel something growing inside me, and it wasn’t anger—it was courage. This was, in his own special way, his attempt to encourage me.

  This was it. I’d become a police officer for one reason and one reason alone: to arrest the serial killer Masquerade. So I couldn’t let myself be flustered the first time I found myself at a crime scene that resembled Masquerade’s.

  “Alright!” I patted myself on the cheeks to pump myself up again. I got up and brushed the sand off my skirt.

  It felt like some strange sign that I was wearing the sailor uniform from when Reina and I had been classmates.

  “Looks like you’re going to manage,” Yamaji said. He took out his police notebook and strained his eyes at it. “From the way you’re saying ‘classmate,’ I’m starting to think that you two weren’t all that close…”

  “I haven’t seen her since we graduated from Junseiwa Academy, the all-girls high school we went to. Even when we were classmates, we didn’t have the same classes and weren’t all that close.”

  “Junseiwa Academy? You must’ve been surrounded by other princesses at that place. Is your family filthy rich?”

  “No…My family was your pretty typical middle class family. It felt like I was being forced to fulfill my mother’s dreams by going to Junseiwa. It was tough on my parents’ finances, and I thought my going just caused problems…I mean, they didn’t have to worry about me! In other words, I was just a regular student. She was different.”

  “What you’re saying is the victim was a genuine princess?”

  “I think so. I didn’t know about the specifics of her home life, so I don’t have any proof, but everything she wore during that time were high-end items that most high school girls don’t have. Even at a school for upper-class girls, she was really popular.”

  “Hmph. Even without her face I can sort of tell that she was beautiful.”

  As Yamaji said, although now a faceless body, her luxurious, flashy lifestyle hadn’t changed. Her lips were mostly intact despite the face being ripped up. They’d blackened and lost all their red color, but I was still drawn to how full they were.

  And when I saw them, her charming voice came to life in my mind.

  “Hey, do you know what a misdirection is?”

  Ah yes, I remembered. She had a high-pitched, feminine voice that lingered like the vibrato from a violin. Her exact features somehow never stayed with me, but I remembered being impressed over and over by her attractive voice.

  “She’s beautiful.” She’d been the kind of woman who made people say that unthinkingly.

  But why? Sure, she was incredibly beautiful, yet for the life of me I couldn’t recall her face.

  When I saw her, I was gripped by that first impression of her being beautiful—it was so strong that it swept aside any other thoughts and prevented me from remembering what she looked like. So she was hazy in my mind.

  That had been true back when we were students. I remembered that she had a beauty mark on her collarbone, but whenever I went to look at her face, I always had to pore over every inch before I realized, ah yes, that’s what her face was like.

  Images from that time were running vividly through my mind, despite the fact that her precise features eluded me.

  The back of my mind was filled with a dissolving crimson color.

  * * *

  —

  Ahh, that day had made such an impression on me. So much so that it’s strange I’d forgotten about it until now.

  In high school I had been on the badminton team (I was only a backup’s backup), and on that particular day we had practice as usual. But during the first breather, I realized I’d forgotten my water bottle in my locker and went back to the classroom to get it.

  The school building was very quiet during the extracurricular period, and I didn’t pass anyone in the hallways. The late afternoon sun poured in through the windows almost aggressively, and my eyes hurt as they were filled with the crimson light.

  Reina Myoko was, for some reason, reading a book by herself in the classroom.

  She seemed to have taken the intense afternoon sun captive and leashed it under her control. The setting sun had transformed her from a girl hunched over, turning the pages of a book, into someone in a movie scene.

  She stood up, still unaware of me, and opened the window. I watched to see what she would do. She looked affectionately at the hardcover book and touched the open page. Then, without any hesitation, she began to tear the page out—ripppp, ripppp—without any change in expression. She persisted until the page was shredded into small pieces. She tore up several more pages, and then took the pieces and threw them out of the window.

  The scraps of paper fluttered gently in the crimson sky like the petals of cherry blossoms.

  There was something awful about that scene. It felt like Reina had calmly stepped past some line that shouldn’t have been crossed.

  However, it was even more beautiful than it was awful. If I’d been holding a DSLR camera instead of my racquet, I would have instinctively snapped a few photos at that moment. Ah, if only I had taken her picture, then I never would’ve forgotten what she looked like.

  But when I snapped out of my daze, I didn’t feel right. I’d run into a classmate in an empty classroom. Even if I managed not to address the whole book thing, I was going to have to say something to her. This wasn’t even her classroom. Why was she there in the first place?

  I was now faced with a very pragmatic problem, the exact opposite of the illusory scene I’d just encountered: What I was going to say to this girl I didn’t know very well?

