“It’s very possible. After all, she’s the daughter of a tattoo artist. Given the circumstances of her birth and her upbringing, it’s no wonder she’s a bit abnormal. When you see her all dressed up in kimono, you can somehow tell she works at a bar, but you would never guess that she’s hiding such extreme tattoos under her clothes. When I saw her bare tattooed arms for the first time, I was so shocked that I couldn’t say a word. I mean, if you think of a tattoo as a substitute for clothing, then I suppose you could be naked and not feel naked, but still.…”
5
As Kenzo and Hisashi were reminiscing about their antic schooldays, they were approached by a man in a cream-colored seersucker suit. He was stout but not obese, with heavy brows, deep-set eyes, and an imposing physical presence. The expression on his face, though, seemed to reveal a subtle darkness of the soul. It was the restless, tormented expression of one who had been sneered at for being nouveau riche and had taken those jibes to heart.
The man wore several heavy gold rings, and the gold chain of a pocket watch hung from his waistcoat, but he didn’t seem to feel completely at home with those expensive adornments. He had the look of someone who enjoys sensual pleasures, and behind that complicated forty-year-old face, with all its timidities and desires, there seemed to lurk a certain slyness. The man’s eyes darted nervously, alighting on some passing face, then quickly glancing away.
“Oh, here you are, Hisashi,” he said. “I wondered where you’d gotten to.”
“I was wondering where you were, too “ Just a few moments earlier Hisashi had been deriding his brother. Now his tone was deferential, almost sycophantic.
“Have you seen Kinue?” asked the man in the seersucker suit.
“No, not really,” Hisashi replied. “I lost track of her a while ago. Sorry about that.” His apology sounded singularly insincere.
“The contest is about to begin, and I’ve looked everywhere for her but she doesn’t seem to be around.” The man’s eyes roamed the crowd as he spoke.
“Maybe she’s feeling embarrassed,” said Hisashi.
“Don’t be ridiculous. She was the one who wanted to enter the contest in the first place, remember?” While his brother was looking around with a displeased expression on his face, Hisashi leaned over and whispered two or three words in his ear. At that, the older man’s demeanor suddenly changed.
Turning to Kenzo, he bowed and said, in an extremely polite manner, “Well, well, I had no idea. Please forgive my rudeness. I’m Takezo Mogami. Thank you very much for all you’ve done for my brother in the past.”
“No, on the contrary, he’s the one who’s helped me.” Kenzo responded with the appropriate formulaic phrase.
“By the way, I hear that you’re the brother of Detective Chief Inspector Matsushita of the Metropolitan Police. I’ve known of your brother by reputation for some time, and I’ve been thinking recently that I would like to meet him face to face, just once. This is really fortuitous, meeting you like this. I’d like to buy you a glass of saké and a nice big American-style steak sometime, but unfortunately tonight I have an appointment with some foreigners. What day might you be free to honor me with your company?”
If you want to shoot the general, first you kill his horse, Kenzo thought bitterly. Clearly the man had some dark ulterior motive—probably financial—for wanting to use Kenzo to make a connection with his brother Daiyu, or with the police department in general.
“Thank you ever so much for your kind offer,” Kenzo said, using the same excessively polite language. “Unfortunately, I’m not much of a drinker.” The truth was, he was able to hold his own perfectly well and had even been accused on occasion of having a hollow leg, but this sly, overfed mogul was not his idea of a convivial drinking companion.
“Now, now, don’t say that,” said Takezo Mogami in a hearty voice. “I can see by looking at you that you like to have a good time. After all, isn’t that whit brought you here tonight?”
“Actually, I’m here as a scientific observer,” Kenzo replied coolly. “I’m working on my dissertation at the Tokyo University research laboratory. That may sound rather grand,” he added self-deprecatingly, “but the truth is I’m just a humble intern who doesn’t even know how to take anyone’s pulse.” More polite lies, he thought. In fact, he could take a pulse or do a tracheotomy with one highly skilled hand tied behind his back.
