The Aosawa Murders

by Riku Onda

  But if that’s the case, there’s one thing I don’t understand.

  Her attitude after the book came out. After it was published, she appeared to lose all interest in it. If that book really were a message for someone, wouldn’t she care about their reaction? It’s incomprehensible that she could lose interest in it entirely, just like that.

  Or was she simply satisfied that she had made her charge and sent out her message? Was it all up to the other party, then, the one receiving the message, to interpret it and take action?

  XI

  It’s getting dark.

  I’ve got a train to catch, so I should be going soon.

  Yes, I took over the family business back in my home town. We have an old traditional inn serving speciality high-quality cuisine. It’s important for a place like that to have a reliable mistress for the front-of-house business, which is why I was able to come out today.

  Yes, it’s my wife – I’m not equal to her, I’m afraid.

  Today was a journey in search of memories.

  I never thought I’d come back here again, but it hasn’t done me any good coming here today.

  This journey has brought me face to face with something else in my memory, which wasn’t part of the plan. Something I shouldn’t have seen, and which I didn’t want to see. I understand now that the temptation to see things you shouldn’t see is much greater than the temptation to travel to see something you want to see.

  Yes indeed, that’s today’s lesson from this city with its male and female rivers flowing through the centre. Its protectors.

  What do you suppose those two rivers protect? Do you think they’re conspiring? I’m starting to get that feeling.

  Saiga didn’t need me or anyone else to help her with the interviews. The Walkman and gifts for the interviewees that I carried for her weren’t so heavy that she couldn’t have managed alone.

  But she had me accompany her on purpose.

  She had me go with her to the interviews, do the transcriptions with her at night, and she made sure I remembered it all.

  Was one river not enough? Was another river necessary for protection?

  What was I doing there? What was it she had me help her with?

  Is it possible I was there as her witness? Did she require an observer for some reason? Did I satisfactorily fulfil the role she expected of me, I wonder? Or did her calculations miss the mark?

  I can see myself in future taking a leisurely stroll along this river bank. Coming here often to visit after I retire and hand the business over to my son. Coming in search of something in my memory, something I ought not to have seen, and dragging my old bones down to the river to stroll along here in the evening with a gentle breeze blowing off the water.

  Ah… I just realized something else important.

  The changes she made intentionally… the message to a specific person.

  Could it be, by any chance, that the message was meant for me?

  I was the person most likely to read the book and notice any irregularities. After spending every night with her working on the testimonies, I was the only one qualified to find all the discrepancies in the finished manuscript. Apart from her, the only other person in the world who would know is me.

  It would follow then, of course, that she would lose interest in the book once it was published.

  If her object was to have me read the finished book, then it had to have been written for one reader alone – me. There was a message in it for me. Her goal would be accomplished at the point I received the book and read it. Hence it didn’t matter what happened next.

  Ah yes, I’m well aware this is no more than wild conjecture on my part.

  After all, the truth is nothing more than a subject seen from a certain perspective. I understand that.

  But she’s the kind of person who will stop at nothing once she’s decided on a course of action.

  I have no doubt she’s already achieved her objective.

  3

  THE EMISSARY FROM A DEEP, FAR COUNTRY

  An excerpt from The Forgotten Festival by Makiko Saiga, published eleven years after the murders

  For the longest time the young girl did not know what to call the crepe myrtle tree, because although she had seen the name written down, she could not pronounce it. But as she grew older and her attention became focused away from the earth, the flowers of this tree, which bloomed between seasons, came to mean no more to her than a pattern vividly inscribed on the fringes of her world.

  All human beings are alike at the beginning of their lives in that they live in close proximity to the earth and propel themselves on hands and knees along the ground until mobile enough to stand up and be liberated from the dirt, thus becoming more distant from it in the process. As they begin to become aware of objects at eye level and higher, so begins an estrangement from such novel delights closer to the ground as moss roses, dandelions, ants and rhinoceros beetles.

  On this particular day, however, the girl’s attention was drawn by the profusion of red that enswathed the tree. The evenly coloured cloud of red blooms reminded her of the folded paper flowers draped around classroom blackboards to welcome new students on their very first day of primary school. The girl had helped make these by folding layers of pink tissue paper into accordion creases and slipping a rubber band over the centre to hold them in place before opening them out to form a flower. She had folded one after another, flinging each completed flower into a cardboard box, until this bored her and she had begun to play volleyball with the folded paper flowers, sending them lightly through the air before they dropped to the floor.

  But these look more like paper balloons than paper flowers, she thought, as she gazed at the tree on this particular day. The blooms were the same colour as toy paper balloons that make a dry, rustling sound when picked up and give a satisfying pop when smacked against the palm.

  That day the sky was leaden with dark clouds. They crawled across her vision, blocking the sun, which had not once made an appearance since she had risen that morning. The world appeared drained of colour, and the flowers less vivid than usual. The girl did not like this hot weather, especially the humidity, which made her feel vulnerable and oppressed by a sense of silent malice.

