Masquerade and the Nameless Women

by Eiji Mikage

  After she left college, she left home, I think maybe because she was starting to consider her circumstances in life. She cut off contact with me for a while. I guess it was three years I didn’t hear from her? Yes, of course I was worried, but I wanted her to be in a better situation, so I tried not to cry and let her do what she wanted…I have no idea what she was doing during that time.

  She showed up in my life again when she was 21 and gave me her contact information. I was so happy. Then she was a totally different person. More grown up, far more radiant than she was before.

  Not long after that I learned she was dating Ken and planned to marry him, although I have no idea where they met, Yes, that’s right. I didn’t introduce them. It was what Reina wanted. So it’s really upsetting to hear it called a marriage of convenience.

  Shota Akiyama? I only found out about him today…Yeah, I was surprised when he said he was her boyfriend. To be honest, I doubt they were really dating. This may be a little rude, but they don’t really match.

  What was Reina like? She was good at school, but aside from that she wasn’t clever in a calculating way or anything. I think she was a little young for her age, probably because she was my only daughter and I spoiled her. She whined a lot, maybe because I was always so busy and she was trying to get my attention. So as you’d expect she was very genuine and gentle. Seen from afar, she might’ve looked like an incredibly blessed little girl.

  I think it was probably inevitable for this to happen.

  Anyway, this isn’t something a father should normally say, but Reina was beautiful.

  If you were to describe her in one word, that’d be it. She was Snow White.

  What? There are discrepancies with what Ken said? Well, it’s normal for someone to show a different side of themselves around their boyfriend than their parents.

  Oh, it’s not that? It’s…Hmm, what is it then? I don’t know.

  Do I know who the killer is?

  …

  I don’t. Not at all.

  [Coughing sounds.] Excuse me, could I have some more water? Yeah, I don’t feel so great.

  The killer. If Shota was lying about being with Reina, then I think that’s suspicious. That’s the only thing I can think of.

  * * *

  —

  I’m Shota Akiyama. 25 years old. Part-time worker.

  Why am I the last to go? I’m ready to get out of here. No, I don’t have anything special to do. I’m just in the mood to be by myself! My girlfriend is dead! Okay?!

  Huh? Reina’s dad didn’t know about me? What a load of bull.

  Nah. I don’t want to admit it, but Reina probably wanted to hide me from her dad. But this wasn’t unrequited love. Reina liked me, too. That I’m sure of.

  Give me a second. I want to get my head straight.

  Okay, I’m ready.

  My alibi? I already told you. Do we really have to go over it? It’s procedure? Whatever, then.

  While I was at work, I got a call, so I went over to Reina’s apartment. I rode my scooter straight to her apartment from the convenience store and went in with my copy of the key…Huh? No, I had no time to stop somewhere else. You can check if you don’t believe me. You’ll realize I’d never have made it on time if I didn’t drive pretty fast.

  So then I found her—[swallowing sound]—foot, reported it, and was with the police until early that morning. Then I just went back and forth from Reina’s apartment to Mukojima Police Station. I was at Reina’s place with the cops until 8:00.

  And that brings us to the next question: Our relationship. We were dating. It was the real thing, unlike that other guy. He was meaningless.

  Where did I meet Reina?

  Why does that matter? This whole thing is crap. We met through friends, ok?

  What was she like?

  She was amazing, very kind. She always thought about how her actions affected others. I guess she was somewhat of a martyr? That side of her was intense. She had more love than anyone I ever met. I always thought she should have prioritized herself more than she did.

  I felt that love, too, of course. She changed me. I felt like I would have done anything for her.

  If I had to wrap it all up in one word, I feel like she embodied “maternity.”

  But you know, Reina Myoko was beautiful more than anything else.

  Why are you making that face? Huh? The other two had a completely different impression of Reina?

  If that’s the case, then maybe she was only showing her true self to me? Of course she’d never reveal herself to Ken, her fiancé of convenience, or to her dad who was making her marry him.

  Yeah, that’s gotta be it! That’s why she didn’t tell her dad about me! I’m the only one—the only one she loved!

  What? I am calm. I’m just stating the obvious.

  Who’s the killer? I’ve told you over and over, it’s that fucking Ken guy. Doesn’t he seem like the kind of guy who’d be tricky enough to kill her and frame Masquerade?

  What? Err, your name was Dr. Higano?

  Excuse me? “What am I hiding?”

  Nothing! What the hell are you talking about?!

  I’ve already told you everything you wanted. So I can go home now, right? What? You want me to stay overnight in a hotel? You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me! Let me outta here! Shit…Is the hotel safe?

  8

  After the interviews, Yamaji decided we couldn’t let any of them go. It was technically voluntary, so we couldn’t force them to stay the night, but though Shota wanted to leave, we eventually managed to convince even him to stay.

  Dr. Higano and I left Yamaji at the station to go over the interrogation report while we took the three of them to their rooms at the hotel. Dr. Higano seemed to have a few unanswered questions remaining, however, and went into Koichiro Myoko’s room to talk with him a little.

  I took the elevator to the hotel lobby and sat on a sofa. I would be in the lobby all night to stand guard for them.

