Due to such circumstances, in practice it often took anywhere from four to five years for death sentences to be carried out.
According to the article, an activist group fighting for the abolition of capital punishment had urged Norio Tsuzuki and his attorney to press for a retrial, but at a press conference after the verdict the lawyer had commented that “The defendant sincerely accepts the ruling.” As such, it was presumed that there would be no motion for a retrial.
Even with the case closed, Kanako didn’t feel at all glad that she’d left things up to the law. Would she feel satisfied in four or five years when she saw on the news that Norio Tsuzuki had been hanged?
Apparently they weren’t told the date of their execution, and in the mornings they would hear the enforcement officers pad quietly down the halls and wonder if today was their day and shudder in fear.
Kanako tried to imagine what it would be like to live those mornings for five years. She tried to compare it with the fear and pain her family had felt as they had been killed, but she flat-out didn’t know.
“For whom the bell tolls…” Kanako mumbled, imbuing the title of last week’s lecture reading with her own feelings, sarcastically. For whom did the bell of the execution ring, and who did the law serve?
Offenders had rights because even though they had done wrong, they were still alive.
Victims had no rights because once dead, they had no way of exercising those rights.
When a death sentence was passed on an offender whose rights were being respected, the punishment was no longer for the death-row inmate himself, but rather for the people who watched from a distance. Its purpose was to show them “what happens when you kill someone.” In other words, wasn’t the law always prioritizing the living?
Then what about me? Kanako couldn’t help but think. When she wondered whether she was among the living that the law prioritized, she felt that wasn’t quite right.
Here she was, accepting the deaths of her four family members and imagining those moments. She believed that she shouldn’t be happy alone and that she ought to sunder herself to an equal degree. It creepily felt as though she were one of the dead, too, and only biologically alive.
Always bearing the deaths of her father, her mother, and her two brothers as her burden, and occasionally taking their memories in hand and polishing them, she created in her mind the parts of their lives that had been lost.
As she walked the virgin road, her father, overcome with emotion, would stand beside her. Her mother would chuckle warmly as she changed her first grandchild’s diapers. Her brothers would both find adorable brides.
Polished like that, the four of them seemed to shine with more life than her. Kanako could only pant raggedly, unable to bear her burden and falling to her knees.
If she was among the living, she wanted to laugh with her whole heart. If she was among the dead, she wanted to rest beneath the earth. Unable to accomplish either, she had no choice but to lock herself in those “four hours.”
Eight years ago, she had stared at her own face in the women’s bathroom in a parking area and told herself to remember since she would change. Belatedly, Kanako was impressed that she’d been such a sharp little girl, able to predict that. The Kanako back then had even gone as far as to smile at herself in the mirror and wonder how long it would take until she could see herself smile again.
The four hours between her departure from the highlands of her school trip and her arrival at a Tokyo medical facility where her family slept were the boundary line between her living self and another self who would live burdened with death.
Was that why she unfurled a screen behind her eyelids every once in a while to watch, in full color with Dolby Stereo acoustics, an epic four-hour production without any intermission, reliving in excruciating detail the night she had crossed the boundary?
“You look like an old man with that sports paper spread out like that.”
A box of snacks landed on its surface as she held it aloft. It was Eri. Norio Tsuzuki’s face was hidden by a package that sang, “Authentic sauce foodstand-style!”
“If you eat stuff like this so early in the morning, you’ll have to diet again,” Kanako warned before grabbing three chips from the open box of takoyaki-flavored chips and crunching on them noisily. She crammed the sports newspaper into the trashcan and walked beside Eri to the wing that housed their classroom.
“I’m rebounding now, it’s been miserable holding back.”
“These are really good.”
“Right? Wait, where’s your stuff?”
“I forgot my textbook. Share?”
“You came early but don’t have it on you. Let me guess, a sleepover?”
“Well, yeah.”
“So that’s why Takster was in the clubroom. Were you also holding hands on your way, or what?” Apparently she had just seen Takumi listlessly killing time in the photography clubroom.
As they bantered back and forth, Kanako felt relieved that it seemed this day was also starting like any other.
An orange watch was digging into Eri’s wrist. The new merchandise bore the face of a Brazilian midfielder.
“As devoted as ever,” Kanako teased.
“I’ve got more supplies from the fan club, want some?”
“No thanks.”
It was their usual shallow chitchat. Kanako couldn’t help but feel that she was some creature only wearing the mask of “an ordinary coed” who sheltered her true identity in a hideaway.
From there, she’d prayed for a noose around Norio Tsuzuki’s neck; wished for the presiding judge’s family to be killed; observed her cells fraying one at a time from pointless sex with Takumi.
Perhaps it was thanks to the hideaway that she could live and not wilt from the challenge. The place was built on the deaths of her family and filled with the blood squeezed out of the four of them by Norio Tsuzuki.
Perhaps she was drowning in it.
Sucking fresh air over her tongue, having burned it eating stone-cooked bibimbap, she returned to the campus with Takumi.
