Deep Red

by Hisashi Nozawa

  Eight years ago. Aren’t you the same? Kanako wanted to ask.

  “I think you’re one of the happier ones, Kako. You get to go to college, and you’ve found a job that you want to do, being a film writer.”

  “I think you’re happier, Miho.”

  Kanako tried using Miho’s name for the first time, and it came easily to her lips, as though they had been friends for several years.

  “You’re a bartender who makes the best drinks and you have a hot husband.”

  “I’m no good at all.”

  “Why not?”

  “My upbringing was bad.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s really complicated.”

  “How? Oh, sorry, I shouldn’t pry.”

  Kanako retreated a step, but her heart was urging Miho to go ahead and fess up exactly how it was complicated.

  “I’m the daughter of someone who’s been sentenced to death.”

  The words had popped up naturally in the flow of their conversation. They had been spoken so casually that Kanako almost missed them.

  “…Sorry, what did you just say?”

  “He’s on death row, my father.”

  Kanako was surprised. She’d never imagined Miho revealing this while happily scarfing down pasta.

  A vague smile lifted the corners of Miho Tsuzuki’s lips as she put her fork and spoon on her plate and took her napkin to wipe at her mouth. Even after she was done wiping, the smile remained.

  Kanako still had around two more bites of pasta left but put her utensils down. She straightened herself and prepared to listen.

  “Whenever it seems like I might make a new friend, I always tell them this first. If they hear that about my father and become afraid of me too, I want them to disappear while it’s still early…so to speak. That’s what ‘protecting myself’ has always meant to me.”

  “What did your father do?”

  “Murder. Four people, too.” Miho Tsuzuki sipped some water to wet her throat. Kanako did the same.

  “It was eight years ago, when I was in sixth grade. My mother had died half a year prior due to illness, and because my father was arrested for that, I didn’t really have anywhere to go. My mother’s family had no choice but to take me in.”

  “What sort of case was it?”

  Tell me everything you know about the case, Kanako thought. I’ll give you my full attention if you have some new truth to bring to light not included in Norio Tsuzuki’s statement.

  “The one where a family of four was killed over by Asagaya. It was big news so you might have heard of it. Only one person survived, their eldest daughter in sixth grade who’d been away on a school trip…”

  Kanako’s heart raced. The face of the girl survivor had been included in articles in the weeklies. You never saw them? If you did, doesn’t that face line up with the woman in front of you?

  “Compared to the culprit in the movie we saw today, I think his motive was a little easier to understand,” Miho said jokingly with a weak smile. “It had to do with debt.”

  It was no joke. And it wasn’t quite that simple.

  “I’m sorry for inviting you to see a movie like that.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m completely fine with stuff like that. Your university library should have the archived versions of the articles. If you check, you can read up on it.”

  “…Is he really going to be put to death? Your father.”

  “Probably. In four or five years. He’ll be able to atone that way, but how do I say it, I feel like sins are passed down…”

  “Passed down?”

  “Yeah, like you know how when people die, they leave inheritances? I think crimes and punishments are the same, and they’re left behind for the kids to bear.”

  Struggling under the weight of the crime and punishment bequeathed to her, she had told Hashimoto, “They should kill me too”?

  There’s no doubt that you have a hideaway too. Just as my hideaway is bursting with cruel thoughts, your hideaway is ready to explode with guilt?

  Miho Tsuzuki had to be holding in more. Anger towards the law and society. But she wasn’t just letting that anger pool. When a male regular messed with a female guest late at night in her bar, she took him to task with more force than necessary. Instead of just letting her husband hit her, she struck back.

  Miho Tsuzuki’s violent streak was a way of letting off steam.

  “It won’t ever end if you see it that way,” Kanako said, letting impulse drive her. “The guilt of the side that did it, and the hatred of the side that suffered it, will persist forever. There’ll be no end to it, no salvation.”

  Her words were quite different from what she actually believed, Kanako thought after she spoke. It wasn’t to stop hating the culprit that she was meeting Miho.

  “There was a calendar stuck to the door of the fridge with some magnets, and my father would write his plans for the day there every morning…If he wrote ‘6 p.m., Yurakucho,’ I would know that he didn’t need dinner. If he wrote ‘8 p.m., Shibuya,’ I could guess that he’d return home after I’d gone to sleep.”

  She said that that day, nothing had been written on the calendar. His daughter had believed that he would leave his company at half past five and return home by six. After school, she’d gone to the shopping district and bought croquettes, pork and green onion skewers, and potato salad. Wanting to finish her homework before her father got home, she’d focused without watching TV. She had made fresh rice and miso soup and waited.

  At around the same time, Kanako had been at the tourist hotel, gathered around a dining table with her school friends in the large hall. They hadn’t been able to stay quiet no matter how many times they were warned and eventually brought Mr. Ihara’s wrath on themselves.

  “Six o’clock passed and my father didn’t return. Once it hit seven, I put plastic wrap on the food. I had thought that something had suddenly come up at work and he wouldn’t need dinner that night.”

  Eight o’clock came and went. Usually her father would have called. Tremors started to go down the daughter’s back. That may have been a sign. Then, at nine, the doorbell rang.

