Deep Red

by Hisashi Nozawa

  “The boyfriend who only watches movies on video?”

  “Yeah, and actually he’s my husband.”

  “Husband?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re married.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Kanako looked back and forth between Miho and the man in the distance.

  “Well, I’ll tell you next time we meet,” Miho Tsuzuki said, looking lonely as she smiled.

  Perhaps the situation was complicated. No, probably it was ordinary and only took a minute to explain, but if she started now she’d have to introduce Kanako to her husband who was crossing the street. She probably didn’t want to just now.

  An empty cab came. Distracted by the man, Kanako had almost missed it, but Miho waved her hand in her place.

  Kanako couldn’t help but wonder over the details, like whose idea it had been for Miho to retain her maiden name. Hadn’t Miho wanted to take advantage of marriage to ditch “Tsuzuki”?

  Kanako got into the taxi and said, “Sometime soon,” motioning putting her phone to her ear.

  Miho Tsuzuki replied, “See you,” and waved her hand. Once the taxi started moving, she took advantage of a break in the stream of cars and trotted across the street.

  Kanako told the driver, “Higashi-Kitazawa,” before turning around and tracking Miho out of the rear window. As she approached with her bicycle, the man seemed to ask, “Who was that just now?” She answered curtly, no doubt with something simple like, “A girl who comes by the bar often.” The man straddled the back of the bicycle. Miho started to ride, wobbled, and lost her balance, and the bicycle fell over.

  Just watching the scene, Kanako could almost hear them say, “What the hell are you doing?” “You’re heavy!” Then the man jokingly kicked her. She went, “Ow,” rubbed the spot, and returned a punch with full force. Not even flinching, the man took light steps and smacked Miho on the head. Unperturbed, she struck a jab into the man’s gut. They were frolicking like wild dogs.

  The taxi turned at an intersection, and the whole show slipped out of Kanako’s sight.

  She untwisted her body to face forward. After submitting herself to the car’s hushed interior for a while, she suddenly saw something as if a light bulb had come on.

  It was that man’s doing. The cut on Miho’s mouth and her bruised shoulder had been her husband’s doing. Perhaps Miho, who was married at twenty, was being abused by her husband to the point where he drew blood.

  That would explain her ambiguous, lonely, and ashamed look when she had talked about her husband.

  If it was Miho, even if her opponent were her own husband, she wouldn’t just take his blows. Did that second-story room, faintly warmed by the light of a household, see flesh-grinding, bone-creaking couple fights?

  Kanako realized that she was smiling. Her desire to get closer to Miho Tsuzuki and step into her heart was only growing.

  What awaited her there? If Miho wasn’t as wounded as Kanako hoped, would she break her promise to Shiina and Hashimoto and strike some cruel blow against the girl?

  Kanako punched characters into the name space on the digital screen of her cell phone. She’d been holding it in her hand this whole time.

  “Mi…ho…Tsuzuki.”

  There it was, her hotline to Miho.

  Kanako guessed that the day of a nocturnal person would begin no earlier than eleven.

  She skipped the two lectures she had Thursday morning and transferred trains to arrive at Gotanda. The apartment building that Miho lived in with her husband was bathed in abundant early autumn sunlight that only retained a trace of the summer heat and subdued the griminess of the outer walls.

  It was like a detective’s stakeout.

  Partially hidden behind a telephone pole, Kanako kept her eyes trained past the balcony for the slightest hint of movement. Her face angled up toward a window dyed orange, she made sure that not a single sound escaped her notice. Maybe she wanted to feel Miho’s pain up-close as she writhed, getting hit and hitting her husband.

  Kanako’s desire to observe every detail of how the murderer’s daughter spent her days off had grown since last night, and she had ended up getting out of bed early.

  She could no longer be satisfied until she knew everything there was to know about Miho Tsuzuki. Kanako admitted that she was obsessed.

  Was it because Miho, the daughter of the man who had killed her family, needed to fight with her husband until she was covered in blood as a form of atonement?

