Reiko

by James Avonleigh

  I may not have known the names of the trees in blossom, but I could certainly appreciate their beauty. And they seemed to grow in profusion as we reached our destination, Izumi Jinja, the village’s main Shinto shrine, hidden deep in the hills. It was a peaceful site, removed from village life and, according to Aya, largely unvisited. She readily confessed that it had never occurred to her to visit it before.

  We parked the car on the quiet path leading to the shrine and made our way towards a steep set of steps, overgrown with weeds and moss. At the foot of the steps two stone foxes stood like sentries one on either side, guarding the shrine. On the way up Aya explained to us that Shinto was the native religion of Japan and that, unlike Buddhism, which was a foreign import, had no scripture or dogma. She described it as a nature religion incorporating a profusion of gods and used mainly for ceremonial occasions. I asked what religion people adhered to and she replied that Shinto and Buddhism co-existed quite happily. There was no contradiction in taking on aspects of both religions, but people just weren’t religious in the sense we understood in the West.

  We got to the top of the steps and I was faced with a kind of giant stone wishing well, covered over with a wooden pagoda. The whole structure was old and dilapidated, but this somehow added to the atmosphere of the place. Aya went over to the water and, clapping her hands together, offered up a prayer.

  ‘When do people come here?’

  Aya shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe if they want to make a wish or offer a prayer for the dead.’

  Looking round there was little sign that the place was ever visited. Standing there with Aya and Sarah and only the sound of the wind for company, we could have been the only people in the world. For some reason I thought of Rip van Winkle going into the woods and emerging a hundred years later. I looked over at Sarah and Aya, who both seemed lost in their own thoughts.

  ‘There is a ghost story about this place,’ Aya said suddenly, turning to me.

  We crouched down in the shadow of the pagoda and Aya told us the story.

  ‘During the war the women of the village would come up here to offer prayers for their sons or husbands who were serving abroad in the imperial army. Often they never got word of whether their loved ones were alive or dead, but they continued to come to the shrine and offer up prayers. Then one day a mother came up here after dark, only finding her way by the light of fireflies. There at the top of the steps she met her son, wearing his army uniform, but with a terrible wound on his neck. He told her he had been struck down on a battlefield in some foreign country and would not be returning. When she began to cry, he comforted her by saying she could return to the shrine after dark on any day and he would always be there waiting for her. And so she did. Until the end of her life she came up here every night, even in the rain or the snow, to meet with her dead son.’

  Neither Sarah nor I spoke for a while. Aya had such a beautiful manner that it was hard not to be moved by the story.

  ‘It’s strange,’ I said. ‘Before I came to Izumi my Professor told me that Japanese ghosts – yurei, he called them – tend to be of a certain type. They are young, female and out for revenge. But the ghost you’re describing is not just male, but friendly.’

  ‘How can you say that yurei are all the same type?’ Aya said abruptly. ‘Different people see different yurei.’

  I tried to cover my tracks. ‘I’m only repeating what I was told. I’m happy to hear all sorts of stories. There’s another unusual thing about that story. As far as I know, ghosts in all cultures are supposed to be location-specific. So, in theory, they’re not meant to travel well. If they die in a certain spot, they tend to haunt that spot. This ghost seems to have crossed continents.’

  ‘Maybe if the emotional bond is strong enough,’ Aya said quietly, so as not to disturb any ghostly listeners, ‘they can travel.’

  I could see Sarah looking at us in amusement. ‘So this travelling thing is all scientific fact, is it?’

  ‘Not so much fact, as an amalgamation of experiences.’ I knew even before I’d said it that Sarah wasn’t going to let it pass and, sure enough, she burst out laughing. I’m not sure if Aya had understood, but she followed Sarah’s lead and laughed along. I tried to maintain some decorum as we were on hallowed ground, but I gave in and joined them. Even if it was a stupid subject, at least I could say my choice of thesis had provoked a good laugh.