  I sighed and thought over the questioning.

  All three of them seemed to be concealing something. None of them were completely unrelated to the death. We had to figure out what they were hiding and expose it.

  I pulled at my hair…and caught myself. That’s not what was bothering me.

  I was frustrated by the lack of consistency between the Reina that each of them had described.

  “Dammit!” I cursed to myself. “There are no photos? Why? It’s impossible. Not even her father? Her fiancé? Her boyfriend? And then what was up with the way they were describing her? Had they all really failed to understand her?”

  Ice Sculpture. Snow White. Maternity.

  Everyone is complex, but there are limits. Their characterizations also differed greatly from the Reina I knew in high school.

  It was all ridiculous. Impossible.

  Something was clearly off.

  “I understand how you’re feeling,” Dr. Higano sympathized with me when he returned to the lobby. “But just relax.”

  “But Doctor—”

  “If you’re too worked up, your best ideas won’t come to you,” he warned, and rubbed my back gently. Naturally, that did nothing to calm me down and only heightened the tension in my whole body.

  “D-Did you finish talking with Koichiro?” I asked.

  Dr. Higano ignored my stammer and sat on the sofa. “Yes, I just wanted to ask about his relationship with Reina once more. But you’re right to be feeling frustrated. We would’ve been in a serious bind if what they said about Reina had been more disjointed. The one consistency was that she was ‘beautiful.’ This whole thing is starting to turn into a nightmare. It’s even made me ask this question.” Dr. Higano paused. “Did Reina Myoko really exist in the first place?”

  Exactly.

  It seemed like each of them had seen their
own convenient illusion of her.

  If no one had been actually interested in her as a person, then it wouldn’t have been an issue. However, it wasn’t just Ken Nakahigashi—Koichiro Myoko’s feelings for his daughter and Shota Akiyama’s love for his girlfriend were unmistakably genuine. They didn’t seem to be lying about her either.

  But someone was lying. For instance, if there was a beautiful flower in a vase, then everyone would be paying attention to the beautiful flower. But if the vase was full of muddy water?

  The person lying had to be Reina, the victim herself.

  I was sure of it. Unless we investigated Reina herself, we’d never understand the entirety of the case. That wouldn’t change even if we assumed this was a Masquerade killing.

  And of everyone currently working on the case, who was most suited to investigate Reina in greater detail? It was without a doubt me, her classmate.

  I had to find out more about Reina.

  “Yes!” I told myself, reinvigorated. I knew who I should contact immediately.

  Otoha Tamachi, Miyuki Yata, Sena Hagawa, Asami Ino, and Ryoko Omura. The “Bumblebees” who all had had close connections with Reina.

  They might know exactly what it was Reina was making such an effort to hide.

  9

  “Yuri Uguisu? Oh, right, we were classmates. It’s been a while. I assume from the timing that you must be getting in touch about Reina, right?”

  I’d cut off contact with all my high school friends, so I was anxious about interacting with the Bumblebees, but Dr. Higano had given me the perfect advice.

  If rumors were already spreading about Reina’s death at her workplace, wouldn’t my classmates be hearing the same rumors? And if that was the case, wouldn’t at least one of them try to verify what they had heard with the police? Dr. Higano’s prediction was right on.

  Luckily for us, we learned that Otoha Tamachi, one of the Bumblebees, had gotten in touch with the police. Even better, she’d been proactive about wanting to know details of the incident and had left her contact information.

  Fortunately, when I called her number, she picked up and we had a short exchange.

  When I told her I was currently a police officer and that I happened to be investigating Reina’s case, she grew excited and rambled on asking for specific information about the incident.

  I couldn’t leave the hotel, and considering how late it was, I thought I’d try to handle everything over the phone, but Dr. Higano stopped me.

  “In order to understand this case as a whole, I think I need to understand Reina,” he said.

  I agreed with him.

  “Otoha may be our best chance to understand Reina on a deeper level,” he said. “We shouldn’t question her over the phone. We need to look her squarely in the face and hear what she has to say.”

  I couldn’t refuse after he was so insistent.

  And so though it was late, almost midnight, when I asked Otoha if she could meet right away, she agreed.

  She said she was at her family home in Seijo. I asked if it was possible for her to come to the hotel, and she said she’d be there in around an hour if the Shuto Expressway didn’t have too much traffic.

  Then I ended the call and let out a long sigh.

  When I looked at Dr. Higano, he had an unusually serious look on his face, like he thought this aspect of the case was extremely important.

  “Was there anyone else other than Otoha Tamachi she was close with?” he asked.

  “Yes, she had a group of girlfriends called the Bumblebees who acted kind of like her bodyguards.”

  “Really? Can we look into them in the police database?”

  “If they have priors we’d be able to find their fingerprints, but…I’d keep my expectations low. I think we can find where they live and whether they have a driver’s license or not. Not exactly useful information.”

  “I don’t mind. Could I ask you to do that for me?”

  I nodded and quickly shot off an email to Yamaji asking him to look into the other four.

  “Dr. Higano, what do you plan to ask Otoha—”

  Suddenly, a spine-tingling machine-altered voice shouted out, “Gahhh!”

