His thoughts turned to the two-story house in Asagaya, Suginami Ward that Yukihiko Akiba always bragged about when he spoke of his family. Having driven the victim to and from golf, the defendant had seen it a number of times and now dreamed of sundering its framework with his own hands and watching it collapse.
The views of the prosecutor and the defending attorney coincide up to this point.
On May 18, 1992, at around five in the afternoon, the defendant borrowed an industrial-grade hammer without permission from the disassembly factory adjacent to his home, purchased a hand hammer, chainsaw, etc., from a DIY center, and brought them with him in intruding on the Akiba household. According to his attorney, a premeditated plan to “destroy the Akiba residence” but not to “murder the entire Akiba family” occupied the defendant’s mind, and this became the central point of contention during the hearings.
As stated earlier, proof has yet to be submitted that the defendant did not know until then that the school chairman who had forced him into the predicament of having to pay off debt was Yukihiko Akiba’s father-in-law.
At what point did the defendant begin to want to murder Masae Akiba?
While the personal statement submitted by the defendant does not declare that he was mentally unstable or suffering a breakdown, it seems to be designed to have us draw the conclusion on our own, contextually.
Closing the statement with the words “I am sane” also comes across as being highly disingenuous.
The defendant’s personal statement, which purports to survey the past from the perspective of sanity, seems at first to highlight his remorse and willingness to meet death as a means of atonement. It is difficult, however, to dismiss the feeling that it was written with the purpose of fabricating the facts of the matter in order to confuse the court and the prosecutor.
3) On the defendant’s motive for mutilating the bodies
According to his attorney’s line of argument, the defendant’s main objective wasn’t to murder the entire family since he continued to demolish the house after killing the four Akibas.
Considering the massive amount of sawdust covering the bodies, we can confirm that he did persist after their deaths.
The prosecutor objected that the demolishment was nothing more than camouflage meant to underscore the impulsive nature of the crime and that the defendant’s choice of large and small hammers and a chainsaw, all tools that seem unideal for attempts at homicide at first glance, was likewise a means of dissimulating that murder was his motive.
Overall, this court adopts the prosecutor’s claim.
While we cannot determine whether such planning had gone into the selection of the murder weapons, there is enough to conjecture that the continued demolition after the murder of the four family members was intended to impart an impression of extensive damage.
The problem we come across now is what motivated the defendant to mutilate the four corpses.
The defendant’s personal statement recounts that “When you spend some time with a corpse, it can start to seem like nothing more than an object. There was probably no limit to the damage I could inflict on the Akibas.” Hoping to erase their expressions because they seemed to be staring at him, he swung the hammer to cave in their faces, the statement notes.
The defendant himself admits that he “considered carrying them to the bathroom” as an option but decided that “it would be faster to just erase their expressions” before bringing down his weapon.
This explanation of his psychological state and behavior is too unnatural and irrational, and we cannot possibly accept it.
There had been a tablecloth in the dining area adjacent to the living room where the bodies lay. If the defendant had felt that “Their resentful gazes as I worked on my project felt unbearably annoying,” he could have covered the four corpses with it to hide their faces.
In the end, the defense never provided a convincing explanation for the escalation of his mental state to allow so inhuman an act as caving in their faces.
The prosecution asserted that these mutilations, too, were premeditated behavior intended to create an impression of mental instability or dysfunction, and the court agrees.
Going back, it also strikes us as contrived that the defendant flew into a rage without warning and ended up destroying property when he represented his apartment building and interacted with the disassembly factory manager to complain about the noise.
The defense tried to emphasize the abnormal personality of the defendant with testimony from the factory manager, but the prosecution’s cross examination revealed that there had been a remarkable gap between the defendant’s remarks and actions at the time.
Abruptly taking up a hammer and cracking the windshield of a decommissioned car—it is not inconceivable that he was already performing “the man who forgets himself in a rage” in preparation for his crime.
The night before the crime, the defendant suddenly started laughing at a club in Ginza and had Yukihiko Akiba remark on his odd behavior, but this was quite possibly another effort to make others believe that he was having a mental breakdown from psychological stress.
This court cannot but conclude that when the defendant skipped work, sent his daughter off to school, and took the hammer from the disassembly factory, he was already following a devious plan.
4) On the severity of the sentence
The defendant is believed to have invaded the Akiba residence and murdered four family members according to a detailed plan in a rare heinous and savage crime.
He was moved by a warped sense of justice that Yukihiko Akiba was an unforgivable person whose entire family had to pay since the man had flouted social norms and attempted to corner the defendant into committing corporate embezzlement.
Yukihiko Akiba angering the defendant and putting him under immense psychological pressure is certainly an aspect of the case, but why murder the innocent Masae, Tomoki, and Naoki?
There are no words to describe his cruelty if he had stolen young lives to feign a personality disorder.
Did the defendant ever calmly consider how he had come to apply his wife’s life insurance money to fulfilling a stranger’s debt obligations?
