Oyamada Rokurō was an extremely energetic man and over those seven years he increased his wealth through hard work. He also established a considerable reputation among his peers.
‘I am truly ashamed to say that I was not truthful about the situation with Hirata Ichirō when I married Rokurō. Despite myself, I covered it up.’
Shame and sadness made Shizuko lower her long lashed eyes, which filled with tears as she spoke in a pained low voice.
‘It seems that he had heard about Ichiro somewhere and that he had some suspicions, but I assured Rokurō that I had not been with anyone but him, taking great pains to hide my relationship with Ichiro. I am still living this lie. The more suspicious my husband has grown, the more I have sought to cover it up. I think that no matter where they may be hidden, our misfortunes are truly fearful. Who would have thought that a lie told seven years ago, and that with not the slightest intention of ill will, should have been the seed for the suffering I now endure. You see, I had forgotten entirely about Hirata Ichirō. So much so that even when a letter from him suddenly arrived and I saw that the sender’s name was “Hirata Ichirō”, I was at a loss for a while to recall who he was.’
When she had finished, Shizuko showed me several letters from Hirata. She entrusted me with their safekeeping and I have them still. As it may assist in telling the story, let me here include the first of the letters:
Shizuko. I have found you at last.
You did not notice, but I followed you from the place where I encountered you and so learned where you live. I also found out that your surname is now Oyamada.
You cannot have forgotten Hirata Ichirō. Surely you remember this miserable wretch.
A heartless woman like you cannot understand the agonies I endured after you abandoned me. How many times I wandered around your house late at night in anguish. But as my passion burned ever stronger, you grew cooler and cooler toward me. Evading me, frightened of me, you soon came to hate me.
Can you fathom the feelings of a man who is hated after having been adored? Can you understand how my anguish turned to sobs, my sobs to hatred that hardened and took shape as a desire for revenge? When your family’s situation so luckily enabled you to disappear from my sight without a word of farewell, as if fleeing, I passed several days sitting in the study without eating or drinking. And I promised to seek revenge.
Being young, I did not know how to find out where you had gone. Your father owed money to many people and he slipped out of sight without letting anyone know his whereabouts. I had no idea when I would see you again. But I remembered life is long and I could not believe that mine would end without ever once meeting you again.
I was poor and I had to work in order to eat. That was one reason preventing me from asking around about your whereabouts. First one year, then two, the days and months flew past like an arrow, but I had to maintain my struggle against poverty. I was preoccupied with finding my next meal.
Then, just three years ago I had a surprising piece of good luck. After failing at various occupations and reaching the depths of despair I decided to write a novel to dispel my gloom. This was a turning point, for I was then able to put food on the table by writing fiction.
As you are still a novel reader, I expect you may know a writer of detective fiction called Ōe Shundei. He has not written anything for a year, but I do not think his name will have been forgotten. Well, I am Ōe Shundei.
Perhaps you think that I have become preoccupied with my fame as a novelist and forgotten my hatred for you? No, no – it is precisely the deep hatred stored within my heart that has enabled me to write such gory novels. If my readers knew all that suspicion, tenacity, and cruelty were born from my vengeful heart, they would probably be unable to suppress a shudder at the evil presentiment lying within.
So Shizuko, having secured a stable life, I sought you out to the extent made possible by time and money. Of course, I held no impossible hopes that I might recover your love. I have a wife, but one whom I wed in form only, to eliminate the inconveniences of life. In my mind, though, a lover and a wife are completely different things. You see I am not someone who forgets his hatred for a lover just because he has taken a wife.
Shizuko, now I have found you.
I am beside myself with happiness. The time has come for the prayers of many years to be answered. I have put together a means of wreaking my revenge on you with the same pleasure I have enjoyed for a long time in assembling the structure of my novels. I carefully considered the method whereby I might cause you the utmost suffering and fear and at last the moment has arrived to implement it. Just imagine my happiness! You cannot foil my plan by seeking protection from the police or anyone else. I have taken all sorts of precautions.
For the past year, the story that I have gone missing has circulated among journalists working for newspapers and magazines. Stemming from my misanthropy and preference for secrecy rather than anything directed at gaining revenge on you, this flight has been useful, unplanned though it was. And with even further subtlety I shall hide myself from the world and step-by-step I will push forward with my plan of revenge.
Of course, you must want to know what this plan is, but I cannot let the full outline be known right now because one of its effects is to gradually increase the fear as it unfolds.
Still, if you really want to hear, I wouldn’t begrudge letting slip just a little piece of my revenge project. For example, I could recount for you in precise detail a variety of trivial little things that took place in your house four days ago, that is, on the night of 31 January.
From seven in the evening to half past seven, you were leaning on a small desk in the room you use for sleeping, reading fiction. The book was ‘Hemeden,’ a collection of short stories by Hirotsu Ryūrō. The only story you read right through was ‘Hemeden.’
