Puppet Master vol.1

by Miyuki Miyabe

  　She'd gone out on a date with Shoji straight after returning from Kawagoe and had ended up telling him about what she'd been up to. His eyes had shone. “Shige-chan, you're amazing. You have to write it. You really have to.”

  　“Eh?”

  　“If there's something you're interested in, you should write about it. I've always thought that. The jobs you're doing now are fine, but there must be something you can pull together into a book. You're definitely capable of it─remember what the Sabrina editor told you. You should go for it!”

  　Well how about that for overreacting! “But it's not as if I can write─”

  　“Of course you can! How can you say you can't when you haven't tried?”

  　“But I have no idea how to go about it, now that the Shimoda case is out of bounds and I'm not getting anywhere in Kawagoe. I'm not affiliated with any paper or magazine.”

  　“Why not start from the beginning? You can write about finding the flier in Shimoda, and how you discovered that she'd run off with her lover. But anyway, Shige-chan, it's not as if you want to just write about each case one by one, is it? It's more why people go missing that you're interested in, right? So how about writing about what happened and what you honestly thought at the time. Like, I don't know, but once you start doing that, maybe you'll find out more, and start coming across other cases. People do odd things, but there has to be a reason behind what they do. Right?”

  　Shigeko looked Shoji full in the face. He had inherited the family's metal works and was a hard worker who enjoyed looking after his car, didn't drink, and never went to pachinko. She had never even seen him reading a book. Where had he been hiding this side of himself?

  　“Shoji, you're in the wrong business. You should have been an editor!”

  　“Don't be silly,” he said, blushing.

  　Nevertheless, the fact that he'd been so strongly encouraging did help to restore her confidence and get her back on track. Her only lead at this stage was Akemi Kishida in Kawagoe. She decided to forget about the police, and patiently went through the telephone directory listings until she tracked down Akemi's family. She visited Mr. and Mrs. Kishida and explained as best she could that she wanted to investigate their daughter's disappearance, and would of course let them know if she discovered anything that might help the police investigation. They seemed a bit bemused by this, especially Akemi's father, but she'd put it down to her being a complete stranger. In which case, the only way to convince them she was serious was to get on and do it. She had therefore started unobtrusively looking into Akemi's lifestyle and character, and her behavior around the time of her disappearance.

  　Akemi was the only child of an extremely well-to-do family. Her father was a well-known landowner, and also a notorious womanizer. Naturally he was always fighting with his wife, and while Akemi was materially well off, she had been brought up in an emotionally dysfunctional household. Maybe because of this, she herself was known for being promiscuous and sleeping around. When Shigeko canvassed a few of her classmates in the area, none of them had anything good to say about her. Nor did she seem to have any particular boyfriends. Lots of names of boys came up as having been involved with her, but there were too many and none stood out in particular.

  　“Akemi's always gone on about leaving home, ever since junior high,” one of her female classmates had said. “Maybe she found a cute guy and went after him. She'll probably come home when she gets fed up or he dumps her.”

  　There was also a male classmate who had said he couldn't believe Akemi's parents were worried about her having left home. “They're stuck-up people who don't give a hoot about their daughter. Are they really looking for her, seriously? I bet they only requested a police search because it would have looked bad if they didn't.”

  　Shigeko herself sometimes had the uneasy feeling that Akemi's father wasn't being quite up-front with her about everything. She had even wondered at times whether he was just trying to keep up appearances. Then, a couple of weeks after she'd started her interviews of the Kishidas, the father awkwardly passed her a letter, saying “To tell the truth, this arrived ten days after Akemi went missing.” It was handwritten in rounded feminine writing, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Kishida. On the back, in the same writing, where normally the sender's address was given, was written simply “Akemi.”

  　“A letter from your daughter?”

  　“So it would seem. It's her handwriting.”

  　The letter was short and had gone something like, Sorry for doing as I please, but I need to be away from home for a while. Being under the umbrella of Dad's wealth, I can't tell whether people who try to get close to me are really just after my money. That makes me feel so terribly lonesome … it's hard. So I want to spend some time on my own somewhere where nobody knows my background. I want to grow as a person, and when I feel confident I'll come back home …

  　For all the girly handwriting, flowery notepaper, and sentimental, self-centered language, it was far better written than Shigeko had imagined from the image of Akemi she'd been getting. However, Akemi's father told her sourly that she'd always been good at composition ever since she was little. Not only that, but he admitted that he was still sending money to the account he'd set up for Akemi's allowance when she went to Tokyo. In other words, she'd still been withdrawing money from her account even after going missing, and her father had been replenishing it to ensure she wouldn't go short.

  　Shigeko couldn't believe her ears. “Hasn't it occurred to you that if you stop sending her money, Akemi might come home?” she'd asked, but the father just replied sullenly, “I don't want her coming home complaining that I stopped sending her money.” Shigeko had no answer to that. However, she was beginning to feel interested in this father-daughter relationship, as it dawned on her that it was something she could write about.

  　“But with this letter, wouldn't it be better to withdraw the search request?”

