Masquerade and the Nameless Women

by Eiji Mikage

  I finished the cup before I knew it.

  “I feel like I finally get why coffee is so delicious.”

  “Yes!” Dr. Higano nodded contentedly. “With coffee, you want to enjoy the acidity.”

  This coffee talk was entirely beside the point. We still had a lot to discuss. I coughed and stared straight at him.

  “Doctor, you’ve convinced me of the reason Reina committed suicide, but we haven’t talked about the trick she pulled off.”

  “Yes.”

  “So…Her severed foot was in her apartment. The knife that killed her was also there. If Reina’s death was suicide, she had to have done it in her apartment, right? And if that’s the case, we have the new problem of determining who took her body to Odaiba.”

  “Yes. However, that question is quite easy to answer,” Dr. Higano said. “She took her own body.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “To be more accurate, she just took her own car there.”

  I was completely lost in thought. I pressed the corners of my eyes with my fingers and asked, “So she died in the park?”

  “Exactly.”

  “No, no, that’s impossible. Her foot was cut off in her apartment! The murder weapon was there!”

  But Dr. Higano didn’t flinch. “The knife was mass-produced. You could buy it anywhere. And the BMW was an automatic.”

  Confused, I racked my brain and tried to come to grips with what the doctor was saying.

  To sum it up, then: Reina had killed herself in the park to try to frame Koichiro. However, her severed foot had been left in her apartment. As was the knife covered with blood—blood from her chest. But it is possible she had another similar knife prepared. Then, according to Dr. Higano, Reina drove herself to Odaiba in the BMW.

  “Ah.” I understood what Dr. Higano was trying to say.

  But it couldn’t be true.

  Because this wasn’t something a normal person would ever do. Even just thinking about the implications made my entire body freeze with fear at how insane it was.

  “Dr. Higano, I think I know what you think happened,” I said, my voice quivering. “Reina cut off her own foot, left it in her room, and drove herself to the bay with one foot.”

  I wanted for him to say no, but Dr. Higano nodded gently and said, “Yes.”

  My mind had taken in all it could, but he continued mercilessly.

  “Furthermore, she purposefully made light cuts in her chest with the knife she had prepared and placed it in the room with her severed foot. Then she stopped the bleeding so she wouldn’t pass out, gave herself anesthesia, and left the apartment in such a state as to make everyone think she had been murdered. She had plastic sheeting in the BMW seats so she wouldn’t leave blood anywhere, and drove herself to the park in Odaiba using her remaining foot. She stabbed herself in the chest with an identical knife she had bought to make everyone mistakenly think the first knife was the original cause of death, and then she died.”

  I was frozen, but Dr. Higano continued his explanation.

  “Before she carried out her plan, she tied herself up with rope and cuffed her own hands to leave signs that she had been bound. She also called Shota after she cut off her foot. We can assume that she weighted down the bloody sheet, the knife she stabbed herself with, and the smartphone that also would have been evidence, and threw them into the bay. We might find them if we search the shallows near the park.”

  “G-Give me a second to take this all in!”

  “Of course.”

  I took deep breaths to slow my racing heart and gave myself vigorous slaps on the cheek to bring myself back to my senses.

  “Phew…Ahh, so…But, in this case, Koichiro had the key to the BMW, right? Why was that?” Finally I had hit upon a good question.

  “Yes. We can probably attribute that to Reina texting Koichiro and asking him to move the BMW that was near the park. He probably didn’t think twice about a request from his daughter, so he went to the park, got in the BMW, and drove it away. By then it was dark, so he wouldn’t have noticed her body nearby. Reina likely planned to pin the crime on Koichiro as he returned the car by putting evidence in the trunk of the BMW—maybe one of the murder weapons—that would mislead police into thinking he was the killer. Doesn’t that make sense?”

  “So Koichiro didn’t return the car because the cops had the parking lot staked out?”

  “Yes. Although he didn’t know about the incident yet, he probably instinctively ran off when he saw the police. Then after they found her body, he must’ve thought he was being framed by the killer. So he didn’t say anything about driving her car to avoid drawing any suspicion to himself.”

  “That makes sense. So by that logic, Reina’s plans were messed—”

  Wait a second.

  I stopped in my tracks.

  Reina cutting her own foot off was improbable enough on its own, but I remembered the severed foot wasn’t the only grotesque part of the mutilated corpse.

  Her face had also been cut off with a hand plane or something.

  Up until now I had naturally thought that Koichiro had done it. It was a brutal murder, but we thought he’d tried to copycat Masquerade, so the details of how the corpse was mutilated were convincing enough.

  However, if Reina’s death was suicide, that changed dramatically.

  “Did Reina…cut off her own face?”

  Had she cut off her face with an electric planer or something while she was still living?!

  That was just out-of-your-mind ridiculous.

