In the end, he didn’t give her a passing grade. Miho thought she wanted to become a first-class bartender for him.
The second time he came, she also shook her shaker for him. He got drunk from Miho’s drinks, and the moment he stood up he stumbled. She asked if he was okay and lent him her shoulder. His hiccups wouldn’t stop, and she realized with surprise that perhaps he was a weak drinker. He was a large man who forced her to look up at him, but he seemed like a baby now. That was why she fell in love. That was how they came to be in a relationship where she could be beaten and still love him, where he could beat her and still be loved.
Kanako invented their background with ease. That was all there was to their love story.
“So this is my home as a newly wed,” Miho presented their surroundings.
Kanako examined them. The dining room-kitchen was minimal in size, the Japanese-style bedroom regular. It was probably meant for a singleton, but the two were creative with storage, and putting aside the damage from Akira Nakagaki’s rampage, it was a nice living space for a newly-wed couple. There were yellow flower-patterned curtains and light pink flower-patterned bed sheets.
“Canola flowers and sweet pea.”
“Yup.”
“It’s very spring-like.”
“I like spring the best.”
Kanako agreed. Spring was the last season in which she’d had a home. Perhaps Miho liked it for the same reason.
4
“Your goosebumps are super visible.”
She could only hear snippets of Takumi’s voice through the harsh wind blowing in from the sea. He finally managed to fix the board reflector and turned the reflected light onto Kanako’s face. After changing lenses, Takumi began to take photos with his camera.
Kanako wore only her undergarments with a beige blanket wrapped around her body. Apparently the image Takumi was going for was a girl who had swum to shore from a shipwreck off the coast.
She relaxed, listening to the staccato shutter clicks.
“Show me your chest.”
Kanako obeyed, lowering the blanket and taking off her bra. It was cold. Her entire breasts seemed to stiffen.
“Glare at me like you want to kill me.”
She strengthened her gaze against the blinding light from the reflector. She glared at the camera as it made continuous clicks.
She wondered why she bared her naked body before Takumi. Did she want Takumi’s camera to take photos of her true self? Every time he turned his lens on her, she had to wonder.
Her family photo albums from up until she was twelve remained sealed away. She still didn’t have the courage to look at them. Even after her aunt took her in, when they went on a vacation or it was someone’s birthday, she avoided getting in front of cameras. She felt it would be terrible of her to line up alongside her aunt’s family and have her smiling photo taken as though she belonged there from the start, forgetting about her deceased parents and younger brothers.
Her school trip decided her fate. She alone ended up surviving. Kanako couldn’t help but feel that these past eight years were “a life that wasn’t meant to exist.” Perhaps that was why she wanted no record of it in the form of photos.
It wasn’t as though she’d ever looked at her own face carefully as a young girl.
Yet at the same time, she also felt lonely. Even if it was a life where she needed to keep apologizing to her deceased family, she at least wanted to leave some proof that such a girl had once existed.
When she first saw the photos Takumi had taken of her, she felt hopeful that perhaps he might create accurate records of her. Her own form stood out clearly against a blurred background as though each of the photos were her last will and testament.
Even though it was late autumn, the sunlight still felt warm. That was why I was squinting up at the sky then. Wind was blowing across the grassy field. So my nostrils were flared, in order to try to breathe in the scent of the season. Here is proof that at that moment, I enjoyed living.
Looking at the photos, she could hear herself speak.
When she bared her naked body in front of his camera, she wished Takumi’s sharp gaze would rip through her skin to the hideaway filled with darkness and burn that onto the film as well.
If she were to describe the darkness within her hideaway, she would say it was a heavy fluid like oil. It equaled the combined amount of blood her four family members had spilled.
The hideaway floating in her heart was so full that she could hear it sloshing, but whenever drops overflowed from the edges of the container and hit the bottom of her heart, there was an eerie echo.
Now, she could sense the darkness trying to overflow. Having encountered Miho Tsuzuki, it was in a precarious state. That was why she wanted Takumi’s camera to observe her.
They weren’t impressive, but Kanako faced the camera and thrust her bare breasts forward.
Takumi took out the finished roll of film. Kanako relaxed and thought about Miho.
It had been a while since they had last seen each other. She hadn’t contacted Miho. Miho hadn’t called her either.
Kanako had progressed another step into Miho’s heart by rushing to her side when she’d been beaten by her husband. When Miho had spoken of bathing in her husband’s violence as her way of inheriting her father’s sin, Kanako hadn’t been able to keep her own mouth shut.
He should just go die.
They had calmed down and sipped miso soup together, and Miho had walked with her to the avenue so Kanako could hail a cab. It had taken some time for an empty one to come along, but the two of them had remained silent. They had both spoken too much that night.
“Thanks, for tonight.”
“I’ll come by the bar soon enough.”
Kanako had finally managed to break into Miho’s hideaway. It was covered in deep scars from striking and being struck by her husband. The wounds had torn open somehow, and the darkness within Miho was threatening to spill out.