  I don’t remember exactly, but I must’ve come up with something harmless to say. Given my lower-middle class background, I must’ve resorted to a silly grin.

  Ahh, now I was remembering! Reina Myoko had been exchanging the appropriate pleasantries with my awkward self, when she suddenly opened her eyes wide with surprise.

  “Hey, Yuri,” she greeted me. That reminded me—she called classmates by their first names, whether she was close with them or not. “Your fingers are so lovely.”

  I had trouble believing someone as beautiful and special as Reina really thought someone so commonplace as me had lovely hands.

  “Everyone is always complimentin
g mine…” I said. “They say that only my right hand is perfect. I always want to tell them that saying ‘only’ is rude!”

  “Is there something wrong with your left?” she asked. “Ahh…you’ve got scars.”

  “Yeah. When I was little, I was holding hands with my sister while we were running in this big park, and when I fell down…umm, ha ha.”

  I laughed uncomfortably. I wasn’t sure how much I could say to her. But Reina ignored me and the scars on my left hand. She seemed to be captivated by my right hand.

  “Ah, ha ha…Stop staring,” I joked. “My right hand is nice, but you’re beautiful all over.”

  “It’s just that I have a slightly better sense of how I appear to the world than others do.” Then she added a comment I didn’t understand: “I don’t have real beauty in the way that your fingers do. Your right hand is the real thing. One of a kind, unlike me.” Then Reina Myoko smiled elegantly. “Hey, do you know what a misdirection is?” she said suddenly.

  Confused, I said, no, I didn’t.

  “It’s a technique used in a sleight of hand trick. It means ‘to shift the focus of the audience.’ By getting the audience’s attention with an exaggerated gesture or something, you conceal from them the most important part of the trick…But I think it’s not just for sleight of hand tricks, don’t you think? It happens all the time in reality. People miss the most important thing because there’s something flashy right in front of them.”

  This was the first time I’d ever heard her talk so much at once, and I interspersed the conversation with sounds of approval and understanding despite my confusion.

  “For example,” she continued. “Say you have a beautiful flower in a vase. Everyone would be paying attention to the beautiful petals on the flower. But what if the vase was actually full of muddy water? Super dirty water from the day after a heavy rain that even water bugs would hesitate to go near. The water should be changed right away, but because the flower’s so pretty no one ever thinks the water’s dirty. So the flower withers.”

  When she finished, she quietly turned away from me. It seemed she had realized how strange it was to talk about this kind of stuff with someone she wasn’t close friends with.

  Flustered and confused, I asked about what I’d just seen, without really thinking it through. “Hey,” I said. “Why were you ripping up that book just now?”

  Reina stared into my eyes, as though she were testing me, but she didn’t seem upset.

  “It was a beautiful story,” she said. “The sentences flowed like a stream. The psychology was subtle, like the author had peered into the human soul with a microscope. And the overall composition was supported by a structure as natural as the human skeleton. At the same time, the story was incredibly warm, and the immediacy of the author’s love for fiction really came through.”

  She turned away from me again. Behind her, the setting sun was turning a burnt umber color, creating a dramatic backdrop.

  She added, finally, “That’s why I wanted to rip it up.”

  * * *

  —

  I took another close look at the lips of the corpse on the tetrapod. Her words were still incredibly fresh in my mind.

  Out of the blue, I suddenly remembered her nickname, which I had learned only after that conversation. The nickname she got because she was so beautiful you always wanted to look away: “Miss Direction.”

  While I was lost in reverie, the brawny officer who had nearly kicked me out earlier ran over toward us.

  “Yamaji!” he yelled, clearly in a panic. “Sergeant Uguisu! Umm, uh…” He struggled to catch his breath. “I heard…heard something from this other officer.”

  “Where’s the fire, man?” Yamaji drawled. “Just breathe a sec.”

  “S-Sure,” the officer huffed.

  It was kind of cute to see the brawny guy follow Yamaji’s orders so obediently.

  “Whew,” he panted. “Um, well, last night there was a report submitted to the Sumida Ward station, and it might be related to this case! The report apparently stated something about a woman’s foot being found in her boyfriend’s room and that she’d gotten caught up in something.”

  Yamaji squinted alarmingly, urging the officer to get to the point.

  “A man named Shota Akiyama submitted the report,” he said. “And his girlfriend’s name was Reina Myoko.”

  1 A play on the existing “Melco Resorts.”

  2

  The Tokyo Bay Police was reputedly the busiest police force in Japan.