  It wasn’t Dr. Higano, of course.

  “Gahhaahaa!” the mysterious voice yelled out. It shrieked again in an unpleasantly high pitch, “Eeek!”

  Dr. Higano picked up his tablet from the sofa. The sounds were coming from there.

  A three-dimension CG bear—green and warped-looking—took up the whole screen. It had a red ribbon on its head, so it must have been a girl. The animation was so realistically smooth, which gave it the uncanny valley effect of being even creepier.

  “Wh-What is that?!” I spat.

  “This is my investigative assistant. She calls herself Noi-tan.”

  “Your…assistant?”

  “I like Kirin, but I like Bears more,” Noi-tan sang, playing on old TV commercial catchphrases. “Can’t stop, won’t stop—Noi-tan!” She winked and stuck her tongue out.3

  This thing was just too much.

  “Doctorrrr. I looked into the topic you asked me about—Wait, ahh!” Noi-tan turned toward me. She opened her bloodshot eyes widely and stared at me. She seemed to be looking at me through the camera in the tablet.

  “Who are you? What are you doing at a hotel with Doctor?! Trying to sleep?! Trying to sleep with Doctor?! Is this a one-night stand? Not on my watch! Go home! If you don’t leave, I’ll get a bot army to dox you and troll you into oblivion on Twitter!”

  “Noi-tan,” Dr. Higano said. “She’s the officer in charge of the case.”

  “Just ‘cause she’s an officer doesn’t mean she’s not looking for a one-night stand! Oohhh…She must be the Doctor’s mistress! You were lying when you told me I was your partner!”

  “My partner’s always my partner,” he said nonchalantly.

  “Doctor, take a gooood look at her face. Looks like she’s trying to hit a home run tonight! She’s going to try to make herself your girlfriend! I bet she’d make you buy her dinner every month on your anniversary!”

  “Yuri is a professional. She doesn’t let her private life get in the way of her work. Am I correct?”

  “Absolutely,” I insisted.

  But the animated Noi-tan was already baring her fangs. “We can’t trust her. She looks like a woman in heat!”

  I did not! At least I hoped not.

  “Doctor! You have to do something for me as a punishment for taking this other woman to a hotel.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “You have to kiss me!”

  What the hell was this bear getting on about?

  But Dr. Higano didn’t bat an eyelash. “Understood.”

  He smiled, and blew her a kiss.

  Complete with a wink.

  Noi-tan was silent for a moment, then said, “Thank youuuu!” Her nose had begun to bleed in typical anime fashion.

  “That bear is too much,” I muttered. “But she’s your…work partner? Not an AI or anything? What exactly is she?”

  “Yes, she’s human. But we just have a contractual relationship, so I’ve never actually met her. Who knows, she could even be a man.”

  Strange. That seemed like extremely lax oversight.

  “How did you get to know this bear?”

  “On Facebook.”

  He was treating detective work like online dating!

  “Noobs who can’t understand our relationship should stay out of it,” Noi-tan said. “Jealousy is unbecoming.”

  I found the self-satisfied look on the green bear’s face strangely aggravating.

  “So,” the bear said, suddenly serious. “About the research you requested this evening. Reina Myoko’s financial situation…”

  Reina’s financial situation?

&n
bsp; Dr. Higano noticed my doubt and turned to me. “People’s money has to move just like blood pumps through their body. It’s one of the first things I had to look into.”

  I took in what he was saying, but inside I was brimming with questions. I expected this of a cop, but Dr. Higano was just a private detective.

  “How exactly did you look into that?” I asked.

  The green bear played with her ribbon as she answered. “Tee-hee, you really are a rookie. There are plenty of ways to look into someone’s money as long as you don’t care about the legality of the method.”

  “You didn’t hack into her bank? Or did you? That’s…not exactly something I can just overlook!”

  “And what are you going to do about it?” Noi-tan said brashly. “Arrest me? You don’t know who I am or what I look like!”

  Dr. Higano lightly tapped the camera lens with his middle finger. He looked like he was scolding a child. “Noi-tan, stop getting so worked up. With this investigation, there’s no need for illegal methods. If we need to look into her bank accounts, the banks will give us that information if the request is made through the police as a registered detective.”

  “Doctorrr! You’re giving away my secrets! I’m going to lose my mystique!”

  Relieved, I stared daggers at Noi-tan. Shameless, she looked away from me. The CG was incredibly detailed.

  “Mmphhh!” She coughed, bringing the conversation around. “So, the money. It’s only been half a day, so even with my superpowers I wasn’t able to look into everything, but I’m confident I have enough information to help with your analysis. I’ll begin with the conclusion.” Noi-tan raised an eyebrow and took on a serious tone of voice for the first time all night: “Reina Myoko had just over 100 million yen in assets.”

  3 These are plays on old commercials for Calbee snacks and the Matsumoto Moving Center.

  10

  Reina had been renting an apartment in a wooden building that was about as far as you could get from a “high-end” lifestyle. She did drive a luxury BMW, but that was an exception; there was no other reason to think she was wealthy.