“I’ve always enjoyed this sort of event, myself,” Takezo Mogami declared, gesturing expansively at the ebullient crowd around them. “And of course I’ve been influenced by my uncle, Professor Heishiro Hayakawa, whom you may know better by his nickname, Dr. Tattoo. At any rate, my woman insisted on entering this contest as a foolish prank, against my wishes, and I just hope she doesn’t embarrass me.”
Kenzo felt a twinge of jealousy at the thought of the tattooed beauty in bed with this corpulent crook. “I just heard about that from Hisashi,” he said. “It sounds to me as if she’s the odds-on favorite to win tonight.”
“Hahaha. Seriously, though, this is the sort of race where there are so many dark horses that the favorite might go home hungry. Well, I’ll see you around. In the meantime, here’s someone else who wants a word with you.” Takezo Mogami jerked his chin in the direction of his hitherto silent companion, who then stepped forward, bowed very low, and handed Kenzo his business card.
“I’m Gifu Inazawa, manager of the Mogami Group,” he said effusively. “I can’t begin to tell you how delighted I am to meet you.” Gifu Inazawa was a small thin man, flashily dressed in a blue plaid suit of prewar vintage. He had a sharp-chinned, ferretlike face, and his thinning hair was artfully combed over a nascent bald spot He wore what appeared to be a permanent synthetic smile, and he reeked of hair oil, lavender water, and tobacco.
“Likewise I’m sure,” said Kenzo drily, for he had taken an instantaneous dislike to the man.
“Do you reside with your honorable brother?” Gifu Inazawa’s super-polite language failed to disguise the cheekiness of the question.
“Yes, I’m just a poor graduate student, so I can’t get anyone to marry me.”
“No, don’t be silly. You’re probably just setting your sights too high.”
What a dreadful creep, Kenzo thought. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was he disliked about Gifu Inazawa, he only knew that his first impression of the manager of the Mogami Group was entirely negative.
“We’ll look forward to seeing you next time.” Takezo Mogami and his obsequious employee took their leave, bowing from the waist and trailing elliptical pleasantries in their wake.
When Kenzo saw Takezo Mogami from behind, he couldn’t help being startled, for the man’s rear view was radically different from the front. Melodramatic as it might sound, he appeared to be walking in the shadow of death. Kenzo shuddered. When he was working as a military medic in China and the Philippines, he had often seen that same shadow hovering around Japanese soldiers as they walked away from his hospital tent on their way to battle. There was no logical explanation for the phenomenon. It was just an instinctive feeling, an irrefutable premonition of death. No matter how healthy and full of life the soldiers might have appeared to be at the moment, Kenzo always knew with absolute certainty that the only thing the future held for those high-spirited young men was a fatal bullet from an enemy gun.
6
The large meeting room of the restaurant was a hundred tatami mats in area. Even so, it was crammed to capacity. Half the occupants were spectators with unembellished skin, aside from the occasional arrow-pierced heart or Stars-and-Stripes tattoo on an American GI’s forearm. The other half were the tattooed contestants who stood around in scanty undergarments, looking like colorful statues. The room was hot and stuffy and the male contestants, without exception, were dressed according to contest regulations in cool white cotton fundoshi loincloths that covered their private parts but left their tattooed buttocks exposed.
It was, undeniably, a grand spectacle. Each person was an individ
ual work of art. But seeing such a multitude assembled in one place, with such a profusion of magnificent skin-pictures on their backs, the philosophical observer was tempted to view them as an independent race, separated by their immortal tattoos from the transience of life on earth. With the force of a tidal wave, the sculpturesque group made a profound impression on the spectators. In the hallucinatory excitement, some people even forgot that they were living in the postwar depression of 1947, and were transported back to the carefree days of the Edo Period.
The female contestants, too, had congregated in a corner of the room, but only about half of them had stripped down to their underpants. Some lounged around wearing nothing but white loincloths and fanning themselves, just like men. Takezo Mogami’s “woman,” Kinue Nomura, was standing at the center of one wall, between the seating areas for spectators and contestants, leaning against a pillar and smoking a cigarette. Kinue was still wearing her white dress, and the eyes of many of the spectators kept straying in her direction. Standing there with sleeves flapping and arms akimbo, she looked like some exotic creature of myth, a giant white bat with an angel’s face.
