by Shiro Hamao
At the time not that many books on horror and crime had been translated into Japanese, so we had no choice but to read them in the original. Somewhere you got your hands on books by authors I had never heard of, such as Poe, Doyle, Freeman and Krafft-Ebing. You gave them to me under the pretence of language study, didn’t you? You lectured me on Carpenter, talked of Whitman and introduced me to Montaigne. Run through by every conceivable weapon and forced by you to build up a demonic philosophy, I found myself stimulated by the criminal and the bizarre. And all the while I was your plaything. Tsuchida-san, I was one of your victims. And because I lacked your brilliance, your zeal, your circumspection and, in some cases, your astounding self-possession, I walked straight into the trap life had set me.
You should be happy with yourself. Not only did you mercilessly transform me into your plaything, but now I languish here in prison, while you, who taught me everything, have used your talents and intelligence to go through life without a single misstep. I respect and admire you from the bottom of my heart. But at the same time I cannot help being appalled at the frailty of the laws of this nation that are powerless to do anything to stop someone as dangerous as you. You are the prosecutor and I am the criminal. What perfect roles for us! But neither you nor I will ever free ourselves from crime, not as long as we live.
By now I’m sure that all of these tedious accusations have given you a sense of why I wanted to tell my story to you in particular. If I hadn’t met you that time when I was a boy I would never have ended up in this place. You didn’t teach me crime. But you did give me the personality of a criminal. This is what I wanted to tell you above all else.
And there’s something else I want you to remember. Surely you do remember it; that autumn evening when we talked of our passionate friendship? If my memory serves, the school year started in September at that time. I had just enrolled, my head was still spinning from the stress of studying for entrance exams, and I was suffering from what seemed a slight bout of neurasthenia.
Life in the dorms was especially unfamiliar to me and each night I found myself almost entirely unable to sleep. This made attending my daily classes an excruciating affair.
It was the 10th October. And once again I had trouble sleeping and went down into the school grounds. Among the dark autumn grasses I caught a fleeting glance of a shadow. That shadow was you.
Until then you and I had never spoken a word to each other. But there is nothing strange in two dormitory mates having a conversation when they find themselves at two in the morning standing in a playground overgrown with autumn grasses. The first thing I said to you was that my nights had been made miserable for the previous month by lack of sleep. You were deeply moved and told me that you yourself had suffered from insomnia for two years already. Under the dark skies our conversation drifted towards those sleepless nights and as we spoke a warm intimacy grew between us. By dawn we were bound together in a beautiful friendship.
But unfortunately I came to resemble you even in your painful sickness. I complained of my suffering each time we met. It was then that I first learned the names of Bromal, Adalin, and Veronal and began to use them regularly. Of course this was also under your guidance. Not surprisingly, this education gave birth to something truly accursed (as I will explain presently). But unlike with your other teachings, you were as much a victim of this one as I was. Recently I heard from a friend that you are now unable to sleep without ingesting enormous quantities of powerful sleeping medication. It is that pain. That pain that I want you in particular to understand.
Tsuchida-san, you, of course, know why I am going on about drugs in this way. To the best of my knowledge I am now in jail for having employed a large dose of powerful medication (of sleeping powder, to be exact) to kill my lover Ishihara Sueko.
I have now committed to paper just those circumstances of which I wanted you to be aware in advance. From this point forward I will write of the crime I did commit and the one I did not. You should know that I do not tell lies. I implore you once more in the name of that friendship we once shared. Please, please believe me.
IV
To order my story properly I should start with the time you and I split up. As I noted earlier, that hot friendship of ours broke off suddenly with your enrolment at university. I would have been twenty at the time. And you were twenty-two.
When you left me for a pretty younger boy I found myself for a time completely bereft. At the same time, as I said earlier, I discovered that you had already breathed your soul into me.
It was in the autumn of that year as well when I met a beautiful woman called Ishihara Sueko.
Tsuchida-san, I had become your disciple in every way, but your particular brand of sensuality seems not to have penetrated me completely. I felt an intense physical desire for Sueko.
It’s tedious to have to listen to other people’s love stories. Tales of broken hearts must be particularly odious to you since you have not the slightest interest in the opposite sex and abhor sentimentalism. So I’ll try to stick to the story line as closely as possible.
Sueko was eighteen at the time, two years younger than I was. She was a student at the XX School for Girls. The first time I saw her it was at the auditorium of a music conservatory in Ueno. You remember don’t you? Those concerts that were held every Saturday in Ueno. They were about the only legitimate musical events Tokyo had to offer. There was one other concert series that was sponsored by the family of a famous former daimyo. But you always hated aristocrats so you never took me. Not even once.
Sueko and I were both regulars at those Saturday concerts. The audience were all working people. I won’t bore you with the details of how we got together. Let’s just say that from that autumn the little forest in Ueno where you and I used to pledge our love to each other became the spot for Sueko and I to do the same. I had just learned how to love the opposite sex. I loved her so much I would have given her everything I had. She seemed quite well disposed towards me as well. If this love affair had a happy ending I might have been able to suck out that awful snake venom you pumped into my veins. I know what you’ll never know; how beautiful women are, how precious. Sueko would have been the goddess who saved me.