  “A bunch of adults came into the room. They were detectives. A lady detective who looked like a grade school health teacher said to me, ‘Miss Miho Tsuzuki?’ to confirm my identity. ‘If you have any relatives close by, you should have them come,’ she told me. I realized that something had happened to my father. The only person I could think of was my grandmother in Utsunomiya, so I called, but the lady detective took the receiver from me. ‘Mr. Norio Tsuzuki is currently being detained by the police as a suspect for a certain case. Please come and stay with Miho, your granddaughter. Can you travel to Tokyo at once?’ The lady detective sounded like she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She gave them the address and phone number of the Asagaya police. She had to repeat it several times, so I got the feeling that on the other side of the phone, my grandmother was disoriented and having trouble jotting it down.”

  The detectives started searching through her father’s desk. They pulled out documents and bankbooks and other stuff from the drawers and started packing them into cardboard boxes. A different detective showed the daughter a piece of paper. They told her it was a house search warrant and that they needed her permission to take things out of the house. The daughter felt as though she’d been caught in a storm. Her tongue felt glued to her mouth, but it finally came loose. Did something happen to my father? the words finally left her mouth.

  They were the same, Kanako thought.

  Mr. Matsunami, in charge of her whole grade, had told her that her family in Tokyo had been in an accident and that she needed to go to the hospital right away. Kanako’s stiff body had been shoved into a cab. It had taken some time for her to ask Mr. Ihara, who had come with her: An accident. Was it a traffic accident?

  “The lady detective told me that my father had hurt a certain family so the police were asking him some questions.
I probably wouldn’t be able to see him that night, but my grandma would arrive soon so there was nothing to worry about…Hurt? My father? Did that mean he’d been violent and wounded them? My father wasn’t the type to do something like that. I couldn’t believe it.”

  As Miho Tsuzuki’s confession streamed out, Kanako listened, holding still.

  “That night, I left the apartment building with the lady detective’s arm around my shoulders and got into a black car. The people living in the building had come out in their pajamas and were looking at us curiously, wondering what had happened. I heard two detectives ask the people in the neighboring disassembly factory whether they were missing a hammer around this long. I remembered what the lady next door had said once. During negotiations over noise pollution, my father had suddenly swung a hammer and started destroying a car. Which meant that he may have hurt someone in the same way. As I imagined that, I got more and more scared…”

  That’s right, your father lined my family up along the floor and brought his hammer down on the faces of all four of them. Kanako desperately held back the impulse to throw out those sharp words.

  “After I was brought to the Asagaya police, they asked me a lot about how my father had been recently. They asked me whether he’d spoken with me about a Yukihiko Akiba. It was the first time I’d heard the name. I didn’t know that my father had been suffering at work. Eventually, my grandpa and grandma from Utsunomiya arrived at the police.”

  The daughter was finally informed. Her father had slaughtered a family of four named the Akibas. The family had a daughter the same age as her, but she had been away on a school trip, and she alone hadn’t been killed.

  The pounding in Kanako’s chest made it quiver. She was afraid that Miho Tsuzuki would hear the sound beating against her ribs.

  “I remember that day clearly, and it hasn’t faded at all with time. I remember how the detectives who’d suddenly stepped into my house reeked of cigarettes, and how the lady detective who was nice to me had unnaturally white teeth. I had to go in and out of the police station without being spotted by the media, so I went through the hallway from the rear entrance, walking fast. The squeaking sound my feet made against the linoleum still rings in my ears.”

  Kanako wanted to put the memories that continued to haunt Miho on a scale against her own “four hours.”

  “But I don’t remember very well what happened after that. Or rather, it was like my emotions had been ground away, and I didn’t feel much no matter what happened in front of me. In the end, I couldn’t even say goodbye to my friends in Tsukishima, and I got in the moving truck my grandma had prepared and left the city like I was flying by night.”

  Kanako had had a farewell party that treated her as though she was transferring away. They had done the folk dance for her that she hadn’t been able to participate in during the school trip. Teased by Maiko, Yumi, and Shoko, she had danced with Yohei Murakami.

  Even after transferring to an elementary school in Utsunomiya, the murderer’s daughter must have been known as such before long. Everyone avoiding eye contact—her father had been punished by time in prison, the daughter by isolation.

  “I entered a local prefectural high school and was finally able to surround myself with people who didn’t know my background. But even though none of the friends I had gotten close to even asked, I would tell them how I was the daughter of a man who would soon receive the death penalty. At the time, my friends would say, ‘We don’t care what kind of father you have, Miho,’ but as expected, they eventually faded out of my life.”

  “Do you think I’ll be the same?”

  “I won’t get hurt, so don’t worry,” Miho said cheerfully.

  “Am I possibly being tested?”

  Even if you are testing me, you’ll never reach my core. I’m the one testing you.

  “I’m serious, I’ll be okay…I have Akira.”

  “Does he know?”

