Above a certain size and level of prosperity, regional cities in Japan look alike. To discover what makes each one different, one has to sample the food and the sake, and stay long enough to see the patterns of life under the surface. Otherwise it can be hard to tell them apart. Wealth tends to smooth out the differences in the way people live. Life becomes standardized.
Only in nature, in the mountains and valleys beyond the hand of man, are the real differences, the real uniqueness, preserved. There is something about the air in Hokkaido, a kind of richness that will never change. For better or worse, the only thing that really changes is people.
Naka-chan was still open for business. Shiro Nakanome’s izakaya was managed by his cousin now. This was another bit of information Shigenori found on the web, embedded in recollections about Nakanome that people had posted after his death. Shigenori was used to the fact that he could find anything on the web if he dug deep enough, but it still bothered him. Become a victim, and everything about your personal life is aired for the world to see.
The clearing where Nakanome’s body had been found stuffed into a discarded refrigerator lay near a residential area among gently rolling hills northeast of the city. The clearing was in a slight depression, which made it easy to dump illegally without being seen.
The area wasn’t exactly isolated. The multicolored roofs of nearby houses were visible through the trees. The hills seemed ideal for walking, but the clearing full of trash was an eyesore.
Shigenori had come straight from the hotel after dropping off his bag. He knew the way, even down to the landmarks to follow, from surfing the web. He was never close to getting lost.
He stood at the edge of the clearing and surveyed it with a slight scowl, calculating the lay of the land from there to Naka-chan. Only after considering this did he unfold the map he’d picked up at the airport.
A notice on a large sheet of plastic was nailed to a tree: Illegal dumping prohibited by law. The wording was problematic but the message was clear. The sign was dirty and the foot of the tree it was nailed to was submerged in garbage. An old-fashioned twin-tub washing machine lay on its side a few feet away.
There were other signs around the clearing, stapled to trees or on stakes in the ground.
NO ENTRY AFTER DARK
FIRES STRICTLY PROHIBITED
RETRIEVE ALL CIGARETTE BUTTS!
The signs looked hastily erected, probably because of the waves of journalists and rubberneckers who thronged the site after the murder. Now they were tattered and weather-beaten.
What kind of person would kill a man, stuff his body into a refrigerator, and haul it all the way out here?
I wonder if Mishima could use Galla’s power to see traces the killer left behind? No. That’s no way to gather evidence.
Shigenori’s slight scowl was shadowed by a rush of sadness. He gritted his teeth, turned his back on the clearing and walked down the hill.
Shiro Nakanome had once been married. There were no children. His ex-wife had remarried and was living in Tokyo. At the time of his death, he’d been seeing one of his regular customers. Neither of them had made a secret of it.
“We were more than friends, but that’s all,” she posted on the web. “Marriage wasn’t on the table. We never fought about it. He was surprisingly popular with women, and for all I know he was seeing someone else, but we never talked about it. To be honest, I wouldn’t have cared.”
Nakanome might not have been pleased to hear his partner describe him as “surprisingly” popular, but Shigenori could believe it after watching him serve customers at Naka-chan in a video on the web. He was a large, rough-hewn man with a full beard. The beard made it hard to judge his expression; someone meeting him on a dark mountain road might mistake him for a bear.
But everything changed when he opened his mouth. He had a deep, soothing voice and was very good with customers. The video had been shot the September before his death, at a fifth anniversary party for Naka-chan. Shigenori wasn’t sure whether to thank the person who posted it for saving him valuable time, or berate her for invading the privacy of the victim’s next of kin. He just watched the video with a deepening frown.
He must’ve been quite a guy if he could run a watering hole and keep such a pleasant disposition.
Nakanome had gone to culinary school after graduating from the local high school. He’d married at twenty-two, but it ended after six years. Most of his years as a cook were spent in Otaru, in southeast Hokkaido. He’d returned to Tomakomai at thirty-four to start a small restaurant in a renovated wing of his parents’ home. The restaurant prospered, and with new roots in the local community, he’d expanded into the evening trade with Naka-chan.
His parents were still alive and living in the same house. When he opened Naka-chan, Nakanome moved to a one-room apartment a few minutes away on foot, but he had still dined with his parents a few times a month. Sometimes his mother and father would spend an evening at the izakaya.
Nakanome was their only child. His ashes were in the family grave and coverage of his murder had stopped, but his parents were still in mourning. People in the neighborhood worried about them; on the rare occasions when they were seen outside the house, they looked thin and pale as ghosts.
Nakanome’s childhood home was Shigenori’s next destination after the clearing in the woods. The wing that had once been a restaurant still had a lonely-looking menu board and a few other fittings outside. The house was set well back from a broad public road in a neighborhood of fine-looking homes, but one of Japan’s biggest delivery companies maintained a depot a short distance away. It was easy to imagine a restaurant offering cheap, tasty meals doing well here.
