by Yasuo Uchida
The lattice door opened, and a middle-aged woman came out. From behind her, a young shrine maiden dancer called, "You'll come get me, won't you, granny?"
"Yes, I'll be here, but you be sure to eat all of that lunch, now," cautioned the woman addressed as "granny," as she closed the lattice door.
"Er, excuse me, could I ask you something?" Tachibana stopped her.
She turned toward him with inquiring eyes. Tachibana did not notice the flash of surprise in them. Going up to her, he saw she was a number of years older than himself. Her work pants gathered at the ankles and her youthful movements must have made her look younger from a distance.
"Will there be more dancing today?" he asked.
"Yes," she replied. "There are reservations for two more performances. The next one should be beginning pretty soon, I think."
"Oh, that's wonderful. It's still thriving. Hasn't changed since so many years ago."
"No, actually, I'm afraid today is very unusual." She looked at Tachibana searchingly. "Uh, how many years ago do you mean?"
"Well, it's been nearly forty years."
"Excuse me, but you weren't by any chance staying with the Tendoh family then, were you?"
"What?" exclaimed Tachibana in astonishment. "How did you know?"
"From Tokyo? A nobleman's son, I believe you were?"
"Uh, well... my name is Tachibana, but.. ."
"Oh yes, Tachibana, that was it! Then I'm right!" Her eyes got bigger. "I'm Haru Kusumoto. I lived just down the road. I was very close to Taki."
"Ah, Haru Kusumoto. I remember!"
"But I'm just an old granny now. You never would have known me, eh?"
"Well, I'm afraid we've both gotten old."
"No, Mr. Tachibana, I knew you right off. You really haven't changed."
Suddenly, Haru began to cry. The sight of Tachibana must have brought back too many memories. Those had been hard times.
"May I accompany you down?" he said, putting a hand on her back. They headed down the seldom-used Women's Slope, so they wouldn't have to worry about meeting anyone.
"I'm sorry. I've made a spectacle of myself," said Haru with an embarrassed smile, hastily wiping her eyes with her cuff.
"The country is a great place, isn't it? You run into friends from so long ago," said Tachibana with feeling. "But I'm afraid I never knew exactly which house was yours."
"I'm not surprised. To us, the young master Tachibana was way up above the clouds."
"Enough!" laughed Tachibana. "I'd prefer to forget that old stuff."
The Women's Slope rejoined the stone staircase at a level area near the bottom. From there, Haru pointed through a gap in the trees and said, "That roof over there, that's the roof of my house." It was a big house at the foot of the peak.
"Then that big fire didn't get your house, did it?"
"No. It was touch and go for a while, but we were awfully lucky. If our house had caught fire, I think the whole peak would have gone up, shrine and all. I never believed in the gods until that day. But Mr. Tachibana, you knew about that fire?"
"Yes, I came back here once in 1947. I believe it was Mrs. Otomo I spoke to, from the house across the street from the Tendohs'. I asked her about Taki."
"You did?"
"Yes. She told me Taki was dead."
"Oh my!" Haru stopped in her tracks and looked up at Tachibana with a sympathetic gaze. After a moment's hesitation, she said, in the tone of someone whose mind was made up, "Won't you come with me to my house? There are some things I'd like to tell you."
Tachibana did not need asking. There was a mountain of things he wanted to find out about Taki.
The Kusumoto house itself still looked as it had in the days when it served as a priest's residence, but it had been completely reborn as the Kusumoto Inn, as indicated by a sign outside and a microbus in front for transporting guests to and from the station. With a melancholy smile, Haru told Tachibana that all such priests' residences had been turned into either inns or restaurants. The prosperous days before and during the war when the government used to make offerings to shrines like the Togakushi ones were gone forever. Most visitors today were students, who used the place as a base to hike across the mountains from the Togakushi Plateau. Young voices were calling back and forth all over the building, inside and out.
She led him into a vacant room that would serve instead of a parlor, made him comfortable, and brought him some cola. Not having put his legs to such use for a long time, he heartily enjoyed the cold drink. She waited for him to finish it, and then began to speak deliberately.
"Taki is alive."
"What?" exclaimed Tachibana, caught unprepared. It took some seconds for the words to sink in. "Alive? What do you mean?"
"She didn't die. You were lied to."
"Lied to?"
"All the villagers had agreed to give that story to anyone from outside the village."
"But why? What happened to her?"
"She became a demoness."
"A demoness?" He had just finished the cola, but his throat felt dry again. "What do you mean, she became a demoness?" he shouted, his eyes wide.
Haru lowered her eyes and took a deep breath. "After that thing happened to her, she went mad."
Tachibana was near choking. With a pain like a dagger thrust, he realized what Haru meant by "that thing."
"The police brought Taki home because of her madness," continued Haru, "but they put Keijiro and his wife in prison. Taki went on living alone in her house. Those of us who were close to her tried to take care of her, but the whole thing was just too sad for words. And to make matters worse, we hadn't noticed it at first, but she was pregnant."
"Pregnant?"
"Yes. She gave birth to a baby girl right in the middle of the great fire."
