The Lady Killer

by Masako Togawa

  He thrust the papers into his pocket and made his way out of the station. On the way to his flat, he stopped off at a small liquor store, which was just closing, and bought a bottle of whiskey and a jar of olives. As soon as he got in, he opened the lid and gulped down a few of the olives; their oil lined his throat and stomach, and he chased them with a whiskey before opening his diary. The name and address were the same; he began to read the passage that he had written two months ago.

  September 2

  Cloudy

  Had business in Chiba in the morning. Came back at 3 p.m.

  Toll road congested, so used Chiba Kaido.

  Landscape pale gray—soot, smoke, and ashes from the factories lining the road.

  Left car at office and walked around Koto Rakutenchi.

  Cinemas, gaudy posters for low-class dramas, workmen wearing clogs, tango music played by second-rate orchestras. Heard fragments of music from a dance hall and went in.

  Had to buy a ticket for a soft drink in order to gain admission. Floor small and very dark. Looked into tearoom just inside door; a few potential targets in there. But also young men looking like punks or incipient gangsters.

  Sat down on my own for a while. Then a woman’s voice behind me offered to change my ticket for a soft drink. White pants, blue sweater, looked like she was up to no good, but seemed to be open-minded enough. Talked. Overfamiliar, and a bit vulgar, but she would do.

  Today her day off; says she works at a supermarket. Danced a bit and then she offered to take me out to the F Health Center. Was curious, so went. My role today was American buyer of part-Japanese descent. Took a cab to Funabashi. Health center full of women and old people—looked like farmers. All having great time going up on stage and dancing between eating and drinking.

  Victim suggested we take a bath together. Had to wait an hour for small bathroom to fall vacant; passed time drinking beer and eating not very good sushi. Maybe because it was still early, but felt out of place amongst all these villagers. She kept talking and I listened, trying to work up desire by looking at the nape of her neck and her alcohol-flushed face. Bathroom free at last. Tipped middle-aged woman in charge, got key, and in we went. Sank into mineral-spring water and looked at victim’s body. White flesh seemed to sway under water. Bath was tiled. Touched her body—no adverse response. Sitting in bathtub having fun and feeling desire rising in me. Her breasts and fat bottom caked with the mineral salts; left a taste on my tongue.

  Mark of the tiles on her back; reminded me at first of whipping, then of iron-barred windows.

  Buzzer rang; time up. Woman in charge of bath looked at us curiously on way out.

  Went straight to Kinshicho. Desire aroused and then interrupted—annoying, but perhaps better than the hollow feeling I always get after the act.

  Took her to Korean restaurant. She had an enormous appetite—wolfed down a large bowl of rice with nothing but pickles to go with it. Nothing doing tonight, it seemed, but she gave me a map of her apartment and I promised to call around in a few days.

  The diary for September 2 ended there, with the sketch map that the girl had drawn attached by tape at the bottom of the page. It was drawn and lettered in a childish hand; he looked absentmindedly at the various landmarks—a tram stop, a moat, a concrete bridge. Gradually the image of the apartment came back to him, and he could clearly remember the bridge, the narrow streets.

  The apartment was behind a lumberyard; when he had made his way there, night had drawn its gloomy curtains around him, and he remembered passing by the dark shadows that were bundles of timber.

  He thought back to the newspaper reports of the murder. She had been discovered by a middle-school student delivering milk at 5:30 a.m. on that very morning, just when he had been standing on Olympic Street waiting for a taxi. He imagined the boy passing the lumberyard, the milk bottles rattling in the carrier on his bicycle. When he crossed the small garden at the back of her apartment, he had noticed that the window was half-open, and he could see the whole room reflected in the mirror on her dressing table. The woman whom he had seen writhing on the tiles of the bathroom—now the milkboy saw those same limbs writhing, but frozen by death.