  Kanako was dragging a tired, sleep-deprived body, irritated that she couldn’t even decipher her own intentions. Perhaps stalking Miho Tsuzuki this way would help Kanako get sick and tired of involving herself in the girl’s life.

  Some part of Kanako dreamed of being able to put her own fruitless scheming to rest.

  Ants were marching by her feet. They formed a black swarm around a bit of cicada wing and were trying to drag it through a crack in the brick wall. Were they storing it in their nest in preparation for winter?

  Just like the piece of carcass being ferried off somewhere, the inflamed portions of Kanako Akiba were being guided to an appropriate location. Perhaps her hatred, heretofore deprived of an outlet, would be granted its right place and finally activate.

  She heard a door opening. From the back of the apartment building, Kanako’s blind spot, she sensed a resident leaving.

  It was a pair of people. Miho Tsuzuki was wearing pink tights and had a transparent plastic bag slung over her shoulder. There was a thermos inside, and also a folded picnic sheet. How they planned to spend their day off wasn’t hard to guess.

  “Make sure it’s locked up properly,” Miho said from the stairs, looking up at the outer second-floor hallway.

  Akira Nakagaki stuck his hand in his wrinkled cargo pants and headed down, yawning.

  They put their luggage in the basket on the bicycle.

  Oh dear, Kanako thought, another marathon. She rotated her ankles and made sure to stretch.

  The man was pedaling. Miho Tsuzuki sat on the rear luggage rack. Their destination was probably a nearby park.

  The bicycle began to move, but the handlebars swayed. It seemed as though the man, hung over, had wanted to sleep in. Miho Tsuzuki must have woken him up saying, “It’s a beautiful day out, let’s go to the park.”

  The bicycle carrying the two of them moved slowly, and Kanako only needed to jog to keep up with them.

  The pair stopped in front of a sake shop’s vending machine, and Miho Tsuzuki bought bottles of tea and juice. The man pushed the button for a can of beer, ready to fight his poison with more of it.

  They approached a downward slope. Akira Nakagaki didn’t step on the breaks as they went down. Miho Tsuzuki, sitting behind him, screamed happily as though on a roller coaster.

  Kanako ran down. The soles of her shoes slapped noisily against the pavement. The bicycle in front of her reached the bottom of the slope and then turned, disappearing from view. If Kanako didn’t hurry, she would lose them.

  She put on a burst of speed and turned the corner in a large arc, but the bicycle was nowhere to be seen. She began running as fast as she could, but didn’t see them down the first street. They weren’t on the second street, either.

  It was a leisurely shopping district, and the banners in front of a meat shop were flapping in the breeze. Miho Tsuzuki and the man had stopped their bike and came in and out of view behind a red banner. They were taking freshly fried croquettes from the storeowner. The oil-stained bag was apparently hot, and they pinched the corners with their fingers as they put it in the bicycle basket.

  Miho now walked beside the bicycle, perhaps because her rear had started to hurt from sitting on the luggage rack. The man rode the bicycle. Miho Tsuzuki’s hand held the hem of the man’s shirt.

  Past the shopping district, they came upon a park entrance.

  Kindergarteners in matching uniforms and their teacher were playing with a ball as part of some outdoor session.

 
Miho Tsuzuki’s face as she watched the children wasn’t visible to Kanako from her position behind the couple.

  Was Miho remembering at all that the kids in front of her were roughly the same age as the two murdered by her father?

  The rubber soccer ball slipped through the hands of one of the kindergarteners and hit the wheel of the bicycle. “I’m sorry,” the teacher shouted as she came running. Neither Miho Tsuzuki nor Akira Nakagaki made any move to pick up the ball rolling at their feet.

  As though they only had a limited amount of effort to expend on a given day, they didn’t even glance the teacher’s way and moved past.

  Kanako also cut through the ring of kindergarteners. Their round eyes as they looked up at her reminded her of Naoki and Tomoki, and for a moment she felt as though her heart had shriveled.