  Izumi castle was predictably small in scale compared to its counterpart in Osaka, and like that castle, had been demolished and rebuilt in concrete within the last century. Still, it had a certain presence, perched upon a hillock, stately-white with a pagoda-like roof. There were more ghostly associations as Aya discovered in the explanatory pamphlet. Apparently during its original construction in the mists of the feudal era the builders decided that, for good luck, a young woman should be buried alive within the walls. How they arrived at this decision or who the lucky woman was, the pamphlet didn’t tell. It explained simply that the unfortunate victim became an unhappy ghost and had haunted numerous inhabitants of the castle.

  This was more familiar territory for me. Young, female ghost with good reason to be pissed off, wreaking havoc on the living. I insisted that we take the full tour.

  Inside it wasn’t that spectacular. A few exhibits of samurai armour and headgear, with a collection of swords and early muskets. But the real story of the castle and the one for which it became famous throughout Japan, occurred in 1870, in the early years of the Meiji era. The local lord, a man by the name of Wakamatsu, refused to yield his title and came under siege from imperial forces. Rather than give himself up, he committed ritual suicide, but not before butchering his entire retinue of servants, as well as his wife and children. Notwithstanding the brutality of this act, his uncompromising attitude won him great admiration in the country at large.

  We followed the events of that fateful day in a sequence of prints around the wall, a kind of Japanese Bayeux tapestry, which ended with a grim depiction of the aftermath of his heroism: the rooms of the castle strewn with twisted corpses and severed body parts. Aya and Sarah made their excuses at this point, while I lingered in front of this last print, trying to fathom what would move a human being to act in this way. I wondered if the ghost of the woman in the wall had anything to do with it, whether Wakamatsu was acting on voices heard in the air, whispered to him while he slept, feeding him thoughts of foul and bloody murder.

  We left the castle and its dark history behind and made our way through acre upon acre of farmland to see the strange and wonderful burial mounds. I had read about them both in Charlie’s notes and my own guidebook: a collection of thirty or forty grassy mounds, ranging from fifty feet in diameter to a few hundred. I knew there was no other place like it in Japan or indeed anywhere else in the world. Here was evidence of Izumi’s greatest mystery. How did it become such a centre for the construction of burial mounds? Was it just a fortuitous accident? Did people really believe that the gateway to the next world was to be found in Izumi? Or, as the Buddhist monk believed, the gateway to hell?

  Whatever the answer, the tumuli were impressive to behold. It was hard to imagine that by the seventh century, when the arrival of Buddhism put an end to their construction, the entire village was covered with them. That would have been quite a sight. For a while, the three of us sat in the car, staring at them through the window in silence.

  ‘I wonder who’s buried there,’ Sarah said.

  ‘No one knows. There are no records.’ Aya opened the car door to get out.

  ‘I suppose you have to assume that the more important your status, the bigger your hillock,’ Sarah said, following Aya’s suit and getting out of the car.

  We started walking around the mounds. It was incredible to think that these grassy tombs, some of which rose to twenty feet, had stood there for fifteen centuries with almost no erosion to speak of. I wondered what they had found when, over the centuries, they’d gradually razed them to the ground. Fully-formed skele
tons? Funereal artefacts? Everyday objects the deceased might find useful in the afterlife in the style of the Egyptian tombs? I couldn’t remember Charlie going into detail on ancient burial practices and, when I put the question to Aya, she didn’t know either.

  For a while we lingered in that strange graveyard and I couldn’t deny its power and majesty. It made me realize why Izumi was special, why it attracted thousands of visitors every year and why I had followed in Charlie’s footsteps on this bizarre pilgrimage. And the idea that the destruction of so many of these mounds over time could have awoken some dark spirit now seemed more compelling.

  ‘Is it all right to walk on them?’ Sarah asked, breaking the spell. ‘In England you’re not supposed to walk on a person’s grave. It upsets them.’

  Aya seemed a little bemused by this titbit, but accepted it with a polite nod. As to whether we could walk on them or not, she didn’t say.

  ‘Have you heard any legends or stories about this place?’ I asked.