Seeing Miho’s face dirtied with nosebleed from her husband’s blows, perhaps part of Kanako had wanted to see the girl bleed more: My family died in infinitely greater pain, I hope your husband keeps on hurting and wounding you.
Her eight years and Miho’s were like facing mirrors. Their gashes were different in length and angle, but Kanako felt they were equally deep.
If that was the case, perhaps now was the time to end her relationship with Miho.
Kanako could still turn back.
If she couldn’t reveal her real name, perhaps she needed to start preparing to withdraw from Miho’s life.
“School’s getting busier, and I might not be able to come drop by as much…” Maybe that was what she ought to say on her next visit to the bar.
And then she would change her cell phone number. It wouldn’t work if Miho chased her to her university, but the girl would probably realize what it signified: Yukako Fuyuki was yet another one of her friends who’d gotten scared of the daughter of a man on death row and abandoned her.
Miho would end up saddened, but perhaps that was a fitting way for Kanako as she was now to disappear.
“Good work. You can put on your clothes.”
Takumi had used up all his film. Looking at how satisfied Takumi was, Kanako felt happy too. It had been worth it to come out all the way to southern Boso.
That night, they would stay at a boarding house along the sea, and if they left early enough Monday morning, she should be able to make her lecture at ten.
A day off. She had to enjoy herself.
She got careless, and the surf that broke on the rocks sprayed her. Kanako let out a shrill scream. Takumi laughed as he put away his supplies, but it was refreshing to scream out loud.
From the window of the boarding house, too, they could see the ocean.
It was placid, completely unlike during the day, and the surface gently reflected the light pouring down from a nearly full moon.
The dinner course had been heavy and rich in seafood. After
returning to their room, they decided to toast their successful photo shoot with cans of shochu-and-soda they’d picked up at a liquor store.
“Are you cold?”
“Yeah…but let’s keep it open for a while more.”
The sound of waves and the salty smell of the sea poured in from the open window. As she felt Takumi’s warmth at her shoulder and relaxed in the stillness, she began to feel that perhaps now was the time to reveal who Kanako Akiba was.
It wasn’t that she suddenly felt guilty for having lied. She wanted to see Takumi not leave her even after learning everything. If a guy like that held her tight and put her at ease, she might be able to make up her mind about leaving Miho alone.
“Hey, I’ve been lying to you, Takumi.”
This was it. It was time for him to see her true face.
She looked up, and Takumi was waiting for her next words.
“I…I have no family. My house in Hachioji is my aunt’s.”
Takumi gave a small nod, eyes fixed, concentrating on her next words. His expression seemed to say he’d accept anything.
“My family, they were killed by a man named Norio Tsuzuki while I was away on a school trip in sixth grade. I lost my four family members all at once.”
Takumi’s expression didn’t change. That may have been a sign of surprise.
“I thought it’d be better if I could date you without having to talk about all that. I’m sorry. For not saying anything until now. I thought it might shock you. To know that I’m the last survivor of a murdered family.”
“I knew.” The words that slipped from Takumi’s lips interrupted Kanako’s confession. “I knew about all that.”
Kanako stared at him intently. Takumi looked slightly apologetic.
“I was the one who was lying. I knew that had happened to you long ago, Kako, and wondered how tough it must have been for you these eight years, but dated you pretending not to know. I felt as long as you didn’t say anything, I shouldn’t ask about it at all.”
“When. When did you find out?”
“It came to me a while after hearing your name. I thought oh, could she possibly be the surviving kid from that case?”
She’d told him her name after summer break her freshman year, when he’d given her the photos he’d taken without her knowledge.
“…You knew just from my name?”
“Most people wouldn’t remember the name of a survivor from some case that happened years ago, even if they saw it once or twice on TV or in the newspaper. But it somehow hung on my memory, the name Kanako Akiba.”
“Why, from just hearing my name…”
She hadn’t thought that anyone around her would tie the name Kanako Akiba to an old case from eight years ago, Miho Tsuzuki being the exception.
“I started getting interested in photography in my third year of middle school. And well, the kind of photos I started to take with the single-lens reflex camera my dad got me…I guess you could say it was in poor taste.”
He scratched the back of his neck, looking embarrassed as he spoke.
The first thing the young cameraman Takumi had gotten into was snapping photos of locations that had been the stages for various crimes. Sites that reporters no longer frequented since the media had done all the investigating they’d wanted—he would visit them days afterwards. The case where a woman from the Philippines was stabbed through the chest in an alley in downtown Niigata. Or the one where the decomposed bodies of a couple who seemed to have committed double suicide were unearthed by real-estate developers.
The TV and newspapers didn’t go as far as to give the addresses of incidents, but when he asked residents of the town they told him right away.
He took black-and-white photos and developed them in his room closet. He felt he could sense the murderers’ passions and the victims’ suffering through the grainy scenes in the photos.
His combined obsession with crime and photography gradually escalated, and he bought a book entitled A History of Modern Murders, and after marking it up, he came to Tokyo over summer break on the bullet train. The purpose of the trip was to visit the sites of notorious crimes.
