A Cop's Eyes

by Gaku Yakumaru

  “You know what, I’m not doing this …”

  As the izakaya pub came into view, Seiji Tsukamoto lost his nerve and stopped walking.

  “What are you saying, after coming this far? Everyone is looking forward to seeing you, Sei,” his wife Kyoko pepped him up, pulling on his sleeve.

  “But I feel bad toward your parents. We’re having them take care of our kid while we go drinking. I’ll go get Nozomi and take her home and then you can have fun for yourself.” It was all an excuse to skip the coming party.

  “They don’t mind something little like this. They even said to take our time even if we don’t get her tonight. Stop being a broken record. Let’s go. You have to do some PR. Nozomi is going to need a lot of money and stuff from now on.”

  Kyoko steadily drew Seiji’s hand towards the pub. Looking at the approaching sign, he let out a heavy sigh.

  His middle school reunion was taking place in the pub. It seemed Kyoko regularly saw her classmates, but Seiji hadn’t met with anyone in the eleven years since graduation. No, not even graduation. He hadn’t been in attendance at the commencement ceremony, having gotten in trouble with the police.

  As he thought over his many doings during middle school and seeing his classmates now, he felt heavy-hearted, like he was about to sit on a bed of nails.

  “Welcome—”

  He followed behind Kyoko as they were guided by one of the pub’s employees.

  Upon seeing the many shoes lined up at the entrance of the Japanese-style guest room, his feeling of tension reached a crescendo.

  “Sorry for being late,” Kyoko said. Hiding behind her, Seiji entered the guest room.

  At that moment, the boisterous guest room suddenly quieted down. About twenty of his classmates were staring intently at Seiji. Although they were grown up and seemed more mature, he could remember everyone’s names by their faces. Memories of his time in middle school flashed before his eyes, and he couldn’t speak right away.

  “Thank you … it’s been a while …” he squeezed out the words, but everyone was still looking at him vacantly and hadn’t reacted.

  “Did everyone hear? Tsukamoto said ‘thank you.’ When did you learn those words?”

  The moment a classmate named Sudo said this, everyone there was wrapped in laughter.

  “Well … only recently,” he replied, and the laughter doubled as he scratched his head.

  A classmate in the middle of the room opened up a seat for them, and Seiji and Kyoko sat down side by side.

  He ordered a beer and had a toast with everyone. One by one, everyone came to his side, curious, and poured for him. Still not knowing what to talk about, Seiji drank his beer and chimed in occasionally.

  After some time, his nervousness seemed to have subsided and he was able to talk with everyone normally.

  It seemed he had been needlessly anxious. To everyone right now, it seemed the trouble Seiji had caused in school was nothing more than old memories.

  “More importantly, who ever thought the class chair Toda, of all people, would marry Tsukamoto?” cajoled Hashimoto, who had been studious and reserved in their middle school years. He seemed to have judged that Seiji had been safely defanged after talking to him for a bit.

  “Yeah? Even back then, I felt like they had feelings for each other. But Tsukamoto was always busy fighting and just didn’t have the time for dates,” Tomomi Sekiguchi, who was still close to Kyoko, poked some more fun at them.

  Seiji meekly lowered his head. “I’m really sorry for how I was back then … I caused everyone a lot of trouble.”

  “You sure were rough. We were scared, so all we could do was avoid you … but everyone sympathized with you in their hearts,” said Nishikido, who’d had the best relationship with Seiji out of everyone there.

  Unable to say anything in return, Seiji put his glass to his mouth.

  “Looks like the party’s getting on—”

  Seiji turned toward the entrance and the shrill voice that seemed to extinguish all their boisterousness.

  A man threw off his shoes and stepped up into the guest room. Looking at him, Seiji realized that it was Ohta.

  The moment Ohta entered, Seiji felt the atmosphere change. Everyone watched Ohta with distant eyes and started whispering to their neighbors.

  Seeing that, he guessed that Ohta was an uninvited guest.