  　“Do you think I'd show a letter like this to the police? It'd be tantamount to announcing to the world what a self-centered fool my daughter is. No way would I do that,” he said scornfully. “In any case, the police aren't looking for her. A notice has been put out for her, and I'm fine with leaving it at that.”

  　He was probably right. But then there was the matter that she'd approached him on the basis that her investigation would help in the search for Akemi. “But Mr. Kishida, if that's the case, now that you've admitted this much to me, in terms of me writing about your daughter's disappearance─” she started apprehensively.

  　“I want you to stop,” he interrupted her, as dismissively as if he was cancelling a restaurant reservation. “When you first came here, I hadn't thought you were all that serious about investigating Akemi's disappearance. But then there's the neighbors and others to consider, so I couldn't turn you down right out. And so, well, I ended up talking to you. But now I want you to listen to me.”

  　Shigeko had been left open-mouthed, and she still hadn't recovered when she got on the train and went home. By the time she got home and sat down at her computer, she felt the rage welling up in her. But then she decided to write down everything that had happened until now without leaving anything out. This was also background information to people going missing in this day and age and she could use it as material for her article. In the end, her chapter on Akemi Kishida turned out to be quite long.

  　While she was doing this, Sakiko Himuro in Shimoda contacted her. She and Sakiko talked on the phone every now and then, but this was different. Another young woman in the Shimoda jurisdiction had gone missing.

  　“It's a bit hard to judge whether it's a case of her running away from home, or whether there is criminal involvement, but anyway, do you want to investigate? As long as you're subtle about it, there won't be any problems from the police side, and the family have said they will cooperate if it can help the search.”

  　So Sakiko had already told the family about her. Shigeko was grateful
for Sakiko's good intentions, but at the same time it was rather like being told that if she didn't do a good job she'd be betraying Sakiko's trust in her. Still, she could hardly refuse. And so it was settled. Unlike Akemi Kishida, Shizue Iino had no obvious problems with her family. However, when Shigeko went to interview them, she eventually came to realize that Shizue had been fed up with her peaceful, comfortable life─something that she noted in her manuscript, too.

  　By this time, Shigeko was beginning to get the hang of investigative journalism work. She went around all the police stations in the Tokyo metropolitan area, and pulled on all her writer connections to get introductions to crime reporters, and little by little managed to increase the scope of her leads. Her case file rapidly grew thicker, and the number of names on her list grew. Sometimes she'd just start investigating a case when the woman concerned would come home or make contact, and when this happened she interviewed them too. Bringing all these different threads together, Shigeko gradually began accumulating enough material for her first independent story.

  　It seemed Sakiko liked the way she worked. One day she told Shigeko, “You know, actually I'm from Tokyo. We only moved to Shimoda when I was in high school, because of my father's work. So I still have quite a few childhood friends in Tokyo. One of them is now a detective with the Higashi-Nakano Police Station.” This had been Shigeko's introduction to Tatsuo Sakaki. “I spent a long time in the traffic division, so I haven't been involved in missing persons searches for all that long, but Sakaki is a veteran in the field. He can probably help you quite a lot. Do you want to meet him?”

  　And so Shigeko had gone to meet Detective Sakaki at Higashi-Nakano Police Station. Having been introduced by Sakiko, who still called him by the familiar Sakaki-kun as she'd always done when they were children, she found herself well received. At first he'd been rather aloof, but as he came to understand the essence of Shigeko's work he grew more interested and began looking into things on his own and giving his opinion.

  　Writing alone and with no deadline or even promise of publication, feeling her way as she went, Shigeko's enthusiasm for her project grew. It took far more effort than she'd ever expected. It would have been better to reduce the amount of paid work she took on, but she needed to make a living, too, so she ended up working long hours, day after day.

  　Eventually it took its toll. Last year, during the rainy season, she was at home working on her manuscript when she vomited blood, and rolled around the floor in agony clutching her stomach. In the fifteen or so minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive, she thought she was going to die. It was a duodenal ulcer, and in such an advanced state that it was necessary to operate. She was in the hospital for a month. Weakened by her illness, she started feeling apprehensive about the future for the first time. She was already thirty-one years old. She was also cut to the core to see her mother crying at her hospital bedside.

  　It was at this time that Shoji came out with it on one of his visits to the hospital. “I've been so worried that I'd only annoy you by asking that I've been putting it off, but …”

  　“But what?”

  　“Won't you marry me?”

  　Half laughing and half crying, Shigeko said, “I've been wondering for ages when you'd ask …”

  　And so their marriage plans began to fall into place. Shoji's fear of rejection stemmed partially from an inferiority complex. Compared to Shigeko, who had graduated from a good university and worked in the media, he was uneducated, having started work straight out of high school, and only knew how to do manual labor. Plus he had an interfering family, and Shigeko couldn't deny that the fact he came with a possessive and nagging mother was a big problem. Apart from that, though, his background didn't bother her─as long as she wasn't expected to work in the family business, that was.

