In 1990, there was a certain case where a victim had found a police investigation inadequate and had tried to sue the country. The Supreme Court handed down a clear-cut ruling: “The purpose of conducting criminal investigations and employing prosecutorial powers is to maintain a greater good, namely public and social order, and not the restitution of interests or reclamation of rights of the victim of the crime.”
Kanako said, “Right, but the presiding judge still has the nerve to say in rulings that he understands the victim’s family’s anger and sorrow. All the while shutting them out from the courts.”
She didn’t actually go around carrying this frustration in her heart. She was just acting the part of a bereaved middle schooler incensed at the law’s shortcomings in order to manipulate Shiina into getting her the statement.
Kanako’s true feelings lay elsewhere.
Couldn’t someone just kill the presiding judge’s family? She wanted people who casually threw out words like “unimaginable anger and sorrow” to know what they really meant.
“The offender is judged according to the law, while the victim ends up getting judged by society,” Shiina said.
It sounded like some human rights platitude, but Kanako agreed. After the incident, the relationship between her father and the perp and bits about her grandfather’s company’s shoddy management were in the tabloids almost every week. People tried to keep her unaware, but as time passed they started to let their guard down. Kanako could gather, whether she liked it or not, that the public felt for the perp who’d been tricked into guaranteeing her grandfather’s debt.
She browsed magazines at a bookstore on her way back from school. She also got up early while her aunt’s family was still asleep to secretly watch the early morning news.
She was shocked when she saw her own name and face in an article, but after learning that the victim’s side was left out of the loop for court proceedings, she realized that that was just the way things worked.
The victim’s side had no role in the trial system. That they had no role meant that their rights were not protected in the media. That the law didn’t protect them meant that society didn’t view their rights as worth recognizing.
When they spoke about “safeguarding the rights of the weak,” “the weak” referred to underage criminals who were Kanako’s age, criminals with a history of mental illness, or even criminals’ families. It did not by any means refer to the victims of crime.
“Mr. Shiina, you’ve read the statement, right?”
“I have.”
“What did you think? Did you think it sounded fake?”
“No, I think everything he wrote is true. Although whether or not he was mentally unstable or having a breakdown at the time is a different matter,” Shiina replied with conviction.
“In that case, please, let me read it.”
She gazed at him bravely, seriously, knowing that there was no way that a middle-aged man would not feel pity for her, a fifteen year old.
“I’ll do it,” Shiina consented to the deal. Manipulating men was too easy, Kanako thought.
Two days later, a thick package arrived addressed to Kanako.
She read and reread the statement that Shiina had acquired from the activist group.
She shared the prosecution and court’s dissatisfaction with it.
Her mother had died after being hit multiple times with a hammer. Her father had been choked until he couldn’t breathe. Up to that point, she could stretch her imagination to its limit and imagine their pain. But with regards to the physical shock that her brothers must have experienced as they had clung crying to their mother’s corpse, the statement was vague. The “blank thirty seconds” had been hotly contested at the trial.
Both of her brothers had probably shared the fate of their mother and been struck with a hammer. She wondered who had been first. Tomoki or Naoki?
If Tomoki had been first, what had Naoki and the eyes of a four year old witnessed? He would have heard a thunking noise and seen his older brother fall to the floor like their mother. She wondered how much time had passed before Norio Tsuzuki had aimed for Naoki and raised his hammer up again. Two seconds? Maybe three? How much fear had Naoki felt during those three seconds? The weapon glinting stickily with his mother and older brother’s blood was bearing down on him. Kanako wondered if he had closed his eyes and waited.
She felt that her own life couldn’t progress until she fully understood and internalized her brothers’ fear in their last moments. Her therapist would most likely sum it all up as just an obsession. Was living always going to be “a challenge” for her?
What was the fear of approaching death like?
And the pain between receiving the shock and death?
She didn’t know. She felt like she didn’t know anything. Frustrated with the incompetence of her imagination, Kanako opened her window. It was midnight.
Maki, who slept in the same room as her, continued to breathe peacefully, sound asleep. Kanako climbed over the windowsill with her bare feet.
She cut through the tiny yard that contained the family vegetable garden and stepped out onto the street outside. She wondered what she was trying to do. She didn’t know.
There weren’t enough lights in the residential area in the fifteen-minute walk to Hachioji station. The empty, dozen-feet-wide public road was so chilling it seemed a passageway for ghosts, and she finally remembered a scent that she had forgotten for the longest time.
The medical examiner’s office at which they’d finally arrived after losing their way several times. The smell of the morgue where the four of them had been draped with white cloth. The smell of bodies that no longer had blood flowing through them rotting, the smell of the germs in them multiplying exponentially.
Her bare feet clung to the icy asphalt. A stream of light appeared on the road from beyond the slope. It was a single bike. A man with a helmet that covered his whole head gave Kanako a dubious glance as she stood there like a sleepwalker, and tried to pass by.