  Showing no sign of noticing everyone’s stares, Ohta looked around the room and smirked. He sat down in an unoccupied seat and poured himself a beer, which he started drinking.

  “Who invited him …” Nishikido muttered with an annoyed look on his face.

  “I think no one did,” Sekiguchi answered coolly.

  “Did something happen with Ohta?” asked Seiji, not understanding the shift in mood.

  “Well, until recently, we invited him to our reunions … but the way he acts and talks is so strange, it’s creepy … and we’ve been leaving him out.”

  “When you say he acts and talks strange …”

  “Look at that face for yourself,” Nishikido told Seiji, which he proceeded to do.

  Ohta was grumbling and muttering to himself, all the while sneering and looking around. The moment their eyes met, Seiji felt like he’d witnessed something disgusting and averted his gaze.

  “It feels like something’s off with him, doesn’t it …”

  Just as Nishikido said, the look in his eyes wasn’t normal. Tugging back his memories from middle school, Seiji remembered Ohta as a gloomy and somehow irritating guy. He had been teased often, by Seiji and the rest of the class.

  During elementary school, he’d sometimes gone to Ohta’s house to play, but at some point, as far as Seiji was concerned, he’d become a nuisance.

  “You know that case from a long time ago … where a man who’d been picked on went to a reunion and killed all his classmates? When I see that guy I get the chills.”

  “He wouldn’t … right?”

  When Seiji looked next to him, Kyoko’s expression was taut, too.

  “What’s that guy been up to?”

  “Apparently, ever since he dropped out of high school the freshman year, he’s been a hermit. If you’ve been living that way for a decade, I guess that’s what you become …”

  Come to think of it, he had heard about this from Kyoko in the past.

  She had been in the same cram school as Ohta during middle school, but after summer break of their freshman year, he’d stopped coming. She’d said there was a rumor at the cram school that he’d also quit high school around that time.

  “Well, let’s not mind him and have fun. By the way, what have you been up to, Tsukamoto?”

  “Oh … I started bartending when I was twenty, and I finally opened up my own place this past year.”

  “Oh, that’s amazing. Can I come by sometime?”

  Seiji, who had anticipated this, pulled a business card holder out of his pocket.

  “ ‘Hope’ … that’s a good bar name,” Nishikido said looking at the card.

  Seiji thought it was a bit of a cliché but had decided on it because it described his current self best.

  “It’s just a small, counter-only shot bar in Ikebukuro, but if you can, please come. I’ll give you a discount.”

  When Nishikido stood up to announce that Seiji had opened a bar, everyone came to him asking for a card. Handing them out, he felt a foreboding presence at his back. When he turned around, Ohta was staring at Seiji with a faint sneer.

  “All right, who’s coming to the after-party?” asked Sudo, standing up and taking attendance.

  “It’s our bad, but we need to go get our daughter, so we’ll bow out. Today was fun. We’ll come again,” Seiji told everyone and headed out of the room with Kyoko.

  “Tsukamoto,” a voice came from behind as they were putting on their shoes. Goose bumps ran down Seiji’s back. When he turned around, it was, of course, Ohta standing there.

  With a viscous gaze, he put out a hand. “Give me a car
d, too.”

  Seiji was reluctant, but he couldn’t resist the guy’s ghastly gaze, which seemed to coil around him.

  “See you then …” Card in hand, Ohta smiled faintly and waved at them.

  “Sei—” Kyoko called for his attention, and Seiji rolled his eyes to the side. “A penny for your thoughts.”

  “Well, it’s nothing … I’m just tired,” he answered, but since they had gotten into the taxi, he’d been thinking over his middle school years.

  “You didn’t need to worry, right?”

  “Yeah … it feels like some lump in my chest I had for eleven years just went poof.” He was grateful towards Kyoko for forcing him to attend the reunion.

  “Good,” she said, faced the other way, and closed her eyes.

  Her face had been so tense before the party, and now she looked exhausted. There was no mistaking that it had been a stressful day for her as well. It was still some time until they got to her parents’ home in Nakano. He would let her sleep until then.

