The short, middle-aged desk clerk who came out to greet them immediately recalled Shinkichi Yoshizawa with a smile. “He’s the one with a toy monkey, right?”
He must have been amused by a twenty-year-old man having a toy like that, thought Sawaki. Or perhaps he had found it ludicrous. Sawaki again wondered why Shinkichi had been carrying such a childish toy around with him as though it were a prized possession.
The clerk brought out the hotel register and showed it to them. Shinkichi Yoshizawa stayed there under his real name for one week. His handwriting was not elegant, but it had an earnest feel, almost excessively so. Toku’s nose rubbed against the register as she peered at her son’s handwriting, but after a while she raised her face and asked the clerk, “May I please see his room?”
The clerk called a maid to show Toku to the room. Sawaki would have liked to see it too, but he felt he should let Toku go alone and instead questioned the clerk about the last seven days of Shinkichi’s life.
“As soon as he arrived, he wrote some letters,” the clerk told him. Letters? Sawaki’s eyes gleamed. If those had been suicide notes, they might learn the reason for his death.
“There were three altogether. At his request, I mailed them myself from the post office,” added the clerk.
“Three letters?” It sounded even more likely to Sawaki that they were suicide notes, but it was strange that he had not sent one to his mother, Toku.
“I sent them express delivery. That’s what he told me to do.”
“Do you remember the contents of the letters?”
“Contents?” The clerk smiled wryly. “Well, they were in envelopes, you know.”
“So how about the addressees? Can you at least remember whether they were sent to Hokkaido or Tokyo?”
“All three were to Tokyo.”
That meant that none of them had been addressed to his mother.
“What about the names?” asked Sawaki.
The clerk rested his forehead on his hand as he considered this, but he could only recall one of them. His eyes shone as he told Sawaki, “It was the name of one of those experts that’s always appearing on TV. He’s pretty well known.”
“An expert? You mean a college professor or social commentator, or something?”
“A commentator, that youngish guy who wears black-rimmed glasses. Name’s Fuji-something-or-other.”
“Fujishima? Kiichiro Fujishima?”
“Yes, that’s the one. I’m sure of it.”
Kiichiro Fujishima was an assistant professor at S University who had been making a name for himself as an up-and-coming commentator. Sawaki had met him once. He was extremely articulate and just the type of commentator popular on TV these days, although he was also criticized for being too much of a celebrity. In any case, he was famous. How come Shinkichi Yoshizawa had known him? Or could it be someone else of the same name? Sawaki could find out by paying Fujishima a visit upon his return to Tokyo.
“And after mailing the letters?” Sawaki pressed.
“He seemed to be waiting for something. Every day he would sit, looking out of the window and often asked about arrival times at the station and airport, and he was always checking to see if any mail had come for him,” the clerk lowered his voice. It would appear that the three letters had not been intended as suicide notes, even if that was how they had ended up. Shinkichi Yoshizawa had spent a week at this inn waiting for the replies. When none came, he killed himself. What had Shinkichi written in those letters? Would he have still killed himself if he had received any replies? Why had the three recipients not replied or come up here to see him?
Toku had not returned. Sawaki suddenly felt uneasy and went upstairs to look for her. As he slid open the door of the tatami room with a sea view where Shinkichi had stayed, he was struck full in the face by the wind. Toku had flung the windows wide open and was sitting there gazing out to sea. Dusk was falling, and the breeze blowing in off the sea had an added chill to it. Frowning, Sawaki walked round to face her and said, “You’ll catch cold.”
Toku did not respond. She did not even appear to have heard him. She was not weeping, but she seemed abstracted, expressionless. Sawaki had no idea what she was thinking about.
