Thinking about the riddles of the Tattoo Murder Case made Kenzo’s head spin, and he was relieved when the conductor called out, in his mournful voice, “Yurakucho! Please watch your step, and make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.”
***
Yurakucho means Pleasure Town, and the pursuit of earthly delights was in full swing when Kenzo arrived. Rows of tiny restaurants and red-lantern drinking spots spilled their light and noise onto the crowded sidewalks, and the air was thick with aromatic smoke from skewered chicken roasting over open fires. Kenzo forged ahead, oblivious to the delicious smells and inviting interiors. For once, food was the furthest thing from his mind.
The place he sought was just around the corner from the teeming station. Nicknamed the Field of Poisonous Flowers, it was a stretch of tree-lined pavement just before the Sugiya Bridge, where streetwalkers plied their trade. Kenzo was a bit nervous, for aside from a couple of forgettable trysts in the Philippines, he had never even spoken to a prostitute.
The women stood in clusters, talking and giggling among themselves. The pinkish streetlight cast a dim theatrical glow, and Kenzo was reminded of the performance of Swan Lake he had once seen on a school excursion. From a distance, the women looked like graceful ballerinas striking poses against a backdrop of painted trees. As he drew closer, though, Kenzo got a sense of the sadness and desperation that the women’s flashy dresses, bright makeup, and brittle patter couldn’t disguise.
How tragic, he thought. Japan had always had a thriving sex trade, but this was different. Before the war there had been a few streetwalkers in the seamier parts of town, but most of the prostitution was carried on in designated brothels, behind closed doors, with a certain decadent élan.
Now, though, there were hordes of women standing around all the major train stations hoping to rent their bodies to some stranger for an hour or two, simply because they could find no other way to support themselves. These women were somebody’s daughters, mothers, wives, sisters.… Suddenly remembering why he had come, Kenzo took a deep breath and approached the nearest group of prostitutes.
“Hey, good-looking,” said the tallest of the group. She wore a short, curly blond wig, but under the heavy Western-style cosmetics her features were classically Japanese.
“Hello, handsome boy,” said a short, plump woman. Her gauzy cocktail dress—orange with black and yellow spots—gave her the look of an overweight butterfly, and her cheeks were rouged in perfect circles, like those of a doll.
“Um, hello, good evening,” Kenzo said shyly. “I should say right away that I’m not a potential customer, but I am willing to pay for certain information.”
“Oo-ooh!” the women chorused in mock excitement. Kenzo was sure they were making fun of him, and he had a strong urge to run away.
“Hey, big spender,” purred a woman with a henna-tinted ponytail.
“Handsome and rich,” quipped the butterfly.
“Wait a minute—are you a cop?” demanded the tall faux-blonde.
“No, no, nothing like that,” Kenzo assured her, more or less truthfully.
“A private detective, then?” The speaker was a woman in her late thirties, incongruously dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform of middy blouse, pleated skirt, and knee socks, with her hair in two fat red-ribboned pigtails. Kenzo had heard that some men liked that sort of thing. The thought of it made him feel slightly nauseated.
“Yeah, what are you, a private detective?” echoed the other women. Their collective perfume mingled the heady scents of jasmine, gardenia, rose, lavender, sandalwood, and citrus with the ambient urban odors of car exhaust and burned-out buildings Kenzo’s head began to swim.
“A detective?” he stammered. “Sort of. Not exactly. You see—“ The women were staring at him with suspicious expressions on their garishly painted faces, and once again, Kenzo felt the desire to flee. You have to do this for Kinue, he reminded himself sternly. She can’t rest until her killer is caught and punished.
Instead of running away, he decided to tell a tiny lie. “The truth is, I’m looking for my sister,” he said without batting an eye. “She used to work here, and she went by the name of Sumiyo Hayashi. She looked like this.” He took a photo out of his briefcase and held it up.
“Never saw her, never heard of her,” said the aging schoolgirl, raising her drawn-on eyebrows. “But if you’ll come with me I’ll make you forget your sister, and your wife, and all your other troubles, too.”
