by Unknown
Hideyoshi wondered about his son, his namesake, whom they called Yoshi. When Hideyoshi was relishing his last meal on earth—sautéed lobster with her roe inside—he had overheard the guards talking about the son’s food request. Yoshi’s desire was much more pedestrian. Beef curry rice with a bowlful of rakkyo, mini pickled onions. It was a pauper’s meal. Hideyoshi, who hadn’t seen his son since their sentencing seven years earlier, was both a little disgusted and charmed. His son was always satisfied with whatever was presented to him. His teachers had classified him as a bit slow, but since Yoshi was always so dutiful, they openly tolerated his academic weaknesses in the classroom. Yoshi was definitely no troublemaker.
Hideyoshi hoped Yoshi was not in pain now. Had the noose slipped? Was his death a slow one? Hideyoshi had remembered once watching an American movie, which featured actor Sean Penn, a death-row inmate who was executed at the end. His advocate, a nun, had witnessed his execution. Hideyoshi was fascinated by the scene. He had just killed his second woman, and perhaps he had a premonition that the same dismal fate would await him. But here in Japan, all hangings were conducted in secret, as if an arrow happened to pierce a certain space on a dart board one day.
“Something awful must have happened,” Hideyoshi voiced his fear out loud. His son, with the same name, belonged here with him, in the same box. Could his son be in a coma, perhaps unconscious, floating in the space between earthly reality and Hell?
“Is this really Hell?” Hideyoshi wondered.
“What else could it be?” Osumi asked.
“Purgatory. Like Dante’s Inferno.”
“I didn’t know that you were that well read.”
Hideyoshi felt annoyed to be insulted in this way. It was true, however. Hideyoshi was not a reader in any way. It had been a guard, a Catholic, who had shared Dante’s work with Hideyoshi. After reading of the nine circles of Hell, Hideyoshi had wild dreams of twirling down a giant drain of blackness, heads of red demons greeting him as he descended.
“So why are you here, anyway?” Hideyoshi asked his neighbor, who continued to ignore his questions. Instead, Osumi said, “Perhaps your son was extended mercy at the last moment. You were the mastermind behind the killings anyway, weren’t you?”
Even his own lawyer didn’t quite believe him, but Hideyoshi didn’t intend on killing his first victim, the one whose body had been hidden below their floorboards. She, like some of the others, was young. She was about twenty, originally from the countryside. Hideyoshi ran a used furniture shop a few blocks away from Okayama station. Inherited from his mother, it was the perfect business. First of all, Hideyoshi could encounter a fresh crop of young women, newcomers to the city, on practically a daily basis. He, a native of Okayama, was the expert on the best markets for deals, the best coffee shops, the best-maintained laundromats. For fifteen captive minutes, these women’s shiny faces would turn to him, open and accepting. And many times, when they ordered a large piece of furniture, they were grateful for Hideyoshi’s policy to provide free shipping within a ten-kilometer radius.
The twenty-year-old woman, Chie, was the type who couldn’t make up her mind.
It both infuriated Hideyoshi and excited him. “What do you think?” she’d ask him over each purchase, whether it be a skillet or an end table.
He suspected that she didn’t have anyone to consult with in Okayama City. No partner, no friends, no family. This had not been the case in her past. Hideyoshi couldn’t imagine this pitiful girl surviving on her own up to this point.
At the end she—well, they—decided on a kotatsu, a low table with a heater. You could eat at the kotatsu, use it as a desk, warm your thighs and feet. It was a piece of furniture with many uses, Hideyoshi said. The woman nodded her head as if she was trying to convince herself. “That makes sense,” she declared.
Hideyoshi could have carried the kotatsu with him. But he wasn’t in the mood to do that kind of labor for seven blocks. He offered to transport it in his van, free of charge. Chie bowed several times in appreciation.
It was one of those apartments where the walls were paper-thin. Even though it was a cold March, sweat ran down the sides of his face as he dragged the kotatsu into the tiny six-mat room. Chie moistened a face towel with tap water, apologizing that she hadn’t gotten hot water installed yet, and handed it to Hideyoshi. There was a scent on the towel, a slight perfume. He hadn’t been close to such a scent in years, maybe decades. Before he knew it, he was putting his mouth over hers.
It happened so quickly Hideyoshi couldn’t quite believe what happened. Chie lay limp on the floor, his fingers still around her neck. The damp face towel was on the tatami floor, a few centimeters away.
What could he do? Surely one of the neighbors had to have heard their struggle. Hideyoshi remained frozen for a minute, listening. Only a steady drip from the girl’s faucet. This small apartment unit was probably full of low-level salarymen and women still hunched over their desks at their workplaces.
Think, Hideyoshi, think, he told himself. It was before five, before any neighbors would be arriving home. He quickly carried the kotatsu back to the van and then grabbed a dolly and a large flattened cardboard box.
He pulled her legs through the box and then closed both sides by folding in the flaps. After a few tries, he was able to get the box onto the dolly and quickly wheeled it into his van parked on the curb. He hadn’t touched anything in the apartment aside from the girl and the towel. He shoved the towel in the glove compartment. It later became a memento of what he had done.
