The man’s tattoo was of Jiraiya, the wild-haired mountain sorcerer who rides on the back of a giant toad. On the back of the photograph someone had written Tsunetaro Nomura with a fountain pen. The two women in the pictures resembled one another so closely that if they had both been dressed in kimonos, Kenzo would have had a hard time telling them apart.
He examined the photographs carefully, staring for a long time at the image of Kinue Nomura with her snake-and-sorcerer tattoo. When he looked at the pictures of the other woman—obviously her sister, Tamae—he was more than a little surprised. This woman must have really liked tattoos, he thought. She took the process much farther than Kinue did.
Men are another matter entirely, but women, however much they may love their tattoos, are usually reluctant to show them off to strangers. For that reason, to keep people from peeking up their sleeves in summer, most women, and many men, choose designs that stop just above the elbow. For similar reasons, the majority of tattoos end above the knee.
The woman in the photograph, though, had tattoos below her elbows. From the shoulder all the way to the wrist, her arms were gorgeously tattooed with a traditional design of reddish-golden carp climbing a waterfall. She had designs on her calves as well, of crabs and cherry blossoms against a background of stylized clouds. On her back was a splendid tattoo of the sorcerer known as Tsunedahime riding on a giant slug, which was in no way inferior to the other two tattoos, Jiraiya and Orochimaru. There was a strange quality to the photograph, a lack of shadow that gave the woman’s entire body a garish cast, which Kenzo thought must have been a result of shooting with available light.
Kenzo put the photographs back in his briefcase and went to the research room. Miss Ogi, the attractive young department secretary, was standing in the door looking oddly upset. “Sensei, you have a phone call,” she said. Miss Ogi was usually wreathed in smiles, but now her round face was downcast, and her tone of voice sounded almost reproachful.
“From whom?” Kenzo asked wonderingly, for no one ever called him at work.
“From a young woman.” Biting her lip, Miss Ogi turned and ran into the restroom.
“Hello,” Kenzo said, picking up the telephone. A woman’s voice flowed through the receiver and seemed to twine around his heart.
“Kenzo, darling, it’s me, Kinue.”
“Miss Nomura!” Losing his composure for the second time that morning, Kenzo glanced around to make sure no one was listening.
“Did you get the photos and the letter I sent you?” Kinue whispered.
“Yes, I did receive them. Thank you very much for your kindness.”
“Why are you being so cold, darling? That’s not—Oh, I get it. Is someone listening? Please take good care of the photos for me,” she said softly. “If I should be killed—“
“Don’t talk like that, it’s bad luck. Nothing’s going to happen to you, I promise. I won’t let it.”
Kinue was silent for a moment. “I really can’t tell you the details on the phone,” she whispered, “so I was wondering if you could come to my house tomorrow morning. There’s a reason.… There’s a reason why it isn’t silly for me to be afraid. I’d like to see you tomorrow and tell you about it, and borrow some of your strength. Tomorrow morning at nine. You’ll be there, won’t you?”
“Yes, but.…” Kenzo had been hoping to meet at a more romantic time, after dark.
“Don’t worry about a thing. My husband won’t come by, and the maid won’t be there. It’ll just be you and me, with all the time in the world to be together, just like the other night. And since it’ll be daylight, you won’t have to be concerned about what people will think. Are you ready for the directions? Go out the north exit of Kitazawa Station, and walk through the market that runs along the tracks. You’ll come to a business district. Go straight, and when you get to a dead end, turn right. You’ll see a public bathhouse called Asahi-Yu on the corner. Turn right there and my house is just a few steps farther along.”
“Are you sure it’s all right?”
“Don’t be silly, of course it’s all right. I’m counting on you to save me. I’m so very frightened, and I need you so much.” Kinue hung up abruptly, but her cry for help—and, he thought wishfully, for affection— echoed in Kenzo’s ears for the rest of the day.
