Togakushi Legend Murders (Tuttle Classics)

by Yasuo Uchida

  As Haru reached the Otomo house, the family was trying to get its belongings out. Two houses away, the farmer's roof had caught fire, and they could feel the heat on their cheeks with every gust of wind.

  "It's no use. We've got no water," said Mitsuyoshi, carrying an oblong chest, nodding toward the pond in his garden. A little stagnant water was barely visible on the bottom, and the newts were turned red bellies upward.

  "Did you check on Taki?"

  "Yes, but she wasn't there. She must have already fled."

  Placing the chest on the cart, Mitsuyoshi hurried back into the house. Out of it came his wife, moving slowly with her palsied mother-in-law leaning on her shoulder. The younger woman grinned at Haru. What the grin might mean, Haru could not guess. The older one, her bloodshot eyes fixed on the sky, kept mumbling about the wrath of the gods. She had suffered a collapse from the shock of the defeat, and since then had taken it into her head that the gods were sure to punish Japan for its unconditional surrender.

  Mitsuyoshi had said that Taki was not there, but Haru decided to check anyway. Taki's house was just a block away on the other side of the street, and it would be only a matter of time before the fire reached it. Haru could already hear the rustle of sparks falling on the tops of the cedars, oaks, and chestnut trees above her.

  Entering the house, she found the air unexpectedly cool. It was dark inside, and her eyes took some time to adjust. She called Taki's name any number of times from the entryway. The houses of all Shinto priests were big, intended as they were to provide accommodations for religious groups, but the Tendoh house was conspicuously larger than most, and Haru could not be sure that her voice would carry to every corner of it. It was no time for ceremony, and she did not bother to take off her shoes. Going to the back, she looked into the bedroom. Taki was not there. Haru called out at the top of her voice, then strained her ears for an answer. Finally, she heard a faint moaning.

  Taki was in the garden at the back, crawling on the ground on all fours, her face smeared with mud.

  "What are you doing, Taki?" scolded Haru.

  "It's coming out... it's coming out..." Taki howled at the sky like a wolf, her hand pressed against her lower abdomen, as if she were trying to hold back a bowel movement. Her belt was undone and the front of her unlined kimono was dragging on the ground, her breasts and her gigantic belly half exposed.

  "What's coming out, Taki? Do you mean the baby's being born?" asked Haru, rushing over and quickly tying Taki's belt.

  "It's coming out, it's coming out," Taki kept on, bobbing her head up and down. Each time her head went down, her tears dripped onto the ground. Fear and pain were once again distracting this unfortunate girl.

  Haru had to do something, but what? "Taki, you wait here. I'm going to get my mother." She started to go.

  "Don't go! Oh, please, don't go," cried Taki desperately.

  "But..." As Haru turned to look at her, Taki fell flat on her back, her legs toward Haru, and the bottom of her kimono fell open. Before Haru could avert her eyes from the embarrassing sight, what she saw made her gasp. From between Taki's spread thighs, a blood-smeared spherical mass was pushing its way out. It was unmistakably the baby's head. All over Taki's white thighs and buttocks were dribbles of slime that looked like the trails of slugs, and trickles of blood were running everywhere.

  She would die like this, thought Haru, rushing into the house in a daze. She fumbled all over the place in the darkness until she had managed to find two cushions, a pair of scissors for cutting the umbilical cord, and some thread, then she went back to the garden.

  The baby's shoulders were already visible. Taki's arms and legs were stiff, and she was groaning intermittently, apparently with the effort of trying to push the baby out. Haru placed the cushions under Taki's buttocks. The baby came out slowly above them. With an agility she would not have believed possible of herself, Haru took hold of it and laid it gently on the cushions.

  In the distance, she heard the roar of the fire.

  From the Rokumu Slope behind the Zenko Temple, the winding road up the mountain gained altitude steadily. Making a wide detour around Mount Omine, it came out all at once on the Iizuna Plateau, from which point it became a level road called the Birdline, with many straightaways, cutting through a forest of larches toward the Togakushi Mountains. Ahead of them, Togakushi West Peak was already showing its mysterious face.

