Deep Red

by Hisashi Nozawa

  She got off the Inokashira line at Shimokitazawa.

  She didn’t want to bother eating out and bought a salmon bento and tea at the convenience store before passing through the lively streets filled with drunken students.

  Her room was cold. The air conditioner was on. Last night, when she had fled to go see Takumi, she had forgotten to turn it off.

  When she turned on the TV, a news program was on. She doubted they would show a follow-up report on Norio Tsuzuki’s death sentence. After the one-minute segment on the previous night’s news, the media and the general public would probably never betray any interest in it again. Later when the execution was carried out, people might say, “Oh, yeah, there was a case like that. So the perp finally paid for it with his life.” It was that trivial for them, but she didn’t mind. She was perfectly fine with people forgetting about it.

  She decided to listen to her voice mail. There was one message. As expected, from her aunt.

  “We got some calls from newspapers and weeklies asking for you to comment, Kako, but I just told them that you don’t have anything particular to say.”

  Perfect.

  “They asked for your phone number, but of course I didn’t tell them. They didn’t seem too desperate so I doubt there’ll be anything after this. You should come home sometime. Well then, I’ll call again…”

  She put the salmon bento in the microwave. She made a bowl of instant miso soup. She opened the cap to a bottle of green tea, meaning to only take a sip, but ended up gulping down half the bottle. It seemed like she’d been dehydrated.

  The microwave rang. She pulled out the heated salmon bento but found herself feeling full from the tea. No longer hungry but not exactly satisfied, she just sipped at her instant miso soup.

  She took off her clothes and tossed her sweaty underclothes into the laundry basket. Now that she was naked, she might as well take a shower.

  A sound similar to pouring rain echoed in the unit bathroom.

  The sound of rain. The rainy season. An umbrella with flower patterns. Through a chain of associations, she remembered that day during the rainy season eight years ago.

  The forty-ninth-day memorial service for her family was over. Interview requests from the media had ceased for now, and the procedures for her transfer to Hachioji Elementary School were also complete. It felt like standing at a new starting line.

  She sat on the porch, spacing out and staring at the slanted rainfall that drenched the yard.

  Kanako had to wonder what an elementary school student like herself was doing there at such an hour. But this was her time to rest, as recommended by her therapist.

  She’d heard of “household help” as being a woman’s profession and couldn’t help but feel that that was what she’d become.

  Every morning she would make lunches for her uncle and Shingo, then assist with her aunt’s grocery shopping. If it was nice out they would go to a nearby park and relax and have lunch together, and in the afternoon, she would help Maki with her homework after she came home from school. After repeating these days, she could feel the stiffness falling away from her face.

  In exchange for not crying every day, she had probably pasted on an expressionless iron mask.

  Even so, spending her days on the self-same household chores with her aunt, Kanako learned that a calm life wasn’t devoid of trifles that brought a smile to your face.

  She counted on her fingers the simple pleasures she had experienced recently.

  The fried mackerel she put into the lunches turning out perfect. Hydrangeas wet from the rain shining so blindingly bright when the sun cast its rays through a break in the clouds. A cool breeze passing through the streets of the shopping district after the rain and drying her sweat in an instant. When she lined up outside a bento chain store, the employee used freshly made rice for her. When she ate it on a bench in the park, it tasted amazing.

  She heard the doorbell ring. “Coming!” her aunt called, heading to the entrance. Her conversation with the visitor sounded like the chirping of insects. Eventually her aunt came out to the porch.

  “We have a guest…”

  Her aunt’s smile looked confused. From her expression, Kanako sensed that someone was going to disturb the peaceful daily life she had achieved with all of its simple pleasures.

  A sleek black suit that looked designer repelled the water droplets from the rain. The red rose brooch looked like a bloom of blood from a gunshot wound to the chest. Hair set voluptuously and dyed to have hints of brown. A strong smell of perfume wafted out around the altar where Kanako’s family’s photos were enshrined. Foundation coated the woman’s skin without leaving a single crack as though wearing makeup were part of her job description. As a result, it was impossible to guess her age. Kanako had once heard that you could tell a woman’s age by looking at the wrinkles on her hands, and peering at the woman’s as she prayed before her father’s photo, Kanako guessed that she was in her mid-thirties. To use her aunt’s words, the visitor could be summed up as “a woman who worked the nightlife.”

  “I felt that a woman like me shouldn’t turn up at a funeral…I apologize for my rudeness in not paying my respects till now.”

  Her aunt’s face revealed that she already recognized what this woman had been to Yukihiko Akiba. It didn’t take long for Kanako, too, to surmise what the visitor had meant by “a woman like me.”

  “This isn’t much, but…”

  Her aunt hesitated a moment before accepting the offered condolence money with a “Thank you kindly.”

  The woman turned a damp gaze towards Kanako and continued to stare, as though uncertain what words of comfort she should offer. Kanako started to feel awkward, but whenever she tried to look away, the eyes framed with false lashes exerted a gravitational pull.

  “Kanako, what did you call your father? ‘Father’? ‘Papa’?”

  “Father, ma’am.”