“Are you tattooed, too?” A woman who was sitting next to Kinue suddenly spoke to her, out of boredom or curiosity. The woman had a picture of Kintaro (Golden Boy), the legendary wunderkind of Japanese folklore, tattooed on her back.
“Just a little bit,” Kinue replied cagily
“Well then, you’d better take off your clothes. Everyone else is already undressed, so there’s no need to hold back. That dress must be unbearably hot.”
“When I look at all these splendid tattoos, my own scribbles seem like a bad joke, and I feel embarrassed. I think I’ll stay like this until my number is called.” When Kinue said this the woman with the Kintaro tattoo, obviously miffed, stuck her nose in the air and looked the other way.
The meeting room had a slightly raised area that was used as a stage. On this makeshift platform the expert judges—five middle-aged and elderly men, including Professor Heishiro Hayakawa—were seated at a long table. One by one the society members paraded up and down in front of the row of judges, in the order in which they had registered. The numbers were assigned in the same manner, so that while Kinue was one of twenty or so female entrants, her number was forty-seven.
The greatest applause for a male competitor was for number twenty-one, a young man with a shaved head and gothic eyebrows who was tattooed everywhere except his face, his neck, the soles of his feet, and the palms of his hands. Rather than the usual designs, he was imprinted from hairless head to hammer-toed foot with mystical Sanskrit scriptures rendered in scarlet, black, and blue. The applause escalated when he raised his arms to show the arabesque runes in his armpits, for everyone knew that the tender underarm flesh was the second most painful place to receive a tattoo.
When the man paused in his jaunty promenade and let his white loincloth drop to the stage, there was a universal gasp as the audience saw that the man’s penis was tattooed from top to bottom as well. No one in the crowd was unaware that this was by far the most sensitive spot on the male body, and most of them had heard stories of how such tattoos were done. While the tattoo master plied his bundles of sharp-tipped needles as gently as possible, an assistant would stretch the skin taut, and four strong men would immobilize the arms and legs of the shrieking, writhing subject.
“Ouch! That must have hurt like hell!” shouted a wag in the first row as the tattooed man showed off his illustrated sex organ, and everyone laughed uproariously.
The women’s competition began when a woman whom Kinue had met many times took off her white yukata summer kimono and walked in front of the judges. The woman was the proprietor of a restaurant in Yokohama and had formerly been the wife of an influential organized-crime boss from Kanagawa. As was the custom, she was known by her own name’ in conjunction with that of her tattoo: O-Kichi of the Fiery Chariot. O-Kichi was well filled out, even a bit overweight, and on the plump flesh of her back two blue demons were shown pulling a flaming chariot while above them a naked beauty writhed in torment in the raging fire
The breathtaking exhibition continued, and the atmosphere in the hot, stifling room became electric with anticipation. “Number forty-seven, Miss Kinue Nomura.” Kinue was the final entrant in the women’s division, and when her name was called at last she didn’t reply. She just stood by her pillar, with the impermeable dignity of a sumo grand champion toeing the mark before a match.
“Orochimaru Miss Kinue Nomura,” Professor Hayakawa called again, and this time Kinue stepped forward. Flicking away her half-smoked cigarette, she threaded her way through the contestants’ seating area with long strides, while the spectators watched her as if with a single eye. Still fully dressed, she stopped in front of the judges’ table.
“We have to see you naked, Miss, so please take off your clothes.” The professor’s voice was as crisp and businesslike as if he were addressing a stranger.
“All right, I will,” Kinue replied saucily. “As long as I’ve come this far, I may as well put myself on the chopping block, like a dead carp.” She stepped out of her white one-piece dress and stood in front of the judges in a thin-strapped chemise of translucent white silk that revealed the colorful tattooing on her upper arms. It was a strikingly beautiful sight: her bare skin was flushed a pale pink, and against a blue-black background the tattooed cherry blossoms appeared to be in fragrant bloom, with vermilion maple leaves floating through the air around them.