13
In the evening, shortly before eight o’clock, there was a bit of a ruckus at Asahi-Yu, the public bathhouse in Kitazawa. Due to the postwar fuel shortage the bathhouse’s hours of operation had been shortened, and it was getting toward closing time. The women’s bath was so crowded that when a statuesque stranger walked in wearing a leaf-patterned summer kimono, no one took any special notice at first. The moment the woman shed her clothing, though, thirty or forty pairs of eyes were immediately riveted upon her colorful naked body.
It would have been different if the bathhouse had been in downtown Tokyo, where tattoos were a common sight. In the quiet residential district, it was extremely unusual to see a tattooed female in the public bath. The woman herself seemed unaware of the stir she was causing. She wasn’t even blushing as she made her way through the crowd with a long, graceful stride. When she got to the large bathtub, the woman dipped steaming water from it with a wooden bucket and poured it over her body with a self-confident air that bordered on arrogance.
“Who is that?” whispered a local kimono maker.
“Does someone like that really live in this neighborhood?” said a fish seller.
“No way she’s anybody’s wife. She has to be a mistress, or a bar girl,” chimed in a florist’s apprentice.
“She looks like a bandit to me. I’ll bet she has a criminal record,” said the seamstress, squinting into the mirror as she carefully shaved off all her facial hair, including the eyebrows.
“Maybe she’s a professional gambler,” said a caterer.
“I’ve never seen such a big tattoo, even on a man,” said a mother of five. Huddled in bunches, the neighborhood women stared at the glamorous interloper and gossiped in scandalized whispers.
Whether she was under the taps or in the middle of the big communal tub, the subject of all this speculation conducted herself with quiet, regal dignity. Her tattoos, though, were another matter. The giant snake that wriggled on her back appeared to be sticking out its long red tongue at the people in the bathhouse, while the sorcerer Orochimaru seemed to be watching the nervous behavior of the local women and sneering in disdain.
“Mommy, why is that lady going in the bathtub with her snake kimono on?” Nobody laughed at the child’s innocent question. They just went on staring at the tattoo, not head on but rather sideways, with eyes filled with fear and curiosity.
After about twenty minutes, Kinue Nomura got out of the bath. She stood in front of the mirror for a moment, admiring her spectacular reflection, and then slowly put on her clothes.
***
Kenzo was at home playing a rather sloppy game of shogi chess with his brother, Detective Chief Inspector Daiyu Matsushita. Daiyu—who was also known as “Matsu the Demon” and “the Locomotive”—was a tall, bulky, crewcut man. He had a square-jawed face with a wide mouth, deep-set eyes, and a low, broad nose that had been flattened still further during his career as a collegiate judo champion at Nihon University. Daiyu had wanted to be a police detective since boyhood, and he spent almost every waking moment either doing his job or thinking about it. His taste in entertainment ran to drinking beer and reading an occasional pulp novel about a sword-wielding medieval magistrate, while his only hobby, if you could call it that, was blowing smoke rings. Daiyu and his pianist wife, Manko, had met at the university and married for love. Their standing joke was that someday when they were old and gray they would spend a leisurely day together, and maybe even go out to dinner.
Next to the chessboard stood a nearly empty bottle of medium-grade whiskey. It was obvious from Kenzo’s flushed face, and from the crooked way the pieces were lined up on the chessboard, that both he and his brother were more than
a little tipsy. Daiyu had been scowling at the chessboard, trying to figure out his next move. Now he raised his eyes and said, “Kenzo, how are things going at the university?”
“Same as usual, I guess. Sometimes I get the feeling I’ve been in school forever.”
“Of course, that’s only natural. But since you’ve been studying forensic medicine, you seem to have become more of a realist.”
“A realist, huh? Yes, I suppose I have… .”
“Aha, I see you’re trying to get me to jump your rook. Well, if you insist, I’ll just help myself. So tell me, have you finally graduated from reading detective novels?”
“Wait a minute.… Check!”
“That move doesn’t scare me at all. No, what I mean is, I’ve been handling murder cases for ten years, but so far there hasn’t been a single one that bears any resemblance to the exaggerated cases in your detective novels. Hey, how’s this for a defensive maneuver?”
