by Riku Onda
What exactly do you want to know?
Do you intend to use my Forgotten Festival to write your own Forgotten Festival?
Me? Write a new Forgotten Festival?
Yes, I could possibly write another Festival, but that would belong to me – not you. There will most definitely not be another Forgotten Festival.
The real culprit? No, that’s not what I was saying. Well, I’m not sure… I really don’t know.
You see, it’s a very simple story.
If there are ten people in a house and nine die, who is the culprit?
It’s not a whodunnit. The answer’s easy – it’s the survivor, of course.
That’s what I’m saying.
Hisako did it?
Well, I don’t know what to think. I can’t confirm or deny anything. There’s no evidence or grounds to think that. But after coming here today, I know this – the last remaining person was the culprit. That’s all.
Oh, it’s so hot. Look how big the raindrops are still. This rain doesn’t look like stopping any time soon. It simply stirs the heat up even more.
Such dreadful heat…
How long will this last, I wonder?
2
TWO RIVERS AND A HILL
The assistant
I
It’s a long time since I took a stroll along this river.
The humidity’s as oppressive as ever.
Indeed it is, and today’s another sultry day. It’s like being in a sauna. This clammy sensation on the skin brings back vivid memories.
Well, from my observations of the city so far, it’s hardly changed in some respects, yet in others it’s considerably different. In all honesty, I don’t recall much. I was an utterly average student back then, not given too much to deep reflection. And it’s been more than twenty years since I helped Makiko Saiga with the interviews for The Forgotten Festival. Well now, let me think, how old was I when the purpose of my travels began to change…
As a young man, I’d travelled with the intention of seeing things I’d never seen before. If memory serves me rightly, I used to say I’d go and see anything once so long as it was new, or had curiosity value, or was out of the ordinary in some way.
However, after I graduated and got a job, I became so consumed by my work that I lost interest in seeing new things. In fact, the aim of my travels became to not see anything I didn’t have to. They were an escape from the daily grind, basically.
Yes, as time went by, I began to travel again in order to see things I had a fancy to see. Mind you, they didn’t necessarily exist in reality any more. My travels became a quest for the sources of memories, things that I had ostensibly seen before. Scenes from childhood, for example, or locations with nostalgic associations and the like.
I do believe that’s why I’m here now. It never would have occurred to me otherwise to visit this city, other than for work-related reasons. I’m here in search of nostalgic memories.
I say, the sky is rather low and gloomy, don’t you think? One almost feels as if tears might fall from it at any moment.
And indeed, here comes the rain.
II
Makiko Saiga? I haven’t heard her name in a long while.
She was a year above me at university. We belonged to the same club. Our official name was the Travel Club, but we weren’t a particularly gung-ho group. In reality, it was simply your average social circle and mostly an excuse to play tennis or go skiing under the guise of “travel”. We had a few dozen members and organized trips for the whole group, as well as small group tours. Five or six core members often put together short itineraries with very specific objectives. Tours to see listed cultural assets, or early Showa period buildings – that kind of thing. I enjoyed a ramble, so I often joined them. Makiko Saiga was also in that crowd.
My impressions of her? Well now, she was very mature. Composed, one might say. Which is not to imply she was passive or anything. I had the impression that she simply stood back and observed people. She seemed slightly aloof, which I interpreted as stand-offish in the beginning because she never initiated conversations or conversed in order to keep other people entertained. But once we spoke I realized that she was surprisingly unaffected and straightforward. Another thing about her, which you wouldn’t have expected from her distant manner, was that occasionally she would become so excited she would rattle away like a machine gun. This contrast with her usual manner always astonished me.
Is she in Tokyo?
I see, so she has a daughter. Whom did she marry?
Aha, that means she didn’t marry the fellow she was going out with at university.
Her boyfriend as a student? Well now, I never met him, but the word was that he was at the same university as us. My guess is they were in the same tutor group. I heard she started going out with him in second year and became engaged as soon as she graduated, but that might have just been rumour. You know how rumours can take on a life of their own.
You’re asking why she chose me as her assistant? Good question. Even now I couldn’t tell you the answer.
It wasn’t as if I was indispensable to her. I’m sure that I wasn’t the only one who could have done the work. Perhaps she simply thought I had the time. My being from Niigata, which isn’t so far away, might have been a factor, but in actual fact I’d never been to K— before then.
All I did mostly was carry equipment, which wasn’t a particularly onerous task. There were also papers and so forth to transport, of course, but by equipment I mean a tape recorder, which was simply a Walkman with a recording function – yes, they were on the market by then. I also assisted with transcribing the tape recordings.
