The Moai Island Puzzle

by Alice Arisugawa

  ‘Indeed it was. You left the evidence, suicide note and the weapons in the annex and fled the scene. And with that, everything had finally ended…at least, that was what you were probably thinking.’

  ‘Everything had already ended three years ago for me.’

  This was the first time Reiko had spoken sharply.

  ‘I had been going to spend the rest of my life with Hideto. I’d been all alone in the world, but I’d finally found my own family. That was what I thought, but then he suddenly died. From that day on, living has been like hell to me.’

  Unexpectedly, tears started to flow from her eyes.

  ‘Right after his death, I had a mental breakdown. Perhaps I would’ve been happier if I’d really gone mad then, but I didn’t go that far. I felt as if I was being cruelly tortured and that even my pleas of wanting to die right away weren’t being answered. I wouldn’t have taken the lives of those four if I’d committed suicide then, but I hadn’t done that. To let everyone know, to let myself know how deep the pain was of having lost Hideto, I wanted…to go crazy.’

  I winced at her unbearable words.

  ‘The pain became worse with every day and I awaited the day I would truly go mad. Kazuto, Sumako and Mr. Hirakawa, who came to visit me in my private room in the institution, must’ve thought my case was hopeless. Feeling sorry and afraid for me, Sumako started to cry. She started to blame herself out loud, saying that she couldn’t have known this would happen. That’s when I began to realise what had actually happened. I decided that only revenge could give meaning to my life.’

  Egami listened to her with his eyes closed. The darkness behind Reiko looked deeper than before. Even though it was a night of falling stars.

  ‘I’m sure that Sumako drifted away from Mr. Hirakawa because of what happened. I think she left him saying she wouldn’t talk, but she couldn’t be with him any more. She must have been suffering as well. You might think I could have at least forgiven Sumako. But that was something I couldn’t do. She might have had a painful parting with Mr. Hirakawa, but she soon found a loved one after that and regained her smile again. I couldn’t forgive her….’

  Reiko’s tears kept falling.

  ‘Haven’t you considered the consequences of what you did even just a little?’

  Egami said this mildly, but the meaning of his words was grave.

  ‘You’re talking about my father? You want to ask me if I hadn’t thought about the pain my father would suffer, having first lost Hideto and now Kazuto? I did think about it. But I couldn’t stop myself despite that. As I hadn’t died after Hideto did, I decided I’d spend the rest of my life together with my father to ease his pain, however little. That was what I’d planned to do. But not even once had I considered sparing Kazuto. In the winter two years ago, not even a half year after madness had rejected me and I had been let out of hospital, he timidly tried to make advances to me. When he saw how shaken I was by that, he quickly said it was just a joke. By that time, I’d already pulled the trigger on him dozens of times in my mind. What I wrote in the suicide note about his motive for killing Hideto was not a product of my imagination. He had let slip all of that while in my hospital room. Only the part that Mr. Hirakawa had asked for more money this year was fiction.

  ‘And to be able to take care of your father for the rest of your life, you couldn’t have anyone find out you were the murderer,’ said Egami in a frustrated tone. ‘And I would’ve needed to deny and laugh away this deduction of mine that’s flimsier than a sheet of paper.’

  Reiko remained silent.

  But if that was the case, why did Egami expose all the crimes she had committed in front of her? As long as Egami didn’t talk, she would be safe.

  ‘This is not a warning, saying I will expose you. But when I saw you, I couldn’t help but tell you there are people who know about your crimes. I needed to know if you could bear that knowledge. You can’t run away from yourself. You yourself have been the one witness to all that you’ve done. Soon the police will arrive on the island and you’ll have to survive an intense investigation. You’ll need to be able to withstand that as well. So why, then, couldn’t you put up any argument against my tale which is even flimsier than the piece of paper you dropped?’

  Reiko stood up without wiping away her tears.

  ‘That’s my problem. I need to deal with it myself. I’ll think about it.’

  She bowed her head slightly, passed in front of us again and went to the door. Without turning round, she said: ‘I came here because I had a feeling this would happen. I am grateful Maria wasn’t here.’

  She raised her chin a little and sighed slightly, with her back still turned to us. She appeared to have made up her mind as she opened the door and disappeared into the hallway.

  The artist once wrote this in his diary:

  “Tomorrow will be a sad day.”

  On the day before the boat finally returned to the island, I contemplated those words.

  6

  After a light sleep, a sad day awaited me.

  By the time the morning sun had started to shine through the six hallway windows and be reflected on the doors on the other side of the corridor, Egami and I were already awake. Both of us were looking up at the walls and the ceiling, lying on our beds. For more than an hour, each of us had thought the other was still asleep. Even the noise from the waves of the morning sea hadn’t calmed my mind.

  And then we began to hear people getting up here and there in the house.

  ‘Let’s go downstairs,’ said Egami.

  We washed our faces, got dressed and went down to the hall. Maria was preparing breakfast in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, good morning.’

  Her energetic voice pained my heart.

  ‘It’s not like her at all, but I think Reiko has overslept. I felt sorry for her, as she needs to take a rest too sometimes, so today I’ll prepare everything.’

  She was cutting slices of ham with a smile on her face, happy that Reiko was sleeping in.