  On summer mornings, the air hung heavy.

  The temperature remained constant overnight as the machinery of the city continued to function ceaselessly, generating even more heat to add to the already high humidity. The city was like an unventilated factory, and the shrill keening of cicadas that switched on early in the morning like the buzz of idling engines assaulted the girl’s ears as she walked to the park for her early-morning exercises.

  The uncomfortable heat constantly generated by this relentless factory sucked moisture from its workers until they were ready to drop with fatigue. As the end of the summer holidays drew near, however, the arrival of a low-pressure system heralding the approach of the typhoon season promised a respite from the heat.

  An augury of rain was not the only thing out of the ordinary that day. The young girl was aware of the excitement in the air, unique to a special occasion, which had begun to pervade her neighbourhood early that morning. The air of anticipation that hung over the streets infected everybody, and the grown-ups, instead of keeping to themselves indoors, as normal, were outside rushing to and fro energetically, with more lightness of heart than usual.

  Something’s happening at the house with the porthole windows, the girl thought as she stared out at the garden from the dark interior of her home. She should have been finishing her summer holiday homework, but did not feel inclined to do anything as only her least favourite subjects remained. The situation was not yet urgent, but she did not have time to waste. It was the same every summer; there was always a period when the days slipped idly by before she was prompted to exert herself for the final spurt to finish her homework on time.

  The girl shared a room with the younger of her two older brothers, who was three years her senior
. Their room fronted on to the eastern side of a courtyard garden, roughly three square yards in size. Directly outside the room an old fig tree thick with amoeba-shaped leaves cast a spooky silhouette when evening fell. One night, not long after they had moved to this house, the girl had been frightened to tears by her brother suddenly raising his voice to yell melodramatically, “Look! Something’s moving under that tree!” It was a very old tree and produced a great deal of fruit, which attracted flocks of birds when it ripened.

  Even without the tree, however, the old wooden house that her father’s company had rented for them was a gloomy place. There was a mark in a corner of her bedroom ceiling that looked to the girl like a face, and made her feel so uneasy that she could not bear to sleep there alone whenever her brother was away at school camp or elsewhere. She was not a particularly nervous child, but she was unusually imaginative. All the dark shadowy corners in the corridors, stairs and cupboards, and even the patterned paper covering the grime on the screen doors and door shutter box appeared sinister in her eyes and sowed the seeds of occasional nightmares.

  Which is why the girl suspected she had had a visitation of another one of her nightmares. She had returned from early-morning exercises in the park, exhausted by the oppressive humidity of an approaching low front. She ate a hurried breakfast then went upstairs and flopped onto the lower bunk, where for some time she hovered in the borderland between reality and dreams. Though her body was all but asleep, one corner of her mind remained vigilant and alert.

  Then, all of a sudden, she became aware of some kind of presence. A shiver of fear ran through her. What could it be? she thought. Naturally, the fig tree in the courtyard was the first thing to spring to mind. Two sliding doors separated the bedroom from the garden, each with four glass panes fitted in wooden frames, the lower two of which were frosted glass. All that could be seen through the panes was a blurred outline that cast indistinct shadows.

  Someone’s there, outside the glass door… No, not someone – something!

  The girl was convinced of it. Tension slowly built as an internal struggle between drowsiness and fear played out. The fear won. She froze, paralysed in fright by whatever it was that she truly believed was out there. What was it? She wanted to see, knew she should see, but at the same time was desperately afraid of seeing.

  Suddenly, her neck moved, but not of her own volition; something had made it move. Now she was able to look up and see the glass door as she lay on her bed.

  On the other side of the frosted glass she saw a white shadow.

  What on earth could it be? A cat, perhaps?

  More than anything, however, it looked like a large, white cocoon.

  A white cocoon?

  The garden could be entered without passing through the front entrance, as the girl knew, because she had sometimes seen neighbourhood cats stroll along the top of the breeze-block fence and slip inside. But this cocoon-like object was too big for a cat; and besides, it moved in the upper reaches of her vision rather than along the ground.

  She pictured a trembling white cocoon floating through the garden. Whether it was real or not was another question.

  The girl could not have said how long she was in this state, but when at last she felt anchored in reality once again, she saw that the cocoon was no longer there. That presence of which she had been so keenly aware, so intensely that it almost hurt, had also vanished without a trace. Confused, the girl dozed off again. When next she awoke, everything that she had seen was gone from her memory, and she passed the rest of the morning listlessly as usual. It was to be a long time before any memory of this incident came back to her.

  She had a feeling that the front door had been left open that day. In memory she sees herself sitting in the front hallway, looking out at the scene framed by the open door; she sees the crepe myrtle tree next to it, and people coming and going along the street.

  Where were her brothers at the time? Junji was probably racing about the neighbourhood and would undoubtedly have been in and out of the house with the porthole windows since early morning. He was a sociable boy who could never stay still in one place for long. He slipped in and out of other people’s houses without a second thought, and had mastered the art of doing so unnoticed.