  Beyond the trees that surrounded the playing field was a grassy hill. It had to be Miho Tsuzuki and the man’s usual spot because they made a beeline for an area underneath a cherry tree, right where the light filtered through the leaves, and spread their picnic blanket there. Miho Tsuzuki grabbed one end, Akira Nakagaki the other, and they spread it tautly, placing their baggage on top as weights.

  Their drinks, the croquettes, and a thermos were lined up. White rice was packed into some tupperware.

  Akira Nakagaki first opened the beer. As he gulped it down, Miho Tsuzuki extended her hand to ask for some, too. She drank the rest of it.

  The thermos apparently contained miso soup. They sipped carefully at the hot liquid from paper cups.

  They both had quite an appetite.

  The wife poured a generous amount of sauce onto a croquette before biting in. The husband stuffed his mouth full of rice.

  “Damn good.”

  “It really is.”

  Kanako could only see their lips move, but she could tell what they were saying.

  She was on a path by the benches. She wouldn’t be spotted there behind the thickets.

  The couple finished their meal in just five minutes. Their lunch beer may also have started to affect them. The man still seemed to be hung over, and he rolled limply onto the picnic blanket. Miho Tsuzuki also lay down, gluing herself to his side.

  They pointed their feet towards Kanako and, staring up at the swaying beams shining through the leaves, fell into a nap.

  This was how the murderer’s daughter spent her days off.

  She felt drowsy when her stomach was full, the warmth of the man she loved at her side, and brushed away all thoughts of the four deaths and the existence of her father, who’d been sentenced to death, as she dozed.

  They should just kill me too.

  It was a line, no doubt, that she had ready at all times. When people came to her asking about the case from eight years ago, she pretended to be self-destructive in order to escape the guilt of the crime.

  As if Kanako would be so easily deceived.

  Gazing at the four feet lined up on the grass, she began to plot how the murderer’s daughter should suffer.

  “Wow, this is my first time at a private screening!”

  Miho’s voice was excited.

  They’d switched from the Tom Cruise spy movie that had been in theaters for a while to a psychological mystery starring Angelina Jolie as a female detective, and there was a reason for it.

  This film was about the female detective and her coroner lover conducting a joint investigation of a series of murders in New York’s high-rises. The word was that it was twice as bold as Seven, with a heartbreaking love story woven in. The perfect movie to see with Miho Tsuzuki.

  Having opened in America in June and topped the box office charts for three weeks, it was scheduled to premiere in Japan in a week, and people were talking about it. Kanako got to watch films at a private screening beforehand if she was going to be conducting surveys at the theater’s exit. She’d asked the editorial department for an extra ticket and invited Miho Tsuzuki.

  They agreed to meet in Sukiyabashi. It was Kanako’s first time meeting Miho Tsuzuki during the day, and the noon sun made her look more her age. Like Kanako, her smooth skin didn’t need makeup.

  The private screening room could hold around fifty people, and it was packed full of film critics, magazine staff, and TV reporters on the cinema beat. They were clearly here to see the film for work and were killing time for now by poring over their press sheets.

  “Isn’t it a bit stressful seeing movies in this kind of environment?” Miho whispered as they got to their seats.

  “It won’t matter once it starts.”

  “If there’s a scary scene, am I allowed to scream?”

  “Scream away. It sometimes makes a great marketing message. A horror film that made screams ring through the private screening.”

  “This isn’t allowed, right?” Miho pulled a small bag of potato chips halfway out of her cloth shoulder bag.

  “Yeah, hold back on those.”

  “What about this?”

  Xylitol candy. Kanako accepted one and asked in turn, “It’s a murder mystery. You okay with that?”

  “Where you don’t find out who did it until the end, right? I actually like those.”

  The organizer from the distribution company stood in front of the screen to announce the release date. Then the screening began.

  It started off immediately with a murder case. In a penthouse apartment towering above Manhattan, an able Wall Street businessman and his family of three got killed one after another with a Chinese sword on a stormy night. It was easy to see why the film had an age restriction in America. The scene was quite graphic. A flash of lightning illuminated the murderer standing in the sea of blood that spread across the floor.