  Tachibana had heard that this "Birdline" had been constructed along practically all of the route once followed by the so-called Old Road, which had served as an approach for worshippers to the Togakushi Shrines, and he was now whizzing along comfortably in a car on the same route up which he had fled thirty-eight years ago. Since the fall of 1964, when the Birdline was completed, Togakushi had ceased to be isolated by the surrounding mountains.

  "This is the first time you've been to Togakushi, isn't it, Professor Tachibana?" asked Shimizu, who was sitting next to him.

  "Uh, I was here for just a little while many years ago."

  "Were you really? As a matter of fact, I thought that was a look of fond reminiscence on your face. Well then, I don't need to tell you about the place, do I?"

  With a rueful smile, Tachibana realized that he must indeed have been looking sentimental.

  "Anyway, you certainly are a real life-saver, agreeing to come along like this," said Shimizu for the tenth time. "When Shiraishi told me he couldn't make it after all, I was really in a spot. A clumsy oaf like myself certainly wouldn't have been welcome there alone. You'll make a much better impression. This should get us a lot of good will. Should make the sponsors pretty happy, too."

  "You make me sound like a male geisha," laughed Tachibana.

  "Oh no, please don't take it like that. It's your reputation that I'm counting on. It was because of that that I asked you to join me. I'm not kidding you."

  "I don't mind."

  "Of course, like it or not, there come times when not only the administrators, but the professors as well do have to play male geisha." But it was obvious from Shimizu's smile that he didn't dislike it too much.

  T—University, where Tomohiro Tachibana taught, was at the top of the second rank of private universities, but it had established affiliated high schools all over the country and put so much effort into seeing that they all had good baseball teams that the joke was going around that its high schools would soon be taking over the nationwide high school baseball tournaments. The university had become better known for baseball than for learning.

  Shimizu, the university president, held a Doctor of Science degree from Imperial University and was a scientist of undisputed reputation, but he had found his true calling as an administrator. He showed great skill in negotiation with outside organizations, and when it came to getting his own professors to do something, he was an excellent persuader. There was something about the man that made it impossible to dislike him.

  Having wanted to establish an affiliated high school in Nagano City for a long time, he had jumped at the chance to scratch the back of a member of the education subcommittee of the lower house of the Diet elected from the First District of Nagano, a man named Shishido. Hearing that Shishido wanted to build a golf course somewhere in the area, Shimizu had offered his cooperation in return for assistance in obtaining permission to build the school. Now he was hurriedly responding to Shishido's rush invitation to the first meeting of the organization to promote the golf project, a meeting which was actually a party to entertain local people of influence, from whom Shishido was expecting considerable opposition.

  Tachibana had been dragged along in spite of his protest that he did not even play golf. "You can't know whether you might enjoy it or not unless you pick up a club and give it a try," Shimizu had said, unconcerned. "And anyway, the enemy should be satisfied if we just put in an appearance."

  Shimizu had made it sound like a picnic, an invitation that would not bear refusal. But before they arrived, Tachibana had thought the meeting was to be held
somewhere in Nagano City, and evidently Shimizu had made the same assumption. It was only in the car sent to meet them at Nagano Station that they learned they were going to Togakushi. Shimizu had been quite pleased, but if Tachibana had known, he would most likely have refused the invitation, whatever the consequences. Togakushi held altogether too many bitter memories for him.

  He had visited Togakushi once more, after the war, in the summer of 1947. His tuberculosis had gotten worse on the Southern Front, where it had been compounded by malaria, but just when he began to think he was finished, the war ended. After this narrow escape from death, he was late being repatriated and had to spend a long time in the hospital even after that. But as soon as he was able to get around, he insisted on going to Togakushi. He was ordered by the doctor, of course, to stay put, but he was not to be stopped, and in the end he left the hospital without the doctor's permission.

  In the two and a half years since he had seen it, though, the Hoko Shrine village had changed completely. Looking up in the direction of the shrine from the bus stop at the bottom of the slope, he could not believe his eyes. The rows of priests' houses were gone without a trace, and in their stead was nothing more than a scattering of poor, barracks-type huts. He rushed frantically up the slope, only to find that the Tendoh house was gone with the rest. Of that imposing structure with the secret room in which he had hidden, not a pillar was left, only the bare, dark-red scorched foundation. That was the cruelest stroke of all.