But the chips didn’t fall that way. Our romance came to a nasty end. And the end came much faster than I thought. By the end of that same year a future husband had been found for Sueko.
Whether it was her intention or not – she claimed at the time that she was sacrificing herself to her parents’ wishes – made no difference to me. All that mattered was that she had chosen a man other than me to be her husband. I was furious. I was sad. And I cursed women. Tsuchida-san, that’s when everything you used to say started to work on me again. I cursed all women.
What I’m about to say isn’t easy to talk about. I, the young prodigy, started carousing so much that my friends at university came down on me hard. They told me I was making them all look bad. But what did I care? What value could a warning from my friends have if they didn’t understand my suffering? In the spring of my twenty-first year I had to drop out of university.
Thanks to you, up to then everyone thought of me as a brilliant and well-behaved young man. Now my transformation was so extreme that a trusted teacher urged me just to take a break for a while and then come back to university. But I had already made my decision. I threw away that school cap with the two white stripes that was once so precious to me and marched right out of the university gates. It was that time of the year when every tree around the dormitory sent its blossoms scattering like crazy in the spring breeze and everyone was outside enjoying it.
My parents back home were shocked by my rash behaviour. They came to me in tears and begged me to reconsider. But there was no turning back and I had no desire whatsoever to go back to university. Then they got angry and tried to call me back home. But how could someone schooled in your demonic teachings ever set foot in the rustic backwater I came from? I told them they could go to hell and drifted my
way through big old Tokyo without any goal in sight.
Over the next few years I tried out all sorts of jobs. Once I got a job at a magazine helping with translations. Once I worked writing film scenarios for the moving pictures. Before long I’d prowled around every last corner of Tokyo.
I had just enough work to eat, but there were two things I could never give up. One was alcohol and the other was sleeping powder. The more I drank the more powder I took. The loss of Sueko made me so self-destructive that I couldn’t get to sleep on my own. I was already so far gone that even a double dose wasn’t enough.
Eight years have passed since then. You know very well from your own experience how much more of it you have to take after using it for so long. The amount I take now would probably be just right for you since you use it all the time, but it would be enough to kill anyone else.
So to get back to the beginning, I lost Sueko and I dropped out of university. As I started to hear how my classmates were coming up in the world I just sunk deeper into the gutter. About two years ago I started living with a woman. My current wife – who finally got permission to visit me here yesterday. My wife Tsuyuko. Later you’ll understand what made that meeting so fateful.
Of course she’s not an educated woman. She was working in a real dive of a cafe. Like Sueko, she is two years younger than me and we got to be close when I used to go out drinking. Tsuyuko loved me. I wasn’t that into her. She was fiercely loyal. And kind. So two years ago I married her and we started living together. It wasn’t a marriage for love (at least on my side). I needed her devotion, her kindness, her body and the little cash she’d saved up. Tsuchida-san, I say this without any shame: I was a little devil. I’m sure you would agree there was no reason not to sacrifice a dame or two so that I could grow up into a bigger devil.
Tsuyuko didn’t have any family so I was all she had. Even after we got married she was obedient, faithful and sweet as could be. I could go out drinking and buy as many whores as I wanted and she couldn’t say a word. With such a loveable wife I finally felt at peace.
V
Six relatively peaceful months passed with my new wife, interrupted only by the death of my father. Of course I hurried home as soon as I got the news but he died before I arrived. I was the heir so a little property came my way. Not much but enough for the two of us to get by, so I returned to Tokyo.
I started working at the magazine again doing translations and set myself up with a little income. I was renting a small house in the suburbs at the time and have lived there ever since. Anyone would have thought this young couple had the world on a string. I even thought so myself.
But alas, that was just a daydream. I’d forgotten that I was the disciple of a devil. After that first six months Tsuyuko started to get on my nerves. Of course I didn’t marry her for love and I was never crazy about her, but I had never hated her either.
Once we started living together, however, I began to despise her. Of course all young couples start to get on each other’s nerves once the honeymoon period is over. But in my case it was different. I told you already that Tsuyuko was obedient, faithful and sweet. Now it was those same qualities – that same obedience, faithfulness and sweetness – that started to grate on me. I hated her for her shyness. Her girlish virtue irritated me. And more than anything that sweet disposition drove me out of my mind.
It was then that I felt the seed you planted inside me start to grow. I was afraid of myself. I felt like I had to do something. But I didn’t know how to escape this strange agony.
Tsuchida-san, you have no interest in the opposite sex so you are no doubt still single. You probably cannot imagine the suffering of a husband who hates his wife. But as my mentor you do of course understand what it’s like to hate someone who is blameless in the eyes of the world, someone who has nothing but good qualities.