  Kanako stole a glance at Miho’s profile. This film was a litmus test. How would Miho Tsuzuki react to the motif of an entire family getting massacred? Wouldn’t she recall her father’s crime and try to avert her eyes?

  Yet, busily rolling around the candy in her mouth, she was transfixed by the screen. If she’d been allowed her chips, she’d be munching on them, murder sequence or no.

  The father, the mother, and the young child being rocked in a crib. The blood from the three of them spread across the floor.

  Miho Tsuzuki had to be aware of the circumstances of her father’s arrest and had to be imagining them given the scene before their eyes.

  But she didn’t even stir, eyes glued to the screen.

  Was she shameless, immature, or just empty? Kanako’s litmus paper registered nothing.

  What about herself, she wondered. The spray of blood that looked like it would jump through the screen—did she imagine the blood flowing from her parents and brothers from this spectacle?

  She didn’t. Someone who’d had their family murdered could still watch a movie about a family being murdered. Then perhaps Miho Tsuzuki was the same. Their past trauma was left untouched by a film of this caliber.

  A laugh spilled from the corner of Kanako’s mouth. The girl beside her turned to look curiously. Was I supposed to laugh just now? her eyes asked. No, it’s nothing, Kanako replied by shaking her head, and decided to focus on the movie.

  After two hours, a surprising culprit was revealed and Miho Tsuzuki said, “What? Seriously?” out loud, unable to contain her innocent reaction.

  Exiting the building where the private screening had been held, they were faced with the brilliant sunlight flooding from the west. Kanako described Angelina Jolie’s other works to Miho as they walked to the Shinbashi station-front and entered a pasta house with an Italian flag waving outside.

  “Thanks for showing me such a great movie.”

  “It was interesting, but didn’t it kinda feel like cheating that her lover the coroner was the murderer?”

  Cutting up dead bodies, the man had developed a desire to cut up living people. Miho agreed that the motive was weird.

  Detectives hadn’t had to go on a mystery chase in the real murder case. Norio Tsuzuki sat exhausted in a sea of blood and was found and arreste
d by Officer Hashimoto.

  Looking at Miho Tsuzuki up close in the light of day, Kanako could indeed see the family resemblance between her and Norio Tsuzuki, whose photos she had seen more than enough in the papers. The way the corners of their eyes tapered and the shapes of their noses were identical.

  If my school trip had been a day off, I would have been killed by your father too. The words wriggled up to Kanako’s throat, but she swallowed them down with her ice coffee.

  Miho’s Japanese-style mushroom pasta and Kanako’s carbonara arrived.

  “Did you marry recently?”

  “We officially registered it last month.”

  That must have been around when her father’s death sentence had been handed down. She had said, “They should just kill me too,” to Hashimoto and moved out of her apartment in Shimomeguro.

  “We’d been like a commuting couple for a year, though, so it doesn’t feel like a sweet newly-wed life.”

  On their off days, they pressed close together on the grass in the park and took naps. It certainly seemed sweet to Kanako.

  “He looked like a tall, attractive guy, but I only saw him from afar.”

  “He was a boxer in high school. If you see him up close, his nose’s a bit crooked.”

  If the person hurting Miho was her husband, then getting punched in the face by a boxer must have really hurt.

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a contract employee at a recruitment company.”

  Kanako wondered what kind of people the company recruited. It sounded kind of sketchy.

  “Hey, Yuka…” Miho said, shortening “Yukako” that way, “is it all right if I call you that?”

  “Everyone calls me Kako.”

  “What’s your boyfriend like?”

  “He goes to the same college as me. He takes photos. He says he doesn’t plan on going pro though.”

  “Then, he must take lots of pictures of you.”

  “Yeah, sometimes nudes.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. Must be the best kind of record to leave. Preserve yourself before the rough waves of the world toss you around.”

  “Those waves have already gotten to me.”