  “You loved your father, didn’t you?”

  “…I did.”

  “Do you think you could offer this to your father?” The woman pulled boxed brandy out of her bag. “This was your father’s favorite.”

  Kanako didn’t recognize the brand. They didn’t have such expensive-looking alcohol at home.

  “You should pour some when you visit him.”

  She was being told to pour it on her father’s tomb. Kanako felt that it was a hassle but couldn’t refuse.

  The woman didn’t even stay in front of the altar for five minutes. She also didn’t touch the tea her aunt had steeped for her. She stood up from the tatami and said, “If you’ll excuse me,” and left. The smell of her perfume lingered for a while. Her aunt opened the window to air out the room and murmured, “Brother, what shall we do with you…” Kanako sort of understood what she meant.

  An umbrella with flower patterns had been forgotten outside the door. When the woman had arrived, the rain had been coming down hard, but by the time she left the sun had peered out through the clouds. Noticing the forgotten umbrella, her aunt’s face twisted. “Yikes,” she said.

  Kanako felt that it was her role to deliver the umbrella. Taking it in hand, she put on her sandals and stepped out onto the street outside.

  She ran around a hundred yards down the road that led to the station and caught up with the woman. “Um, excuse me, this…” Kanako offered the forgotten umbrella to the woman as she turned around.

  “Oh my, I’m so sorry,” she said, flashing a brilliant fake smile and accepting it.

  That was when their hands brushed. Kanako felt the woman’s was lacking in warmth, but her gaze, as she stared down, was heated.

  Kanako wasn’t being allowed to run home yet.

  “You look just like your father.”

  “No, I look like my mother.”

  The woman’s mistake was insignificant, yet irritating.

  “I don’t know if it’s right for me to say this…but I couldn’t in front of your mother’s photo.”

  Kanako steel
ed herself, sensing that this would be outrageous. The woman had given the impression of carrying a bomb ever since she had entered the house.

  “If your father had survived and your family had been just you and him, I might have ended up raising you. You understand what I’m trying to say, yes?”

  She did, but she shook her head.

  “Your father told me he loved me,” the woman said as though she were showing off a medal.

  Her father had betrayed her mother. It wasn’t as though Kanako hadn’t suspected it. One night, her father had come back late and argued with her mother, who’d stayed up waiting for him. Kanako had heard their voices coming from the bottom of the stairs as she’d made her way back from the bathroom.

  Once she recalled this, more came back, all linked together.

  Taking the trash bags out to the disposal area had been the children’s job. One morning, on Kanako’s turn, a pair of disposable chopsticks stuck out as she was carrying the bag, and it ripped, dumping its contents out on the street. Hastily trying to stuff them back through the tear, she noticed some strange pieces of garbage.

  There were several scraps of cloth that looked as though they had been cut by scissors. They were her father’s white briefs. Somehow, Kanako guessed that it had been her mother’s doing. At that time, she couldn’t fathom why her father’s underwear needed to be hacked to pieces before being thrown away.

  “I might have become your mother.”

  Kanako thought it was some joke, but the woman was serious. Kanako couldn’t imagine having a mother-daughter relationship with this woman who looked like a makeup pro.

  So she thought that if Kanako’s mother and brothers had died but her father had survived, she might have become Kanako’s stepmother?

  “Your father gave me this brooch as a present. I’ll treasure it my entire life.”

  The red rose glinted as she proudly thrust her chest forward.

  “Please forget about me as soon as you can.”

  If she wanted to be forgotten, she shouldn’t have come in the first place, but Kanako kept that to herself. She knew how to hide her shiv.

  She pretended that the woman had come from a different planet. Perhaps Kanako needed to be grateful since this visitor had come to deliver a clue about her father’s true nature.

  “Live strong. I’ll survive, too.”

  It sounded like an actress’s line. The woman walked away down the sloped hill, the sun reflecting off the wet streets as her heels rang against them.

  When she disappeared from sight, Kanako realized that she had never even asked for her name.

  She stopped the shower.

  She couldn’t remember what had happened to the brandy the woman had left behind. She didn’t recall ever pouring it on the tombstone on her visits, so her uncle must have had it with co-workers that he’d invited home.

  She stretched her hand out from behind the shower curtain to fetch her toothbrush and tube of toothpaste and brushed her teeth to end her shower. The salmon bento she had only warmed but not opened could wait until tomorrow.

  Having washed off a day’s worth of grime and slipped her body into pajamas, Kanako opened a small can of beer and sat on her bed. She had a lecture tomorrow morning as well, so she planned on getting drunk and going to bed.

  Junichi Shibaki’s translation notes were lying on her desk. She put them in her tote bag before she could forget. She finished drinking her beer and crushed the can.

  “I love you. Let’s get together one day.”

  She wondered if her father had made such a promise to the woman while sleeping with her. “My eldest daughter is a daddy’s girl, so even if I divorce my wife I want to bring her with me,” he may have even said.

  She ended up imagining her father and the woman having sex. She had no choice but to draw on her own experiences with Takumi. Unlike her, that woman had no doubt let out exaggerated moans.