"I see," said Tachibana, hanging his head. It was pointless now, but a feeling of shame settled heavily on him. He knew that the great fire around the Hoko Shrine had occurred on August 20, 1945. That would mean that the baby Taki gave birth to on that day had to be his. Haru obviously knew that, too. She had not spoken accusingly, but that was small consolation to him. "Where is Taki now?" he finally managed.
"That's not for me to tell."
"Why not?"
"She's had an awful time of it, but now she's finally managing to live in her own way. If you go to her, you'll just stir up sad memories." Haru went on, speaking as one trying to placate a child, and he could make no reply. "But her daughter was raised with loving care by Keijiro's wife. Keijiro's health was ruined in prison, but his wife showed up here alone two days after the fire. Taki and the baby were staying with us. Keijiro's wife waited for her to recuperate and then took both of them home with her. But they finally had to put Taki in the hospital."
"You mean, in a mental hospital?"
She nodded.
Imagining the misery of Taki's madness from Haru's vivid description that she had become "a demoness," Tachibana sank into a deep gloom that continued to torment him after he got back to the hotel. Knowing Taki was alive could do him no good. Even the confirmation that Katsura and Yuko were his daughter and granddaughter, which should have been such good news for him, felt like retribution instead.
He wrote a note to Yuko, a simple note to the effect that he had suddenly been called back to Tokyo on urgent business. He thanked her for her kindness and sent his regards to her mother. The note struck him as too abrupt, but he was afraid to write more.
It was almost noon. He canceled the reservation for the remainder of his stay, left the note at the front desk, had a taxi called, and headed down the hill in it. The weather was going to turn bad. Clouds were moving across the sky, and an almost wintry blast of wind began to blow. Feeling chased, he sank deep into the seat, wishing the driver would go faster.
He stayed in a hotel in Nagano City that night, and the next day, with heavy feelings, made the rounds of mental hospitals in the city and suburbs. From the first, he knew that the exercise would most likely
prove futile, but he also knew he would never be able to rest until he tried it.
As he had expected, he was treated with coolness everywhere. There was no reason for anyone to divulge a patient's secrets to him. Besides, he was asking about a patient who would have entered the hospital more than thirty years ago, and that in itself earned him a laugh at a number of places. At one, he was told not very politely that the hospital itself had only been there for fifteen years, and was looked at with a suggestion that he ought to consider having himself committed.
All his efforts proved in vain. He found no record anywhere of a patient named Taki Tendoh. Physically and emotionally exhausted, he headed for Tokyo on the last express of the day, feeling ten years older.
It was two days after his chance meeting with Tachibana in Togakushi that Takemura received the order to conduct a thorough investigation of the man.
"May I ask why?" he said. "Did we get something new on him?"
"No, not really," said Miyazaki with a sullen look. "This comes from higher up. I mean, a certain person apparently believes there's some deep significance in the fact that Takeda was having Tachibana investigated."
"That's pretty strange, don't you think? That business is the only thing we found on Tachibana at all, and I can't see the point in going into it again unless something new has come up."
"Neither can I. But I'm asking you to do it anyway."
"Who exactly does this come from? If I'm going to change the whole course of my investigation for someone, I'd at least like to know who it is."
"You're really putting me in a spot," grumbled Miyazaki. Then he counterattacked. "Now look, you aren't getting anywhere anyway. You're hardly in a position to refuse." He finished with a look of triumph.
"Yes, I know," said Takemura with a rueful smile. "I'm not refusing. But I at least want to do the best job I can, and for that I need to know what this guy is really after. And how am I supposed to find that out unless you tell me who he is?"
"Damn you're stubborn!" Miyazaki spread his arms in exasperation. "But look here, Takemura, if any of this gets back to him, it's my ass. If I have your word you won't let that happen, I'll tell you who he is."
"Right," laughed Takemura. "So who is this earthshaker?"
"Hirofumi Shishido."
"What? Well, well, what do you know about that! All right, sir, I'm ready to re-investigate Tachibana as ordered," said Takemura obediently, and then withdrew, thinking it very peculiar that Hirofumi Shishido should still be bothered by Tomohiro Tachibana. He wondered if there was some connection between the two. That was what interested him.
Leaving word that he would be somewhere in the city, Takemura headed for the door. Kinoshita got up to follow, but Takemura stopped him. He was not going far enough to need a car, and he judged that it would be better to do this alone. His destination was Kisuke Takeda's mansion.
It had been almost a month since Takeda's murder, and public interest in the case was waning in favor of the prefectural eliminations for the nationwide high school baseball tournament—a welcome circumstance for the police. Takemura had not needed Miyazaki to tell him he was at a dead end. No helpful clues had been discovered to either the Takeda murder or the subsequent Ishihara murders. The period between the Ishiharas' departure from Nagoya and the discovery of their bodies the next morning at Arrowstand was still a total blank. The visit to the Hall of Heavenly Wisdom, the only lead they had, had not helped at all. Public aside, the police themselves were getting impatient, and high-level administrators were beginning to fume.
