The Lady Killer

by Masako Togawa

  “And then?” asked Shinji.

  She concentrated on her food for a moment, plunging her chopsticks busily into the bowl.

  “And then nothing. He said good night and I went home.”

  Shinji cursed the clumsiness of his interrogation. He would have to do better than this. How could he get the answer he wanted questioning her in this way?

  The waitress brought over two dishes of tokoroten, and Kyoko attacked hers wolfishly. Shinji followed suit but got too much horseradish in his first mouthful; the pungency assailed his sinuses.

  He tried again, deciding to be more blunt.

  “You became lovers, of course. So tell me what you think. Was he as abnormal as the papers say?”

  She shrugged her shoulders and dilated her nostrils.

  “You’re asking me the same thing as that policeman did who came here the other day. Asked if he ever tried to strangle me.”

  “And?”

  “Of course he didn’t—what do you think he was, a pervert or something? I’ll tell you this, though: he was really passionate—the most passionate man I’ve known,” she added self-importantly.

  “Did you take him home with you?”

  “Who, me? You must be joking. My apartment block is full of respectable families who like to spy on a working girl.”

  “I see. How many times did you meet him altogether, then?”

  “Well, maybe ten times or so—I forget.”

  Shinji smiled to himself; a likely story, indeed, he thought. Honda never used his women more than once or twice, tiring of them quickly and moving on. The girl was boasting or disguising her injured pride.

  Kyoko had finished her tokoroten. “Pay for mine, will you?” she said. “I’ve got to be off—if you want anything else, come and see me in the coffee shop.” And she got up and left without further ceremony.

  Not a word of inquiry about Honda. The affair had just been another small incident in her life. Shinji dropped some coins on the counter and left.

  Outside, the sun was beating down more fiercely than ever.

  3

  On the following day, Shinji visited the two remaining women on his list. First he went to see a chanson singer who worked at a music café on the Ginza. Before setting forth, he rang the establishment and inquired into her exact schedule for stage appearances. It was thus that he made his way down the stairs of the Salon de D at 3 p.m., passing on the way a poster upon which was emblazoned in large letters the name of the woman he had come to see. At the entrance they charged him 150 yen, giving him a ticket good for one drink and telling him that all further drinks would cost him a uniform 150 yen.

  He made his way inside. It was pitch dark, only a spotlight playing upon the woman on the stage, who seemed to be whispering rather than singing into the microphone into which she leaned like a lover. Shinji took a seat at the back and watched and listened; this was the woman he had come to see.

  Finally the song came to an end, the woman throwing her arms forward theatrically as if to embrace the microphone; the spotlight faded and simultaneously the house lights came on. There were, as he had expected, hardly any other customers around at this time of day. So far, so good. He summoned the white-coated waiter and asked him to present his compliments to Shoko Toda, handing over his business card as he made his request.

  A few minutes passed, and then a statuesque woman in a backless black satin dress came over to him, holding his card in her hand as if it were a talisman. She presented herself and, in most formal language, asked how she might be of service to lawyer Shinji.

  The brief description in the list prepared by the detective agency described her as being about twenty-seven, but she looked much older. Shinji waved her into a chair.

  “I’m defending Ichiro Honda. Could I speak to you about him, please?”

  She nodded and, remarking that this was a topic to be discussed without haste or interruption, led him over to a table in a discreet position at the corner of the room. They ordered drinks and Shinji embarked upon his interrogation.

  “Tell me, please, if, within the limitations of your own knowledge or experience, there was anything abnormal about Ichiro Honda?” He gazed intently into her face, trying to appear as businesslike as possible.

  “I suppose what you are really asking is, did he ever try to strangle me?” the woman answered frankly. It seemed to Shinji as if Shoko Toda had been asked this question before and was prepared for it, so that she immediately grasped its import.

  “It seems as if the police have already asked you the same question. Would I be correct in presuming that? Did they examine you on the same point?”