  Aya smiled. ‘Actually, for Izumi, it’s quite a peaceful place. In fact it’s famous for fireflies. In the summer they come here in such big numbers that the whole area is lit up. No one knows why they come here in particular, but they say if you stand in the hills at night and look down over the village, everywhere will be dark except for this place. They say it’s as bright as a football stadium under floodlights.’

  We ate lunch in a traditional inn in the hills. We had our own little tatami mat room with good views from the window. There we removed our shoes and sat cross-legged at a low table. A little old lady in a silk kimono served us a set menu of clear soup and an assortment of traditional delicacies, some of which even Aya had trouble identifying. She excused herself by saying she was a city girl by upbringing and was uneducated in country cuisine. Both food and presentation were first class, but somehow I couldn’t muster an appetite. Though my headache had eased after the morning’s activities, my tummy was still feeling the effects of Mrs Azuma’s hospitality.

  For most of the meal we chatted amiably about Aya’s time studying in the States, swapped stories on cultural misunderstandings and took lessons in bowing etiquette. Keep your eyes on the floor, not on the person, and the more important they are, the lower you bow. As we expected Aya was far more relaxed outside of the workplace. It was no wonder that the male teachers at the school queued up for her company. She was lively, witty and had note-perfect English. Sarah seemed almost subdued by comparison.

  But it was Sarah who eventually brought up the subject of the high school tragedy. I had resolved not to mention it, having cast a pall over enough conversations during my short time in Izumi. And now that the protagonists were invading my dreams, it was time to take a step back and get some perspective. It had never been my intention to awaken Sarah’s interest in the distressing events.

  She waited for a lull in the conversation, then put down her chopsticks and waded in with a loaded question. ‘Are you suspicious of any of the teachers at the school?’

  Aya took a moment, carefully weighing up the question. ‘Suspicious, how?’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about what happened yesterday, seeing Shirakami-san in the room. Then, last night, we were eating at Mrs Azuma’s house – you know her, don’t you? – and she was talking about what happened. I know you can’t really talk about it in school, but I just wanted to know if there’s anyone I should be careful about.’

  Aya looked round, as though considering how thin the walls were, or whether someone could be standing on the other side of the sliding screen door, listening. ‘It’s a difficult question.’

  ‘It’s not because I want to hear all the gossip, because I don’t. I don’t even know most of the teachers, beyond saying “hello” in the morning.’

  Aya still seemed to be wrestling with her conscience. This went beyond the usual office gossip about illicit romance and other personal peccadilloes. Sarah was asking about one of the darkest episodes in modern Japanese history.

  ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ Sarah said, touching Aya on the arm.

  ‘There have always been rumours,’ Aya said suddenly. ‘Ever since I arrived at the school, I’ve heard rumours. No one says anything directly. That’s not the Japanese way and this subject is too serious. But you come to understand what people are thinking.’

  ‘Are there any rumours you believe?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘No,’ Aya said, without hesitation. ‘I don’t think any of the teachers are capable of anything so horrible. But that’s my opinion. Of course there were other teachers, who left before I arrived. I can’t make any comment about them.’

  Sarah seemed relieved. ‘I completely agree. I think you’d know if you were faced with a murderer.’

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping our green tea and gazing out of the window at the blossom trees dotting the hills and woods around the inn. Sitting up there on a peaceful afternoon, the warm spring air floating in through the bamboo blind, it was hard to believe that the village could have seen so much brutality. Hard to believe that evil could have ever taken such deep root there.

  Aya had clearly been reflecting on what Sarah had said. ‘I don’t know much about this kind of thing, but there’s one peculiarity I’ve noticed about murder cases in Japan. When the murderer is named, he is often a very ordinary person. Sometimes, he has a respectable job and a family. Even in very brutal cases, he is polite and well-mannered and is very sorry for what he has done. There is no outward sign of what is going on in his head. When I saw cases in America, there were always clues. The murderer had a history of violence and abuse, he lived on his own, was aggressive to people and had clear behavioural problems. You saw their photographs in the newspaper and you could see the evil in their eyes. In Japan it’s different.’