  A woman in traditional work pantaloons had come out of the hut across the street pushing a bicycle, and Tachibana ran quickly over to her. When she turned around, her face looked familiar. He remembered her as the daughter-in-law of the Otomo household, whom he had occasionally seen from a window. But she didn't recognize him. That was natural enough, since he had seldom gone out, and had stayed hidden all the while he was evading the draft.

  "Excuse me," he said, "could you help me?"

  "Yes?" she said.

  "The house that used to be here, the Tendoh house, what happened to it?"

  "The Tendoh house?" She gave him an enquiring look. "You don't know about the fire, then?"

  "Fire?"

  "Yes. The big fire the year the war ended. The whole neighborhood burned down."

  "There was a big fire?"

  "Yes." The woman's look asked what else there was to say.

  "What happened to the people in the Tendoh house?"

  "You mean, to Taki?"

  "Well, uh, yes... there was someone named Taki, and uh..." mumbled Tachibana vaguely, before he realized that he was being so cowardly as to try to conceal his identity. Angry at himself, he spoke up. "Yes, that's right. The young lady named Taki and the elderly couple who lived there."

  "You want to know where they are now?"

  "If you don't mind."

  The woman looked troubled. "I'm not sure, but I heard they died."

  "You mean, in the fire?"

  "No, no, not in the fire."

  "Then when, and where?"

  "I'm really not sure."

  "But you do know what happened to them after the fire, don't you?" Annoyed that she wouldn't give him a straight answer, Tachibana raised his voice.

  "Who are you, sir?" she asked, looking up at him.

  It was Tachibana's turn to try to avoid a straight answer. "Well, I stayed here once, and I haven't been back to Togakushi for a long time, so I..."

  "Well then, it's better that you don't know. I'm very sorry, sir."

  With a deep bow, he hurried off, imagining he saw the light of recognition in her eyes. Tachibana the returned soldier, who had lived through all the humiliations of war, was a mere shadow of the student of two or three years earlier, but he feared the shadow might be recognizable.

  He went straight up the slope to the top and began slowly climbing the stairs to the shrine, noticing along the way that the village had not been totally destroyed. The two or three houses closest to the peak had survived, as if under the shrine god's protection. And he found some solace in the fact that the giant cedars on both sides of the staircase remained.

  A drum sounded to signal the beginning of a dance offering, recalling for him the summer of his first year of junior high school, the morning after his first arrival in Togakushi to stay with the Tendohs, when the sound of the drum had for some reason frightened him. Now, so many years later, each beat filled him with inexpressible emotion.

  He reached the top of the stairs just as the shrine maidens were preparing to come on stage. Four young girls in white tunics over crimson pantaloons, wearing gold crowns and shaking sacred bells in each hand, came across the boardwalk and around the veranda. When they had performed their ritual worship in front of the shrine and taken their places at the corners of the stage, a flute began to play a peaceful tune. The drum beat out a monotonous rhythm and the girls shook their bells in time to it, as they spread their long sleeves and began a serene dance.

  He had stopped, his eyes fixed on the stage, thoughts crossing time and space to see Taki once more as a child on that same stage. She had been far more graceful and beautiful than any of the other dancers. No one could compete with her for beauty as a dancer. The dance was usually monotonous, but it never seemed so when she was performing it. The other three dancers had always seemed merely to be following her lead. Taki herself would be in a sort of trance. She had once told Tachibana that she forgot everything when she was dancing.

  And now he had been told she was dead. In spite of himself, he began to cry, and the shrine maidens on the stage became but a haze.

  More than thirty years had passed since that last visit. Tachibana had thought that what had happened to him at Togakushi had been locked tight away in the recesses of his consciousness, along with his war memories. In the mid 1950s he had gotten his position at the university, and in 1957 he had begun a calm, uneventful marriage. He had gone neither against the trends of the times nor with them, but had spent his whole life in mediocrity. He and his wife had never had any children, probably because of the malaria he had contracted, and she had died just before their silver wedding anniversary.