“You’re working part-time tonight too, right?” he said.
“Yeah. What about you, Takumi?”
Apparently there was going to be a club meeting to discuss a photography tour to take photos for the school festival project. This year they’d be exploring Yakushima Island, and Takumi was pumped for it.
“Which theater?”
He at least bothered to worry about her. Her job required her to stand out in the shopping district late at night, and sometimes scouts with bleached hair approached her.
“Same as last night. Cinema Rise. It’s at the top of Spain Slope.”
Kanako had her doubts about putting so much effort into part-time work. She only made forty thousand yen per month at it, only enough to pay for her electricity and cell phone bills.
She had received a considerable inheritance upon her family’s demise, from her father and mother’s life insurance, the money from her brothers’ educational insurance, and the plot of land in Asagaya, which had sold after being marked down considerably. Half of the total had gone to her aunt’s family, who would be taking care of her, and the remaining half comprised her tuition funds and her savings for when she became independent.
Among her relatives on her father’s side, there were some who gossiped about her aunt’s family—They got to remodel their house after taking in Kanako, so at least someone got something out of this misery.
The amount recorded in her recently updated bankbook flashed in her mind. There was no denying that the money her family had left her had served her well.
There was also no denying that Kanako hadn’t been able to count on any of her relatives except her aunt’s family.
Kanako’s grandfather, that is to say, the father of her father and aunt, had been in a special elderly nursing home at the time. Once a private clinician in Yokohama, she had seldom seen him because he and her father hadn’t gotten along from when her fat
her was little.
She recalled how her grandfather had looked at the funeral—in a wheelchair, his mouth hanging open as he lit incense. He had breathed his last at the home the year Kanako entered college. His funeral had been a lonely affair, a far cry from her father and the rest of her family’s.
The media had preyed on her grandfather on her mother’s side after the incident eight years ago. He’d declared bankruptcy and disappeared, and in the end didn’t even show up for the funeral. When some noontime show found him working at an inn in Kushiro and cornered him for an interview, he gave the miserable excuse that he “wasn’t the one who asked this Norio Tsuzuki person to co-sign.”
He was probably right. He’d entrusted his son-in-law with the task of finding a co-signer. And Yukihiko Akiba had looked around and asked himself who could pay if the debt caught up with his father-in-law.
He’d never considered taking the heat himself.
In her last year of middle school, after poring over the statement she’d obtained via Shiina, Kanako had headed to the library to re-read the first trial’s microfilmed summary.
While it thoroughly disputed the defense’s claims of a mental instability or breakdown, it also held that Yukihiko Akiba was morally culpable for offering the equivalent of a blank IOU and deftly manipulating the defendant to sign and put his seal on it, and for psychologically browbeating him.
To a certain extent, we can understand the defendant’s hatred of Yukihiko Akiba. Those were the words between the lines that rose up.
The media’s tone had shifted as time passed. Looking up in the library the weeklies that she hadn’t been allowed to read back then, she could readily imagine the faces of all the reporters dying to say, “It couldn’t be helped that a man like Yukihiko Akiba was murdered.”
She refused to swallow what the statement and weeklies told her and to incriminate her father.
Still, she couldn’t help but admit that he’d earned someone’s grudge and that her mother and brothers had paid the price in blood.
The weeklies’ articles all concluded with similar text.
Regardless, it is difficult to forgive him for also killing two young children, for which he deserves capital punishment…
Tomoki and Naoki’s deaths were the breakwater that managed to protect their family name. If it had been only her father and mother, Norio Tsuzuki would likely have benefited from the extenuating circumstances. Maybe Kanako needed to be grateful for her brothers’ deaths for clinching the man’s death sentence.
She had received a mortality payout from her brothers’ education insurance as well. One million five hundred yen each, for three million total. She had put it to good use by entering the private Eiwa Gakuin University, which cost one million per annum.
Though she lamely borrowed notes from Junichi Shibaki, she did get passing marks in all of her classes. She hoped that was enough to earn the forgiveness of her family who had left so much money in her bank account.
“So, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?” her boyfriend said.
“Yeah.”
Takumi casually waved goodbye before running off to the Econ wing, his Leica and choker jangling from his neck.
She wondered how long this would continue with Takumi.
He would no doubt be horrified to learn that no matter how much passion he poured into her, she would never thaw, and that she was only using sex as a tool to destroy herself.
“Maybe I want you to rape me. Maybe I’m letting you make love to me so you can damage any cells in me that are still healthy.”
She wondered what kind of face he would make if she told him that.
Kanako got lonely just like anyone else. That was why she stayed in Takumi’s room twice a week. If they didn’t have sex, there was comfort, however fleeting, to be had in the feeling of skin clinging against skin.
However, men were creatures who couldn’t be satisfied with just that.
He was meant to be a convenient lover to whom she could bare her body, but not her heart.
Such a relationship wasn’t love. It was just her using a man as a convenient tool to scoop away her loneliness. Keep saying that, Kanako shot back at the voice coming from her hideaway.