  “Examine me? Forced me to speak, rather,” the woman replied, her face suffused with cynicism. “They asked me again and again, ‘What sort of relationship did you have with Honda?’ Really! ‘What sort of a relationship’… a pretty indelicate way of putting things, don’t you think? I was furious with them; I almost wanted to spit in their faces. The relationship between a man and a woman, what passes between them in bed and so forth, really, what can it have to do with the police? Then it dawned upon me that the term ‘what sort of a relationship’ is just a cliché of police interrogation. But how does one answer such a question in just a few words? The relationship between a man and a woman is not such a simple thing, I told them.”

  The woman paused and, extracting a cigarette from her case, broke it in half carefully before putting it into a long ivory cigarette holder. She lit it, blew the smoke over Shinji’s shoulder, and went on talking.

  “So as a result we beat about the bush for at least an hour before I realized that what they were getting at was whether or not Ichiro Honda displayed any abnormal behavior. It became clear to me that they wanted me to say that he put a tie or a rope around my throat whilst we were making love. Those police! What a race apart they are, with their narrow little imaginations. To them, Lady Chatterley, the Marquis de Sade, they are nothing more than pornography; they don’t know what pornography is, that’s what I say.” A sort of grandeur entered her speech, and she went on.

  “I am an actress, or at least a woman who lives out her life on the stage. What could please me more than to play the role of Othello’s wife, if that is what my audience wants. However, somewhat to my regret, I did not find Ichiro Honda to be a man of such unique and elevated tastes. He was just an ordinary man after all.”

  “You mean that there was nothing abnormal about him?”

  “If you accept that sex is not of itself abnormal, then he was in all other respects normal.” Again the cynicism showed through her mask.

  “How did you meet him?”

  “Well, these things are all a matter of timing, aren’t they? I was lonely, needed someone to talk to and so forth, and I suppose the same applied to him. Anyway, his seduction was just like dancing. He led and I followed. It was all very smooth. Do you know what he gave me? A paper umbrella with a bull’s-eye pattern! Rather original, don’t you think? That appeals to a woman, you know. And that voice of his… so sweet, so soft, so low. He really did look like a man of mixed blood; it was very romantic. And he said his work was importing films for TV—that was romantic, too.”

  “And how many times did you see each other?”

  “Oh, only the once. Yes, just once.” And suddenly she burst into a sudden laughter that contorted her body.

  A man came across the room and joined them, a man wearing tight trousers and with his hair loosely permed. It was the pianist.

  “I hear you are Ichiro Honda’s lawyer—the waiter told me. Look, I’d love to go and see him in prison—could you fix it up? I’ll make it worth your while.” The man’s voice and gestures were effeminate and Shinji felt a deep repugnance as the man laid his hand on his shoulder. Was he trying to make a fool of him? he wondered. But the man seemed deadly serious. Ignoring him, Shinji stood up and addressed Shoko Toda.

  “Thank you for telling me what you have. Could I ask you one more question? Do you believe
that Ichiro Honda is a murderer and a pervert?”

  She removed the cigarette holder from her lips.

  “I am someone, perhaps the only person, who believes his apparently absurd protestations of innocence.” She fell silent and began to muse, a dreamy look in her eyes, as if she was reviewing sweet memories.

  He climbed the stairs and drew a deep breath as he made his way into the street. That was another world down there, its denizens, perhaps, people who feared the light of day. He made his way to the subway station at Nishi Ginza and boarded a train headed for Shinjuku. And in the tunnels he became overcome by an obsessive urge to get off at Yotsuya Sanchome. It was there, he remembered, that Ichiro Honda had had his hideout.