Naka-chan opened at five. With time to kill, Shigenori walked to Nakanome’s high school, then his culinary school. He had no intention of talking to people. Even if he were to find someone willing to unload to a stranger who was neither detective nor reporter, the information wouldn’t be reliable anyway.
The high school was crowded with students. Most of the people coming and going at the little culinary school along the main drag were young too, but there were a few men who were probably as old as Shigenori. Maybe they were planning to open their own restaurants as a second profession after retirement. If so, they were far more healthy and productive than Shigenori, who couldn’t seem to put his inner detective out to pasture.
He saw little point in venturing inside either school. There would only be ordinary classrooms and ordinary people with nothing to hide. All he’d find would be peaceful daily life, with the usual backbiting and insecurities beneath the surface, just as there surely had been when Nakanome was here, when no one would’ve dreamt someone would take his life at the age of forty-one; when he couldn’t have dreamt it himself.
Shigenori’s feet ached. There was a donut shop not far from the culinary school, on the same street. He went inside, bought a donut and coffee, and sat down near the windows. The place was cavernous but there were few customers. The parking lot outside was big too. There were multiple shops from this chain in Shigenori’s Tokyo neighborhood. The donuts were the same and the coffee was the same, but somehow this branch in Tomakomai felt totally different.
He finished his coffee, pulled out the laptop, and put on his reading glasses.
Shiro Nakanome’s murder had entered the national spotlight after victim number two was discovered in Akita. The fact that both crimes involved mutilation had triggered a media frenzy. Partially because the murderer had taken pains to erase every trace of the second victim’s identity, interest in both murders faded after a few weeks. But when Mama Masami’s body was found, the media’s attention returned, hotter than ever, and the specter of Toe-Cutter Bill was fixed firmly in the public mind. Shiro Nakanome became not just a murder victim, but the first in a series of grotesque killings and a subject of new interest.
Shigenori peered at his laptop.
What was happening before Mama Masami was found? How was Nakanome’s murder covered between June 1, when his body was found, and September 22, when the Akita victim’s decaying body turned up in a Dumpster at a public housing complex? What aspects did the media see fit to cover? What did the public—the Internet society, the people who couldn’t stop talking about the Serial Amputator—think when there was just one murder, with nothing to compare it to? How did they guess the case might eventually be solved?
As far as he could discern from the ocean of information spread before him, the main point of speculation just after Nakanome’s murder revolved around whether the refrigerator had been there before the killing or had been brought there with the body in it. A few days after the victim was found, careful inspection proved that the refrigerator had been in the clearing before the murder. This was important, because if it had been brought to the site after Shiro was killed, there would have had to have been more than one perpetrator. The site showed no sign of tire tracks, and there was no way a single individual could have unloaded the refrigerator from a vehicle.
If the refrigerator was in the clearing before the murder, one person could conceivably have transported the body. Or perhaps the killer somehow lured his victim to the clearing and killed him there. Both scenarios were possible. The refrigerator was in relatively good condition, and the body was found soon after the murder because some unlucky individual had been curious about whether the fridge was still serviceable.
Still, something about the setup bothered Shigenori. Was this really the work of one person?
Several of the posts he’d read commented on the victim’s muscular physique and above-average height. They also noted that the refrigerator was a popular home model from ten years ago, a compact but surprisingly deep design with ample storage space.
But piecing information together wasn’t enough. No conclusions could be drawn without a visit to the scene. Someone had overpowered and strangled a heavy, well-built man on uneven terrain—or transported the dead weight of the corpse up the hill and into this depression in the woods—and manhandled it up and into the refrigerator. Could all that have been the work of one person? It hadn’t occurred to him to doubt it until he saw the site.
I’m losing my touch. “One more time” Tsuzuki, huh? I’m a rusty old has-been.
Like most people, once the second murder hit the news, Shigenori had been infected with the assumption that the same individual committed both crimes. And because he’d swallowed that assumption from the outset, he hadn’t bothered to go back to the beginning and consider the first murder in isolation.
Serial killers with strange predilections work alone, committing their crimes in pursuit of dark fantasies that are uniquely theirs. They almost never work in concert with others, even people with similar destructive urges. Toe-Cutter Bill—the Serial Amputator—had to be a solo operator. There was no other way to look at it. If that assumption was wrong, the whole structure of profiling in criminal investigations would collapse.
But murdering Shiro Nakanome and dumping his body up in those hills looked like a team effort. One person could have orchestrated things while the other, or others, assisted. An inner voice was telling Shigenori that was how it happened, and that voice was growing more insistent. Did that mean there were multiple Toe-Cutter Bills, multiple Serial Amputators, collaborating to kill people all over Japan? It would be unheard of in the annals of crime.
Or maybe the whole thing was a one-off. After four murders, it wasn’t surprising to have a copycat killing: Ayuko Yamashina. Maybe the killing in Tomakomai was a one-off too—and the domino that sent the rest falling.