Takemura was calmer than the rest, because his view of things was a little different. He could not deny, of course, that the investigation was at a standstill, but that did not bother him excessively, for he had found himself at such dead ends often enough before. To go through everything available on a case without finding a single clue was not rare, and the effect of being blocked in every direction was often a sudden inspiration. He was sure one was coming. What he was suffering now were labor pains. Stuffed to the bursting point with information as he was, the slightest inspiration would serve as a needle to pop everything loose. Only the time was not ripe.
* * *
Takeda's widow, Sachie, must have been in a good mood, for Takemura was shown immediately to the parlor. From outside, the house looked purely Japanese, but inside, various concessions had been made to Western style. The parlor had sliding doors and Japanese walls, but a carpeted floor and a rococo reception set made it look like a movie scene depicting Japan's 19th-century opening to the West.
He was kept waiting only long enough for a sip of tea before she entered wearing a pale lavender dress of mediocre design that made her look even thinner than she was. Knowing nothing of fashion, he assumed the dress must be elegant and decided it was not bad.
"If this is about your investigation, I believe I told you that Izawa was handling such matters," she began, with a mild, but not disagreeable reminder.
"Yes, I haven't forgotten. But I would like very much to get your own ideas on a few matters."
"I'm afraid I'm short of those."
"But as his wife, I should think your view of him must have been different from other people's."
"His wife?" she said with a scornful smile. "Oh, never mind. What do you want to know?"
"Anything you can tell me about Tomohiro Tachibara. As you know, your husband was having him investigated, but we still don't know why. Mr. Takeda made the request from the Koshimizu Plateau Hotel, and it so happens that Professor Tachibana was staying at the same hotel on the same day. It appears that they met there and your husband contacted the detective agency right away. We know he asked them to get back to him as soon as possible, so he must have been very worried and in an awful hurry. But for the life of us, we couldn't come up with a single reason— business or private—for the urgency, so we eliminated Tachibana as a suspect. But now we've been urged by a certain person to reopen that line of investigation, and that's why I'm here."
"What person?"
"I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to tell you that, but anyhow, we're stuck. So I'd like to check once more to see whether you might remember anything, or whether there might be some mention of Tachibana in Mr. Takeda's diaries or other papers."
"I've never heard of this Tachibana. I may be getting senile in my old age, but of that much I'm sure. And Kisuke didn't leave any diaries around here. He was always so afraid I might find out something about his private affairs that he just never would have left anything like that in the house. If there are any such things, they would be in his office. That's why you'd do better to talk to Izawa."
Her antipathy for her husband came through in the way she spoke of him, using his first name to a stranger. Takemura could guess how she must feel. They might not even have had any physical relations, let alone spiritual intimacy Maybe that was why they had no children. Of course, the superfluous thought did occur to Takemura that he and his wife, who were not lacking in physical relations, did not have any children either.
"But instead of looking for something new on this Tachibana," said Mrs. Takeda, raising her voice, "hadn't you better be questioning this 'certain person' you mention? It sounds to me as though he must know something."
"You're right about that," said Takemura, impressed with her acumen. "That's exactly what I think. But that's the trouble with working for the government. I'm under orders from on high not to go near him, and I can't disobey."
She glanced at Takemura with a sarcastic laugh. "It must be that guy, then. The one who came up through the military police..." She stopped, scorning to let the name pass her lips.
"Came up through the military police? Who do you mean?"
"You can drop that innocent pose."
"It's no pose "
"What? You mean you really don't know? No, I guess maybe you don't. You are pretty young, aren't you?"
"I'm much obliged to you for that," said Takemura with a smile, it being rare nowadays for him to be cal
led young.
"Well, I guess I'll just have to tell you. I mean Hirofumi Shishido, the Diet Representative."
"Oh really? Was he in the military police?"
"That he was! I forget his rank—second or first lieutenant—but he was a rotten bastard who used the influence of his superiors to throw his own weight around. He wormed his way into my father's good graces and then got the best of him. I've heard about an awful lot of other nasty things he's done too. It is him, isn't it?"
"Well..." Takemura scratched his head. "I'm afraid I can't confirm your guess."
"Then it is him! Well, what do you know? If he's worried about this Tachibana, you can bet it's because he's got a guilty conscience. You just go question him and see! I bet you'll find he did something to the man."
Though the conversation had taken quite an unexpected turn, Takemura had a feeling there might be a lot in what she said.
"Can you tell me when your husband and Representative Shishido got to know each other, and how?"
"Well, I don't know too much about that, but it was through Shishido's patronage that Kisuke met my father, so they must have known each other for some time at least before that."
"And when was that?"
"Around 1948 or 1949, I believe. Anyway, it was a couple of years before the Korean War. As a matter of fact, it was in the midst of all the confusion over that war that my father's business and our family finances recovered. Shishido did a neat job of setting himself up in the world, too. It's a wonder he wasn't tried as a war criminal! But I suppose he weaseled out of that just by being what he is. Anyway, he got rich and then got into politics and became a Diet member. There are an awful lot of things wrong with this world, I'll tell you."
"What had your husband been doing before he got to know your family?"
"I'm not sure, but I think he was some sort of broker, times being what they were. There were a lot of black marketeers in those days. Shall we say that he was one of the higher-class ones?"