“Thank you very much for the offer. Perhaps another time,” Kenzo replied, with far more politeness than the situation warranted. He knew he had made a mess of his first interview, and he wasn’t surprised when the women burst into raucous, derisive laughter the minute he walked away.
He tried the next group of women, with similar results: a lungful of cloying perfume, a faceful of flirtatious jokes, an outright invitation or two, and finally, after each woman had confirmed that she had never heard of anyone named Sumiyo Hayashi, with or without tattoos, an awkward good-bye. Some of the women were quite beautiful and intelligent looking, and Kenzo couldn’t help wondering how they had sunk so low.
It’s the damned war, he thought. It turned everyone’s lives upside down, and drained all the innocence out of the world.
One particularly lovely woman, standing alone beside a tree, caught Kenzo’s eye. She was dressed in a simple black satin sheath, with her hair twirled up in a sleek chignon, and for a moment Kenzo tried to picture the two of them together. Not entwined in some tacky hotel room with a blinking neon sign casting lurid stripes across the swaybacked bed; no, Kenzo’s heart, soul, and libido still belonged to Kinue Nomura. He just thought it might be nice to walk through the park with a pleasant, pretty female companion and talk about normal things, things that had nothing whatsoever to do with war, or murder, or tattoos, or dismembered corpses.
Then the woman spoke, and Kenzo’s modest fantasy evaporated. It wasn’t just that she had a rough, uneducated country accent or that her front teeth were chipped and broken; those things didn’t help, true, but it was what she said that completely shattered the spell.
“I’ll be your best friend till morning, sweetheart,” she crooned in a grotesquely seductive voice. “All for the price of a bowl of noodles. I’ll do anything you like, even—“
Kenzo was stunned, and appalled. Before the woman could finish her pathetic proposition he thrust a handful of money at her—enough for ten bowls of the finest hand-rolled noodles—and hurried on to the next group.
It was nearly midnight. Kenzo was exhausted, but he was determined to talk to all the streetwalkers before he headed for home. It had not been a productive evening so far. One or two of the women had thought they remembered the name Sumiyo Hayashi, but they were unable or unwilling to supply any details.
The photo didn’t seem to jog any memories, either. When he brought out the picture of the three siblings the prostitutes cracked jokes about getting tattooed themselves, or asked whether the handsome Tsunetaro was single, or exclaimed over the artistry of the designs. No one recognized the faces of the Nomura sisters. Part of the problem was the rate of turnover. Most of the women had only been working the area for a month or two.
Kenzo’s hope was ebbing away as he approached the final group two thirtyish women in tight-fitting red tango dresses, and a very young girl in a blue Alice-in-Wonderland pinafore who appeared to be half the age of her colleagues, at most. He thought at first that the young girl was just keeping her mother company on the job, so to speak, but then he noticed that the girl was wearing rouge and thickly mascaraed false eyelashes, and he felt the shock in the pit of his stomach. The girl gave him an exaggerated come-hither look, batting her spidery lashes, and he had to avert his eyes in pity and shame. She must be an orphan, he thought. Poor thing.
After fending off the older women’s shrill offers of expert companionship, Kenzo trotted out his searching-for-my-sister lie. Then, in a weary listless voice, he said, “I don’t suppose you ever met
a woman who went by the name of Sumiyo Hayashi?”
“Oh, you mean Sumi?” said one of the older women, and Kenzo was suddenly wide awake. With her flat-featured, kindly face, the woman looked like some of Kenzo’s country aunts, back in Nagano Prefecture. He thought she must be a war widow, doing this to support her children.
“Yeah,” the woman went on in a nostalgic tone, “me and Sumi, we were good friends. She was a strange one, though. She never wanted to talk about the past, but I got the impression she was estranged from her family. She seemed to have a lot of anger just below the surface, if you know what I mean, like a volcano. Another funny thing—she always wore the same sort of outfit, no matter what the weather was. Even on the hottest summer nights—and you know how muggy it gets in August. She would show up wearing a long-sleeved dress, with dark tights and high heels. Some of the other girls called her the Librarian behind her back, but the clients didn’t seem to mind. She was always very popular. Maybe it’s true what they say about modesty being sexier than showing it all.”