At his table in the huge, quiet donut shop, bathed in sweet aromas, Shigenori glumly drank his coffee, input more search terms, and stumbled across this post:
“The victim in Tomakomai was stuffed into a refrigerator in an illegal garbage dump. The Akita victim was found in a municipal refuse bin. The Mishima victim was left in a clothes trunk. The Totsuka victim was discovered in a locked restroom. The killings share common features, but they each encode a slightly different message. The fact that the killer amputated a different body part each time might also be some sort of code.”
The moon is round. So is a turtle. Not the same, but they look similar. And that is all. Each of the five killings came saturated with the smell of an overall sequence, the legend of the Serial Amputator. The post had been uploaded two days before Ayuko Yamashina’s body had been found in a vacant lot in central Tokyo. Shigenori wondered how the poster would’ve explained that.
Ayuko was still considered by the public to be the fifth victim. The poster would probably feel compelled to shoehorn her murder into the same theoretical straightjacket, and that probably wouldn’t require much work. That’s the thing about stories: they’re flexible enough to accommodate just about anything.
Is anyone looking at this without bias? Shigenori squinted at the monitor. Had anyone in this far-northern town taken a good long look at the unshakable facts of Nakanome’s murder without being infected by the serial killer story?
Someone in Naka-chan was charring the fish.
There was a run-down game center across the narrow street from the izakaya. All the machines had seen better times in some other amusement spot.
It was ten past six. Shigenori had been here since before five, feeding the slot machine with game tokens. He’d planned to check out the izakaya at six, but he’d had a clear sight line to the front door since it opened, and not a single customer had shown up. So here he was, still dropping tokens and killing time.
It looked like the new manager, Nakanome’s cousin, was a distant second when it came to culinary skill. Nothing seemed to have changed from the outside. Maybe the clientele Nakanome had spent years building up didn’t like his cousin’s style.
The smell of burnt fish was pervasive. Shigenori didn’t want to be the first customer; it would make him too conspicuous. The slot machine was the only one he could manage to play and still keep the entrance to Naka-chan in sight, so he was monopolizing it. It didn’t matter; there were hardly any customers, and the part-timer behind the counter didn’t seem to care.
Maybe he should just go back to the hotel and wait? Arriving later in the evening would give him a better chance of chatting up some of Nakanome’s old customers. But he also wanted to talk to the cousin when he wasn’t too busy serving. He wanted to be there when there were a few customers, but not too many.
What the hell is he cooking, anyway?
The stool was hard and his rear end was starting to ache. He decided to get on with it. He didn’t have to go in right away. There was something he wanted to see first, next to the sliding front door. Something he wanted to examine up close.
It was a stand of miniature bamboo stalks in a big ceramic pot, their slender branches festooned with strips of paper, each inscribed with wishes for the summer Star Festival. A few minutes before five, a thirtyish man in jeans, a polo shirt and a white apron had emerged from Naka-chan and set the pot outside.
There was nothing unusual about the bamboo. It was that time of year. Many other businesses had pots just like it outside their doors. Some even had a supply of paper strips so anyone could jot down a wish and tie it to the bamboo.
The stalks next to the entrance of Naka-chan were heavy with wishes, a pretty rainbow of color. It lent a very pleasing effect to the shop. Shigenori wanted to read the wishes on those strips of paper.
The man in the polo shirt was likely Nakanome’s cousin, the new manager. He’d only been outside for a few seconds—not enough to judge a family resemblance—but he wasn’t as physically large as the deceased. Medium height and build, close-cropped hair, clean-shaven.
The burnt-fish smell was fading. Still no customers. Shigenori got up from the slot machine and stepped outside. The pounding music faded as the door closed behind him. The narrow street, lined with mult
itenant buildings, was wrapped in lengthening shadows. It was less than an hour before sunset.
Shigenori strolled causally across the street and stopped in front of Naka-chan, as though noticing it for the first time. He glanced up and down the block and approached the door. The bamboo stalks stood higher than his head. They seemed to be bowing toward him gently.
He pinched a paper strip between thumb and forefinger and examined it closely. The characters were large; he could read them without his glasses.
I hope they catch the person who did it soon. —Aiko
Shigenori read one strip after another. Some were in a masculine hand, some were written by women. A few were clearly left by children.
Naka-chan, are you having a cold one in heaven? —Kenta
I hope they arrest the guy. —Miki
Naka-chan, thanks for your great sake. Let’s raise a glass again. —Natchan
I hope they catch him and give him the death penalty. —Sanae
Naka-chan is forever! The killer can go to hell! —Katsumi
Naka-chan, we miss you. Please come back. —Rie
Rest in peace, Shiro. —Reiji
Shigenori read every strip. He glanced at his watch. It was 6:44. Still no customers. He heard music coming faintly from inside, some unidentifiable genre.
All right, then. I’m from Tokyo, here on business. I hear you have some great sake. I don’t know anything about the murder. Not a thing. I’m just a guy.
Shigenori turned his cover story over in his mind one more time. He was reaching for the door when he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder.
The Gate of Sorrows Page 42