Yes, interview recordings. That was indeed a challenge. I was meant to write down everything verbatim, but it was damned hard to catch it all. Before I got an ear for the local accent – which took some time, I might add – I had great difficulty following older people’s speech in particular. I was often confused. Although I was born and bred in the Hokuriku region, there is an enormous variety of local dialects, and vocabulary and expressions differ significantly over short distances. The older generation also never learned standard Japanese at school, which meant that they tended not to distinguish between dialect and standard language, and that added to the difficulty of my task.
It was hard work, yes indeed, but interesting nonetheless.
At the time, we were discussing a crime that had taken place more than a decade earlier. Hence with the passage of time… er, how do I put this… it had taken on an aspect of legend or myth.
Sorry, that’s probably not the best choice of words – of course it was a terrible crime. The impact on the surviving family and everybody else in the community was immeasurable.
Nevertheless, the interview subjects appeared to have put it behind them over the course of time. It’s my belief that talking about it often had helped them to digest the experience to a certain degree. And in the process of that they had, in my opinion, gradually created their own versions of the story in their memories. Which meant that they had their stories already rehearsed in their minds, and perhaps explains why they were so interesting to listen to.
Yes, it was most fascinating to hear versions of the same event from many different perspectives. Hearing those stories frequently gave me cause to ponder the nature of truth.
Every person spoke in the sincere belief that what they said was the absolute truth, but if one thinks about it, it’s difficult to describe an actual event in words exactly as one sees it. More like impossible, in my opinion. Each person has their own idiosyncratic biases, visual impressions and tricks of memory that shape their perception, and when one also takes into consideration the individual knowledge, education and personality that influence each single viewpoint, one can see how infinite the possibilities are. Hence, when hearing about the same event from a number of people, one starts to notice that all the accounts are, without exception, slightly different.
That’s how I came t
o believe that it’s impossible to ever really know the truth behind events. Once one accepts this, it follows that everything written in newspapers or textbooks as “history” is actually an amalgam of the greatest common factors from all the information available. Who killed whom may be known, but the parties directly involved were probably not aware of all the facts, nor could they have interpreted a situation at the time and know everything that led up to the event. Only an all-seeing god – if there is such a thing – could ever possibly know the real truth.
I recall being very depressed when I reached this conclusion. You see, I was a law student at the time. It mattered a great deal to me to know what we base our judgements of others on, and it was shocking to realize how presumptuous it was to think that we could know the truth of anything.
I did have memories of the crime. However, I was in primary school when it occurred, so those memories were only to the extent of being aware that something terrible had happened, and that all the grown-ups were talking about it.
After I agreed to help Saiga with her interview research, I did some research of my own in newspapers and so forth from the period, in order to get a handle on the chain of events. However, she told me that it wasn’t necessary as she preferred me to have no preconceptions, therefore I didn’t invest a huge amount of time and effort in preparation. The terms she offered were transport and accommodation plus a daily allowance, so as far as I was concerned it was nothing more than a short trip combined with some casual work.
Saiga worked a couple of casual jobs to fund her research, correcting homework for a correspondence course and serving in a shop that sold bento boxed lunches. She was very impressive in the way she set about executing a plan once she’d decided on it. She even calculated how much time was necessary to allocate to part-time work in order to raise the exact amount she estimated necessary to cover her research costs.
We stayed at a guest house near the station. In separate rooms, of course. I went with her to K— several times and we always stayed in the same lodgings. We also spent almost every night in the same way, with the two of us transcribing interviews. The people who ran the place apparently thought that we were budding folklorist researchers.
Yes, transcribing those tapes was painstaking work indeed. An hour or two can go by in no time during an interview. But when it comes to listening to tapes of those conversations over and over again in order to get them down in writing, however, it’s extremely demanding work. We interviewed several people a day, hence the stack of tapes kept growing. We had to make at least a rough start on transcribing each conversation every day, or it only became harder when going back to find the necessary places the next time. It was intensive labour, similar to cramming for exams with a study partner. Yes, come to think of it, that’s exactly what it was like – I was always reminded of the days I spent going back and forth to Tokyo to take my university entrance exams. I used to come up to the capital and study with one eye on the clock right up until it was time for an examination to start.
Saiga was always very economical with words. I don’t recall her ever chattering unnecessarily. When the day’s work was done, we would open a can of beer, talk a little to unwind, and then go to bed. That’s how it always was.
III
Yes, I may as well confess. I did have feelings for her at the time.
It wasn’t a romantic attachment exactly. I simply wondered what she thought about, what kind of person she was, and I wanted to get to know her better.
She wasn’t a particular beauty, but she did have a distinctive quality about her – she was a person one noticed. I’m reasonably sure other men were very aware of her.
Female friends? Well now, she hardly had any as far as I knew. I suppose, from a woman’s point of view, her demeanour was off-putting. She had a tendency to be dismissive of other girls, and whenever she had a request or needed to do something in a group, it was always the male students she approached first. She found men more efficient and straightforward to deal with. I remember her saying something to that effect.