  Absentmindedly watching the scenery run by outside the car window, he retread the thoughts that had been racing through his head.

  Everyone sympathized with you in their hearts—

  He hadn’t noticed at all back then, but perhaps everyone who’d been aware of his home environment had felt that way.

  It certainly called for sympathy.

  From the time Seiji was a child, his father was in and out of jail for theft, assault and battery, and meth use. Even now, his father was in the middle of serving a ninth sentence. During the times his father was in prison, his mother would bring home a new man, and when he was fourteen, she disappeared somewhere.

  Seiji was a troubled kid since he was very little. He hurt people around him as though they were to blame for his unhappy home. In elementary school, he was taken to a child consultation center for shoplifting and for taking other kids’ pocket money. By middle school, he was an inveterate delinquent who stole and got into fights day after day, a hot potato tossed among the police, juvie, and family courts.

  During that time, he thought his fate was completely sealed. In the same way that he could not change his parents, he could never swap out the violent blood coursing through him.

  He was convinced that being born to his parents was the root cause of everything.

  But he now thought that there were no excuses for many of the things he’d done, whoever his parents were.

  The person who convinced him of that was none other than Kyoko.

  He’d been in the same school as her since elementary. Raised in an upstanding family, Kyoko did well in school ever since she was a kid and enjoyed the trust of her teachers and classmates. He didn’t remember now how he’d come to know her, just that even when he caused problems and was feared by everyone, Kyoko never ceased to be considerate toward him.

  He’d had something of a crush on her ever since they were kids, and felt at times that she liked him back.

  At the age of sixteen, however, without saying anything to her, he skipped their hometown. He simply couldn’t abide living there anymore. From then on, he moved from job to job, occasionally getting his hands dirty with things he shouldn’t have, and somehow made a living.

  He reunited with Kyoko when he was twenty. By chance, she’d come to the bar he was working at then. She was with her friends, and he at the counter, but when their eyes met, her lips trembled, as though robbed of words, and the next moment she started crying. Then, leaving her friends behind, she ran out of the bar.

  Seiji had thought over what those tears meant. Had she been overcome with the joy of being reunited with him? He writhed between the part of him that wanted to believe it and the part that didn’t want her to show up again.

  Several days later, Kyoko reappeared at the bar.

  She asked him why he’d vanished without telling her anything. Seiji, however, could only answer that he’d come to hate their town.

  He couldn’t possibly tell her the true cause of his antipathy—about the grave sin that he had committed.

  After that, she paid him many more visits.

  The twenty-year-old Kyoko was pretty enough to be mistaken for someone else. The slight crush Seiji had always had on her grew and grew, but it felt wrong for him to announce his feelings. Unexpectedly, however, Kyoko confessed to him that she had always liked him.

  Even as Seiji felt a soaring sense of happiness, his heart ached with pain.

  Going out with Kyoko meant living in sight of the cross he’d been burdened with.

  Could he bear that suffering? If she weren’t at his side, he might be able to live with his eyes averted from his sin. Just as he’d done until then. But another part of him pleaded to him from deep inside.

  That this was the fate he deserved.

  That enduring the pain of having his heart gouged out as long as he lived was his atonement. Even on the brink of death, he wouldn’t be able to turn a blind eye to the sin he’d committed. He might build a happy home with Kyoko and, all the while, continue to suffer in his heart. That had to be his punishment for eluding the police.

  With such a resolve, Seiji started dating Kyoko.

  Although he did, because of his guilt he couldn’t bring himself to touch her. Kyoko, despite having confessed to him, also seemed to be hesitant about something and maintained a distance.

  Perhaps, having confessed as an extension of her childhood crush, she wasn’t sure if a man like Seiji were right for her after all.

  Once they started dating, he sought to live an honest life like a man reborn. He plunged himself into the bartending work that he had only thought of as a temporary gig and worked hard to become a man Kyoko would approve of.