  “That’s impossible,” I said.

  Yes, it was ridiculous!

  “Totally impossible. There’s something fishy about this ‘trick’! It’s nuts to think she drove after cutting off her foot, and even crazier that after that she wouldn’t have gone into shock halfway through trying to cut her own face off while she was still alive. This is just too much!”

  Unthinkingly, I had raised my voice, and Dr. Higano tried to calm me down by nodding along with me in agreement.

  “Of course, that’s a natural reaction to have.”

  “Right?! So that means—”

  “However,” Dr. Higano interrupted me. “This only proves my point. No one ever thought she cut off her own face. Anyone would reject the possibility as entirely too strange. Which is precisely why no one considered this case a suicide at first glance. Yes, this too was one of Reina’s misdirections.”

  I was at a loss for words.

  It couldn’t have been true. Was he suggesting that she was trying to plant a red herring for us by cutting off her own face?

  “I can’t help but respect the lengths she was prepared to go to in order to execute her plan,” the doctor added. But he could probably tell that I wasn’t convinced, so he continued, “Yuri, do you remember the way Reina’s face had been cut off?”

  What the hell was he getting at with this question?

  I was still dazed, but eventually I shook my head quickly. The exposed bones and awful brutality of how her face had looked had been so horrible to look at that now, my mind couldn’t remember any of the details.

  “Her face seemed to have been cut off, but actually everything from her nose up was left more or less intact. That’s because she still had things to do after she cut off her face. She had to get rid of the tool she used to cut her face—or maybe she threw it in the trunk to serve as evidence that Koichiro was the killer. She also had to get rid of the other evidence like her phone. She couldn’t lose her eyes while she was cutting her face.”

  I couldn’t keep up with what he was saying whatsoever. Nor was I able to accept it.

  “B-But say this had all miraculously worked out and she was able to do everything you say she did? There’s no way she planned this all out ahead of time! Nobody makes a plan they’re not sure they’ll be able to complete!�
��And there’s no reason Reina would opt for such a torturous method. No matter how prepared she was for it, normally she’d never pull it off!”

  I could feel my head getting dizzy from lack of oxygen after all my yelling. I collapsed onto the sofa and tried to get my ragged breathing under control.

  “Normally, you say? But you must’ve felt it a number of times over the course of this investigation…You likely even thought it from the very beginning when you were in school, right?” Dr. Higano shut me up with a single sentence: “Reina Myoko was insane.”

  Ah.

  That one explanation was more convincing than any of his most logical theories.

  I could finally be convinced of her ridiculous trick. Indeed, for her, this entire bizarre production probably even seemed entirely natural.

  Convinced, I had no retort for him. I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion.

  “As for why she decided on this plan,” Dr. Higano said, “I have my own opinion, although it’s just a hypothesis.”

  “I’d love to hear it.”

  “As I mentioned earlier, I think Reina felt both love and hate for Koichiro. Don’t you think she must’ve wanted to test these two competing emotions to see which one was correct? If she couldn’t make it all the way through, then that couldn’t be helped, and she would have had to be satisfied with the limits of her persistence. So it must’ve been a difficult choice for her.”

  That was a persuasive hypothesis.

  But it just didn’t jive for me.

  “Well…I knew her in high school and have a slightly different take.”

  “Really. Please share.”

  “Something came to me when you said she was insane. She’d never shown the cracks in her armor, and she lied at times to keep her self, and her true feelings, hidden. This was true when it came to me, her classmate, obviously, but even for the Bumblebees, too. I couldn’t understand why she did that. It didn’t look like she was having fun or enjoying herself. But through this case, I was able to see that she didn’t even reveal herself to Shota, Ken, and Koichiro, her lovers and her father, which led me to think this.”

  I didn’t have any basis for it.

  But I was certain of it.

  “Hiding herself was the way she lived. She didn’t know any other way. And no reason she had would’ve convinced anyone.”

  Miss Direction.

  Without a doubt, Reina had lived a life fitting of that name.

  And now we’d seen the result.

  “I finally understand why she chose such a convoluted suicide,” I said. “That was just her nature.”

  * * *

  —

  I sat on my bike and looked up at the sky. The stars in the ultramarine night were blotted out by the casinos’ gaudy neon light.

  I really hate this town, I thought to myself.

  It was still oppressively hot, so I put up my hair in a scrunchie. My mind was mush, like jam that had been simmered down to pulp.

  My emotions were still bottled up and I didn’t feel like sitting, so I pedaled standing up as I cut through buildings that were under construction.

  “Huff…huff…huff…”

  I panted as I pedaled.

  By the end of our conversation, I hadn’t been able to bring up the most important thing with Dr. Higano. But I couldn’t help it. My theory was just too absurd—even delusional—to share with anyone, even the doctor.