I tried to get rid of Tsuyuko but she wouldn’t leave me. She didn’t mind if there was another woman. Said she’d work as a maid as long as she could stay by my side. Since there was no talking her into leaving I tried all kinds of ways to make her want to leave on her own. But nothing worked. Physical and psychological abuse had no effect. In fact the more I tried to push her away the more she clung to me and wormed her way further in. I couldn’t stand to be near her.
If she’d been a little less of a good girl, a bit more selfish, if she’d just pushed back a little I might not have been so enraged. But she never let up. She was demure and obedient no matter what. I could stay out three or four nights in a row and she wouldn’t say a word when I came home. Not a word until bedtime that is, when she would get down on her knees and beg me to love her. The pathetic sight of her was nauseating. I hated her so much I wanted to tear her into shreds and eat her. I would make a point of sending her out on errands on stormy nights but she just kept on smiling. When I couldn’t stand it any more I would slap the smile off her face. But Tsuyuko just bawled and begged me to love her more.
I did everything I could think of to turn her body and soul into an instrument for my own pleasure, my toy. I thought surely this would get her to cave in. But she held fast. In the end I tortured her so cruelly that I started to hate myself. I started to feel possessed by her living ghost.
Tsuchida-san, if you’d been in this situation I’m sure you would have used that powerful brain of yours and found a solution. But heaven didn’t bless me with a brain like yours and what I came up with was pretty damn prosaic. There was only one way for me. It was death. To die. And according to our philosophy she was the one who had to go. Sometimes late at night she used to say she’d kill herself if I left her. I’d tell her, ‘Go ahead. Knock yourself off for all I care.’ But I was only saying it to hurt her. I never thought it might actually happen.
But as the days wore on the idea started to grow on me. I imagined what it would be like to have Tsuyuko dead. I still had trouble sleeping but I comforted myself by picturing her dying by illness, by suicide or by murder. I don’t know how many nights I indulged in these devilish fantasies with the hateful sound of Tsuyuko’s breathing next to me. Tsuyuko’s face as she slept filled me with satisfaction and I smiled as I gazed upon it.
What do you think, Tsuchida-san? Had I not become the perfect inheritor of your soul?
VI
At that time I was still just fantasising about murdering my wife. I had no intention of actually carrying it out. But then something happened that made everything change. Ishihara Sueko and I met again.
I imagine a woman-hater like you will laugh at the thought of someone who hates his first love but still can’t stop thinking of her. But it can’t be helped This is the difference between your personality and mine. I lost her when I was twenty but I always, always remembered her.
As I drifted around the country I was careful to follow what news I could find about the famous, rich man she had married. So I knew that he had been killed during the Great Kanto Earthquake, crushed mercilessly beneath a building along with virtually every other member of her family and the neighbourhood they lived in.
But my masculine pride kept me from going to see her. And even if I wanted to see her I couldn’t have since I didn’t know where she lived. And then, towards the end of last summer, I bumped into her in a section of Yamanote. She told me that she had been living there alone with only a maid to keep her company since the earthquake had taken her husband. Bereft of everything, from the family she had married into, to the town they lived in, she had lost all hope.
We talked about the way things used to be. We went back to the days we had spent together. I truly loved her and she loved me. Sometime between the autumn and winter of last year our passionate love came back in full force.
Of course I told my wife Tsuyuko all about it. I figured this would be more than enough to get her to leave me. Wrong again. She didn’t budge from what she’d said before. I could fall as much in love with other women as I wanted, just as long as I didn’t leave her.
I figured things could be
worse and stayed away from home for most of the final months of last year, shacked up with Sueko the whole time. Luckily Sueko didn’t have any children. She didn’t know for sure if I was married or not. And anyway I promised to marry her eventually. You’re probably wondering why I didn’t just dump Tsuyuko. Perfectly understandable. Tsuyuko was alive but she haunted me like a ghost. As long as she was alive there was no escaping her. No matter how long I stayed away from home she’d be waiting there when I came back with that same pathetic and yet accursed look on her face.
By February of this year I had resolved to kill her. In January she had started to feel sick and February brought no improvement. Turns out she was pregnant. She was carrying my seed.
What awful luck. Your typical husband – no, anyone human – would be thrilled to have made his wife pregnant. But not me. I found it revolting and terrifying. The wife I hated and despised was pregnant with my seed. I knew myself too well not to realise it was the devil’s seed that was growing inside her. It was bad enough that the bitch was pregnant. But this was the spawn of a devil. I had to kill her and I had to do it fast. I had to get out of this nightmare.
I wanted to kill her partly to rid myself of her living ghost. I knew she would keep haunting me wherever I ran. But now that she was pregnant it was even worse. I was done for as long as she was alive. I could try to hide from her but she’d hold on until the kid was born. But the thought of her giving birth to this cursed child sent shivers down my spine. This second me born from Tsuyuko would pursue me for the rest of my life. I had to stop her from having this child. I had to bury her and the child inside her.
I have to admit I found the thought of killing her thrilling. I’d made up my mind. She had to be killed. And now all was left was to figure out how and when.