Deep Red

by Hisashi Nozawa

  “Kako, you hang back, over there,” her uncle said, preventing her from going near the room. That served her fine. She’d been dreading, as the Akibas’ sole survivor, having to thank people who’d taken time from their busy lives to come pay their respects.

  Her aunt’s family was in a waiting room in the back, and Kanako, too, faced a sushi tray there. Shingo, starving but pretending not to be, was eating surreptitiously, while Maki just nibbled on an egg topping.

  Until Kanako took up her chopsticks, they couldn’t dig in. Sensing this, she recommended, “Shingo, there’s fatty tuna,” with a cheerfulness that was ill-suited to the occasion.

  “Thanks. Kako, you should try to eat too.”

  She chose the most expensive-looking sushi and put it on her plate. The atmosphere lightened just a little, and chopsticks began to move to and fro across the tabletop. Kanako forced the piece she had picked down her throat.

  The set included herring roe sushi, which Tomoki and Naoki always fought over. Her brothers would never be having any again, and the thought made the back of Kanako’s nose prickle. She was at a loss. She thought she’d dulled her perception, but it was gradually beginning to assert itself.

  When she imagined falling prostrate across the tatami and bawling, she felt scared. If she let go, every last drop of moisture in her might flow out through her tear ducts.

  The adults were talking about tomorrow’s weather. The service would begin at one in the afternoon, and the procession was scheduled to begin an hour later. They had already decided who would be carrying the four caskets. Shingo was among the people chosen and seemed a bit nervous about it. Kanako was to cradle the deceased’s portraits, but some of the relatives voiced concern over whether she could hold all four of the cumbersome and heavy frames.

  They decided to have her try before the funeral tomorrow to make sure.

  “Do you want to sleep at the temple with everyone tonight?”

  By “everyone,” they didn’t mean her aunt’s family, but her own, in the four coffins.

  “Yeah.”

  Kanako wanted to cooperate and do as the adults wished. She would endure it all by following their lead.

  “I’ll stay with you,” her aunt said.

  Apparently the abbot had granted permission to spread futons in the main hall. Exhausted from having spent three hours bowing to all of the people who’d come to give their condolences, Kanako was ready for sleep.

  Saying, “Well, see you tomorrow,” her relatives took their leave in small groups and departed. Her uncle also packed Shingo and Maki into their car and disappeared into the night.

  When the lights were cut in the main hall, the candles made the coffins cast long shadows.

  “Goodnight.”

  “Night.”

  Kanako slid into the futon beside her aunt’s. The sound of sliding cloth echoed up to the high ceiling in an exaggerated manner.

  “If you get scared, tell me, okay?”

  If Kanako got scared of sleeping beside corpses, they could return to the waiting room, her aunt said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “If you want to cry, you can, okay?”

  Kanako felt bad that she was making her aunt worry so much. “Thanks. I’m fine.”

  She was still fine, probably.

  Enveloping herself in the thin feel of the blanket, she lay on her side with her cheek against her pillow and staring up at the four coffins on the platform.

  Her aunt began snoring almost immediately. She must have been exhausted.

  Kanako didn’t dream.

  She felt suffocated by the weight of the darkness that surrounded her. This is probably a kind of dream too, Kanako thought blearily, half-awake, half-asleep as she did her best to endure.

  She ended up waking up at five in the morning while it was still quite dark outside the windows.

  Next to her, her aunt was still passed out. Unable to hold back the urge to go to the bathroom, Kanako slipped out of her futon and stepped out to the dim hallway.

  She tried to finish her business in the bathroom by the waiting room, but not a single drop came out. Had her internal organs suddenly gone stupid? It was almost as though all the fluids in her body including her tears were being stored somewhere and couldn’t find an exit.

  She heard the sound of life in the building beside theirs. The rhythmical sound of something on the cutting board shook the air; perhaps someone was chopping vegetables.

  She could also hear the sound of a TV set. It was the early morning news.

  “Regarding the Akiba family case, the Prime Minister, too, seems to have expressed his sincerest condolences during last night’s cabinet meeting, and now all of Japan…”

  She had been trying to return to the main hall, but found herself sucked toward the announcer’s voice.

  Case? Prime Minister?

  Beyond the window and six feet of outside air, in the building next door, was the truth. A desire, a compulsion to know seized Kanako and directed her.

  There was a pair of slippers by the back door of the main hall. Kanako slipped both her feet in. She opened the door and breathed in the fresh morning air. Telling herself that she would have no regrets no matter what she learned, she wandered closer to the other building and peered inside.

  It was a kitchen. The abbot began his mornings early. Two middle-aged women in aprons were busy preparing breakfast. They were also looking at a small TV set enshrined atop an orderly shelving unit stuffed with cooking utensils.

  Kanako was able to see the screen by standing on her toes.

  The coverage of her family was coming to a close. A young reporter was talking in front of what appeared to be a police station. It was still dim around him. It appeared to be live.

  “The investigation of the suspect, Norio Tsuzuki, continued on past 10 p.m. with only a break for dinner, but there are still many unanswered questions regarding his motives, and we predict that it may be some time before the full story of the family’s brutal massacre is uncovered.”