However, I didn’t have the impression that she simply fancied men. She wasn’t the type to get annoyed if she thought they weren’t paying enough attention to her.
Nor was she one of those lively, active girls who have had male friends since childhood. The kind who say other girls are boring and wishy-washy and that boys are simpler and easier to get along with. Deep down, that type of girl is actually a lot more “girly” than other girls.
That wasn’t Saiga, either. She was very dry. That’s why the other girls didn’t think of her as someone who preferred men. If anything, she was regarded as a masculine sort, someone whose values were slightly different.
My impressions of her? She didn’t trust anybody.
Yes, and she seemed to have no patience for all the intricate exchanges and games that went on between girls. She disliked that groupthink consciousness, of everybody having to do everything together all the time. From my observations of her, I formed the impression that she trusted nobody, and that when it came to the formalities of social interactions she would always choose men over women as her partner in any activity. If she ever asked something of you, it was never as a favour. It was give and take with her, she always made sure things were square.
Maybe that’s why I was useful to her. I was someone she could be comfortable with, but I was also a safe choice because she knew it wouldn’t go any further.
When we were transcribing the interviews, I used to wonder about the fellow she was going out with, what he was like and why she hadn’t asked him to help. It might have been a simple reason, like the timing wasn’t good for him, but she also might have wanted to keep her private life separate. From the beginning I could never picture what she was like in private. She never, ever let her guard down – to anyone.
When the two of us were alone together, she was no different from usual.
I didn’t tell anyone I was assisting her, and I don’t think she let it be known either. She wasn’t the sort to open up about her activities to others, and since she was in her final year, she wasn’t involved in the club any more. None of the acquaintances we had in common noticed the coincidence of us both being away from Tokyo at the same times.
When her thesis was made into a book, she asked if she could credit me as a collaborator, but I refused. For some reason, I didn’t want anyone to know that I had helped her. I wanted that experience to stay a fond memory for myself alone. That was sufficient for me. In the end, however, my initials were amongst the acknowledgements, but nobody appeared to put two and two together.
IV
I only discovered after we began interviewing people that Saiga was connected with the case and had been at the scene on the day. She gave nothing away; I found out only in passing during the course of an interview. Imagine how astonished I was. It was all I could do to contain my surprise and maintain composure.
I’d read in a newspaper article about the neighbourhood children who had been at the scene but hadn’t imbibed the poisoned drink. Never in my wildest dreams, however, had it occurred to me that she had been one of them! I’d assumed she was from Tokyo, and had no inkling she’d lived here as a child. In her student days her home was definitely in Tokyo.
Actually, until then I’d had my secret doubts about how effective the interviews would be. What would people think when a pair of students from Tokyo turned up and, apropos of nothing, started asking for their thoughts on a mass murder that had happened a long time ago. How would they respond? But when Saiga started speaking people opened up to her. Her surname jogged memories, and generally they remembered her. I was taken by surprise the first time it happened and asked her if she had prior acquaintance with that person. Then, to my astonishment, she informed me she’d been at the crime scene. The scales fell from my eyes. What I had anticipated to be a bit of casual work over the summer suddenly, and unexpectedly, became very direct and real. It cast her in a different light and cau
sed me to reassess the situation. Up until then I’d considered her to be very cool and collected, so it was startling that she would decide to investigate a crime she had been connected with as a child. The thought crossed my mind that maybe this had been a defining period for her. Maybe it had shaped her personality. Maybe she had been dragging it around all her life.
It’s not far from here, is it, the house where it happened?
Yes, it was the road along the river, I believe.
I went with her, just once, to the house. Yes, only the once. But I think she went there on her own a number of times.
It was a historic old stone house, with round stained-glass windows at the front. By then it was rather decrepit and had an air of having been forgotten by the world. To be frank, it was completely run-down. In spite of any preconceptions I had because of the murders, it didn’t make a particularly ominous impression on me.
A crepe myrtle tree? Next to the front entrance?
Well, I can’t really say. I don’t recall it.
White flowers? I don’t have any recollection as such. I saw the house in August, but don’t remember a flowering tree. I might have simply forgotten, however.
I accompanied her to almost all the interviews.
The only one I didn’t go to was at that house. When Saiga met Hisako Aosawa I didn’t go with her. She told me my company wouldn’t be necessary. That’s why I only ever saw the house once. Which was also on the last day, when all the other interviews were done and we were about to leave. The last thing I saw was that house. Saiga kept staring at it, right up until it was time to go and catch the train.
V
My word, the wind off the river is strong, isn’t it? These gusts are unpredictable.
The wind blows from unexpected directions because of that hill, I presume.
Cities with a river through the centre aren’t uncommon, but a city like this, with hilly terrain at its heart and surrounded by two rivers, is unusual. Defence was clearly the ruling principle of town planning here.