Even if it was just the surface of Kanako Akiba, she wanted him to love it. She wasn’t seeking anything more.
“I still like you, Takumi…” Kanako muttered as he was sucked into the Econ building entrance.
What kind of tears if any would she shed when she said goodbye to Takumi?
She finished her survey at Cinema Rise and walked down Spain Slope.
She was sure that her aunt had left her a voice message. She could listen to it now on her cell phone but decided against it. If she was going to get depressed anyway, she might as well wait until she got home.
She could easily imagine the media coming down on the house in Hachioji.
“If your niece could give us any comments,” those people would ring the bell nonstop and call through the intercom. Her aunt had said last night that she would just make up answers.
Kanako wondered exactly how. “My older brother’s family will finally be able to rest in peace,” maybe?
Thanks to doubts that had sprouted one day during high school, for the past four years Kanako had been unable to fully trust her aunt and uncle.
She was confident that she wasn’t being paranoid. Without feeling any self-disgust or that she was a twisted girl, Kanako calmly analyzed her aunt.
It began when she asked herself why her aunt’s family had taken her in and raised her as one of their own.
Although half of the inheritance including her family’s insurance had gone to her aunt’s family, Kanako didn’t believe that the money was the reason why they had adopted her. It had taken considerable convincing to get her aunt to accept the sum in the first place. “You should put all of it into your own savings,” she’d said, and her husband had finally relented and deposited it in their bank account only after Kanako insisted that they hold on to it for her sake.
As far as she knew, most of the money remained untouched. Her gossiping relatives who claimed that her aunt and uncle had used it all to renovate their house were not telling the truth.
So why had she been welcomed into her aunt’s household? Why had Kanako been given her own room alongside Shingo and Maki in the renovated house?
Maybe it was guilt, the sixteen-year-old Kanako had hypothesized.
Her aunt was happily cooking tempura in the newly renovated kitchen. Apparently she had decided beforehand that the first dish she’d make there was tempura. The oil bubbled merrily as she pulled out one deep-fried vegetable after another and laid them on a pure white kitchen sheet.
She was humming a song by one of her favorite artists, Yumi Matsutoya.
Kanako had come back from school before Maki and Shingo and was organizing the bookshelves in a brand-new room.
She now had a room the same size as Maki’s and Shingo’s, but her good fortune felt like a complex math equation.
Why were they being so nice to her?
As she sat there on the flawless new flooring, a hypothesis came to her like a divine revelation.
Maybe her father had asked her aunt, his little sister, to guarantee the debt of his father-in-law, Kanako’s grandfather in Kobe. And maybe her aunt had refused.
“Why don’t you become his guarantor, brother? It’s for your own father-in-law,” her aunt would have argued.
Aware of his father-in-law’s loose management style, Kanako’s father must have known that the loan would turn bad and that the co-signer would get burned. He didn’t want to take any of the heat himself.
Her aunt suspected that her refusal to become the guarantor and Norio Tsuzuki ending up in that role had precipitated the case. In order to alleviate her guilt, she’d taken in her brother’s orphaned daughter, Kanako. Wasn’t that it?
That was why they had given her such a room.
Kanako went down to the kitchen. Her a
unt looked satisfied at how the batter was turning out.
“Did my father ask you to co-sign?”
The words bubbled up Kanako’s throat but never left her mouth. She didn’t want the peaceful life that she finally enjoyed to start creaking and teetering.
“Aren’t you also one of the people who forced Norio Tsuzuki’s hand?”
She sealed those words in the place where she stored all her cruel but true thoughts in the past. It was only recently that she had named this place the “hideaway.”
“Did you finish organizing your room?”
Her aunt finally noticed Kanako, who stood still at the entrance to the kitchen. The glow of the sun from the west made the curls on her aunt’s head seem aflame as she sent what may have been a smile towards Kanako.
“Yeah…do you want help?”
Green peppers, shiitake mushrooms, and sweet potatoes. Kanako began to line the steaming deep-fried vegetables onto five plates. Her aunt continued to hum Yumi Matsutoya beside her, and it sounded like a lullaby as it reached Kanako’s ears.
It was like a lullaby that soothed and put to sleep the misgivings that couldn’t quite fit in her hideaway and were trying to crawl out.
The hideaway’s construction had been completed during her taxi trip back to Tokyo from her school trip.
Knowing that she would only get hurt if she saw and heard many things, she’d decided then that she would live with her five senses dulled.
As for the things that passed through her eyes and ears regardless, she carefully wrapped them up and stored them in her hideaway. She also locked up her reactions to the things she saw and heard. If she let out her true thoughts, the world around her would only strain, making it even harder for her to live.
Maintaining a sturdy hideaway was the only piece of worldly wisdom she had.
When she got into her first-choice college, she would leave the house in Hachioji. It wasn’t that she couldn’t commute from there to a school in Higashi-Kitazawa, but she wanted to free herself from the tangle of thoughts that lingered there and be alone.
Deep Red Page 11