She moved closer the moment he did. She defied the overwhelming force that was charging towards her. “What the hell!” the helmeted man roared, and the sharp wind of the bike speeding past cut into her cheek.
She was finally able to imagine what Naoki may have felt in his last moments.
She thought that perhaps this was the wind that he felt on his cheek when Norio Tsuzuki swung down his hammer. It must have been several dozen times more terrifying than what she had just experienced, and to think that that had been her brothers’ last moments—she couldn’t help but reaffirm that she ought to have shared in that experience. She blamed herself, feeling that it wasn’t right that she alone remained alive.
Suddenly, her field of view warped and became wet. The tears that she hadn’t even shown her therapist had returned, and she cried for her family for the first time in three years.
“I’m sorry…” Kanako looked up at the night sky, sought out the brightest star, and squeezed out her voice. “I’m sorry I’m alive…”
She wanted them to forgive her, she who sometimes laughed rolling on the floor at her aunt’s house. If living life without ever laughing again would honor her family, she vowed to never laugh again.
But Kanako also understood that that would most likely be impossible. She was just a kid, she knew. If she had fun, she would laugh.
She finally peeled her feet from the asphalt and headed back home. She passed through the window and entered the room, closing it firmly behind her so nothing could sneak in. She curled up in her futon and cursed herself for failing to completely wreck herself. And for the first time since the incident, she felt rage and hatred so intense that it burned her body.
Her family’s fear and pain, her own suffering in that her life would be a challenge of sorts—she wanted to turn it all into a weapon and hurl it at Norio Tsuzuki.
She felt something grasp her breast from behind and woke up.
She wondered where she was. Morni
ng sunlight poured in abundance into the seven-tatami mat room. It was Takumi Watanabe’s room, where she usually ended up staying twice a week. Although it was in the jam-packed residential area of Higashi-Kitazawa, there were few things blocking the sky, and the mornings after she stayed the night were always blindingly bright.
She was embarrassed being held so early in the morning, and in such a bright room, and kept her back turned on the pipe-frame single bed.
Takumi seemed to understand before he even touched her there and carefully moistened her with his saliva. Already wearing a condom, he thrust into her from behind. That was the only time Kanako let out an earnest moan, her senses jolted. After that followed sluggish movements, sex that felt half-asleep. She wished they didn’t have to do this and could just idle in bed.
When Takumi woke up in the mornings before her, it always ended up this way. Of course it wasn’t against her will. He would sleepily mumble, “All right?” in her ear, and she would reply, “Sure,” before it began.
Takumi trailed his hand under her shirt and grasped her breast. His skin felt rough. His hands were getting chapped from his part-time at the pub. Takumi’s skin was sensitive to dish detergent, but apparently he had been glared at by the more senior workers when he had tried wearing rubber gloves.
“Does it feel good?”
“Yeah. Good.”
She wondered how she managed to say the words with such melancholy.
She felt there was a limit to the number of times they would make love. Takumi would realize this one day, too.
He was the only guy Kanako had been with, but she doubted it would be any different with another man in his place.
She hoped he’d finish soon. After all, it’d all end without her having felt anything, without any afterglow.
The morning after a death sentence had been passed on her family’s murderer, the surviving daughter was having sex with a man. She wondered if this was inappropriate.
She thought it’d be soon, and tried a moan. As though singing in a round, Takumi also cried out. She felt like she was controlling the intensity of his pleasure and was a bit amused. She decided to allow herself this small bit of fun.
Takumi wailed, sounding almost in tears. Half a year ago, when she had first slept with him in this room, in other words during her first experience, she found it mysterious that the man should seem to be in such anguish.
Takumi moved impatiently, reached his climax immediately, and then began to soften. She put her hand over Takumi’s where it still grasped her breast. She did feel like her blood was coursing through parts of her lower body, but once again her core hadn’t shook an inch. She wondered if this was what frigidity was, but sex wasn’t a very important part of her life so she decided to leave it be.
She was wasting her own body. She felt that every time she did this, the healthy cells in her body bruised and broke. She wondered why she didn’t refuse Takumi and accepted his caresses nonetheless.
Takumi left for the bathroom, still naked. He would no doubt flush the condom once he had removed it. Kanako always worried whether that was all right. Wouldn’t a clump of rubber come out from a clogged sewage pipe one day?
“English starting at ten?”
He put away his rather pathetically shriveled privates beneath boxers, then pulled on sports shorts that had their university logo. “I’m in the auditorium at eleven. I can sleep there so it’s fine. Want to go together?”
“How about breakfast?”
Kanako took off the T-shirt she had borrowed to wear in place of pajamas and put on her bra and summer sweater. She wore a checkered skirt on the bottom. She put up her messy hair in a fast and simple ponytail.
“I’ve got heartburn.” No doubt the culprit was the ramen from the street vendor he had eaten at past two in the morning.
