The Aosawa Murders

by Riku Onda

  “Origami’s all maths, you know. Maths was your forte, wasn’t it?”

  This friend had found a job after leaving high school but had then struggled to return to study at university; he now worked in a research laboratory. The detective recalled that his friend had always been deft with his fingers and good at origami as a boy. In addition to folding standard pieces such as cranes and beetles, he also used to make original creations that he designed himself.

  From that day on the detective took to carrying paper about with him. In his pocket he kept square sheets of advertising flyers creased into four, which he opened up to fold any time he needed to think, or felt the desire to put something in his mouth, or needed something to fill time while drinking.

  For an origami piece to turn out well the paper should be equal in length on all four sides. In the beginning he used to purchase paper sold for the purpose, but it wasn’t always cut evenly, and so he began to prepare the paper himself, which also helped to economize a little. It became his habit on days off to use a carpenter’s steel right-angled ruler to measure and cut squares from loose leaflets that came with the newspaper. His wife also collected flyers and decorative wrapping paper from cake and sweet boxes for him to use.

  He rapidly became adept and moved on to trying his hand at more elaborate origami. Making original pieces and geometric designs in three-dimensional forms interested him too, but in the end he always came back to the most basic pattern, and the one that is also the ultimate in origami: the crane.

  Cranes have been auspicious symbols since ancient times. Origami cranes were folded originally as part of Shinto rituals, and in fact the art of paper folding itself was believed to be a pathway to the gods. It was so highly regarded as an art that ancient documents record the importance of pouring heart and soul into every bird folded. Tradition has it that the first origami crane was folded at the Ise Grand Shrine, one of the most sacred of Shinto sites, which perhaps explains why priests from the Ise region were responsible for the invention of various crane designs during the Edo period.

  The detective obtained copies of the ancient documents, and he liked to puzzle over pictures of completed pieces to work out how to fold them without referring to the explanatory diagrams.

  With connected cranes – a series of large and small cranes joined together, requiring the use of scissors – he enjoyed trying to figure out where to make the cuts. He realized that once he had fathomed a set pattern it was all a question of application, but if he became fixated on the pattern it was impossible to do anything new.

  In some ways this resembled his work. He had come to learn that people’s actions were to a certain degree fixed patterns, a template for reading the train of their emotions, but he could not allow a pattern to solidify into assumption or prejudice, as that would prevent him from seeing anything else.

  Three years had passed since he had taken to concealing origami paper in his jacket pocket, and he was now forty-six years old. It was at this point in his life that he encountered the most incomprehensible case of his career so far, one that failed to make any sense and was impossible to comprehend based on any of the other patterns he had met with so far. He was to remember it all his life: the case of the mass murder poisoning.

  III

  The detective acknowledged the existence of a faculty that humans call instinct, as well as intuition that could be honed by experience and professional knowledge. Although he would never dare express it in those words exactly, he had encountered many instances that led him to believe there could be no other explanation than these faculties at work.

  There used to be a very popular American detective show that he watched with his wife in the evenings. It was one of those inverted mystery-type dramas that begins with a scene of the person committing the crime. In the show, the perpetrator is usually intelligent and someone of high social standing who at first glance appears to have committed the perfect murder. Then along comes a mediocre-looking detective in a shabby trench coat, catching the culprit off guard. The mediocre-looking detective is in fact outstanding; sharp and observant, he sticks close to the culprits, frustrating and annoying them at every turn, boxing them by slow degrees into a corner.

  Some of the detective’s colleagues dismissed the programme as unrealistic, but the detective was not averse to a police drama with a clear, comprehensible motive that wound up satisfactorily in under an hour.

  Teru was watching this programme with his wife one evening when she said to him, “Can you tell the first time you meet a criminal whether or not that person is guilty?” The detective in this particular drama was always saying that he could tell the first time he met a guilty person because he had a nose for these things.

  He didn’t know how to respond to this. In almost all the murder cases he had handled it was obvious from the first who the murderer was, since he or she would either be at the scene of the crime standing next to the victim in a state of bewilderment, or would have fled in horror at their own actions but be easy enough to track down quickly. He had never seen a perpetrator like the ones on TV – a tuxedo-wearing, champagne-drinking schemer who lives in a mansion with a pool, has complicated interests at stake, is the type to say “call my lawyer” and commits a carefully thought-out crime requiring the preparation of an alibi and the planting of red herrings in advance – and nor did he ever expect to encounter one either.

  “No, not at all,” he answered his wife, but deep down he heard a voice inside: You never know.

  It could happen. He did think it possible, but was doubtful that he would ever have the chance to test himself.

  He was not to know that this very opportunity awaited him in the near future.

  IV

  That opportunity arrived towards the end of summer.

  The day started out unbearably hot due to an approaching typhoon, with warnings of torrential rain forecast for the afternoon. As he left home in the morning the detective patted his pocket with a sigh. His usual sheets of folded paper were in there, but he knew that the heat and humidity would turn them damp with sweat and render them unusable. It would be impossible to fold anything in this weather. On previous occasions when he had been caught in heavy downpours, afterwards he had had to scrape a wet pulpy mess of soaked paper from his pocket with great difficulty. It crossed his mind that he might be better off leaving the paper at home today.

  The misery of the endless, wearying heat was compounded by the prospect of having to spend the day on long-delayed paperwork. Much as the detective loved his job, even his feet dragged as he set out wearily for headquarters.