  Honda remembered that dressing table well. It had been covered with a red square of fine silk, on which were arrayed jars of powder and bottles of cheap creams and lotions. It was now unpleasant to remember that the girl had taken a bottle of milky lotion from that same dressing table and poured it over his body. He threw down the diary in disgust and opened the window, gulping down the cold night air. It was unbelievable that the woman who had innocently pressed her lips all over his body was now dead.

  At all events, it was clearly the same woman; the name and address in the diary told him that.

  The newspapers reported that on the night of her death a man had visited her room, and that the evidence suggested that he had had sex with her. Kimiko Tsuda must have been something close to a prostitute, he imagined. Although he had no direct evidence as to this—she hadn’t asked him for payment—it seemed likely from her overfriendly manner and also from her obvious sexual expertise. Why, she had had a man with her last night… and that had been the end of her.

  The newspapers also reported that she had had many male friends, so in due course every one of them would be investigated. What about him? No need to worry, surely. He had only been to her room once, and she had only known him as Sobra, a buyer from the U.S.A.

  He closed the window, and in that instant, inexplicably, he remembered how large the whites of her eyes had been when she had raised her head from his loins…

  At the time, there seemed to be no connection between the murder of his former victim and the fact that he had been sleeping with a new girlfriend at the time.

  The connection only became clear much later.

  THE SECOND VICTIM (DECEMBER 19)

  The Day When Fusako Aikawa Was Strangled at Akebono-so Apartment at XX, Koenji, Suginami-ku

  1

  At 8 p.m. on the nineteenth of December, Ichiro Honda was high above Tokyo on the observation platform of Tokyo Tower. He was accompanied by a girl, a student at an art school, whom he had met about a week before.

  He was wearing a trilby, tipped back slightly, and the buttons of his overcoat were undone. Throughout the proceedings, he kept his hands thrust deeply into his pockets. He was posing as a correspondent of The Times of London. This was his third meeting with the girl, Mitsuko Kosugi, for he reckoned she would be a tough nut to crack and was taking his time over her. However, he had to be back in Osaka by Christmas Eve, and so tonight it was now or never; he must shoot at all costs. He therefore kept looking at her out of the corner of his eye, working out how best to proceed.

  Mitsuko was looking out over the nighttime city, which seemed to be hung with jewels. Her eyes were sparkling; she wore no makeup and her face was blemished in places. Her face was thus somewhat unrefined, but by contrast her body was marvelously mature; there was a green, hard unripeness about her that appealed greatly to Honda. She was only nineteen; it was some time since he had enjoyed a woman so young, and he was determined not to let her escape.

  He had met her at the Western Art Museum at Ueno, where she was sketching a muscular male statue. It was Ichiro’s custom to visit museums two or three times a month, as he found them fruitful hunting grounds. He admired her work and then introduced himself to her as a foreign correspondent. They went to the museum tearoom together, where he drank his tea and ate his cake in a clumsy foreign manner, and he discovered that she was on a long vacation and so was able to persuade her to show him around Tokyo. She agreed, and on the next day she had taken him, not to the famous historical sites or scenic areas, but to the Kabuki theater and on a bus tour around cabarets in Yoshiwara and Akasaka. Tonight they had eaten mudfish and were now visiting Tokyo Tower.

  He listened raptly to her explanations, but at the same time could not help staring at the pretty conductress when they went on the bus tour. She had a full boso
m and pert buttocks; he didn’t mind at all that the conductress was conscious of his gaze. At the Kabuki theater, he tested Mitsuko’s reaction by resting his hand on her knee. She ignored the action, fixing her attention on the stage. Was this her way? he wondered. To pretend that nothing was happening, however much a man took advantage of her body? The thought tantalized him.

  And then, suddenly, he had tensed and muttered “Disgraceful!” in English.

  “What is it?” she asked, gazing anxiously into his face.

  “Oh, nothing,” he replied in genuine embarrassment. The reality was that the memory came back to him suddenly of a theater in America where he had lusted for a white woman in black tights. Why did this memory suddenly strike him in the Kabuki theater? And what had come over him to yearn for that white woman—too ascetic a life during his studies, perhaps? But wasn’t it, after all, natural to entertain such desires at that age? Of course it was, he thought, and calmed down. Why remember a thing like that now? He smiled reassuringly at her.