  The visuals switched to show her house during the day. It had probably been shot yesterday. They had most likely filmed it from the walkway of the apartment building next door. Blue tarps isolated the house, and people who looked like detectives were bustling in and out. A police dog was sniffing Tomoki’s bicycle.

  “After losing four family members at once, sixth grader Kanako Akiba returned early from her school trip to head to the hospital. There, she faced their bodies before being taken to a relative’s house. During the vigil last night, she stoically performed her duties…”

  The TV showed the temple’s exterior. It was from last night. The people who had come to give their condolences were lined up at the reception counter.

  “She will no doubt appear before our cameras during the funeral today at 1 p.m. We hope that she will be able to recover from the heartache of losing her family and regain her smile as soon as possible.”

  And now, on to our next news, the announcer at the studio segued dutifully.

  Kanako backed away from the window.

  She had learned a few things. A family massacre. The suspect’s name was Norio Tsuzuki.

  Her father, mother, and two little brothers had been murdered by this Norio Tsuzuki. They still didn’t know why he had killed them.

  She wondered how they had been killed. Eventually, she’d learn why their heads had appeared caved in.

  The lid on her perception wasn’t staying put anymore.

  As she tried to return to the back entrance of the main hall, she stepped into a puddle. Her sandaled foot was drenched. At the nasty feeling of her pajamas clinging to her skin, she looked down and saw that it wasn’t just her foot. Her entire lower body was soaked. She’d made that puddle herself.

  Kanako realized that she had wet herself.

  The fluids in her body had found their exit.

  “Mom…Mom…”

  Like most children who had suffered a mishap, Kanako felt helpless and wa
nted to cry. It was in a tiny voice that she called out for her mother.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  Statement

  Norio Tsuzuki, Tokyo Detention Center, 1-35-1 Kosuge, Katsushika Ward, Tokyo

  To Mr. Keiichiro Haruta, Presiding Judge, Tokyo District Courthouse

  I have carefully read over the indictment.

  With the first public hearing to be held a month from now, I have decided to take up my pen in hopes that I may convey to the presiding judge what I cannot with my physical voice in court.

  You may feel that this is nothing but the desperate plea of a defendant bound to receive the death sentence, but I would like to explain to the best of my ability my relationship with the Akiba family and how I reached the state I was in the night I gripped the murder weapon, before conveying my current unvarnished feelings.

  I, Norio Tsuzuki, was born in 1952 as the second son of a farming family in Ichinomiya city, Aichi prefecture. I came to Tokyo after graduating high school. I sought employment in vain for two years but finally obtained a job at a certain manufacturer of educational tools.

  My job was to act as a salesperson for elementary schools north of the Kanto region, and I visited them with our sample globes and triangle rulers. It was a medium-sized company without a particularly large sales territory, and I was thrown out to work alone and ordered to earn my keep through legwork. In those days, I literally made a living by wearing the soles off my shoes.

  On one such day, I was walking along a heavily snowed country road in Aomori when a globe fell from my frozen hands. The body detached from the axle to go rolling down the unpaved path, and I stared after it in a daze. Since what was getting buried in the icy earth was one of my company’s precious products, I dug through knee-deep snow to retrieve it.

  As I clutched the snow-covered globe to my chest in a land where even my tears froze, I was past mere misery and felt like laughing at my career.

  I met Chiyoko Kajiyama, a freshly graduated teacher at an elementary school in Utsunomiya, when I was twenty-five.

  During the two years following, I told my boss that we were “securing the Utsunomiya territory” and diligently frequented Chiyoko’s school.

  On more than one occasion, as I peered into the science lab that was Chiyoko’s domain, the kids would inform me that their teacher had a cold and was absent, and I would leave the school, disappointed. Apparently prone to illness since her student days, she was a woman with such pale skin it looked transparent who always wore a bashful smile.

  She later told me that while popular among the children, she won few allies in the staff room thanks to her taciturn and introverted ways and spent every day stressed out by faculty politics.

  It seemed that behind her faint smile, she sincerely looked forward to my visits to Utsunomiya, which I made at least once every three months. We kept on going on dates, meeting up again in town after school hours and catching a meal together, after which I’d escort her home. Chiyoko introduced me to her parents around one year after we had met.

  I spent my early twenties abusing my legs as an itinerant salesman in the Tohoku region, but the company recognized my modest contribution to expanding its territory and gave me some subordinates of my own.

  Before I was thirty, I was appointed an assistant sales manager. It was apparently a rare promotion considering my handicap of having only a high school diploma. I was certainly lucky in that the department head valued results first and foremost. Assigned to the Nihonbashi headquarters in Tokyo, I was finally freed from walking around day after day trying to hawk globes and triangle rulers.

  No longer having an excuse to go to Utsunomiya, I mustered up my courage and proposed to Chiyoko. I was surprised when she agreed on the spot. Dealing with people at her school must have exhausted her more than I’d imagined.

  We rented an old apartment in Tsukishima in Chuo Ward and began our newlywed life. We were overjoyed when she immediately became pregnant, but at the same time I was worried whether her sickly body could handle the strain of childbirth.