As Kinue had known, the beauty of her tattooed body was tantalizingly visible through the thin silk of her chemise. She was well aware that the flimsy fabric would act as a conductor of light, and that the indescribably gorgeous colors of the tattoos—the vermilion, the pink, the purple, the indigo, the luminous yellow-green—would shine through with subtle glory. She also knew that if she appeared to be shyly concealing her superb tattoos it would have a bewitching effect on the audience, and would make the ultimate unveiling that much more dramatic. After twirling around once or twice to heighten the suspense, Kinue casually stepped out of her silk chemise and stood in front of the crowd, dressed only in a pair of skimpy tailor-made underpants cut high on the hips, like the two-piece bathing suits worn by foreign women.
Kinue couldn’t see her own back, but she could feel a blush of excitement spreading over her full breasts, and she could feel them undulating gently as she walked. As the flush engulfed her body it appeared to the spectators as if the wild-eyed sorcerer on her back was blushing in shame, and the giant snake seemed to be wriggling like a living thing. The meeting hall, which had been dead silent, suddenly erupted in cheers, shouts, and whistles.
When she heard that thunderous roar Kinue knew without a doubt that she would be crowned the queen of the tattoo contest. Raising her crescent-moon eyebrows in triumph, she looked first at the five male judges and then turned to face the rowdy, cheering audience. The young man who had given her a match in the garden was standing near the front, shoulder to shoulder with Hisashi Mogami, staring hungrily up at her. Kinue caught his eye and gave him a small, secret smile.
“What’s your headline going to be?” a photographer in a filthy tan trench-coat asked a cigar-chewing newspaper reporter, as they left the hall after the contest.
“Hmm,” said the reporter, scratching his head with a toothmarked yellow pencil. “How about ‘A Beautiful Snake-Woman Sheds Her Skin’?”
“Perfect,” said the photographer. He jammed a new roll of film in his camera, then ran off in pursuit of the woman in question.
The tattoo competition was over, and everyone agreed that it had been a huge success. As expected, Kinue Nomura was awarded the grand prize. After the judging ended and the musical entertainment began, a number of contestants wandered out into the garden without bothering to put their clothes back on. Some refreshed themselves under a small manmade waterfall, while others relaxed in the cool shadows of the trees.
Kenzo Matsushita and Hisashi Mogami strolled am
id the flowering shrubs. “How about it’” Hisashi asked. “Would you like to meet the snake-woman face to face?”
Kenzo still hadn’t recovered from the excitement of being in such a decadent, sensual atmosphere, and he answered deliriously, “Yes, by all means, let me bask in the glory of the radiant queen.”
“I don’t mind introducing you, but I have to warn you that she has a tendency to take over people’s lives Also, she sometimes comes out with bizarre and even paranoid remarks, and the best thing is just to say ‘Yes, yes’ and act sympathetic. I think she’s probably a little strange in the head because of the sort of upbringing she had, if you know what I mean.” Hisashi spoke in a serious tone, and Kenzo nodded.
Kinue Nomura was standing in the garden under a large cryptomeria tree, dressed in her demure white dress and surrounded by admirers. A large crowd of newspaper reporters was laying siege to the newly crowned queen, waving notebooks and cameras and yelling the usual questions.
“No, no!” Kinue shouted back, flapping her hands at a couple of photographers who had gotten too close. “Show’s over, boys. No more photographs. If you want to see my tattoos, you’ll have to come again next year.”
Kinue was still trying to shoo the journalists away when Kenzo and Hisashi approached. As they elbowed their way through the surging crowd, Hisashi called out, “How’s it going, Kinue? You seem to be having a hard time.”
“Oh, Hisashi, your timing is perfect. Please make these annoying creatures go away.”
“You don’t need me. If you just bare one shoulder like a gambler and shout a few insults at them, they’ll creep away in terror with their tails between their legs.”
“Bare one shoulder? That’s not exactly a brilliant suggestion. I mean, that’s what they’re hoping for, to see some skin!”
“Well, we’re living in a democracy now, remember. Why not give them a break and let them take a few pictures?”
Tattoo Murder Case Page 3