  “Of course I told him. Right after we started going out. But Akira didn’t go away. Akira’s father works at the water bureau in Shizuoka, and he was once suspected of being involved in corruption and was unjustly treated like a criminal by the police. When Akira was in middle school, a local newspaper reporter even said horrible things to him like, ‘You’ve got a thief’s blood running through your veins.’ ”

  Akira Nakagaki had told her, “I guess we’re the same species.” He’d been the first person ever to hug her closer after learning that she was the daughter of a murderer. She had wanted to marry him, to build a family with him.

  She sounded unsure, as though talking of a dream that couldn’t come true. She was happily married, so why was she anxious? Kanako found it odd, but the answer came to her right away.

  “There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you for a while now,” she said, reaching out to touch Miho’s red skin where a scab had peeled. “The cut by your mouth and the bruise on your arm, weren’t they made by someone hitting you?”

  Miho Tsuzuki was at a loss for words at this question from left field.

  “Someone’s beating you, right, Miho? Isn’t Akira beating you?”

  Kanako feigned sympathy and tried poking her where it hurt. Her shame brought to light, Miho cast down her eyes.

  “You figured it out…Kako, you’re amazing,” Miho admitted with an embarrassed laugh. “I’m a jealous woman, and Akira’s got a low boiling point, and when we’re both in a bad mood it’s easy for us to get like that. But I don’t just take a beating.”

  Perhaps this man who had been a boxer had found a sparring partner in his wife at home. If she hit back, he could punch her without restraint. Kanako could picture the couple letting off steam on each other.

  “Oh, it’s already so late,” Miho Tsuzuki used the time as an excuse to run.

  The leftover pasta was dried up and stuck to the plate. Bill in hand, Miho said she wanted to treat Kanako as thanks for inviting her out to see such a great movie, but Kanako requested they split the bill.

  They halted in front of the station. Miho Tsuzuki was taking the JR line, Kanako the Ginza line. They were getting on different trains.

  Twilight at Shinbashi was filled with swarms of businessmen looking to get a drink, and it was almost hard to breathe in the traffic of human bodies.

  “I’ll be happy if you drop by the bar again, but don’t force yourself.”

  Did Miho utter those last words to every new potential acquaintance? Kanako pasted on the indecisive look that most of them must have worn.

  “I’ll go, I promise…”

  She thought she sounded terribly noncommittal. On the JR line to Gotanda, Miho would conclude from past experience that people who wore that expression and promised in that way always failed her.

  She would feel certain that she had lost another friend. Then, after a few days, Kanako would appear at the bar, offering a droplet of hope to Miho Tsuzuki in the midst of her despair. Imagining her beaming face, the welcoming bartender, Kanako’s heart smiled in pity.

  “Seriously, there’s no need to force yourself. Okay, bye!”

  Miho Tsuzuki disappeared into the crowd.

  Her heart could be toyed with, true, but Kanako suspected that stepping through the doors of Ice Storm after this would mark a point of no return. Adding a drop of hope would thicken her relationship with Miho Tsuzuki. Miho would trustingly bare her wounds from the past, and Kanako would fake sympathy to spread them open. Fat chance she could keep her promise to Shiina and Hashimoto.

  For her own sake, perhaps it was best if she never approached Miho again. The last person on earth Kanako should have ever met was Miho Tsuzuki.

  The Kanako who had been ecstatic over her own scheming until a few moments ago was gone. Even as she stood there surrounded by people, she felt wrapped in loneliness.

  Before going down to the subway platform where she wouldn’t have service, Kanako pushed the speed dial on her cell phone.

  “Takumi…where are you now?”

  He said
he was still in the school clubroom.

  “Do you think we could meet tonight?”

  What’s wrong, you sound like you’re going to start crying, Takumi worried, if only laughingly. He’d sensed her loneliness from just that brief exchange.

  “Meet with me…Hold me, until I almost break.”

  She didn’t mind if he really did break her.

  So you’re the type of girl who can say stuff like that over the phone, how cute, Takumi tried to play it off as a joke, but sounded rather pleased.

  Whispering words of love in a crowd of bustling businessmen did strike Kanako as being ridiculous. Even so, she wanted Takumi to caress her goosebumped flesh. She wanted him to breathe fresh air into her scarily overheating heart.

  Is my room good? Takumi asked.

  The shards of afternoon sunlight reflecting off the building windows suddenly disappeared. She could smell a hint of rain in the air as it rushed to greet the night. Gray clouds were sneaking through the sky from the east. She could end up drenched running to Takumi’s apartment through an evening shower.

  3

  The deadline for her report in journalism theory class was approaching. She even took time off from her part-time taking exit surveys at the movie theater. She spent three days cycling between just her apartment, the library, and the cafeteria.

  Kanako pulled endless amounts of news and media references on internal conflicts within the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and spewed them onto her notepad. She tried to chase away any distracting thoughts.

  When would she push open the door to Ice Storm? If the girl spoke again of that incident eight years ago and the name “Akiba” came up, wouldn’t Kanako lose control? Wouldn’t she blurt out to Miho that the girl in front of her was the survivor from that family?

  Kanako typed up her manuscript and submitted it. Soaking in the feeling of freedom after coming out the other end of the tunnel, she went to drink beer at a pub with Takumi.

  “I’m going to make plans for our photography trip.”

  “What photography trip?”

  “Don’t play dumb.”