  In the end, it took close to two years for their hearts and bodies to yield and meet.

  Although their relationship held and blossomed, Kyoko’s parents strongly opposed marriage. Their familiarity with Seiji’s home environment and missteps as a teen proved to be a real obstacle. They married nevertheless three years ago, a fact that Kyoko’s parents refused to accept for some time, but Nozomi’s birth two years ago finally swayed them.

  The warm family Seiji had yearned for since childhood surrounded him now. He relished his happiness, but it would forever be entwined with heartache.

  “It was your reunion, you should have stayed longer,” reproached Kyoko’s mother, Nozomi in her arms.

  When Seiji looked at Kyoko, she made a face as though to say, See?

  Kyoko’s mother looked regretful as she handed Nozomi over to her daughter.

  “Urn … before going to the reunion, we bought some sweet dumplings from the department store so could I set them out as an offering. I heard from Kyoko that Yasuko liked them.”

  “Oh, we’re always troubling you.”

  Kyoko’s mother consented, however, and Seiji went into the living room.

  He placed the dumplings on a plate Kyoko had brought him and set them as an offering on the family shrine. He sat in the formal position and faced the death portrait. A sweet-looking girl with a smile looked back at him.

  Kyoko’s little sister, Yasuko, had passed away when she was eight, the victim in a certain decade-old case.

  Whenever Seiji saw the portrait, the pain threatened to sunder his heart in two.

  He closed his eyes and put his hands together.

  I’m sorry—

  He continued to pray for forgiveness from a girl he’d never met.

  “Welcome—”

  When Seiji turned his eyes to the door and saw the patron, his face almost turned into a grimace.

  Ohta was eyeing the bar’s interior and approaching the counter.

  The eight seats at the counter were mostly filled with regulars. Taking the one empty seat, Ohta sat down, faced Seiji, and smiled faintly.

  “Hey … welcome. You came so soon … Thanks,” Seiji said, controlling his discomposure as he put a coaster in front of Ohta. “What would you like?”

  “To think you, Tsukam
oto, would be polite to me. Back then, you’d just call me ‘dolt’ or ‘bastard’ or ‘dimwit.’ ”

  The regulars glanced at Ohta.

  “Well, I’m in the hospitality business. I was … also immature back then,” Seiji dodged smoothly.

  “I’m fine with anything, just give me something strong,” Ohta ordered in the most ill-tempered manner.

  “How about bourbon on the rocks?”

  Why in the world would he come here—

  Seiji had a bad feeling but poured some ice and bourbon into a glass and set it in front of Ohta.

  “A name like ‘Hope’ doesn’t suit you, but this is a pretty good bar … Maybe I should have you let me work here.”

  That would be no joke—a cheerless man like Ohta at the counter would doom the business.

  “Speaking of which, Ohta, you haven’t been working? You were always smart, there must be plenty of jobs for you,” Seiji countered for the time being with flattery so naked that it got on his own nerves.

  “No social rehabilitation for me. All thanks to you …”

  The regular next to Ohta looked at him and Seiji.

  “Hey, listen up,” Ohta started speaking to the regular in an overfamiliar way. “This guy screwed up my life. In elementary and middle school, he always bullied me in the nastiest way. Because this guy kept stomping on my self-confidence, I’m still scared of talking to people.”

  True, Seiji had often beat up Ohta whenever he was in a bad mood. His past self would have done so on the spot now, but with his customers watching, he couldn’t do anything at all.

  Ohta, apparently not sated, informed his fellow guests of the many wrongdoings that Seiji had perpetrated in his middle school days. The regulars who were forced to listen embarrassedly asked for their checks one by one.

  “Enough!” Seiji snapped at him after the last customer had left.

  Ohta was grinning, clearly pleased by his host’s exasperation. “What, it’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  “If you’re going to bring up all that, you’re obstructing my business, so don’t come back.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t oblige. I like this bar, so I’ll come and have fun every day.”

  “Don’t.”