The Aosawa Murders
Page 3
When the investigation stalled, the atmosphere became tense. Despite a huge investment of manpower, and persistent questioning by police to the point that everyone was fed up with it, no picture of the suspect had emerged. Police and residents alike were stressed by the situation.
We were all on edge. A mass murderer was among us and we didn’t know who. All anyone knew was it had to be someone nearby.
And of course the murderer was close.
The man in the black baseball cap and yellow raincoat.
Although he’d become notorious, no one had actually seen his face. Police created a composite photograph based on neighbours’ testimonies, but it wasn’t very useful.
The man who had ridden a delivery motorbike loaded with a case of drinks.
He wasn’t the usual man from the liquor shop, but he gave a convincing impression of having been asked to bring the drinks round. As I told you before, the name he gave as the sender was a friend of Dr Aosawa’s, the head of a hospital in Yamagata Prefecture who was a friend from the doctor’s medical school days. So the doctor didn’t question it.
Yes, it was raining at the time. A low-pressure system was approaching, and it was working up to a storm, blowing wind and rain. That’s why nobody thought it odd that the man’s face was hidden by rain gear.
Next day, the yellow raincoat was found in the river downstream. The man must have discarded it immediately after delivering the drinks. Apart from that strange letter, that’s all the physical evidence the culprit left behind.
IX
We were in limbo, that white summer, while the police investigation dragged on through the late summer heat.
The longer it went on, the more worn out and depressed people became.
Practically the whole Aosawa family had been wiped out in one fell swoop, and the house looked like it was slowly crumbling away.
I crept past that house many times, but it was always deadly silent. You’d never have guessed there was anybody in there, although relatives from Fukui and Osaka had come to deal with the aftermath.
After the murders everybody treated the place like a haunted house – nobody went near it.
But of course it wasn’t unoccupied.
She was still living there. And the people who took care of her.
I caught sight of her in the window a few times, but always sneaked away quietly, though she couldn’t have seen me.
There was a large crepe myrtle tree out the front of that house. Crepe myrtle is most often associated with red flowers, like the decorative paper flowers used on sports days, but the flowers on that tree were pure white. And it always used to be in spectacular bloom over summer.
I remember walking past the house and staring at the crepe myrtle.
Maybe that’s why I associate that summer so strongly with the colour white.
X
I think it was around the end of October that the investigation finally picked up.
The trigger was a suicide. A man living in a rented apartment hung himself. When the landlord who found him read the suicide note he called the police.
In his note the man confessed to being guilty of the mass poisoning at the Aosawa house. He wrote that he had delivered the poison after receiving notice that he had to kill the Aosawa family. This man had been plagued by headaches from an unknown cause for many years, and suffered from insomnia and delusions. He also had a history of psychiatric treatment.
Understandably, the police didn’t take it seriously at first, because several other people had made similar claims by then. But they saw things differently when a black baseball cap, the keys to a motorbike and the dregs of an agricultural poison exactly the same as that used in the crime were found inside a cupboard in the apartment.
The clincher was the discovery that his fingerprints matched those found on a glass and the letter left at the scene. All at once the police and mass media were fired up again, and all people could talk about was the discovery of the culprit. But the excitement didn’t last long, since he was already dead.
It was something of an anticlimax after the investigation had stalled for so long.
People had mixed emotions. Relief for one thing, but also a feeling of being let down. And, equally, an overwhelming emptiness.
They were glad the culprit wasn’t a neighbour or acquaintance, and relieved that there was no reason to hold a grudge against the Aosawa family, but they still couldn’t make sense of why all those people had died. Of the absurdity of so many innocent people losing their lives because of one man’s delusion. Quite a few people became depressed once the crime was solved. It seemed so pointless. If the culprit had at least had a strong motive, it might have been easier to understand.
Once it was all over, people felt as if they had been left in limbo.
Yes, they did. Many people expressed doubt as to whether the man who committed suicide really was the culprit.
The biggest sticking point was his connection with the Aosawa family – what was his link with them, where and how had he met them? He didn’t live near the Aosawas, and ultimately it wasn’t clear how he knew them. In the end it was put down to an indirect connection through the Aosawa Clinic. It was a large facility, and there was also the possibility he’d seen an advert for it somewhere.
Another point of contention was how he knew the name of Dr Aosawa’s friend in Yamagata. That doctor was cleared of suspicion, but he had no connection with the culprit either. That was another unsolved mystery.
General opinion was the man had delivered the sake, but some raised the possibility of someone else having actually put the poison into the drinks.
His acquaintances testified to his long medical history, his lack of confidence, and personality traits such as a tendency to dwell on things and be easily suggestible. There was speculation that he could have been persuaded by someone into believing he was responsible, and that that someone had planted the poison and baseball cap in his room.