  But I’d become obsessed with my delusional theory since I’d first thought of it.

  I arrived at the Hard King Hotel. It had been modeled on a royal palace, and flashed with blue and orange lights. My old-fashioned bike didn’t match the decor, but I put it in the parking lot anyway. I felt pretty out of place myself as I walked in, following the seemingly never-ending red carpet, and finally made it inside the casino. The interior was nothing short of dazzling. A massive chandelier hung down from the high ceiling. But strangely, most of the customers looked pretty rough.

  I faced the location we’d set up beforehand: the slots farthest to the left from the entrance. Electronic sounds cascaded in the air around the slots area, where everyone sat riveted in front of the simple matching games, their eyes reflecting the screens. No one paid me any attention.

  I made my way over to a machine on the far left.

  A beautiful woman was sitting there.

  I didn’t know whether I was lucky or whether she had been saving the seat, but the machine to her right was open so I sat down.

  Miraculously, she had agreed to meet me here. I called out her name, or more accurately, the only name I knew to call her by—“Otoha Tamachi.”

  She looked over at me and smiled. “How are you, Yuri?”

  Today “Otoha” had matched her outfit with the casino venue: she was wearing a formal, bright red dress slit up the leg, and stiletto pumps. Her makeup was different as well. Her lips were bright red, her gold eye shadow had glints of lamé, and her eyelashes were thick and prominent with mascara. She looked like a foreign celebrity; any trace of the demure princess from the day before yesterday was gone. You could’ve convinced me she was an entirely different person.

  Nevertheless, the word that rose to the tip of my tongue didn’t change:

  Beautiful.

  “I wasn’t certain you’d actually meet with me,” I began.

  “Haha. Relax, you don’t have to speak so formally.”

  “Thank you, but I feel more comfortable this way.”

  I didn’t think I could speak more casually to a woman whose true identity I didn’t know.

  “I appreciate you taking time out of your schedule for me today. But what I’d like to talk about is so absurd I won’t be surprised if you laugh at me. My apologies in advance, but please hear me out.”

  The woman looked at me inquisitively.

  “I want to lay out a hypothesis I have. I’ll provide each and every piece of support that forms the basis for this crazy idea.”

  The woman brushed her long hair aside and turned her whole body toward me.

  I sighed deeply, gathered my breath, and then began to lay out my case:

  Reina was extremely meticulous. She never let her boyfriend or her fiancé take pictures of her, and when her father sold the house, she threw out all her old photos, too.

  After she had supposedly died, a coworker spotted Reina in her red BMW.

  From high school onward, Reina used her beauty as a misdirection—despite her beauty, the way she looked was actually surprisingly forgettable.

  Her apartment was almost impossibly absent of any personality.

  Koichiro relied on psychoactive drugs after his wife’s death, yet he was still so disturbed that he became physically intimate with his daughter.

  Koichiro was completely unaware of Reina’s boyfriend, Shota.

  Reina’s fiancé, father, and boyfriend all had completely different impressions of her: ice sculpture, Snow White, and motherly.

  Despite this, when Ken and Koichiro saw you, they both said you not only looked like Reina but gave off the same impression as her.

  All of the Bumblebees, including Otoha Tamachi, went missing at the same time.

  At right around the same time, Reina and Koichiro had been estranged for three years, when she was 18 to 21.

  The woman laughed and shook her head. “I think I know what this crazy idea of yours is.”

  “I have more support. Please listen.”

  The face of the corpse couldn’t be identified because it had been cut off.

  Reina and Koichiro aren’t biologically related, so not even a DNA test could prove whether the body was his daughter.

  The dental records used to ID the body were from when she was 21, after all the Bumblebees went missing.


  Shota was almost disturbingly devoted to Reina.

  Shota drank the entire energy drink even after he realized it had cyanide in it.

  Reina might’ve had others devoted to her. And while she was at Junseiwa Academy, the Bumblebees followed her around so closely it was unnatural.

  I had dumped out everything I wanted to say. I realized my heart was throbbing heavily and pressed my hands against my chest. The cacophony around us completely faded from my hearing.

  The woman was unfazed. She only looked at me with an unconcerned expression. It wasn’t possible to get a read on what she was feeling based on her facial expressions; Dr. Higano had said she was exceptionally skilled at lying.

  “There’s a conversation I had with Reina while we were at Junseiwa Academy that I remember vividly,” I added.

  * * *

  —

  “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.”

  * * *

  —

  I shared the conversation Reina and I had in the evening light of the high school classroom.

  “What was the flashy thing that served as a misdirection in this case? The gruesome corpse without a face and foot? The father getting involved with his daughter and being accused of her murder? Reina’s insane suicide? There were too many for me to pick just one.” My hands were damp with sweat. “But I did figure out what she was hiding.”