Takumi clipped the silver choker she had given him for his birthday onto his tanned neck. He wore a white V-neck shirt with an army vest and put his cell phone and a box of Lark Mild cigarettes in his two breast pockets. He looked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and combed his overgrown curly permed hair with his fingers, then hung a small Leica brand camera over his head. Takumi had finished his preparations.
Kanako realized that the number of photos on the wall had increased. Takumi had taken and enlarged the photos, pinning them to a corkboard with tacks to create a collage that covered one entire wall.
A grassy eulalia plain shining with backlighting. A city throng where everything cast long shadows. A kitten that had been thrown away in a cardboard box. There was even a close-up of Kanako’s grumpy face. It wasn’t that he didn’t have shots of her smiling. These were just some of the photos that Takumi had taken on a whim.
He had renovated the closet to create a dark room, and a bottle of film developing solution sat beside a bottle of prime sake in the corner. The sake had most likely been sent from home.
If he was seriously considering going pro, he should have entered the photography department at an art school or gone to a film vocational school, but as the eldest son of a sake brewery in Niigata, he felt it more proper to become a business major. He claimed that he was fine with photography being a hobby.
Kanako had stopped taunting him to “Try to take good photos,” but whenever he shot photos of her, she wanted them to be the best.
If he had any intention of creating an accurate record of her as she was now, she didn’t want him to hold back any of his talent.
Kanako also finished getting ready and the two of them left the room together.
She didn’t have her textbook or any writing implements on her. It was a pain to walk the twenty minutes back to her apartment, so she decided to ask one of her friends to share her textbook for the morning core curriculum class.
Takumi turned around from where he walked three paces ahead of her and turned the Leica towards her and quickly clicked the shutter.
“Stop it,” she said, hiding her face. The hollow expression she had worn last night may have lingered and she didn’t want it preserved. She’d let him know when she wanted herself to be shot.
“There’s no film in it.”
“Oh.”
They bumped shoulders and joked around.
The narrow street was lined with eateries for students, and soon they could see the university campus that also included within its perimeter the attached middle and high schools.
They passed through the middle school grounds. They could hear children laughing as class ended in the science lab.
Kanako’s eye caught sight of a boy sitting near the window at an experiment table. He was dismantling something with a pair of pliers.
Kanako slowed down. She was distracted by the boy’s hands.
He was dismantling a simple battery. He lifted out the black core with blackened hands. She remembered learning that this was the positive pole in a battery. She tried to recall what it was called. The carbon rod. Or something like that.
“Hey, what are you looking at?” Takumi followed Kanako’s gaze.
It looks just like that, Kanako thought. The thing that pierced through her parallel to her spine, the thing that remained cold no matter how much heat it absorbed and took in Takumi’s gasps with a dispassionate gaze.
The black core.
“I’ll wait for you here for lunch.”
She parted ways with Takumi at the green belt in the courtyard. They tried to eat lunch together when they didn’t have prior arrangements with friends. Even though they were dating, Takumi had suggested that they try not to neglect their friends. Compared to Kanako, who had to think about how many friends she actually had that she trusted, Takumi was the vice president of the photography club and had a wide network of acquaintances.
After seeing off Takumi as he hurried to the building that housed his clubroom, Kanako sat on a bench and looked at the trash bin that had been in her sight since they had entered the courtyard.
A sports newspaper had been discarded there. She took
it in hand and checked the date. It was today’s. She found the article she was looking for in the society section.
The Supreme Court had rejected the final appeal of defendant Norio Tsuzuki, he of the Asagaya family massacre, and handed down a death sentence.
She had seen the mug shot so many times it was stuck in her mind. It made her think of a shy hamster. The article summarized the case and proceedings all the way to the final appeal. Kanako quickly skimmed the contents, making sure that her name wasn’t mentioned.
From the first trial to the final appeal, his lawyer had fought against the prosecution like a one-trick pony and contended that the defendant had experienced a mental illness or breakdown. The contents of this ruling didn’t vary much from that of the district and high courts and pointed out once again the deceptiveness of the personal statement.
According to the article, the Supreme Court providing a ruling a mere eight years after the case was exceptionally swift, and perhaps the courts had taken into consideration the feelings of the victim’s family.
Taken into consideration the feelings of the victim’s family? My feelings?
It was as if Kanako had asked them to “Execute him already.” She didn’t remember having ever made such a request, but it was true that she had hoped for it. Perhaps she should be grateful for this chief justice’s thoughtfulness. In that case, she didn’t mind burying her wish that his family ought to be murdered as well.
In the end, with everything entrusted to the government and the law, Norio Tsuzuki had received the punishment she’d wanted for him.
Apparently, there were around sixty criminals on death row in Japan right then. Death sentences were technically supposed to be carried out within six months of the ruling, but if the regulation were actually being enforced, sixty death-row inmates wouldn’t be piled up in the system. The executions were delayed because many of them appealed their sentences. Ministers of Justice who opposed capital punishment or were mindful of critics tended to balk at signing writs of execution.
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