It was only speculation, though – there was never any evidence to support this theory. In the end, the man who committed suicide was deemed the culprit.
XI
Impressive, isn’t it? For a house of this kind the ceiling is quite high, and the stairs are rather wide.
The garden is magnificent too.
See how the wide eaves along this walkway are entirely unsupported? It’s held up by a kind of cantilever structure. Wouldn’t it be nice to take a nap here? It looks so cool and pleasant with the breeze blowing through.
What do I think? I don’t know what the truth is really. I don’t even know if I believe that the man who committed suicide is the culprit. Though I do think he is connected somehow.
The Forgotten Festival doesn’t have a conclusive ending. I was criticized for leaving it open-ended, but I couldn’t reach a conclusion. I never even thought I would reach one.
If I may speak frankly – and please don’t misunderstand me – I wonder if a crime like this, something beyond our comprehension, is more of an accident than anything else. At some point it begins to roll down a slope, like a snowball, rapidly picking up speed. Moment by moment it gets bigger until, before anyone knows it, anyone at the base of that slope gets mowed down by it. Of course, human agency and contrivance are at the centre of this particular snowball, and probably repressed emotions have something to do with it as well, but I believe that terrible things – terrible beyond anything that humans could devise – can happen due to a series of circumstances coinciding with some kind of trigger. Such events are then presented to us in the form of a great calamity, as if to mock our puny human desires. Do you see what I mean?
My feeling is that this crime was something like that.
XII
Look at this room. It’s so elaborate for such a small space.
It’s called the ultramarine room. See how the walls are bright blue. That’s lapis lazuli, a colour used a lot in ancient Egypt, apparently. It’s made by grinding up highly prized minerals.
/> The author and scholar Kenichi Yoshida mentioned this room in his writings about the city. He said it was probably contrived so that when you go upstairs and walk along the veranda past the tatami-mat rooms to reach this corner room, your eyes will fall on the bright-blue walls, whose colour is enhanced by the slanting light from outside.
I don’t know if it’s a calculated effect or not, but in this city the walls of old houses are usually painted a deep red, so these blue walls are unexpected.
The light in winter reaches as far as that wall. It’s an unusual, unsettling kind of room.
When she – Hisako, that is – was questioned, she was confused at first, and apparently started talking about this room all of a sudden. No matter what the policewoman said to her, she’d only speak of things she had seen as a child.
I can well believe it. She’d been alone and listening to her family dying all around her with no one to tell her what was going on. It must have been terrifying. Of all the people who lived in that house, only she had survived.
Hisako Aosawa… She was in her first year of middle school at the time, so she would have been around twelve.
Hisako was very beautiful. When she started middle school she had her long, straight hair cut short into a bob. It suited her – made her look like one of those traditional dolls. It also highlighted the contrast between her pitch-black hair and pale, delicately textured skin.
She was smart, and very composed. All the children in the neighbourhood admired her. My brothers, too. They idolized her.
But she had health problems, a condition called autointoxication. She turned pale sometimes and had to lie down. She was often absent from school, but the teachers weren’t strict about that as she was a good student.
Autointoxication… Apparently children with unstable autonomic nerve systems often have it. The body manufactures toxins, just like with pre-eclampsia in pregnancy. Hisako said that on the day she had been sitting in her special chair with the armrests because she was feeling exhausted and drained of energy. Isn’t it strange the things that can decide your fate one way or another? That day she didn’t put anything in her mouth because of the autointoxication, which had always been an affliction but turned out to be her saviour.
I have to say, that was very like her. I realize she must have suffered, but that weak, delicate air did suit her perfectly. It added to her mystique. She was quite the young lady from a grand house.
I know how insensitive this sounds, but it was my impression that even the aftermath of such an awful tragedy was in keeping with her image. It was dramatic. She was the survivor of a tragedy – a role she was made for. Nobody actually said it, but I think the other children thought so too. She was a tragic heroine in our eyes, and the crime only ensured that she was imprinted that way in our memories forever.
XIII
When I did my research for The Forgotten Festival I spoke with Hisako only once.
She ended up living in that house for a long time afterwards, but when I met her she was packing up to leave.
She was about to be married. Her fiancé was a German guy who she had met at graduate school, and they were going to live in America, where he’d found a post. Apparently he was planning to have her eyes examined again by doctors in America.
She was happy to meet me again, and we spent a whole day together.
My conversation with her then was central to The Forgotten Festival.
Hisako’s powers of memory were outstanding. She hadn’t forgotten anything of what she’d touched and heard that day. Ten years after the event her memory was still astonishingly sharp. So much so that I felt able to recreate her experience in my own mind as she had lived it.