  The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had previously operated on a “Districts” system that divided Station jurisdictions into ten geographical blocks, but the Tokyo Bay Station’s expansion forced the TMPD to designate the Tokyo Bay Station the new “11th District,” effectively making it independent. The TMPD gave the Tokyo Bay Station authority second only to headquarters when it came to crime associated with the Odaiba Integrated Tourist Facilities District. This meant that the Tokyo Bay Station more often than not operated on its own. But it also feuded with the TMPD and the other Stations, whose officers hated basically everyone at Tokyo Bay.

  The buildings making up the police station in Tokyo Bay and the force itself expanded piecemeal. The three buildings that made up the Tokyo Bay Police Station were surrounded by a thick concrete wall. The Station was ridiculed as the “Patchwork Fortress” because of its intimidating appearance so shoddily fitted together.

  At night when the rest of this part of the city was adorned with flashes of color, the Fortress stood out with a gloomy, ominous air all its own. Rumor had it that the TMPD intentionally designed the “fortress” for this effect to assert control in Odaiba during a period of unrest. But with this, even if a criminal decided to turn himself in, one look at this building and he’d piss his pants and reverse course.

  I rode towards the Patchwork Fortress on my trusty, two-wheeled steed and immediately headed to the locker room to take off my school-girl outfit. I was standing in my underwear when I glanced at my watch (a favorite that I’d picked up at a New Year’s sale) and noticed that it was 11.

  I hadn’t said anything to Yamaji about the conversation I had had with Reina Myoko that one day after school. I wasn’t at all sure whether it had anything to do with the case, and besides, it was embarrassing for me to talk about those formative years of my life.

  And now we had a report from Reina’s boyfriend…

  I tried to imagine what her boyfriend looked like, but I couldn’t imagine what walk of life he’d come from. She wouldn’t have been a good match with someone in a generally well-respected profession such as a professional athlete, a young entrepreneur, an actor, or a politician.

  It’s possible that if I saw Reina’s face now, I might think she was an incredibly normal person. I might be exaggerating her mystique to myself because we’d met as adolescents.

  “But…” I still wanted to believe that Reina Myoko was special, and I trusted that instinct.

  I changed into my brand new suit from Yofuku no Midoriyama2 and headed to Reina’s apartment, riding alongside Yamaji in a police vehicle.

  * * *

  —

  Reina’s rented apartment was not far from a shopping arcade in a blue-collar shitamachi neighborhood filled with a mix of new and old buildings. Several police vehicles were parked on the narrow streets, from which the towering futuristic spindle of the Tokyo Skytree was visible, intruding upon the neighborhood’s old-fashioned character.

  At a month-to-month parking lot placed quite a distance from Reina’s apartment, I noticed two other parked cars.

  Reina’s apartment, located in the middle of the bustling shopping arcade, was an aged wooden building whose character fit right into the shitamachi neighborhood.

  To be honest, I found it strange that Reina lived in such a pedestrian building. The rundown, wooden structure d
idn’t even have security cameras; the whole place was at odds with her flashy looks.

  We were greeted by a man with thick arms and eyebrows. “Hey,” he said. “You must be Yamaji from the 11th. We’ve heard you like to play fast and loose with jurisdiction. What the hell brings you all the way over here?”

  This must have been the investigator from Mukojima Station. He stared at Yamaji. His intensity chilled me, but Yamaji only gave him an indifferent glance before zipping up the stairs to the apartment.

  “Looks like the rumors were right,” the investigator drawled, seemingly unimpressed by Yamaji’s cool response. “You go where you please without waiting for orders.”

  Yamaji just frowned and said, “Shut your hole, man. Yapping about jurisdiction isn’t gonna solve cases.” He stepped into the apartment, and I rushed to follow.

  The room was a 10-mat studio with a separate kitchen. The flooring was unnaturally new, suggesting it’d been redone recently, and the bathroom and prefab kitchen were also relatively new, but still, overall, the rent for the place couldn’t have been all that high. This was in no way a room where a princess from Junseiwa Academy would live.

  Maybe her family hadn’t been so wealthy after all? Had she come from an ordinary family just like me?

  Other than the forensics ID tags placed around the room, at first glance it looked like an ordinary room with only the bare minimum of things. There was no extraneous furniture to give the place any personality, making it seem the residence of a cold minimalist.

  But I started to get a bad feeling.

  “Huh?” I asked. “I feel like something’s off.”

  I took another look around the unusual room, which had no business being unusual.

  Something was definitely off. The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot of clothes. But the styles all seemed scattershot, without any unifying theme throughout, and it was impossible to get a sense of the owner’s tastes. The clothes seemed as though they could have been a careless assortment of gifts.