  He cast his mind back to the trial, to the severe cross-examination of Honda by the public prosecutor on the question of the secret apartment. Honda, the prosecutor insisted, kept this lair with its supply of clothes, the better to commit his crimes. The prosecutor got quite carried away, his language becoming ever more elegiac and anti-quated as he described the fiendish cunning of the criminal. The memory made Shinji smile. For to him Ichiro Honda’s motives were crystal clear. The profession of an engineer was a serious one; what more natural than that he should wish to discard it for a disguise and wander the town in casual clothes?

  As the prosecutor had spoken, all Honda could do was to mutter such phrases as “to refresh myself” in response to the barrage of questions and accusations. Honda’s demeanor was that of a man who has given up trying to explain himself; this plainly left the judge with an unfavorable impression of him despite the attempts of the defense to explain that Honda’s changes of clothing had been quite innocent, that all he was seeking was a sense of freedom. How could the world possibly be convinced that the freedom that Honda sought was just the freedom to seduce women? Shinji sat crushed into the corner of his seat reflecting that it was not so much the law as morality that had brought its guns to bear upon Ichiro Honda. With morality on the side of the prosecution, what chance could the defense have?

  So even when the defense lawyer had spoken of the existence of Honda’s diary and of how it had vanished, and also when he had spoken of the booby trap set in the wardrobe, the response of those who listened had been disbelief tinged with secret laughter.

  Shinji obeyed his instinct and alighted at Yotsuya Sanchome, making his way to the pay phone in a small tobacconist. He rang the Wada law office and asked for the address of Honda’s hideout. The clerk at the other end of the phone kept him waiting for some time; it was plain that the Wada law office, having lost their exclusivity over Honda, had lost some of their interest in the case.

  The sun beat down on Shinji’s head as he waited. At last the clerk came back and grudgingly, it seemed, gave him instructions as to how to get to the Meikei-so. It all seemed quite simple.

  “Turn left by the sushi shop, you say, and then walk fifteen yards. Is that all?” Shinji scribbled feverishly on the memo pad by the phone. A ten-minute walk, that was all, it seemed. He made his way down the road. It was a very quiet area: there was a telephone exchange, a lumberyard—those were the sort of places that stood around the Meikei-so.

  It was a two-story building faced with unpainted mortar, a simple enough place. A stairway ran up the side and along the outer corridor; anyone could come and go freely. Ideal for a hideout, Shinji thought.

  On the corner door of the ground floor there was a small sign, which read “Manager.” Shinji knocked on the door; it was opened by a woman who took one look at him, turned around and shouted “Darling!” before making her way back inside. She looked haggard and worn-out; a few lank hairs were glued to her forehead by sweat.

  The manager proved to be a man of about forty with a pale and puffy face. It appeared that he was a jobbing tailor, for he wore a tape measure around his neck. Shinji presented his name card and asked about the apartment that Ichiro Honda had rented.

  “Oh, you mean Mr. Ueda’s room. It’s just the way it was.”

  “You haven’t rented it out yet?”

  “Well, since all this happened, the owner wasn’t sure what to do, but then we got a letter from Mr. Ueda’s family saying that they would like to keep the apartment on until everything is settled. So it’s left just as it was.”

  Shinji noticed that the manager still referred to Honda as “Ueda,” the name under which the room had been rented. He asked if he could see the room, and the manager readily assented, slipping on a pair of sandals and reaching for a bunch of keys.

  “I’m stuck to my sewing machine all day long, so I welcome the chance to get away,” he confided as he led Shinji up the stairway. He came to a door and opened it; the air inside was musty.

  Shinji saw an iron bedstead, a wardrobe like a locker, a wooden table, and two chairs. The manager opened the window with some difficulty. “Should open them once in a while, I suppose,” he murmured.

  “Did Honda have many visitors?”

  “No one in particular. I used to think it odd, but then he told me he was a scenario writer and only took the room to work privately, so I thought no more of it. But he was such a quiet and nice person; I wish I hadn’t testified against him, you know, that he had an adhesive plaster on his face when he moved out, but I really didn’t mean… you know, I didn’t understand…” The manager smiled weakly, his face revealing his fear that his evidence had put the rope around Honda’s neck.