If she had been sighted, things would have been different, I think. I’m sure the case would have been solved much more quickly if she had been able to see the culprit. She heard somebody walking in the kitchen. She heard the letter being put on the table, and a glass being placed on top of it. If she had been so inclined, she could have seen the person’s face.
If she had been able to see, of course.
Her thoughts ran along the same lines as mine.
She told me she couldn’t have endured seeing everybody’s suffering as they died. To have seen that would have destroyed her and made it impossible to keep on living afterwards.
She also said that she had always felt the weight of two conflicting emotions in equal measure. One was frustration that the perpetrator might have been caught earlier if she had been able to see, and the other was the certainty that she would never have survived if she had.
I think so too. If she had been sighted, she also would have died, either from having drunk the poison or being killed by the culprit.
Nobody knows what would have happened.
It was fate – that much is for sure.
XIV
Hisako lost her sight before she started school.
I don’t know the details, but apparently she was injured falling off a swing and hitting the back of her head, then she developed a high fever and gradually her sight went.
Her parents were desperate and had her examined by numerous doctors in Tokyo, but no one could give them any hope of recovery.
She didn’t lose heart, though. Being still young, and a bright, sensitive girl, she got used to being blind very quickly and didn’t appear to be at all incapacitated in daily life. If you spent time with her, you’d see what I mean. When you’re with her it almost feels as if you’re the one at a disadvantage, despite being sighted.
She didn’t go to a special school for the blind, either. Her parents must have done everything they could to get her into an ordinary school. She memorized the school layout and the exact details of the route our group had to walk to school every morning, so she was always confident. After she learned how to use an abacus she could calculate with such extraordinary speed it made everyone wonder what she might have been capable of if she were sighted.
She was very mysterious.
I did wonder more than once if maybe she actually could see. I always had the feeling that she picked up on everything, despite being blind. If you were in a room with her, she immediately perceived changes in people’s facial expressions or what was happening around her. Adults often remarked on it too.
Sometimes she made mysterious comments. Things like I became able to see after I lost my sight. She often said that.
She said once it was as though she could see with her hands, or ears, or forehead. I remember feeling very spooked when I heard her say that.
That’s why I tried to visit her in that house several times after it all happened, because I wanted to ask her privately about it. I thought she must have seen everything.
She had to know who the culprit was.
XV
I really don’t know where Hisako is now. Still overseas, I expect.
We corresponded several times when I was writing The Forgotten Festival, but I’ve lost touch since then. With her intelligence, I’m sure she’s managing perfectly well wherever she is. She might even have regained her sight. I enjoy imagining her being able to see again and prefer to leave it that way. I’m not inclined to look her up and find out for certain.
Oh, I knew it would still be humid outside. It’s almost closing time but the heat hasn’t let up at all, has it? My handkerchief’s soaking wet.
Letter? Ah, that letter, you mean.
Ultimately it remained a mystery. Everything about it – who wrote it and left it there, why, and for whom? What did it mean, and who was this Eugenia?
It was never established anyway that it was he who wrote it. The handwriting was analysed, but experts couldn’t say whether it was his or not as his writing hand was injured at the time. There’s no doubt he touched the letter, but we don’t know whether he took it there or simply touched it by accident when delivering the sake.
In the end, however, that letter was treated as evidence of his crazed delusions.
Eugenia…
I wonder if that letter ever reached its intended recipient.
That will remain a mystery forever.
XVI
Oh dear, a sudden shower. The rain here creeps up on you before you even notice it getting dark and overcast. Let’s take shelter somewhere.
The raindrops are very large, so I don’t think it’ll last long.
Fate… The world spins on fate.
An amazing coincidence happened to me today.
When I arrived at the station, I saw a familiar face. We both recognized each other, but – as often happens – couldn’t remember each other’s name.
We stood there talking for a while, sizing each other up, and then we both remembered at the same time.
It was the policewoman who assisted in the investigation, interviewing women and children.
Meeting her again really took me back. She’s retired now, apparently.
We chatted a bit, then she suddenly brought up the topic of Hisako Aosawa’s interviews, and I learned something that I hadn’t known before writing The Forgotten Festival.
It was about the blue room that I mentioned to you earlier.
Well, it might have been because of the shock, but apparently the first things Hisako spoke of in interviews were memories of when she could see, and she mentioned the ultramarine room in Seisonkaku Villa.
Another thing she mentioned was the white crepe myrtle.
That was a shock – I mean for me. It was a big shock that Hisako had spoken of the ultramarine room and the white crepe myrtle immediately afterwards.
If I’d known this before writing The Forgotten Festival, it would have been completely different.
XVII