  Fortunately, after a difficult delivery that took twenty-five hours, she became the proud mother of a girl. When I heard the baby’s wailing down the hall, I was so relieved that I sank to the floor where I was.

  The apartment in Tsukishima was plenty large enough for a family with an infant, but I predicted that it would become cramped when our child grew up. I began to save up money for a better place and for our daughter’s education.

  I wasn’t a man who spent very much to begin with as I rarely drank, didn’t smoke, and had no interest in gambling. It wasn’t that much of a hardship to put aside fifty thousand yen every month in a fixed-term savings account.

  Chiyoko, too, wanted to contribute by becoming an adjunct at a cram school once she could take a break from childrearing.

  Waking up every three hours to give the baby milk, however, took a horrible toll on Chiyoko’s body. She even collapsed several times from anemia, and the medical fees during our first two years of marriage were immense.

  We named the baby Miho, using the characters from “future” and “walk,” in hopes that she would walk towards her future one step at a time and still appreciate her surroundings.

  Whenever we got on buses or trains, she was indeed the kind of girl who clung to the window and stared at the passing scenery without ever growing bored.

  “There’s a factory with a red roof. There’s smoke coming out of the chimneys. The trees in the park are moving in the wind. The lake is shiny. There’s lots of clouds in the sky, but it’s sunny too.”

  I think Miho was about three years old. She’d clamber up on her seat and describe the scenery to her parents, who were sitting with their backs to the window, just so we wouldn’t have to turn around.

  I think that perhaps those times were the happiest for myself and Chiyoko.

  It was around then that I met Mr. Yukihiko Akiba.

  Mr. Akiba was the section manager at a large precision machinery manufacturer and completely overwhelmed his rivals with his sales network for fax and copy machines.

  We met at a golf course my boss took me to, and I remember Mr. Akiba looking like a dashing military officer. He was two years older than me, so at the time had only been thirty-three.

  If you grew up in the capital, graduated from a prestigious university, and always walked a sunlit road, that was how confident you became—I remember gazing at Mr. Akiba’s face as he heartily chugged down beer at a restaurant with half the round left.

  My boss’s aim was to piggyback our company’s sales on Mr. Akiba’s network. Office automation had been progressing in the field of education as well. This was back when they were saying that computers would be integrated into the classroom before long.

  We would bundle our globes, triangle rulers, and volcano geography and human anatomy models with Mr. Akiba’s OA equipment and sell at a discount. He and my boss supposedly knew each other from their college ski club, but the deal didn’t move forward due to such pleasant connections alone.

  If our company’s products sold, one percent of the profits would go to Mr. Akiba’s bank account. He would then use that money to treat school personnel, further expanding his sales network, once again to our company’s benefit.

  Over the weekend, Mr. Akiba would take me golfing to entertain members of the city educational committee or the board chairmen of private elementary schools. In terms of our companies, I was in a subservient position to Mr. Akiba, but after sending our guests away in taxis we would go sip scotch at an old bar in Ginza. There, we were able to be open with each other, both of us fathers with daughters around the same age.

  I believe that, around then, Mr. Akiba had a one-year-old son and that his third child had just been born, only a year apart. Sometimes we both lamented the educational cost of raising a child to adulthood.

  Mr. Akiba and I never had an equal relationship, though. We had no outings together with our families. Whenever we met, I made su
re to remind myself that he was by no means a friend but an important business partner.

  I may have instinctively sensed that if I expected friendship from the man I would only get hurt in return.

  His father was a private clinician, but Mr. Akiba once reminisced when he was drunk that lacking the smarts to become a medical student himself, he had always felt his parents’ disappointment even as he did his best at his current company.

  My complex fueled me, he said with passion, and I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from saying, I bet you’ve never had to chase a globe rolling down a snowy road.

  “I’d like you to keep this between us,” Mr. Akiba prefaced, then shared with me his plans to set up his own company in the near future.

  The current business climate wouldn’t continue for long. The age of investing in hardware equipment was almost at an end. It would soon be the age of leasing businesses. Instead of long-term marketing that waited out the service life of hardware, he would blaze new sales routes to accommodate an OA market cycle where new products appeared at half-year intervals.

  Mr. Akiba’s words were convincing.

  “I would love to support you. If there’s anything I can do…”

  I remember answering in some such way, but he probably didn’t think that my company could help him with his new venture. He simply happened to pick me as his audience, because I was there that night, for a speech meant to motivate himself to brave the tracks he’d laid down.

  For Mr. Akiba, that wasn’t really where I came in. I do not know if he had already calculated that far then, and now I have no means of finding out.

  After a while Mr. Akiba quit his firm and, taking with him three trusted subordinates, established a new company.

  On the third floor of a building facing Waseda Street in Takadanobaba, they hung a sign that read “Autumn Leaf Co., Ltd.” with a red leaf logo that had apparently been his daughter’s idea.

  The entire floor was packed from floor to ceiling with the latest OA appliances, and to me it seemed less an office and more a warehouse that used space efficiently.