As Daiyu moved a chess piece, he knocked over a celadon vase containing three stalks of purple clematis. Nonchalantly, he jammed the flowers back into the vase and mopped up the puddle of water with one sleeve of his lounging kimono.
“I don’t know why you haven’t had any interesting cases, and since I’m not God, I can’t very well predict the future,” Kenzo said airily, taking a big gulp of whiskey.
“There won’t be any interesting cases in the future, either. That’s my form of realism. Hey, I seem to have accidentally captured your bishop. Oops… checkmate!”
Kenzo stared at the chessboard and then began to laugh.
“What is it? What’s so funny?” his brother asked.
“It’s just that you aren’t as much of a realist as you’d like to think, at least not when it comes to chess. You can’t promote your bishop that way, and in any case my king is still guarded by two pawns.”
“Who? Which? Where?” Daiyu looked at the chessboard for a moment, then joined in the laughter. “Oh, now I see,” he said. “Where the hell did those blasted pawns come from?”
Kenzo laughed even more loudly. “Even if you were sober, if you can’t at least remember the previous moves, I don’t think you should be permitted to play chess without a sizable handicap.”
“Hahaha, that’s a good one. In that case, shall we call it a draw?” Still chuckling, Daiyu began tossing the chess pieces back in the box. “It’s really muggy tonight,” he said. “It’s going to be hard to sleep.”
“Yes,” said Kenzo, “it’s an awful night. I have a weird feeling, too, as if something terrible is about to happen.”
“Don’t even say that. On a night like this I wouldn’t mind having a nice long rest, so please don’t upset me with talk of terrible things. When bad things happen in this city, it usually means a phone call in the middle of the night for me.”
“What? Don’t tell me that Matsu the Demon actually craves rest and relaxation once in a while!”
“Hey, in this new age of democracy, even the demons in hell can go on strike’” Daiyu quipped. He said goodnight and started up the stairs, still smiling at his own joke.
It was, indeed, an unusually muggy late-summer night. Kenzo found it impossible to sleep. There was no breeze at all, and the wind bells that hung in the garden were completely silent. As the hours ticked by on his alarm clock, he hugged his pillow and fantasized about having Kinue in bed beside him, with her ripe body, silken skin, and fragrant hair.
Kenzo tossed and turned in his sweat-soaked bed until the clock downstairs chimed three A.M., and the air finally began to cool off. He had just drifted into a shallow dream-state when the sudden sound of a faraway train pierced the stillness. Startled, Kenzo sat bolt upright in bed with his heart racing a mile a minute, for the train whistle sounded uncannily like a scream.
14
On the morning of the twenty-eighth of August, there wasn’t a cloud in sight. Kenzo Matsushita got off the train at Kitazawa Station in the throes of a serious hangover and squinted resentfully up at the bright blue sky with bleary eyes. In front of him was a line of the sort of cheap market stalls that had sprung up around every station after the war.
The people milling about the open market all seemed to reek of garlic, and Kenzo felt certain they were staring at him with suspicion and contempt. He immediately blushed, for he had a guilty conscience about going to call on Kinue Nomura with such patently dishonorable intentions. The hangover didn’t help his equilibrium, and every time he thought about holding his tattooed queen in his arms again, he felt so dizzy that he could hardly stand up.
Kinue had said, “Go straight,” but the route she had suggested turned out to be strangely circuitous. The narrow, crooked street wound absurdly around and around. Just when Kenzo was sure he must have left the train tracks far behind, they would suddenly appear on the other side of the road, gleaming in the sun. It’s like some weird hallucination, I must be even more hung over than I realized, he thought. A few blocks later he stopped in the shadow of a rice storehouse and lit a hand-rolled cigarette.
Calm down, calm down, Kenzo ordered his pounding heart, to no avail, for he was filled with carnal desire and nervous anticipation.
On that hot summer morning there wasn’t a single person out on the streets of the plush residential district. The Kitazawa area had survived the fire-bombing that reduced so much of Tokyo to rubble, but all the life had gone out of the town, giving it the vaguely haunted look of an abandoned movie set. As Kenzo was thinking these rather bleak thoughts, a lone man, walking with an unsteady gait and looking distractedly about, approached from the opposite direction. The moment Kenzo saw the man’s face, his own face stiffened. He ducked into a patch of deep shade and waited for the man to pass.