That night Sawaki took Toku back to Tokyo on the overnight train. The journey took almost ten hours, during which time he snapped numerous photos of her. However, her expression in the viewfinder never changed and in the end he gave up and put the camera away. He would not be able to use photos like that. Instead, he tried asking her various things about her dead son, but the answers that came back were equally flat, certainly not the makings of a good story. The boy was well-behaved, a good kid. After his father died, he had left school as soon as he could, to go out to work. He had really looked after her. He had never quarreled with anyone else. After he came to Tokyo, he sent money home every month without fail. He had just written to her that he would soon be earning enough to bring her to live with him in Tokyo. So why did he go and kill himself? Why—
Why had he killed himself? Of course, Sawaki had no answer to that. He sat quietly trying to picture in his mind the twenty-year-old he had never met. The Shinkichi Yoshizawa he imagined from Toku’s account was morally upright, thoroughly unfashionable, and utterly unnewsworthy. He sounded like a pretty dull kind of guy. Was it his deep earnestness that had driven him to suicide? Or had Toku over-idealized her only son, and in reality he had been a very different type of youth? Could he have changed after three years living in Tokyo?
They arrived at Ueno station early the next morning.
Tokyo was far warmer than Hokuriku, and as noisy and bustling as ever. They had breakfast in a café by the station, after which Sawaki told Toku he intended to pay Kiichiro Fujishima a visit. Toku, however, was reluctant to meet such an eminent figure. Sawaki was curious to see how Fujishima would respond to a farmer like her and tried to persuade her to go with him, but the more he tried to convince her, the more she recoiled from the idea. There was no budging her, so for the time being he checked her into an inn by Shinobazu Pond, and went alone.
Kiichiro Fujishima lived in an upmarket condominium near Azabu Roppongi. It was certainly a sign of the times that such a young commentator could be living in a condo and drinking in the bars of Ginza. Sawaki called first to confirm he was home, and when he arrived, Fujishima came out to greet him with a big smile and showed him into the living room decorated with a floral-patterned carpet.
“You’d never believe how busy I am,” he told Sawaki in a slight Kansai accent. “From next month I’ll be serializing my opinion pieces, ‘Youth Today: Reality and Myth’ in your evening paper. That’s going to take up a big chunk of my time.”
“Thanks so much,” Sawaki smiled. Fujishima complained of being busy, but he looked healthy and full of energy, and appeared to be rather enjoying the frenzy of activity. A pretty young girl he introduced as his secretary brought them coffee. Sawaki felt a twinge of envy for this commentator who seemed to be surrounded by a swirl of brilliant color.
Fujishima lit up a slim cigar and then looked at Sawaki. “So, what brings you here today?” The mild scent of the cigar tickled Sawaki’s nose. He had been offered one, but instead took out his own pack of Hi-Lites.
“The matter of a young man’s suicide.”
“Ah, the youth suicide issue,” nodded Fujishima. “A huge problem, particularly in this country. First of all—”
In characteristically eloquent fashion, he rattled off how the youth suicide rate in Japan was the highest in the civilized world, how many youngsters had killed themselves in the past year and for what reasons, as well what measures against youth suicide were being taken in different countries. It was as though there were a number of drawers in his head, and whenever a specific issue cropped up the corresponding drawer automatically opened and the answers came flying out. Being able to instantly come up with answers for all manner of social issues was a valued talent in today’s media, but for Sawaki, who had come to talk a
bout one particular young man’s death, Fujishima’s intelligent, perfectly calibrated talk felt strangely lacking. Once he had made his main points, Sawaki quickly grasped the opportunity to interrupt.
“The young man in question was apparently an acquaintance of yours.”
“Is that so? In that case, he must have been a student at my university. If I’m perfectly frank with you, the university has now become so absolutely ginormous that unless he stood out for any reason I would never remember him. Not to mention the upheaval of the campus protests, ha ha ha!” he said, laughing off any sense of responsibility.
“No, he can’t have been your student.”
“In which case, I’m even more in the dark.”
“His name was Shinkichi Yoshizawa. A twenty-year-old.”
“Yoshizawa?” Fujishima furrowed his brows. He appeared to have no memory of him.
“A week before he died, I believe he sent you a letter,” added Sawaki.
Fujishima called his secretary. “Miss Miyoshi, look and see if a letter came from someone called Shinkichi Yoshizawa, would you?”