You then asked the maid to serve some tea and from half past seven to seven forty you ate two monaka cakes from Fūgetsu and drank three cups of tea.
You went to the lavatory at seven forty five and about five minutes later you came back to the room. From then until ten past nine, you were lost in thought as you passed the time knitting.
Your husband came home at ten past nine. From around nine twenty until a little after ten you chatted with him, keeping him company while he enjoyed a drink. At your husband’s suggestion, you took half a glass of wine. The bottle had just been opened and you used your fingers to pick out a tiny piece of cork that had entered the glass. Soon after finishing your drinks, you asked the maid to prepare your beds and once the pair of you had visited the toilet you got into bed.
Neither of you slept until eleven o’clock. When you again lay down in your bed the pendulum clock you had received from your parents struck eleven.
I expect you cannot suppress a feeling of fear at reading this faithful record, as precise as a railway timetable.
From the vengeance seeker (this night of 3 February)
to she who stole the love of my life
‘I had heard the name Ōe Shundei before, but had not the slightest inkling it was the pen-name of Hirata Ichirō,’ Shizuko explained uneasily.
Indeed, even among authors, very few knew the real identity of Ōe Shundei. Such was Hirata’s antipathy to people and his aversion to being seen in society that I would probably never have heard his name had I not heard a rumour about his actual identity from Honda, who often came to my place and who had seen the copyright information.
There were three more threatening letters from Hirata, but the differences between them were slight (each bore the seal of a different post office). They all contained a promise to seek revenge, followed by a meticulous and accurate account of Shizuko’s activities on a given night, with the times for these included. In particular, the secrets of her bedroom were outlined with painful frankness, down to the crudest detail. Acts and words that might cause one to blush were recounted wi
th cold cruelty.
I could imagine what embarrassment and suffering she would have felt at showing those letters to another person, but I must say that it was a good thing that she resisted doing so until selecting me as her confidant. On the one hand, this indicated just how frightened she was that her husband should learn the secret of her past, namely that she had not been not a virgin when she married, while on the other hand it underscored the strength of her trust in me.
‘Apart from my husband’s family, I have no close relations and there is no-one among my friends with whom I am so intimate that I could talk about this, so while I realize it is an imposition I decided to ask you if you would be so kind as to advise me what I should do.’
On hearing this, my heart raced with happiness to think this beautiful woman was relying on me to such an extent. Of course, there were reasons why she would select me as her confidant, for like Ōe Shundei I was an author of detective fiction and I was an accomplished exponent of deductive reasoning, at least in my fiction. Notwithstanding this, she would not have asked me for my advice on such a matter unless she felt considerable trust and affection toward me.
Naturally, I accepted her request and agreed to help her as much as I could.
It seemed to me that for Ōe Shundei to have ascertained Shizuko’s movements in such detail, he must have either suborned one of the servants in the Oyamada household, stealthily entered the household and concealed himself close to Shizuko, or carried out some similar nefarious plot. Based on Shundei’s style, I deduced that he was just the sort of chap to go to such weird lengths.
I asked Shizuko if she had noticed anything like this, but strangely it seemed there was not the slightest trace. The servants were all trustworthy staff who had lived with the family for many years, while the house’s gateway and fences were very secure because her husband was unusually nervous. Accordingly even if someone were able to sneak into the house, it would be almost impossible to approach Shizuko in her room, within the recesses of the building, without catching the eye of one of the servants.
However, the truth is that I was scornful of Ōe Shundei’s ability to carry out such an action. What could a mere detective novel writer do? At most, he could use his craft to write letters to frighten Shizuko, but I convinced myself that he would be unable to go beyond that and implement an evil scheme.
While it did seem somewhat strange that he had ascertained Shizuko’s movements in detail, this too appeared to be a ploy based on a sleight of hand common to his trade and I simply supposed that he had obtained the information from someone without going to any great trouble himself. To assuage Shizuko’s concerns, I gave her my understanding of the situation and as it would also be advantageous to me, before sending her home I assured her that I would determine Ōe Shundei’s whereabouts and if possible convince him to put an end to this nonsense.
I focused on calming Shizuko down rather than examining various points in the threatening letters from Shundei. When we parted, I said to her, ‘I think it would be best if you didn’t say anything about this to your husband. This is not so serious an incident as to require you to expose your secret.’
Fool that I am, I wanted to continue for as long as possible the pleasure of talking alone with her about a secret that not even her husband knew.
Nevertheless, I did indeed intend to establish the whereabouts of Ōe Shundei. He was completely opposite to me in terms of character and I disliked him intensely. I couldn’t stand the crone-like stream of suspicion-filled whining or that air of self-importance fed by the clamour of his degenerate readers. So I thought that if things turned out well, I would like to reveal his underhand acts and expose his tear-reddened, humiliated face for all to see. But I did not envisage how difficult it would be to ascertain the whereabouts of Ōe Shundei.