Glumly, the woman gazed down at her own plunging, ruffled neckline, but Kenzo’s thoughts were elsewhere. Long sleeves to hide the tattoos! he was thinking, in high excitement. And dark tights, for the same purpose.
He held up the photo of the three tattooed siblings, and the woman stared in surprise.
“Oh my,” she gasped. “That’s her on the right, or maybe on the left. I never knew she had siblings, much less a tattoo. That explains a lot.” Warming to her topic, the woman rambled on. “Yeah, old Sumi was an odd one, all right. I was never sure that she was telling me the truth, about anything. She was a real looker, though, like one of those long-faced beauties in the old woodblock prints. We used to have some laughs, I can tell you that, mostly at the customers’ expense. You meet a lot of unusual personalities in this line of work, if you know what I mean. Oops, no offense to you, sir.”
“None taken,” Kenzo said absently. “But wait a minute. You said something about August. Does that mean Sumiyo Hayashi was still working here in August?”
“Yeah, she was here all that month, as I recall, but I don’t remember seeing her around in September. She dropped a few hints about some wonderful man she had met who had promised to take care of her, so I figured maybe they ran off together. I wish someone like that would come along and rescue us, but no such luck.”
“Us?”
The woman gestured at her two companions, who had been listening quietly, with their shoulders touching like a couple of seabirds huddled against a storm. “Yeah, us,” she said “Me, my sister, and my daughter.”
Oh my God, Kenzo thought, That’s her own daughter? Has the whole world gone insane?
Suddenly he wanted to get out of the unsettling Field of Poisonous Flowers as fast as possible. He gave several bills to each of the women, hoping it would be enough to get the girl in the pinafore off the streets, for one night at least. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen, an age when girls should be at home doing schoolwork or reading novels about dogs and horses, or practicing the piano.
When Kenzo reached the corner by the station, he turned to look back. The three women—the daughter, the mother, and the aunt—were deep in conversation with a trio of men whose distinctive costumes identified them as laborers: jersey shirts, woolen bellybands, balloon-legged pants, knee-high split-toed boots. One of the men was swaying drunkenly, and he had his arm draped familiarly around the young girl’s fragile shoulders.
“War,” Kenzo muttered angrily. “What a lousy, rotten invention that was.”
***
It was long past midnight, and a light rain was falling on the ravaged city. Safely ensconced in his tiny lair, Kenzo lit a hand-rolled cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. He was far too excited to sleep, for he was now convinced that Tamae Nomura was alive, and that she and Sumiyo Hayashi were the same person.
If that was true, though, then how had Tamae survived Hiroshima? Where had she gone with her “wonderful man”? And might it be possible that Tamae’s well-documented estrangement from her sister had somehow culminated in Kinue’s murder?
Kenzo’s head was teeming with questions, but there was a noticeable absence of answers. What this case needs is a fresh point of view, he thought. Or a miracle.
43
Two months passed. It was well into autumn. The air was crisp and cool, and the leaves of the Japanese maples had turned the brilliant crimson of a geisha’s painted lips. On the grounds of Tokyo University Medical School, in the neighborhood of the pond made famous by Natsume Soseki’s novel Sanshiro, a tall, remarkably good-looking youth was loitering about gazing at the scenery.
The young man’s eyes were a distinctive amber color. The large, liquid pupils had the gleam of obsidian, while jet-black eyebrows traced a fine, feathery, arc above long, thick eyelashes. His shoulder-length, pageboy hairstyle gave him a slightly androgynous look, as did his flawless ivory skin and the almost feminine beauty of his chiseled features. He was saved from mere prettiness by the dignity and intelligence that suffused his face. In those days when so many people were wearing charred rags or recycled military uniforms, he was dressed like a country squire in a forest-green tweed jacket with matching knickerbockers, long gray herringbone-patterned stockings, sturdy brogues, and a gray tweed doughboy cap.