The secretary nodded wordlessly and disappeared into the office, returning immediately with a sealed letter. Pinned to the envelope was a typewritten page. While Fujishima was casting his eyes over the page, the young woman took a seat next to him and, crossing her shapely legs, opened up a notepad on her knee. Sawaki thought he had seen this somewhere before, and then realized it was a scene from an American movie. It was the classic pairing of a dynamic executive and his beautiful and capable secretary. Sawaki smiled wryly.
“Now I get it,” said Fujishima. “Yes, the letter did arrive. This appears to be it.”
Sawaki glanced at the envelope Fujishima passed him. The sender was indeed Shinkichi Yoshizawa. The handwriting was the same as in the register at the Star Lily Inn.
“I have a number of top-class brains working under me,” Fujishima said running his eyes over the attached sheet of paper. “Most are graduate students, and according to this memorandum, Utsumi was in charge of this case. He has been away in England, so the reply was pending his return.”
Sawaki did not quite understand what Fujishima meant by being in charge of the case, but he wanted to read the letter, so with Fujishima’s permission he opened the envelope.
Dear Dr. Kiichiro Fujishima,
My name is Shinkichi Yoshizawa. I have never met you, but I wrote to you about a year ago. I did not expect to hear back from someone as famous as yourself, so when I received your conscientious reply it was like a dream come true. I cannot tell you how much that letter encouraged me. I tend to get very lonely, and just the fact that a famous professor like you could be concerned about a nobody like me, gave me the support I needed.
But now I again feel that life is unbearable. I guess I’m not as strong as you said.
I am staying at a small hotel in Hokuriku called the Star Lily Inn. I plan to be here for one week. I know it is selfish of me to ask this of you, but I would really like to receive another encouraging letter from you while I am here. I am sure that if you write to me, I will again find the courage I need.
I look forward to hearing from you.
There was nothing in the letter to suggest Shinkichi had been contemplating suicide, and the contents were pretty vague. What was clear, though, was that he wanted a reply. He had been waiting in that musty old inn in Hokuriku just to hear from Kiichiro Fujishima. And that reply was never sent.
“It was one of your brains, Tetsuo Utsumi, who replied last year,” said the secretary in her clear alto voice.
“I share out responsibilities amongst my students,” said Fujishima by way of explanation. “Whenever we receive a letter, whoever replies to it assumes responsibility for any subsequent correspondence. Other less concerned commentators would not even consider replying, but I just can’t bring myself not to. So I have a team of around twenty brains working on it. Of course I pay them out of my own pocket, and I’m always reminding them about their duty. In this case, too, Miss Miyoshi no doubt thought it appropriate for Utsumi to reply, and was keeping it until he got back from his trip.”
Sawaki remained silent, watching Fujishima’s mouth moving. Fujishima looked quite self-satisfied, but for all he bandied words like “person in charge,” “brains,” “responsibility,” and so forth, in the end, all it amounted to was getting his students to ghostwrite his replies for him, wasn’t it? But there was hardly any point in saying so. Ghostwriting in that world was par for the course, and if anything Fujishima’s way of doing things was, as he said, conscientious. After all, he had sent a reply to a total stranger, even if it had been ghostwritten.
Nevertheless, if he had not been so concerned about getting the same person to write the second time, Shinkichi Yoshizawa would probably still be alive today.
This bothered Sawaki. To put it even more bluntly, if no reply had been sent the first time, perhaps Shinkichi would not have set so much store by Fujishima. However Sawaki did not voice this either. To some extent, ghostwriting itself entailed relinquishing responsibility, so there was absolutely no point grilling Fujishima over his responsibility for a young man’s death. Plus Sawaki also felt that it was not he who should get angry with Fujishima, but Toku Yoshizawa.
When Sawaki requested permission to keep the letter, Fujishima readily answered, “By all means.”
Sawaki asked just one last question.
“What would you think of a twenty-year-old guy with a wind-up toy monkey as a prized possession?”
“Sounds like a bit of a loser to me,” grinned Fujishima. “It suggests feminization. A guy like that doesn’t belong in today’s world. Men of his age should be grappling with something bigger than that.”