He chose several sensational incidents that had occurred in the Kanto area, and regardless of how the current scene had changed, he turned his lens towards them. He believed that he would be able to capture some of the “atmosphere” of the moment.
A mixed-tenant district in Toshima Ward, Tokyo. Teikoku Bank’s Shiinamachi Branch had once been located there. In 1948, a man claiming to be a doctor of medicine with the Ministry of Health and Welfare had poisoned and killed twelve bankers and their families.
In Hiratsuka city in Kanagawa, the prefectural housing project still looked the same as the photos that had appeared in the papers. In mid-summer of 1974, a factory worker had murdered a mother and her second-grade daughter living a floor above him because he couldn’t stand the noise from their piano.
At the Shinjuku West Exit plaza, he took photos of a Keio Teito bus packed with passengers. In August 1980, a construction worker with a history of mental health issues, sure that he was being oppressed by society, had thrown a bucket full of gasoline into a bus before lighting it on fire. That case where families on the way home from a ball game as well as commuting office ladies burned to death had occurred at the west exit plaza.
And in Asagaya, a family had been massacred.
“Did you…go to my house?”
“Yeah.”
“Was the house there?”
“The storm shutters were closed, and the yard was overgrown with no one looking after it. It seemed like it was going to be torn down soon because there was a construction plan signboard.”
That was around the time when they had finally found a buyer for the land. When Kanako had visited after school, the house had already been demolished, and they had been in the process of leveling the plot. She’d gone there in September during her second year of middle school, which meant that only a few days earlier, Takumi, then in his third year of middle school, had visited the same spot.
“The girl who’d survived. Her name was Kanako Akiba. I hadn’t exactly carved it into my memory, but I remembered it because I’d read the piece several times…Last year, when you introduced yourself to me in the cafeteria and I heard your name, how do I say it, I felt something like déjà vu.”
He’d heard the name before somewhere. It had something to do with photography. Takumi had gone over in his mind his career since his third grade in middle school.
And then he had remembered. Kanako Akiba. The young girl who’d been the sole survivor of that case.
“So you’ve known for a whole year…”
“I didn’t look at you through tinted glasses. Pretty much the only thing I’d known about you was your name, so the Kako in front of me at the moment was everything. I decided to keep quiet until you decided to tell me yourself.”
Her tear glands stung. She resolved not to spill any tears. She pressed her cheek against Takumi’s shoulder over his T-shirt.
“Those photos…Do you still have those photos you took of my house?”
“If you want to see, I can look. I think my albums from back then are in a closet back at my house in Niigata…”
“It can wait until you go back for New Year’s. There’s no rush.”
“Won’t it be hard for you to see them?”
“I think it should be fine. Okay, so we just missed each other back then…”
She remembered the Mickey Mouse that had appeared from the dirt. She had heard her younger brothers’ voices in the empty lot that afternoon. On her way home to her aunt’s, she had gotten sick on the train platform and thrown up.
“One day, can I tell you all about what I saw and felt? I think there’ll come a time when I want you to hear it.”
“Of course. I’ll pull an all-nighter to listen.”
Kanako thought she’d like to spend four hours talking. She hadn’t even tried this with her psychiatrist
—taking the exact same time as the “four hours” that she suffered to talk it out.
If she could do that, perhaps something would change.
“Can I ask you something?” Takumi said hesitantly.
When Kanako nodded in response, he furrowed his brows and chose his words with care. “There’s a reason why I still remembered that particular case. From the time the perp was caught and through all the hearings, there was something I just didn’t get.”
“Didn’t get…?”
“I read the microfilmed newspapers from the time. Before the trial, the perp Norio Tsuzuki apparently turned in a personal statement to apologize for his crime. Didn’t he say that even if he was sentenced to death, he was prepared to accept it?”
The newspapers never published the personal statement in its entirety, but the media had come by the gist of its contents by interviewing his lawyer. Kanako had read the archived papers sometime after the case just like Takumi before eventually acquiring the entire statement through Shiina.
Norio Tsuzuki had used a hammer to bludgeon her mother and had strangled her father. That had been described in detail in the personal statement, but he continued to insist that he “had no memory” of how he had killed her two younger brothers. During the trials too, the “blank thirty seconds” became a point of contention. The defense relied on it to argue for an episode of mental instability or breakdown, but across the first trial, the appeal, and the higher-court hearing, the judges concluded that the defendant was fully accountable when he killed his four victims.
“What I don’t get is the contradiction between the culprit’s willingness to accept any punishment and fighting all the way to the Supreme Court. If he really wanted to make amends, why didn’t he accept the first-instance ruling?”
“He tried to fight for the activist groups that supported him. That’s the explanation his lawyer gave. Because he was being supported by a group against the death penalty, he felt that accepting capital punishment would be the same as betraying them.”
“Do you really think that’s it?”
“Maybe he was just scared of dying after all. He wanted to cling to life for as long as possible…”
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