All in all, the cause was the defendant’s carelessness in co-signing the equivalent of a blank IOU and his later indecisiveness in not speaking up to Yukihiko Akiba or sharing the matter with his company superiors.
The series of actions that he took to assuage a self-serving sense of justice and to simulate a crime of impulse is replete with deception and a manifest reflection of the defendant’s almost abnormal egotism.
The eldest daughter, in sixth grade, was on a school trip and luckily eluded what he perpetrated, but her anger and sorrow over losing all four family members at once is unimaginable.
The sheer cruelty of bludgeoning to death even young children and proceeding to cave in the faces of the victims with a disassembly hammer in order to impart an impression of insanity is frightening, to the point that it is difficult to admit that a fellow human is being held accountable for the deed.
Examined in light of the personality formation that we can surmise from his background and the picture of a man living frugally for his family’s future, the defendant’s character does not seem consonant with such a savage crime as this. It is credible, then, that a socially awkward and perhaps too uptight man beset by the tragedy of his wife’s death might have felt too devastated to repulse precious business partner Yukihiko Akiba’s request and driven himself into a corner.
Even so, he should have been able to consult with a third party to address Yukihiko Akiba’s moral responsibility, and the fact that the matter culminated in the present case is most unfortunate for not just the victims but the defendant and his own family.
Weighing all of these circumstances, and despite attending as much as possible to elements that incur sympathy for the defendant, and notwithstanding utmost consideration for the sanctity of human life, an absolute truth that encom
passes the defendant, we have concluded that in stepping so far off the human path the defendant has committed too serious a crime and can only atone for it with his life.
Thus the court has ruled as in the main clause.
Keiichiro Haruta, Presiding Judge, Tokyo District Courthouse August 1, 1994
CHAPTER THREE
1
The air was stagnant.
Within the hazy room, a group of thin shadows gathered together, murmuring. When she entered the classroom after Eri, around half the students were smoking cigarettes and the air was smoggy. She flapped her hand in front of her face.
“Hey, Kanako, did you bring my translation notes?”
Junichi Shibaki had found her. “Sorry, I forgot,” she said without a moment’s pause, clasping her hands before her to beg forgiveness.
“Stop forgetting!”
Muttering that it couldn’t be helped, Shibaki answered a question from the student beside him and began reading the text in his fluent English.
“His English always sounds so pretentious, I hate it.”
Eri had apparently meant to whisper, but her target heard her clearly.
“This is what you call British English.” He made them listen as he pronounced each word with a crisp accent. The word was that his father, who worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had brought him to live in London until he was ten.
“Shibaki’s the only one we can count on to give us good Japanese translations of English,” Kanako said, trying to sooth him.
Shibaki looked fairly pleased. He had figured out what it meant for people to count on him, and she had heard rumors that he was starting to earn some pocket money by lending out his notes. Perhaps she would be getting her bill soon.
Eri wrinkled her face and said to the ever-entrepreneurial Shibaki, “Hey, why don’t you do something about those ridiculously torn-up Levi’s?” Eri owed Shibaki nothing and was free to say all she wanted. His knees were completely visible, and it was no longer a question of whether it counted as fashion. “Even the homeless in Yoyogi Park dress a bit better,” Eri pressed.
“I don’t want to hear that from you. Can’t you do anything about that solid orange?”
Kanako had to agree with him there.
Eri came from a tea-farming region in Shizuoka, and whenever her local team won at the Japanese Professional Football league, she accumulated more accessories in her team’s color.
“You two make a good combo,” Shibaki mocked them. Yet Kanako understood what he meant.
Kanako had met Eri during freshman orientation and had lied and said, I’m a bumpkin just like you. Even though I’m from Tokyo, it’s Hachioji. They had hit it off, and ever since, Kanako had worn a polo shirt with knee-length skirts and long socks, an atrocious pairing that made her look like a high schooler. Her poor fashion sense matched Eri’s solid orange.
By “good combo,” he meant they were the unfashionable, lame duo.
When the two of them sat together, Eri dominated the space and made it feel cramped. She was the renowned top-tier defender of the women’s soccer club, and she had a bod that was just barely describable as stately and glamorous. She jokingly said that she looked like she’d fit in among Hawaiian policewomen, inviting her peers to laugh.
“Make sure to give them back tomorrow, the translation notes.”
“Of course, sorry.”
Kanako smiled sweetly at Shibaki, knowing that if she did so there was a chance he’d waive his rental fees. Kanako was well aware of the effects of her smile.
“It’s all in the face for girls,” Eri snorted from beside her.
“No, it’s definitely all about the body.”
Kanako grabbed her friend’s sturdy arms, and Eri flexed her muscles.
Looking over the classroom, it was around half full. It wasn’t a bad turnout for a morning lecture. Kanako took a window-side seat and aired out the reek of cigarettes as she looked down on the courtyard.
Appraising the campus again, she couldn’t help but think how tasteless and unrefreshing it was. Kanako’s Department of Literature building faced that of her boyfriend’s Economics Department over the green belt of the courtyard at Eiwa Gakuin University. The other buildings housing the Sociology and International Studies departments, majors that seemed useless outside of academics, were slowly swallowing up freshmen and sophomores who yawned and complained about how sluggish they felt.