The passerby was Gifu Inazawa, the manager of the company run by Kinue’s common-law husband, Takezo Mogami. Fortunately he didn’t notice Kenzo in the shadows. The first time they met, Inazawa had been very dapper and well-groomed, in a repellent sort of way, but on this morning he looked as if he had just fallen out of bed.
But whose bed? Kenzo thought, and his heart turned chilly.
Gifu Inazawa’s face appeared oddly rumpled. His eyes were bloodshot and red around the edges, and his skin was as white as a sheet of calligraphy paper. Untamed by brilliantine, his sparse hair stuck up in all directions, giving him the look of an unkempt sea anemone. He was carrying a small package wrapped in a purple furoshiki cloth, and he kept nervously passing it from hand to hand. He was muttering something under his breath, over and over. It almost sounded as if he was chanting a Buddhist scripture. The overall effect was decidedly weird.
As Gifu Inazawa passed his hiding place, Kenzo was able to hear what the man was mumbling. “Oh, this is dreadful. This is really, really terrible.” Kenzo’s feeling of unease suddenly turned to jealous panic. He couldn’t imagine that Inazawa would be out paying a social call at some other house in Kinue’s neighborhood at this hour of the morning.
Oh my God, he thought, don’t tell me this man, this pig of a man, has just spent the night in the arms of my beautiful snake-woman!
Kenzo was already finding it somewhat difficult to breathe because of the heat, and the worrisome encounter with Gifu Inazawa didn’t help. Wiping his dripping face with a crumpled handkerchief, he set off in the direction from which Inazawa had come. Walking a few more blocks, he came upon a new-looking wooden nameplate bearing the calligraphed words NOMURA’S TEMPORARY RESIDENCE.
The house was the sort that, before the war, might have been built by a company section chief or an assistant professor who had saved up a good deal of money. Even in that refined neighborhood, Kinue’s house was one of the more splendid. It was hidden from the street by a hedge and was separated from its neighbors on three sides by a high concrete wall. The lot itself appeared to be at least a hundred tsubo, slightly more than 3500 square feet.
The formerly elegant garden had been turned into a vegetable plot. Kenzo found it hard to imagine a glamorous woman like Kinue digging in the soil
, but someone was evidently doing some gardening. The yard was a jungle of ripe tomatoes and glossy green squash with enormous leaves and spiraling tendrils. What an amazing harvest, Kenzo thought as he walked up the stone path that led to the entrance of the house.
The storm windows were closed tightly, and there was no sign that anyone in the house was awake. Kenzo rang the bell, but there was no answer. He rang again, but still there was no sound from inside the house.
“What on earth is going on here?” Kenzo said in a low voice. The vague sense of unease he had felt earlier began to take on an alarming shape, and his feelings of jealousy toward Gifu Inazawa were replaced by inchoate stirrings of fear.
Kenzo went around to the back of the house. One of the storm windows had been left partially open, leaving a gap as if a tooth had been extracted. Kenzo went up to the open window, stuck his neck inside, and yelled, “Miss Nomura!”
That sounded rather foolish, considering their degree of intimacy. Just as he was about to call out “Kinue!” his eyes became accustomed to the murky light inside the house and the words died in his throat.
Kenzo was looking into a six-mat room—Kinue’s bedroom. It was a terrible mess. Two tansu chests had been haphazardly pulled open and ransacked, and there was clothing scattered all over the floor. A long red kimono-tie had snagged on one of the tansu’s handles and lay stretched out across the tatami. Most shocking were three large splotches of blood, like the blowzy red flowers of a tree peony, which had seeped into the pale yellowish-green tatami mats that covered the floor.
Just then, someone took hold of Kenzo’s shoulder. He wheeled around in terror. Of all people, it was Professor Hayakawa. He was dressed in pristine white linen with all the creases in place, and he was wearing his trademark Panama hat and carrying his rattan walking stick.
Tattoo Murder Case Page 7