  ‘So you’re saying it might be difficult to spot a killer.’

  Aya nodded. ‘Not that I’ve ever met one. At least, I hope I haven’t. What I mean is, there may not be any obvious signs.’ She stopped, thinking her thesis through. ‘Although I’d guess there would be some clues.’

  ‘What about the teachers?’ Sarah asked.

  It was the question Aya had been trying to avoid by hinting that everyone was a potential suspect. She sighed. ‘Well, there is Shirakami-san. I’ve already told you about him. He was the students’ homeroom teacher. Until it happened he was a very popular teacher and now he walks around like a ghost and sits on his own in their old classroom.’

  ‘His behaviour might be weird, but I can’t say he’s threatening,’ Sarah said.

  Aya nodded in agreement. ‘Numata-san was their English teacher. He’s never spoken about the incident to me, but he never speaks to me about anything. Apart from English lessons.’

  ‘He’s married though, isn’t he?’

  ‘Divorced. His wife left him ten years ago.’

  Sarah looked genuinely shocked. ‘But he told me about his wife just the other day.’

  ‘I know. I only heard about it from one of the other teachers. He still acts as though he’s still married. It may be a cultural thing. Divorce isn’t as common in Japan, so he may be ashamed.’

  I remembered that Numata-san had been pointed out to me briefly in the staffroom. He might have been in need of a fashion makeover, but he didn’t have the air of a serial killer. On the other hand, if Aya’s theory were correct that might not be necessary.

  ‘I can’t believe he wouldn’t tell me he isn’t married anymore. Like I care whether he’s married or not.’ Sarah folded her arms in annoyance.

  Aya took a deep breath, as though she needed the oxygen to continue.

  ‘Then there’s Odagiri-san, the chemistry teacher.’

  I wasn’t sure if she was just systematically listing the teachers, or actually naming potential suspects.

  ‘He’s quite creepy,’ Sarah said.

  ‘They say he was in love with Reiko.’ Aya’s voice dropped to a whisper and she leaned forward, leaving us in no doubt that she was tal
king about a prime suspect. ‘Odagiri-san used to talk to Reiko after lessons and sometimes he would offer to walk her home after school. He tried to be like a father to her, but I’ve heard that she found him annoying. Shortly before she disappeared, she even started receiving anonymous flowers left on her doorstep. They couldn’t find out who sent the flowers, but some people say it was Odagiri-san.’

  ‘I thought that most of the boys were in love with Reiko. So it could have been anyone,’ Sarah said.

  Aya nodded emphatically. ‘I don’t know what evidence they had against Odagiri-san. I know he was taken in for questioning by the police, because he had been one of the last people to see her before she disappeared. They found love letters from many boys in Reiko’s bedroom, but I think it’s unlikely there were any from Odagiri-san.’

  Aya ran through a few more teachers past and present over the next half hour, while Sarah listened intently and chipped in occasionally with observations. Not knowing the characters, it was hard to form opinions about these people, but it was clear that in the absence of a credible suspect, everyone came under suspicion. It seemed that almost every man or boy who’d known her had come under her spell, and all had been turned away the same as the last. I thought of her picture, her chiselled features and searing eyes. And I was sure that whatever had happened to the other four students, Reiko was the key to the mystery.

  It was late in the afternoon by the time we paid our bill, gave thanks to the kimono-clad serving lady and traded slippers in for shoes. The other customers were long gone and we realized the entire establishment had been patiently waiting for us to finish up.

  Aya didn’t know if there was any sightseeing left to do in Izumi, but thought it might benefit our religious education if we saw a Buddhist cemetery. I agreed that now we’d seen the Shinto shrine, it was only right that we should see a temple belonging to Japan’s other national religion. Apparently there was no Buddhist temple in Izumi, only a cemetery. Aya explained that while the Christian tradition preferred to have church and graveyard in the same plot, the two were usually separate in the Buddhist tradition. This sounded like a useful area to look into for my thesis and I made a mental note to research it further.