She had been missing for about a week when the police came to visit Hideyoshi’s shop. Some neighbors had remembered seeing Hideyoshi’s van in the neighborhood about the time Chie went missing.
“Let’s see, Thursday. Thursday, Thursday.” Hideyoshi feigned a faulty memory as he leafed through his datebook, a mess of scribbles and old receipts. He had written a receipt for Chie’s purchase. “Yes, she had purchased a kotatsu. I went to deliver it but she wasn’t at home.”
The excuse, which he concocted on the spot, was so believable, so authentic.
“About what time was that?” the detective asked. He was in his forties, probably a seasoned veteran. Hideyoshi was more bothered by the detective’s partner, a young woman in her late twenties. She was a tomboy type, her brown hair in a simple bowl cut. In fact, with her round face, she resembled a chestnut. Hideyoshi found her utterly unattractive.
“About four,” he said with conviction. “And then I returned back to the store.”
“When did you leave the store, Mr. Osumi?” the tomboy detective piped up.
How rude, Hideyoshi thought. This line of questioning should be the purview of your superior. And just who do you think I am? A common laborer? I am a businessman with my own enterprise. But he did not express any of this. Instead he said, “Hmmm. I always close at five-thirty, and then I went home to have dinner with my family. You can ask my wife.”
“Surely we will,” said the tomboy.
Hideyoshi wanted to slap her right then and there. But instead he just gave her a weak smile. “Of course, anytime.”
They came to the house that evening. The floorboards had been reinstalled outside of their bathroom, so everything looked exactly the way it should.
The four of them sat at the dining room table by the kitchen. Atsumi wore slippers that flapped on the linoleum kitchen floor as she went back and forth to retrieve hot tea and teacups. Finally the senior detective told her they were fine and that she needed to sit down.
The tomboy detective spoke up first. “Maybe, Mr. Osumi, you could give us a moment.” She gestured away from the table—so, the police wanted to question Atsumi without his presence.
Hideyoshi quickly smiled and dipped his head. “Of course,” he replied. He rose and turned the corner where he stood beside the door of their first-story bathroom over the spot where Chie Toyama’s body had be
en buried. He listened intently.
“Mrs. Osumi, can you tell us about last Thursday?”
“Well, he came as usual, around five-thirty. Maybe a little early, in fact. He ate sukiyaki that night. I always make sukiyaki on Thursdays.”
“How did he seem?”
“Fine. Nothing special. Normal.”
“Do you have any children, Mrs. Osumi?” the male detective then asked.
“A son.”
“Just one son?”
“He’s twelve. And he was there when my husband was home.”
The detectives wanted to question Yoshi, but he was studying for an important test for the next day.
“I would hate to distract him in any way,” Atsumi said in a quiet voice. “I’m sure that he wouldn’t know of anything that could help you.”
The male detective must have had children about the same age because he backed down. “Of course. If it’s necessary, we will return.”
That particular detective did not come back. The disappearance of young Chie Toyama confounded the police for a couple of years. She never made contact with her parents in the countryside. The local newspaper unearthed the details of her life—how she had been so mercilessly bullied by some girls at her high school that she was driven away from their quaint town after graduation. Weighed down by shame, one of these bullying girls then committed suicide, and then all interest in the missing Chie Toyama receded, as if the suicide was, in essence, penance for whatever happened to the young woman.
For several months, Hideyoshi was in a state of disbelief that he had killed someone. And after Chie’s former classmate’s suicide, Hideyoshi couldn’t believe that he was actually going to get away with it. Every movement became intentional. Even just dragging his toothbrush against his front teeth seemed like a revolutionary action. Ironically, as a girl was now dead, Hideyoshi had never felt so alive.
Eventually, however, the mundane began to seep back into his life. More requests to pick up used furniture from retirement-age men and women, more purchases by bachelors. Hideyoshi needed to find another victim, but he knew that he had to be careful. It couldn’t be an actual customer, but a window shopper who passed through all the small stores on their street. Someone with no ties to the area.
He selected the second one because of her size. She was inordinately small, maybe only four feet nine inches in height.
He was closing up the shop while she was standing there studying her phone. A map was on the screen and the image kept flickering on and off.
“Excuse me,” she said to him. “I hate to bother you. But I’ve just moved into the neighborhood and I’m already lost. My phone seems to be malfunctioning.”
Hideyoshi asked the woman for her address. He knew exactly where it was: a part of town that happened to be a web of skinny back alleys. He could have taken her but he didn’t want to be seen with the woman. No, that would ruin everything.
He instead verbally told her how to get to her destination. Right, then left at the mailbox and then another right at the house with some stonework out front.
The woman giggled in embarrassment. “I can’t believe that I could be so stupid.”
“No,” Hideyoshi said. “It’s all quite understandable.”
Hideyoshi took a shortcut to the woman’s apartment. In spite of his directions she must have gotten lost again, because her small frame didn’t appear at her door until at least fifteen minutes later.
She had barely opened her door when Hideyoshi pushed his way in behind her.