As noted in his own letter, Ōe Shundei was a detective story writer who had emerged quite suddenly some four years ago after having pursued a number of occupations for which he was unsuited.
At that time there was hardly any detective fiction written by a Japanese author and accordingly when he released his first work the reading public greeted the rarity with great acclaim. If you were to couch it in hyperbole, you could say that he instantly became the darling of book-reading society.
Although he was not particularly prolific, a string of new works were released by a variety of newspapers and magazines. Gory, guileful, and evil, every one of these works was full of unpleasant expressions that caused your hair to stand on end, but that actually became a feature that attracted readers and his popularity continued unabated.
At about this time, I changed from writing books aimed at younger readers to detective fiction, and my name became relatively well known in the detective novel market, where there were few practitioners. However, my style was so different from Ōe Shundei’s as to be almost entirely opposite.
In contrast to his gloomy, sickly, and grotesque approach, my style was bright and reflected ordinary values. In the natural flow of events, our works often competed and there were even times when we disparaged each other’s fiction. Infuriatingly, though, it was usually I who scorned Shundei’s writings, for while he occasionally disputed my contentions, for the most part he maintained an aloof silence. And he released his shocking stories one after another.
While I disparaged his works, I could not help but notice in them a certain eeriness. He had a passion that burned like an unquenchable ghostly flame and this unfathomable appeal captured his readers. If this stemmed from his bitterness toward Shizuko, as his letter suggested, then one could half nod in assent.
If the truth be told, I felt unspeakable jealousy each time one of his works received acclaim. I even harboured a childish perception of him as my enemy. Oh, that I could beat him! The desire rankled endlessly within my soul.
But just one year ago, he suddenly stopped writing novels and went to ground. It was not as if his popularity had waned, and the magazine hacks searched high and low for him, but for some reason he was not to be found. While I disliked him, I became a little sad when he suddenly disappeared. I had that lingering, childish feeling of emptiness one has when a ‘favourite’ enemy has gone.
Now I had heard news of Ōe Shundei from Oyamada Shizuko and what strange news it was. I am ashamed to say that I was secretly happy to have met my old rival again, albeit in such strange circumstances.
But was it not a natural progression, I thought, for Shundei to divert the imagination he had focused on constructing his detective tales into carrying out a plan of action?
I am sure many people are aware of this, but he was the kind of man you would call a ‘fantasist about the criminal life.’ In the gory pages of his manuscripts, he lived a criminal life with the same passion a brutal killer feels when he commits murder.
I am sure his readers will recall the strange ghastliness pervading his novels. They will remember the uncommon suspicions, secrecy, and cruelty that consistently filled the pages of his works. We can catch a glimpse of this in the following weird lines from one of his novels.
‘Perhaps the time would come when he would not be content with just writing novels. Bored with the vanity and monotony of life, he had at least found pleasure in expressing his unusual imagination by putting words on paper. That was the impulse for him to begin writing fiction. But now he had even become bored with the novels. Where would he find the stimulation he craved now? Crime, yes, there was only crime left. Having exhausted so many other avenues, only crime’s frisson remained.’
The author was also very eccentric in his ordinary life. Shundei’s misanthropy and secrecy became known among other writers and magazine journalists. It was very rare for a visitor to be shown through to his study. His seniors in social standing were turned away at the door with equanimity regardless of their rank. He also moved house often and never attended writers’ gatherings on the pretext of illnesses that lasted more or
less all year.
Rumour had it that he lay all day and night in a bed that was never made up, doing everything, whether eating or writing, from a recumbent position. Apparently he closed the window shutters in the day, writhing in the candle-lit gloom of his room as he penned those eerie reveries of his.
When I was told that he had stopped writing novels and disappeared, I secretly imagined that he had perhaps set up a base in the jumbled back streets of Asakusa and begun to put his fantasies into action, much as he often described in his fiction. Would he be able to carry it out? Not six months had passed when he appeared before me as someone who did indeed intend to put his fantasies into action.
It seemed to me that the quickest way to ascertain Shundei’s whereabouts would be to ask around in the arts sections of the newspapers or to talk to the magazine journalists . Nevertheless, such was the extreme eccentricity of Shundei’s daily life that he only received visitors infrequently. In addition, as the magazine houses had already tracked him down before, I needed a journalist who was on very intimate terms with him. Fortunately, a magazine editor with whom I was friendly was just the right person.
A scribe who worked out on the streets, Honda had an outstanding reputation as a specialist in his field. There had been a time when his task was to get Shundei to write fiction, much as if Shundei was Honda’s main assignment. In addition, in keeping with his role as a journalist working the front line, Honda had considerable investigative skills.
Accordingly, I telephoned him and invited him over. First I asked him to tell me about Shundei’s day-to-day life, of which I knew little.
He replied very informally.
‘Shundei, you say? Oh, he’s a boor, isn’t he?’
The Black Lizard and Beast In the Shadows Page 17