Kanako prayed that she hadn’t made a mistake in choosing her literature concentration. So long as they worked diligently in core courses like “Introduction to Mass Media” and “Journalism: Theory and Practice,” a certain percentage of graduates would find jobs at publishing companies. Even some of the not-so-elite alumni apparently penned magazine articles as freelance writers.
At the orientation conducted at the beginning of the semester at the Nasu Highlands Seminar House, Kanako had tentatively answered that her dream was “to be in charge of the film page at a trend-setting magazine.” Those pages where film critics and intellectuals gave five-star reviews after private screenings—and she, as the head reporter, would add comments like, “So long as you don’t go in with high expectations, it should be fun,” or “If you don’t watch this on the big screen you’ll regret it your whole life.”
Was my dream becoming a reporter for a magazine? she asked herself.
No, in fact if anything it was the opposite. But it was also true that she had been overwhelmed by the sight of reporters scribbling away furiously. Wincing at the questions thrown her way, she had peered at their memo pads and the indecipherable shorthand notes scrawled on them. When she’d thought about how those words would be turned into print and rivet the eyes of hundreds of thousands of readers, she couldn’t help but feel the power of the written word.
In her mid-teens, Kanako had been forced to make many appearances in articles with titles like, “How They’re Surviving…”
She was never notified in advance but instead cornered by reporters on the street on her way back from school. “Please stop,” she confronted one reporter who tried to take photos of her face. She knew that she’d be asked to smile. They wanted her to give them a smile that said, “I’ve recovered.”
In the end, photos of her from back when she was a sixth grader were used in those articles. That photo, where she had stood as the chief mourner with her uncle from Hachioji beside her. She had carried four heavy frames, the portraits of her deceased family.
Even now, she could clearly remember how on the day of the funeral, the shutters on the cameras had all been clicked at once, and how the flood of noise had resembled the chitter of insects.
She didn’t remember crying. It had been unnaturally hot for the month of May and sweat had gotten into her eye. To the photographers, she had probably looked the perfect part of “the lone surviving daughter of a family that met their untimely deaths, shedding tears.”
She had already shed all of her tears in the morning, leaving not a single drop left. And not just her tears, but all the fluids in her body. Sweating under the sun during the funeral procession, she had become a little dehydrated and dizzy in the car ride to the crematorium.
If those reporters from back then had been promoted to managerial positions at their companies, she could use them as connections. She planned to take advantage of everything she could.
The lecturer entered. He resembled the legal advisor to a religious cult who had often come up on TV and always looked depressed whenever he entered the classroom. Kanako knew why. It was because Shibaki was there.
Although the lecturer was a graduate of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and had just returned from a study abroad in Massachusetts in April, even he was aware that his pronunciation was far inferior to Junichi Shibaki’s.
Kanako held in her yawns and somehow made it through the fifty minutes.
“What is your favorite song, Miss Akiba?” she was asked in English. After getting to a good cut-off point in their textbook, the rest
of their time was spent practicing their conversational skills.
“Yes,” Kanako said with a jolt, standing up. The rule was to never reply to the lecturer’s questions in Japanese. “My favorite song is…” She thought about it and named the first one that came to mind. “‘Yesterdays.’”
“‘Yesterdays’?” The lecturer asked her if she meant “Yesterday Once More” by the Carpenters.
“No. ‘Yesterdays.’”
Both the lecturer and Junichi Shibaki were cocking their heads. Perhaps the song she had chosen was a bit old. It was a standard number of not just Billie Holiday, but also Helen Merrill and Joe Stafford.
For then gay youth was mine, truth was mine. Joyous free in flame and life, then sooth was mine. For today I’m dreamin’ of yesterdays…
She had found the song among the records her father had left behind.
The bell rang signaling the end of lecture, and Kanako felt relieved. She didn’t know what she would have done if she had been asked to sing part of it.
David Lynch’s newest work unsurprisingly didn’t go over well with the audience.
As usual, she was prepared with her binder with a sheaf of surveys and a ballpoint pen. She stood at the top of Spain Slope in Shibuya and cornered five groups of people exiting the movie theater and jotted down their opinions for the exit poll. The exit polls for trend magazines were usually concentrated on Saturdays, the release day for new films, but the place where Kanako worked part-time also conducted surveys during the week. Audiences on opening days, they said, weren’t very reliable because they were filled with people who had eagerly waited for the film to release and as a result positive reviews were the overwhelming majority.
She had just finished her first half-year at the part-time job with the trade journal her uncle had introduced her to. She’d even gotten the hang of the technique: standing in front of a couple to make sure they couldn’t get away before asking, “Please take the survey.” The key was to smile pleasantly and talk fast. If she could manage to get out, “We’ll give you this phone charm as thanks for your participation,” and quickly dangled it in front of their noses, they’d comply and answer her questions.
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