The next day the murder was on the television news. The woman’s body had been found by, ironically, a deliveryman. She was discovered without her panties and skirt, although she was still wearing socks. And she had been strangled to death.
“Mah, what is the world coming to?” Atsumi commented, holding her soup bowl.
Yoshi was now fifteen and seemed mildly interested, especially with the implication that the woman could have been sexually assaulted. There would be proof, of course, but no bodily fluids. Hideyoshi made sure of that.
The newscaster mentioned that the woman, Kaneko Saijo, had been separated from her husband and had just moved into a new apartment.
“I wonder if the husband had anything to do with it?” Atsumi said in between slurps of miso soup.
Hideyoshi’s eyes widened. Would other people think the same thing?
One day in Hell—actually, Hideyoshi wasn’t sure if it was a day or just a moment—his box was opened. He looked up to see a person—or was it a person?—peering down at him.
She was blond like the women in his porno magazines, but only the hair was the same. The face, with its pinched nose, had an unattractive quality to it. It certainly didn’t look human. She wore a tight white uniform, but even her curves seemed a bit misplaced.
Hideyoshi immediately formed a strong distaste for the woman, or whatever she was. He imagined wrapping his hands around her stringy neck, putting his thumbs against the soft spot above her clavicle.
“We don’t like you talking to Mr. Osumi,” the blonde said about his neighbor.
“Why?”
“It’s not recommended.”
“I wasn’t aware of any rules. I wasn’t given any when I came.” He couldn’t remember much about entering Hell. Only that there had been some shaking.
He tried to sneak a look beyond the uniformed creature. Rows of boxes. “How many of us are here, anyway?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“I want to talk to your supervisor,” he demanded.
“Suit yourself,” the blonde closed the top of the box and within minutes—or was it minutes?—appeared a creature with the same pinched, beaklike nose. Instead of blond hair, however, the figure had a bald scalp with extended veins all across it.
“I want to know where my son is,” Hideyoshi said. “We were to be executed by hanging on the same day. He should be here. We have the same name.”
The creature wore a black suit, which again didn’t seem to fit him quite right. He brought out a manila folder. “Well, let’s see,” he said, leafing through the papers.
“Hideyoshi Osumi,” Hideyoshi repeated, in case there was some kind of bureaucratic mix-up.
“Yes, Hideyoshi Osumi. I see him now. Twenty-nine years old. Young to be executed.”
What an unnecessary comment, Hideyoshi thought, but he held his tongue.
“I will look into this,” the creature promised and then the box was closed again.
Yoshi was not Atsumi’s biological child. He wasn’t Hideyoshi’s blood child, either, but they did share the same linked DNA. Yoshi was yoshi, an adopted child from his sister’s family. She already had two sons and a girl, while Hideyoshi had none. This fourth-born would continue the Osumi lineage. Hideyoshi and Atsumi decided to call him Hideyoshi, too, although instead of kanji, they used the phonetic hiragana, Hi-de-yo-shi. His nickname, Yoshi, was an inside joke between the two. The creation of the nickname, in fact, might have been the last time they shared an authentic laugh.
Hideyoshi thought that a child would create a perfect triangle between the three members of the household, but instead Yoshi became a mama’s child, a botchan. Mother and son stood together on one side, while Hideyoshi remained alone again on the other. And that’s the way it was until the murder of the third woman.
Hideyoshi had erred in choosing her. She was physically stronger than the other two, with large shoulders and big breasts. She seemed more decisive, too. She wanted to see whether he had two more of a certain kind of chair, so insistent that she even followed him into his storage unit.
As they stood alone in a dark, dusty space, she didn’t seem the least bit afraid or tentative with him. She probably thought nothing of an old man in a long-sleeved shirt and khaki pants.
It was the smell of her hair, which was long and plaited
in two long braids, that first tantalized Hideyoshi. It smelled milky, like the drink Calpis. He remembered how his mother would stir in the white syrupy liquid with cold water and ice cubes during hot summer months.
The girl was examining one of the chairs when Hideyoshi fingered one of her braids. He thought that he was being discreet, but she felt his touch immediately. She turned back at him and struck his cheek. “You dirty old man!” she proclaimed. She then rushed towards the open door, but Hideyoshi grabbed her jacket, which was tied around her waist. He pulled her back and she immediately started to scream.
To stop her, Hideyoshi grabbed hold of something on one of his shelves—a faux European lamp stand. One blow with it and she fell to the ground, twisting like an injured caterpillar.
Hideyoshi tore at the woman’s shirt. How dare you slap me like that, he thought. He held her neck as she struggled.
“Papa?” Yoshi had entered the storage unit. He was sixteen and partial to big breasts, based on his taste in semi-pornographic manga.
“Come, help hold her down.” Hideyoshi commanded.
Yoshi didn’t move for a second.
“Yoshi-kun!” Hideyoshi called out. His blood was racing. He had to have her.
After he was done with her, Hideyoshi tightened his grip around her neck until she breathed no more.
In hiding the body, Hideyoshi gave his son a series of directions. It was as if they were doing a home-improvement project together. “Yoshi-kun, get a bucket of water. Yoshi-kun, get that bag of cement mix.”