  “Nothing,” he repeated.

  A little later, he got his hand on her knee again. He had slid his hand a little way up her thigh, relishing the sensation of unfulfillable lust…

  And now here they were on Tokyo Tower, and the group of schoolgirls over there had finished with the telescope and they could use it. The girls walked off, speaking in some provincial accent, and he led Mitsuko to the telescope. There was nobody else around.

  “Care to have a look?” he asked, putting his hand in his pocket and taking out a coin.

  “Oh, yes! I wonder what we’ll see!” She ran to the telescope, and Ichiro followed her and slipped in a coin. He put his hand on her shoulder and brought his face close to hers as if to share the viewing with her. Her faint shudder as she became aware of his hand on her body gave him a thrill. Three minutes passed, and with a click the lens was closed. He placed his lips on her cheek, and she did not move. He twisted his head, trying to find her lips with his, and she neither resisted nor collaborated. And then, suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he detected a movement. Was someone watching them?

  He froze his posture and watched. It seemed that the movement had come from behind an illuminated tank full of tropical fish. But if someone was watching, they must have realized that he had seen them and withdrawn into the stairway behind, for all he could see now were the fish swimming under their mercury light.

  He kissed the girl, still keeping careful surveillance on the fish tank, but there was now no sign of anyone there. Perhaps it had been some high school boy. He felt embarrassed and withdrew, leaving Mitsuko gulping air, the saliva showing in her mouth. He kissed her again, and his attention wandered from the fish tank and concentrated on the sensations at the tip of his exploring tongue. There was another movement, but it was just another couple like them looking for somewhere to be private together. He clasped Mitsuko more firmly and kissed her again.

  On the way down, the lift was full of country people. Just as the doors closed, he once again had the sensation of being watched, but he could see no one.

  They hailed a taxi at the entrance. He sat close to her and put his arm around her and kissed her furtively, but was interrupted by a taxi, which came up close behind them and stayed there, its lights flooding the back of his cab, forcing him to desist lest they be noticed.

  They went to a bar, and then to a beer hall. In the noisy beer hall, several drunks peered at them curiously, and they moved on. They went to Shinjuku, to another bar, and then to a sushi shop, by which time he had forgotten all about his feeling of being shadowed at Tokyo Tower—indeed, he was already three parts drunk, and she was beginning to show signs of the alcohol. She did not usually drink much, but tonight he pressed drinks on her, and she proved to have a stronger head than he had. It was already 1 a.m., and he felt unsteady on his feet.

  “Let’s go to a hotel,” he said.

  But, to his surprise, she resisted his invitation firmly. So he called a taxi and told it to take them to Asagaya, the area of Mitsuko’s apartment. At that, she seemed to relax, and snuggled up to him in the back of the car. Perhaps, after all, he would get a shot at her; perhaps she would invite him back to her apartment.

  And so it turned out. When the taxi dropped them, she asked, “Like to come in for a bit?”

  He followed her down the narrow alleyway, with stepping-stones set in the dirt. Her flat was in a two-story building second from the entrance to the alley.

  “Sorry—you have to take off your shoes. It’s a Japanese house,” she said to the Times journalist.

  There was a large shoe cupboard in the entrance hall, with separate compartments for each of the occupants—some thirty in all, it seemed. She opened the compartment marked “Kosugi” and gave him a pair of slippers.

  “This is how my name is written. This character means ‘small,’ and this one ‘cedar.’ Interesting, isn’t it, our way of writing.”

  Ichiro Honda nodded and gazed in a fascinated manner at all the names, playing the role of a foreigner fascinated by the Japanese characters. The names were written in a variety of ways, some on grubby slips of paper, one with a large inkblot half obscuring the name. He ran his finger down the row as she explained the meaning of each name to him. His finger came to rest on the newest nametag of all.