  ‘This morning is kind of strange, don’t you think? Egami and Alice getting up first…. But as you’re up early anyway and there’s still time before breakfast, what about a morning stroll?’

  ‘Let’s do that.’

  The hairs Egami had missed shaving this morning were standing out on his cheek. We went out of Panorama Villa with heavy steps, as if we had just come home from a night out.

  We’d arrived at the steps which went down to the landing place. I glanced at Happy Fish Villa, where the artist was resting, and then looked down at the sea in the morning sun. Then I saw it.

  A boat was floating near the centre of the bay.

  A feeling of déjà vu. I had seen this scene before.

  Someone had rowed the boat out there in the night. And the rower had abandoned the boat.

  ‘Mr. Egami ….’

  He didn’t say anything.

  EPILOGUE

  Reiko’s body had washed up near the Eboshi Rock, where Hideto had also been found. We went out looking for her together; we found her together; we brought her back to Panorama Villa together; and we grieved together.

  ‘And I’d thought that, no matter what, it could never have been Reiko….’ The features of Satomi’s face contorted as she cried. ‘I even doubted my own husband, but I always believed in Reiko….’

  Satomi appeared to have been unable to keep everything inside any more and she let it all out to me, as I stood nearby. She said she’d been suspicious of her own husband Toshiyuki and very afraid. Her only reasons for that were that her husband had experience with clay target shooting and that he needed money to ensure the future business of his restaurant chain. She’d only pretended to take her sleeping pills and had stayed up that night to see if he wouldn’t sneak out of their room. That was what had caused her lack of sleep the following day.

  ‘I was such a fool. I thought that, as I suffer from insomnia, I could stop taking my sleeping pills and easily stay awake all night to watch hi
m, but precisely at that crucial period, right after midnight, I fell asleep for a while. So not only didn’t I get enough sleep, I still couldn’t be sure my husband wasn’t the murderer.’

  Her husband was sitting on the other side of the room, asking Egami for explanations. Elsewhere in the room, Junji said to Sonobe: ‘It turned out even more tragic than we could’ve guessed.’

  I could hear the grieving cries of Ryūichi and Maria from Reiko’s room.

  The motor yacht finally appeared.

  The captain was humming a tune and the yacht had almost arrived. What if we were all to go out to where we could look down at the landing place and stand in one line? It would look even more impressive if we’d been holding a banner up:

  Welcome to the island of the dead.

  Sonobe went to a window that was half open and opened it fully. He said some words to the sea beyond:

  It was a journey past countless mountains and rivers,

  And we travelled to the edge of the world.

  But we met nobody who came from the world beyond,

  One only travels down this road, and never will a traveller return.

  We are puppets and the sky is the puppet master

  This is not a metaphor, but reality.

  Once your part has been played,

  You will be returned to the box.

  The wind blew inside.

  On the table far away were scattered the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which had never been completed.

  The summer was over and the season was turning to autumn. Like an operator trying to stop the train silently at the platform, I also slid into autumn.

  Part of what had happened on that island became public, part of it was suppressed and the remaining part had spread in the form of stories and rumours that didn’t sound familiar at all to me. But that mattered not at all.

  Maria had gone away.

  No matter how long I stayed staring in the lecture hall after Obligation Law had ended, she would not call out to me and no matter how much I looked, I could not find her among the masses of students who were slowly making their way outside.

  Without my even having a chance of congratulating her on her twentieth birthday, the eighth of September passed by.

  When I went to the Law Faculty office, a clerk told me they’d received a notice of absence.

  I left the campus and ate a light lunch at a café I’d never visited before. I felt listless. I could see the Kyōto Imperial Palace from where I was sitting. I told myself that her pain might have healed a little by the time the trees of the palace turned scarlet, and that she would return.

  I hoped so.

  That’s why until then, I would read the Rubaiyat I’d borrowed from Egami and wait for her.

  THE END

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

  * * *

  [i]

  Villa Lilac refers to Rirasō Jiken (The Villa Lilac Case), a 1959 mystery novel by Tetsuya Ayukawa.

  [ii] Enkū (1632-1695) was a Buddhist monk who travelled across Japan to help the poor. During his travels, he carved some 120,000 wooden statues of the Buddha. These were crude statues made from tree stumps and other scrap pieces of wood with just a few strokes from a hatchet.

  [iii] In Buddhism, Jizō is a Bodhisattva who protects (dead) children, (expectant) mothers and travellers. Statues of Jizō can be found all over Japan near intersections of roads.

  [iv] The Boy Detective Club (Shōnen Tantei Dan) is a highly influential children’s mystery novel series by Edogawa Rampo. The series carries the same title as the second book in the series, first published in 1937.

  [v] The Ariake Sea is the home to mysterious ghostly lights called shiranui, similar to will-‘o-the-wisps. References are made to the shiranui in the Nihon Shoki, the second oldest chronicle on Japanese history completed in 720. Modern research has concluded the shiranui are in fact an optical phenomenon.

  [vi] NHK is Japan’s national public broadcasting organisation and somewhat similar to the BBC of the United Kingdom. NHK is an abbreviation of Nippon Hōsō Kyoku. The English name Japan Broadcasting Corporation is also used.

  The poems from Rubaiyat which appear in this book are from the Japanese translation by Ryōsaku Ogawa, published by Iwanami Bunko, not the Edward Fitzgerald version.