  Sei-ichi’s voice still resounded in her head. The elder of her two older brothers was about to sit his high-school entrance exams. He had been in a foul mood that morning, however, because he was behind in the revision timetable he had set himself for the latter half of the summer holidays. His was the single room upstairs and he was now yelling angrily from the top of the stairs at his younger brother, who had apparently been in the room messing around with Sei-ichi’s things out of boredom.

  An image of Junji, trampling over all the canvas shoes lined up in the entrance hall as he beat a lightning retreat out of the front door, imprinted itself in the girl’s mind.

  After an outburst like that from Sei-ichi her mother would normally have been the first to admonish him, but the girl had no memory of that happening. Which meant that her mother must have been out at the time, calling at that house to offer congratulations on the occasion. As newcomers to the district, the girl’s parents could not very well neglect the social obligation to pay their respects to a family who were pillars of the community.

  The girl was sitting in the front entrance hall whiling away the time by reading a book about the life of Beethoven. It was one of a collected set of volumes for children about the lives of the great and famous. She had read this volume over and over because of one episode that particularly intrigued her. The episode that she could not erase from her mind was not part of the events leading up to the creation of Beethoven’s masterpieces, nor his continuing to compose magnificent works despite his hearing loss; rather, it was an incident that had taken place just before he died.

  One day, Beethoven had received a visit from a stranger; a young man dressed in black. They exchanged a few words, and shortly afterwards Beethoven died.

  The man who had come to him was a messenger of death.

  What did they say to each other?

  The girl liked to imagine what the messenger might have said to Beethoven. Presumably the announcement had not been expressed directly; it would have to have been an enigmatic comment, something that was puzzling at the time yet made sense to Beethoven on his deathbed. What could he have said?

  She tried to picture the face of the man in black. He would not be threatening or fearsome in appearance; if anything, she fancied him as a refined young man with noble features, whose expression hinted at his regard for the person to whom he was conveying the message and who had a sensitive insight into the nature of his mission. After the mission was accomplished, he would remove himself quietly.

  To a distant place, deep in the bowels of the earth: the land of the dead.

  The girl was fascinated by this image. She imagined a mountain at the edge of a wilderness, with an ancient cave at its base and a long staircase inside leading down into the depths. The man would disappear down it mounted on a horse.

  Little did she know then that very soon she was to see a real emissary from the land of the dead, but for now she was still absorbed in her own make-believe image of a man who had returned below.

  While lost in thought the wind had gradually picked up and the sky had become dark and overcast, though the girl had not yet noticed it.

  However, upon hearing an immediately recognizable clacking sound outside, she lifted her head from the pages to see a stick searching the ground in the space framed by the doorway.

  “Hisa!” The girl threw her book down and raced outside.

  “Maki?”

  Hisayo turned her head to look at the girl. It was not as if Hisa could really see, but that was how it appeared. As always, that moment gave the girl a start. The visitor’s bobbed hair swung lightly, and she looked fresh in a dress patterned with pale-blue polka dots on a white background.

  “Hisa, are you going somewhere?
”

  “I’m on an errand to collect the sweets for my great-grandmother’s birthday celebration.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Eighty-eight by the traditional count. It’s a very auspicious number.”

  The young girl did not understand what was meant by traditional count, though she had often heard grown-ups use the expression.

  “May I come in for a bit?” said Hisayo, registering the younger girl’s uncertainty.

  The girl happily took Hisayo’s hand and together they sat down on the edge of the raised floor in the entrance hall, the boundary between indoors and outdoors. Hisayo laid her white cane on the floor. It seemed to the young girl that the visitor’s presence had brought a cool breeze inside.

  “When’s your birthday, Maki?” Hisayo asked.

  “The fourteenth of July.”

  “Oh, Bastille Day,” Hisayo promptly responded. “On the day you’re born you’re zero years old,” she continued, “but after a year passes you become one full year old. You understand that, don’t you? So every year on the fourteenth of July you become one year older. But in the traditional way of counting, the year in which you are born counts as one, and every time New Year comes your age increases by a year.”

  The girl was confused. “Why count like that?”

  Hisayo smiled gently. “In the past it meant a lot to people that they had lived to see in another year. Both adults and children recognized that a long life is a precious gift for which to be grateful. That’s why every year we age is a happy occasion, so maybe people wanted a method of counting that gave them the most years possible. Not so long ago it was common for babies to die soon after birth, and many children died of illness even after they reached school age.”

  “Is today your great-grandmother’s eighty-eighth birthday?”

  “Yes. We’ve had visitors coming all morning, and it’s so busy at home. I got tired of greeting everybody and having to be polite all the time, so I came out for a walk.”

  Hisayo poked out her tongue charmingly. It was pale pink, like a cat’s. The young girl’s heart pounded. To be sitting here next to Hisayo, just the two of them talking, was a momentous occasion for her. Sei-ichi and Junji were bound to be jealous when they found out. All the children in the neighbourhood idolized Hisayo.