  “Obana. ‘Little tail.’ Funny name, isn’t it? She’s new here. Room 209—now, whose place did she take, I wonder?”

  There was something familiar about this to Honda, and he thought hard as he went up the stairs but couldn’t bring it to mind. He completely forgot, in his fuddled state, that this was the name of the key-punch operator who had committed suicide.

  The staircase, the hall downstairs, and the landing upstairs were all very spacious, as befitted a building that had formerly been a hospital. Where the reception counter had been, just under the staircase, there was a public telephone.

  Mitsuko’s room was in the far corner of the ground floor. It was just over one hundred feet square and had a small sink and a gas ring. There was an unfinished painting on an easel and several finished ones stacked against the wall. These he proceeded to examine as Mitsuko boiled the kettle and made instant coffee. They drank the coffee; he was at a loss what to do next, and fiddled with books and a paperknife on the table, and picked up a plaster figure and examined it, pretending he didn’t know what to do with his hands, awaiting his chance. Looking at her, he detected increasing anxiety in her eyes.

  This was the chance he had been waiting for. She seemed to sense his feeling, for she opened her mouth to speak.

  “You are…” She broke off, perhaps feeling that he would not understand her meaning. He reached out and touched her knee; she pushed him away, but this only served to inflame his desire and he pounced on her, pushing her down onto the floor, and thrust toward her with his hands and his lips. She resisted him fiercely and did not give in.

  After thirty minutes of struggle, he gave up. He could not think that this was happening to him… why? He separated from her and gazed at her face.

  “I am sorry. I am just not in the mood today,” she said. She pulled down her skirt, which had ridden up in the struggle. There were tears in her eyes.

  Ichiro made up his mind to go. He stood up and went to the door. On the way out, he turned and asked her, “Have you got another boyfriend?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Really I haven’t.”

  He smiled wordlessly, went back into the room and kissed her proffered mouth with his dry lips. It was no less than his duty to do so. This woman had become a different creature from the one who had yielded to his kisses, her whole body trembling, at the Tokyo Tower a few hours before. Now he saw her for what she was: dull, a woman lost in daydreams about true love, egoistical, ignorant, nothing.

  “Your telephone number, please,” he commanded, and she wrote it down in large letters, telling him to call before 10 p.m. and, when the receptionist answered, to give her room number. She rose to see him off, but he pushed he
r down and made his way out on his own.

  Leaving the building, he looked back, but there was not a light to be seen. It seemed that no one else was up at this late hour. He reached the highway and began to walk in the direction of Shinjuku, turning up his coat collar and thrusting his hands into his great-coat pockets. Inside, he was raging at his rejection. Suddenly, in a maudlin way, he thought of his wife, patiently enduring her loneliness in Osaka, hundreds of kilometers away. Perhaps it was self-pity, but he thought of his fruitless endeavors to bridge this gap. It is only because of that—that’s why I waste my time hunting women, he thought for a few seconds, but then he rejected the thought, at which moment a taxi arrived. He got in, and at first told the driver to take him to his apartment in Yotsuya Sanchome, but then suddenly changed his mind and decided to visit Fusako Aikawa, the typist he had met at the cinema. Her apartment was only one stop away on the subway from Mitsuko Kosugi’s. He got out of the taxi near her apartment and walked the last few yards. He had no particular pressing desire for a woman now, but needed something to distract his mind from the emptiness he had sensed when walking in the road.

  He had difficulty in finding the building, but eventually reached it, arriving in the front yard, which was muddied by an overflow of sewage. In the dim light he saw some underwear on the clothesline, which someone had forgotten to take in. The garments floated like white ghosts in the dark.

  Inside, the staircase awaited him, its vast maw ready to swallow him as he climbed.

  2

  Hesitantly, he knocked gently on Fusako Aikawa’s door, but there was no reply. Last time he had left her sleeping with the hem of her satin negligee riding up over her breasts; the lascivious image floated back into his mind. How bewitching she had looked! He pressed his ear close to the door and listened. Within, all was silent.