The young man’s name was Kyosuke Kamizu. He had gone from Ikko Academy to the Tokyo University Medical School just after Kenzo Matsushita, and everyone who knew him raved about his brilliant intellect. As a youth of nineteen Kyosuke had already mastered six foreign languages: English, French, German, Russian, Greek, and Latin. During his student days he wrote a long thesis on the topic of integers, which was published in the German magazine Mathematische Zeitschrift. These extraordinary gifts and accomplishments gave rise to the sobriquet “Boy Genius,” a nickname that Kyosuke himself had always despised.
Naturally, everyone assumed that after graduation Kyosuke would go on to Tokyo University, study advanced mathematics or physics, and then become a great scholar and a distinguished professor, like so many of the boy geniuses before him. Instead, Kyosuke chose to enter Tokyo University Medical School, where he did special research in forensic medicine. In better times he might have stayed on at the university and followed the traditional course of the brilliant academic, from assistant professor through full professor and on to professor emeritus down the road. But the turbulent tide of history swept Kyosuke off course, along with millions of his contemporaries. He was drafted and became a military surgeon, and his wartime assignments took him from China to Java, on the southern front.
Kyosuke was the only son of a well-to-do, aristocratic family of landowners and intellectuals from Kamakura. Before he left Tokyo on a troop tram, Kyosuke said good-bye as if forever to his devoted servants, an elderly couple who had raised him after his parents’ untimely deaths in a dreadful act of violence during a visit to New York City back in the 1930s. Although not a practicing Buddhist, Kyosuke was imbued with that religion’s sense of the impermanence of things. He had resigned himself to the possibility that he might not survive the war, so he was filled with particularly deep emotion upon returning to the calm, unchanged campus of his beloved alma mater. After gazing around at the tranquil scenery for a few moments, Kyosuke climbed a nearby hill and headed toward the medical school library, which had always been his favorite haven.
Kenzo Matsushita had grown tired of working on his dissertation research and he, too, was taking a stroll around the campus. He was standing under an immense gingko tree, staring moodily up at the overcast sky through a canopy of fan-shaped golden leaves, and he looked around just as Kyosuke approached. Kenzo’s face stiffened and turned pale, as if he had seen a ghost, but when he realized that he was looking at the real thing he shouted “Kyosuke!” in a joyful voice and ran toward his old schoolmate.
“Kenzo! Kenzo Matsushita!” A smile was playing about Kyosuke’s sculptured lips, and faint dimples appeared in his smooth, hair
less cheeks.
“Kyosuke, I’m so glad to see you!” Japanese men do not often embrace in public, but Kenzo couldn’t help giving his long-lost friend a robust slap on the shoulder. “How wonderful that you made it back safely!”
“Thanks, but I’m not sure ‘safely’ is the right word. I was beaten rather badly in detention camp in Java, and I ended up more dead than alive. Somehow I managed to get to Kyoto, and I stayed there considerably longer than I had expected, resting in a hospital. The only good thing was, I got to do a lot of reading.”
“That’s terrible. But you survived. I mean, we’re two of the lucky ones. How long has it been, anyway?”
“I think it’s at least four years since we saw each other in Peking.”
That hadn’t been much of a meeting. There was little free time, and before they had a chance to sit down for a meal or explore that ancient city, they were hustled off with their respective regiments. Kyosuke’s train departed first, and Kenzo had a vivid image of Kyosuke at the train window, saluting and mouthing his favorite farewell, Gardez la foi.
The war was over at last and here they were, together again in peacetime, both alive and relatively well. Kenzo’s glum mood had vanished, and he felt he might burst with joy. The sky, too, had been gray and gloomy, but now the thick clouds parted and a shaft of brilliant golden light illuminated the two men. For a moment they looked like Renaissance seraphs in contemporary dress.
At that same instant, Kenzo had a flash of inspiration almost as brilliant as the sunlight. “Mr. Kamizu,” he said with exaggerated politeness, “I know it is terribly rude of me to ask such a thing when you’ve only just returned but the truth is, I really need your help with something.”
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