  Shortly before her death, she had expressed pity for him, but when he asked her why, her response had been only a faint smile. After her funeral, he had recalled the incident and wondered why it had never occurred to him before that perhaps she had known—while pretending not to—that a part of his heart was elsewhere.

  * * *

  The golf-course meeting was held at the largest hotel in Togakushi, the Koshimizu Plateau Hotel, a smart, three-story, North-European style building facing West Peak across the Togakushi Plateau, splendidly located with the Togakushi Ski Slope on Mt. Kenashi right behind it.

  The promoters spent from 3 P.M. to about 4:30 P.M. explaining their aims. Then came a reception starting shortly after five. July had just begun, and there were not yet many visitors to the Togakushi Plateau. Toward dusk, it began to look like rain, but there were no complaints about the weather. Guests who had disparaged the hotel as a place way off in the mountains at which they could not expect a decent meal were more than satisfied by the feast of top-quality beef dishes, as well as fresh crab and shrimp from the Sea of Japan.

  Shimizu introduced Tachibana to one local person of influence after another. Tachibana exchanged perfunctory greetings with all of them. But one person bothered him a little, a man introduced as the head of the Takeda Firm. Glancing at his face as they exchanged cards, Tachibana had the feeling they had met before, though the name, Kisuke Takeda, did not ring a bell. He was a man of strong features and solid build, a little over sixty, with his scalp visible through thinning hair, neatly parted on the side.

  Something must have struck Takeda as well, because he looked strangely at Tachibana, and his hand seemed to be shaking as he received the card. But his greeting itself was perfunctory, which seemed to indicate that he did not, after all, think they had met. At the time, Tachibana thought they must have been mistaking each other for someone
else, or had perhaps just met somewhere in passing. But later he found himself unable to forget Takeda. Something about the man kept on bothering him. From time to time during the party, he glanced at Takeda, often to find that Takeda was looking at him. When their eyes met, both of them would quickly look aside. But after several such incidents, Takeda suddenly disappeared from the party.

  "Is something the matter?" asked Shimizu, coming over to fill Tachibana's wine glass. "You don't look like you're having a good time."

  "Oh yes, I am," replied Tachibana, putting on a smile. "By the way, who exactly is that gentleman, Kisuke Takeda?"

  "I say, you do have an awfully good eye, don't you? That fellow is right at the center of the financial world of northern Nagano Prefecture. He's got especially strong ties to Representative Shishido. Fact is, Shishido is reluctant to show himself at the head of this golf course business, so he's using Takeda as a sort of front. They say this Takeda has a lot of power behind the scenes in Nagano politics. We'd better get him on our side, too."

  "I see," said Tachibana absentmindedly, gazing in the direction in which Takeda had disappeared.

  The rain which began in the middle of the night of July 3rd continued until just before dawn on the 7th, when the mysterious peaks of Togakushi were once again sharply outlined against the blue sky.

  At about nine that morning, five co-eds got off a bus at the Imai bus stop. They had come from Nagoya the day before last, and had been staying at a tourist house in Kinasa, shut in by the rain. Now they were finally out to take the hike they had been waiting for, though they had been told that the mountain trail might still be impassable. They wanted at least to get far enough to see the Demoness Maple's Cave.

  After walking for twenty minutes from Imai, they came to the Ashitagahara information sign, located on a rise that gave a good view of the scattered houses of upland farmers. The sign said that the Demoness Maple had use to come here every morning because it reminded her of her native Kyoto. Another twenty minutes or so beyond that, walking uphill along a narrow farm road, they reached the Arakura Campground, on a pleasant plateau surrounded by white birch and larch trees. Normally it would have been covered with tents and lively with crowds of young people, but they had all been chased away by the three straight days of rain. After a brief rest in the office at the campground entrance, the five girls started out for the Demoness Maple's Cave. Just two-hundred meters along the trail was a sign which told them that this place was known as "Poison Plain" because it was here that the Demoness Maple had served poisoned sake to the enemy general, Taira no Koremochi.