  When he’d returned home from his lover’s apartment, Kanako’s mother had chewed him out and taken a pair of scissors to shred the briefs he’d been wearing that night. A wife who never let her children on to any of her fury—perhaps the Akiba household had already been falling apart back then.

  Kanako’s mother had asked her husband to do something about her father’s debt. Having cheated on his wife, he’d had no choice but to accept her request. Still not wanting to get burned, he’d pushed the role of guarantor onto Norio Tsuzuki?

  Perhaps by some divine dispensation, signs leading up to the night of the incident were strewn everywhere.

  Putting aside the manner, perhaps their family had been doomed to be demolished.

  What if Kanako’s parents had divorced thanks to her father’s affair with the woman with the red brooch?

  If Kanako’s mother had taken her three kids back to her hometown, maybe Norio Tsuzuki, armed with a chainsaw, would have entered the house in Asagaya and slain just her father and felt satisfied.

  “I have no intention of destroying your family,” the woman with the red brooch must have whispered sweetly. Why couldn’t she have been more aggressive and actually wrecked the Akiba family?

  The past eight years would have been so much better for Kanako if at least her mother and brothers had survived.

  Her father got what he deserved—that was the honest feeling peeking out from her hideaway. Kanako was appalled that such sentiments were still bubbling up inside of her.

  A black net of drowsiness floated down on her head. Checking to make sure that her alarm clock was set to seven thirty, she turned off the lights and slipped under her thin comforter.

  Was Norio Tsuzuki terrified that this night may be his last, imagining the guards’ footsteps ringing down the hallway in the morning? Or was he still going to bed secure in the knowledge that the sentence wouldn’t be enforced within a few days of its passing?

  Trapped by a black trawling net, Kanako was carried off into the deep, dark realm of sleep.

  She saw a single red droplet dripping down and steeled herself for the dream that was starting even as she drifted in shallow sleep.

  At first, she thought it was the woman’s rose brooch, but peering into the darkness she saw that it was a drop of fresh blood.

  Whose was it?

  2

  As she approached the bookstore she slowed down. She ran her eyes over the magazine covers that faced her way from where they were lined along the shelves.

  It was her habit.

  Although the covers of the weeklies usually danced with headlines of the main article in that issue, recently there were more magazines, excluding those aimed at women, with simple covers that had just a gravure image that made it hard to know what was inside.

  In the days after the incident, even if there was a bookstore on her way to school, she intentionally excluded it from her vision. A year later, she picked up her habit of walking slowly in front of a bookstore to glance over the titles after seeing a weekly photo magazine with the headline: “The current circumstances of little Kanako, the survivor of the Asagaya family massacre a year ago.” Her own photo had been on the cover. One of her middle school classmates had oh-so-kindly showed it to her, saying, “Look who I found!”

  The photo had been shot with a hidden camera from far away while she had been in her uniform and on her way to school. One of her friends from the same elementary school was next to her, but the friend’s eyes had been blotted out. Kanako was wearing a forced smile as she had called to her friend, “Good morning.”

  It had been exactly one year since the case, and Kanako had gotten bigger and looked as though she had completely regained her former energy. That was all the article said, and Kanako was honestly relieved.

  They hadn’t found out that she visited a therapist twice a month.

  The photo magazine had gotten its hands on her graduation book from one of the students in her year and included a snippet of Kanako’s composition.

  “I want to make lots of friends at my new middle school, t
oo. I want to live life to the fullest for my father, mother, and brothers,” the passage read.

  Looking back now, the piece she’d written for the graduation book seemed like some government communiqué. She had transferred to Hachioji Elementary School six months after the incident and been treated a bit like a guest by her classmates. As a result, she had written something uncontroversial that hardly reflected her true feelings.

  After that, journalists had looked back on the case when the death sentence had been handed down in the first trial and again when a dismissal of intermediate appeal was issued in the second trial. She had been in her last year of middle school when Shiina interviewed her. However, most media outlets lost interest with every year that passed and stopped paying attention to what Kanako was up to.

  Even so, her footsteps still slowed when she passed in front of a bookstore, and she’d glance over the headlines on the covers.

  A week had passed since the phone interviewers had called the Hachioji house, so the articles would be out soon. She headed for the magazine rack at the front of the store to check out all of them.

  The bookstore along Chazawa Street had just opened for the day, and the bald storeowner with his shiny head was unpacking magazines that had arrived that morning and lining them on the shelves. Kanako first picked up a weekly known for its sharp reportage and looked at the table of contents.

  Her eyes widened. It really was in there.

  “Death sentence confirmed for the murderer of that family.”

  She turned the page to the photo of Norio Tsuzuki that she was so familiar with. It was a half-page article and not the issue special. She skipped over the summary of the case and the eight years that led to the Supreme Court ruling. It concluded with a sentence about Kanako.

  “How does the daughter, who lost her parents and brothers at the same time, feel about this ruling?”

  That’s none of your business.

  As always, the media ended up using this language. Through fear of upsetting the victims, they ended with a question mark. It was the usual method of people who had no intention of taking responsibility for their words.