  “There’s only one other thing that I remember… well, it was my wife, really. She swears she heard the sound of a woman weeping in Mr. Ueda’s room one day when he was out. Sounds like a ghost story, doesn’t it? It made the police laugh, anyway.”

  “About when would that have been?”

  “Let me see… it would have been six months before Mr. Ueda was arrested, I would say.”

  Shinji thanked him and left the Meikei-so.

  Walking back along the street, he reflected upon what the manager had told him. Could it be true, this story of a woman weeping in Honda’s room?

  Judging from the fact that he still kept on referring to Honda as “Mr. Ueda” however often Shinji had corrected him, he seemed to be a man subject to idée fixe.

  And if it was true, what could have been the meaning of those female sobs heard in the room?

  Shinji thought about it for a while, but by the time he got back to the main road he had dismissed the matter from his mind. After all, he reasoned, it could not be very important, could it?

  4

  Getting off the suburban train, Shinji soon found a taxi outside the station.

  Only one woman remained on the list that he had been given, a woman for whom he still entertained tender feelings although he had not seen her for several years. He had left her until last; soon he would see her again.

  He had had to work not only through college but to get into college. He worked as a children’s tutor in the evenings and on weekends; by day, he was a part-time deliveryman at a department store or a seasonal assistant at the post office. At festival and gift-giving times he had been particularly busy and heavily laden. Often he would wander the streets, his down-at-heel shoes white with dust or snow, looking for some particularly obscure address, the heavy sack on his back bulging with parcels wrapped in the distinctive paper of the store. These labors, particularly when he was working for the college entrance exam, left him little time for classes, so he tended to spend a lot of time in the college library.

  Gradually he got to know the young woman who was employed there as a lending clerk; they were attracted to each other, it was plain, but much as he had wanted to date her, he rarely had the money to do it. So in all those months and years he had only met her outside the college seven, eight, perhaps ten times. And amongst those few times, he had only made love to her once, quickly and furtively in the six-by-nine-foot room where he lodged.

  Eventually he passed into the college and became even more busy attending classes as well as earning his keep on the side, so they drifted apart and, in tim
e, ceased to see each other.

  This short acquaintanceship remained ingrained in his brain, banal as it now sometimes seemed to him, this brief affair between a struggling student and a library clerk. But how often he wondered as he sat in the taxi, which was climbing the slope to the college campus, do such brief, doomed lovers ever meet again? A faint expectation stirred in his breast.

  The taxi came to the gates of the college, beyond which no cars were allowed. He paid his fare and got out and began to walk toward the old brick building; the road was lined with cherry trees. The first green grass of summer was beginning to thrive on the lawn in front of the campus.

  He cast his mind back to how it had been in his student days. Summer… so hot; the lawn in front of the library would grow so fast that even weekly mowings could not keep it down. Memories… a row of tall sunflowers; sweat that poured down him no matter how he had wiped his brow; the library, empty in the long summer vacation; a girl who worked there and always wore white blouses… Steeped in these memories of student life, he paused for a while in front of the library before suddenly going in as if he was only doing so on second thoughts.

  Inside, it was still just the same: musty and cool.

  He went up to the counter. Michiko Ono, the lending clerk, was writing on a heap of small cards. Just as he remembered, she sat with a slightly bent back, her head tilted slightly at an angle that he found charming. But the former childish expression on her face was no more. He read the passing of time in the lines and wrinkles about her eyes. What those lines meant was the slow death of a human soul.

  “Miss Ono,” he said quietly, his voice choking a little.

  She stopped her writing and looked up as if she was disgruntled at being interrupted in her task. Then recognition crept over her features, mixed with a look of mild shock. She blinked two or three times and then, in a voice throbbing with emotion, said, “Mr. Shinji! It’s you! It’s been a long time!”