So he killed himself.
Sawaki kept the thought to himself.
Back at the inn, Sawaki had expected Toku to react angrily when he gave her the letter addressed to Kiichiro Fujishima. At least that was what he was secretly hoping. He switched on his tape recorder at the ready.
Yet Toku said nothing even after reading her son’s letter. He had kept the tape running in vain. Sawaki grew more and more irritated. He had in mind a particular scenario in which a mother who had lost her only son vented her anger against a social commentator turned celebrity who had acted irresponsibly. However clichéd it might sound, if it served to highlight the young man’s death then he would be able to make an article out of it, but it all hung on Toku. If she maintained her silence, then nothing would come of it.
“If your son had received a reply to that letter, he might not have committed suicide. Don’t you agree?” he said, half trying to goad a reaction out of her. The suggestion of a tremor briefly ran across Toku’s features, but the words that eventually came out of her mouth were not those Sawaki was hoping to hear.
“But such a famous professor must be terribly busy—”
“But hey, that doesn’t mean he isn’t responsible. After all, someone died.”
Toku looked flustered by Sawaki’s raised voice. “Thank you very much,” she said, abruptly bowing her head. “I had completely forgotten to thank you.”
“That’s not what I meant!” grimaced Sawaki. It looked as though it would be impossible to get Toku to denounce Kiichiro Fujishima.
“There must be two more letters from your son. Shall we go looking for them?” he said, changing the subject.
They went out after lunch.
Sawaki just did not understand Toku. He understood her grief at losing her only son, but surely she was angry too? Perhaps she was still too immersed in her sorrow. Or maybe she was overwhelmed by Tokyo, this being her first visit to the capital.
First Sawaki took her to the laundry in Asakusa where Shinkichi had worked. It was quite a large shop, with three brand-new automatic washing machines lined up at the front of the store. When Sawaki stated the reason for their visit, the plump proprietor showed them into the living room at the back.
“He was such a good boy. I still c
an’t believe he killed himself,” said the kindly looking man, looking alternately at Sawaki and Toku. Shinkichi had been a hardworking boy, and he had even raised his salary and could not think of any reason why he might have killed himself. The proprietor did not give the impression he was saying such things to be kind to Toku. He certainly did seem to find it an inconvenience that he was understaffed, having lost such a good worker.
“Did you receive a letter from him after he went away?”
“Yes, one did come,” the proprietor assented. “But it wasn’t addressed to me. It was to Miyamoto, the lad who worked with him.”
“Can we talk to him?”
“He’s already left. Straight after Yoshizawa went away, it was.”
“So what about the letter?”
“I sent it on to him.”
“So where is this Miyamoto now?”
“Last I heard he was working at that cabaret up the road. Chat Noir, it’s called. The nightlife business is all that type of lad is good for, they think it’s easy money,” he smiled sardonically at Sawaki.
Sawaki turned to Toku. “Shall we go and take a look?” She seemed a bit taken aback by the idea of going to a cabaret, but agreed to go.
They saw the Chat Noir as soon as they went out onto the main street, Kokusai Dori. Its enormous neon sign featuring a black cat was just beginning to flicker into life. However, Miyamoto had already left and they were told he was now working in a bar called Violet in Ikebukuro. Sawaki was shocked at such a drastic move, but he and Toku immediately hailed a taxi to take them to Ikebukuro.
They found Miyamoto working there as a bartender. Sawaki had imagined him to be a yakuza type, but he turned out to be a cheerful fresh-faced young man of about twenty-one or twenty-two.
“Anyone who hangs around wasting their time as a server in a cabaret is an idiot,” laughed Miyamoto proudly. Sawaki was unfamiliar with this world and had no idea whether a server or a bartender was the higher rank, but looking at the youth’s self-satisfied air, he guessed the bartender was the more important. When he introduced Toku Yoshizawa, Miyamoto said, “Oh, so you’re Shinkichi’s mother?” as he deftly took an orange juice from the refrigerator.
The Isle of South Kamui and Other Stories Page 8