  　This was the main reason Shigeko didn't want to give up her job. Plus she liked her work, especially after so many of her colleagues had come to see her in the hospital and told her, “You're our best writer, we need you!” When she set this as a condition for marriage, Shoji accepted it without hesitation: “That's great─my sister loves your food column!” And so Shigeko started on her new life in a cocoon of warmth and happiness.

  　Just one thing got left out of this: her investigation into the missing women. After leaving the hospital, while she was convalescing in her apartment, she read over everything she'd written about it so far. Now, though, she really didn't have the energy to carry on with it right away. Also, she was busy with preparations for her wedding. But she also wanted to show what she had written to date─some two hundred pages─to an editor she knew. Would it ever really amount to something? As for who to show it to, of course the best would be Itagaki, the former chief editor of Sabrina. She gave him a call and went to see him at his new place of work, where he was a copy editor for a magazine targeted at seniors. She handed him her manuscript and he called her back a week later.

  　“What do you think?” The receiver felt sweaty in her hand.

  　“Mmmm,” he said. “I think it's good.”

  　Shigeko flushed. He'd said “good,” but what was that “Mmmm” about? It didn't sound like he was terribly impressed.

  　“But it's a bit too downbeat. The subject matter is nothing new, either. The main players seem to be Akemi Kishida and Shizue Iino, but neither of them really seem all that remarkable.”

  　“Oh.”

  　“Look, I still think you'll make a great non-fiction writer on your own─that hasn't changed. Read it again and rewrite it with more confidence. You know I've got a good eye for these things. But,” he continued in businesslike tones, “it's not up to scratch for a first work. It doesn't have any impact. You need to spice it up. Give it a bit of bite, in the good sense. The missing person's theme has already been overdone. If there was a crime involved, like if all the women on your list were victims of a serial killer, then I'd be jumping on it too. But just listing up a few women who are missing and describing their individual cases and circumstances, well it ain't going to sell, if I'm perfectly honest with you.”

  　He finished up by telling her to leave this manuscript on one side and go looking for new material to write up. “You can do it, Shige-chan.”

  　“Thank you.”

  　As she hung up the phone, the words she'd written suddenly appeared leached of all color. And so, just as she had been advised, she shut the manuscript away in her desk drawer. As for Itagaki's other advice, following her illness and in all the excitement of her wedding preparations, she just couldn't summon the energy to take up his challenge and see the project through.

  　Shoji had stopped talking about it too. But she could guess what was on his mind. She had burned herself out working on the project, not sleeping enough and eating irregularly. There was no denying that was the reason for her falling ill. While he didn't mind her working, he obviously didn't want her to make the same mistake of overdoing it again.

  　Just once he'd asked her, “Shige-chan, are you still working on that project of yours?”

  　“Not really. I've kind of run out of steam.” She didn't tell him what her former editor had said about it.

  　“Really? Well, not to worry. It's not as if you have a deadline on it. You can wait until you feel like working on it again.”

  　And that was how she'd left things until now: the manuscript in the drawer, and the case file in a corner of the shelf. So when in June that year Sakaki had made a point of calling her to tell her about Mariko Furukawa's case, she had felt ashamed.

  　“There's also the fact this Mariko was worried about her parents getting divorced,” Sakaki had told her. “Her father had gone off with a younger woman. That might have been a trigger for her leaving home. At least, that's what the division's concluded and they've decided not to conduct a search. But then again the way she disappeared is really unnatural, and personally I think it's possible that something might have happened to her. Her mother is fraught with wo
rry, but her grandfather is a strong, upright sort of character. If it can be of any use to the investigation, they will definitely cooperate with you. Do you want to talk to them?”

  　Sakaki sounded enthusiastic, but she couldn't help thinking it sounded like an excuse. Really he should be investigating it himself, but since he didn't have permission to do so he was palming it off on her. Then again, she was well aware that she was feeling guilty toward Sakaki, which just made it doubly annoying. She had given him the impression she was still working on the story and added Mariko's name to her list, but inwardly she knew very well she wouldn't do anything about it.

  　But now things were different. Today, now, the circumstances had radically changed. Mariko Furukawa. Of all people it was her, the last name on her list.

  　Now, if this was a story about a serial killer or something …

  　Itagaki's words rang in her ears. Her heart pounded as her hands touched the manuscript.

  Chapter 4

  The incident room for the Okawa Park Case was set up at Bokuto Police Station at 2 PM on September 12. There had been no further discoveries in the park, and now the focus was on searching the immediate vicinity, and establishing the identity of the woman whose arm had been found, as well as the owner of the handbag.

  　A second-floor instruction room had been set up with desks, telephones, and other office equipment. A sign with the case name hung on the door. It had been handwritten in ink by the desk sergeant from Squad Four of the First Criminal Investigation Division, Etsuro Takegami. In Squad Four it was almost always Takegami who wrote the sign for an incident room. This was because it brought good luck. According to the squad leader, Captain Kanzaki, “Whenever Gami writes the sign, the case gets solved quickly.”