  However, there was something else going on under the surface, another reason that he did not feel like going into work today: a hunch that something bad was going to happen. From the moment he had awoken he had been unable to shake this feeling. At first he hadn’t identified it as a premonition. Perhaps he wasn’t well, he thought, or maybe the weather had brought it on. But by the time he left home he was close to being convinced that something bad was going to happen that day.

  He patted his jacket pocket again, still in two minds over whether or not to leave the paper behind, but thought that it might be better to avoid doing anything different from usual today, and so he left it in there.

  The weather might have had something to do with the fact that headquarters was more crowded than usual with colleagues grimly tackling their paperwork. In the afternoon the rain arrived in a cycle of violent downpours that periodically beat against the windows, highlighting the quieter than normal atmosphere inside.

  “Aargh, my brain’s on strike today.”

  “Even my cigarettes are soggy.”

  Curses punctuated the silence between downpours.

  The detective rose to fill his cup with weak, watery tea and pulled out the origami paper from his pocket as he walked back to his desk. Sure enough, it was damp and difficult to open up, let alone fold.

  In weather like this he tried to stick to warm drinks as much as
possible as lots of cool liquid made him feel drained, but his cup of tea was uncomfortably hot to hold. On the spur of the moment he put the piece of folded paper down to use as a coaster, then went back to his paperwork while waiting for the tea to cool. But it was taking a long time, and he was thirsty.

  Inwardly cursing, he persisted with his pen. The irritation mounted, threatening to spill over: the heat… this blasted paperwork… something bad is bound to happen… He could not take in the words on the paper.

  He sighed and unconsciously his hand sought his pocket, but then he remembered that the paper was under his cup. At last the drink was cool enough to sip, but his face screwed up in reaction to the unappetizing taste of the weak, insipid tea. He’d be better off with plain hot boiled water.

  The detective was about to wearily put the cup down again when his glance fell on the paper he had used as a coaster. Where the cup’s base had touched the paper was a wet ring, through which the print on the layer underneath was visible. Two words inside the ring leapt out at him, one in the upper left and the other in the lower left. Taken together they read woman trouble.

  He was startled. Though it was still hot and he was dripping with sweat, a chill swept through him. He stared at the two words. Why these words? Uneasily he peeled away the top layer of paper to reveal an advertisement for a pharmacy below:

  For the woman who suffers from cold or hot flushes, joint pain, knee or back trouble.

  He smiled wryly. So that’s it. Just a coincidence, that was all. He felt foolish, but nonetheless relieved. Still, the chill did not go away.

  Something very bad was going to happen today.

  This thought was in his mind when he heard the harsh, loud ring of a telephone.

  V

  The detective and his colleagues were reeling with disbelief as they made their way to the crime scene through driving rain and strong wind after receiving the first report. How could this have happened? And in such awful weather? The wind was steadily picking up and the rain, which was already bucketing down, was only getting worse. Ferocious gusts rocked the car as they stopped at an intersection. The detective wondered briefly whether the weather might have been a factor in the perpetrator’s choosing this day to commit the crime. Rain shutters on houses were firmly closed, umbrellas were useless, and it was difficult even to open your eyes. People were staying indoors, which meant that inevitably there would be fewer witnesses and no one would have heard anything. Any evidence such as footprints would also be washed away. It was possible that the weather had been a deciding factor in the timing of the crime, he concluded, but his prevailing mood was still one of disbelief.

  Unusually for such extreme weather, upon arrival at the scene they were met by a large crowd of people in raincoats standing motionless in the rain. The police, who had arrived first, were controlling traffic on the other side of the crowd. Water streamed from the voluminous waterproofs that shrouded them like filmy white membranes and their voices were drowned out by the rain, making the scene look like something from a silent film.

  A sense of reality returned when the detective saw parked patrol cars and ambulances blocking off the road. Despite being prepared for it, the roar and onslaught of rain and wind that whipped his body when he opened the door still took him by surprise. He hurried over to the huddle of police officers, and by the time he reached the entrance of the house he was as drenched as if he’d been in a swimming pool. With the driving rain limiting his vision he had not been able to get an overall view of the house until now, but once ushered inside he was at last able to look around and absorb its grandeur. The place was huge. These were rich people. He thought of a tuxedo-wearing, champagne-drinking villain. That thought, however, was instantly driven from his mind by the overwhelming stench that assailed his nostrils.

  “Ugh!”

  The sour-bitter, metallic smell was overpowering and prompted everybody entering with him to automatically cover their noses.

  He noticed a woman collapsed in the corridor, lying in an unnatural, contorted position, and his first impression was that she must be terribly uncomfortable.

  Ambulance personnel reacted in horror to the smell, despite the masks they wore. They emerged from the interior waving their hands. One of them spoke to him. “Don’t go in. There might still be poison in the vomit and excrement. We need to get fresh air in, but I can’t open the windows in this weather.” The man sounded desperate.

  “Police. Are they all dead?”

  “We took the ones still breathing to hospital. The rest are gone.”

  “How many went to hospital?”

  “Five.”

  “What about the doctor?”

  “Not here yet.”

  “Was it poison?”

  “More than likely. Looks like they drank a toast and all went down together. Even Dr Aosawa,” the paramedic gasped. His face was pale. “There are glasses lying all around. I’d like to prohibit entry if possible.”

  “Hey, are you all right? Do you feel okay? Maybe you absorbed some of the poison too.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. I —” The paramedic staggered and reached out for support. A strange sound came from the back of his throat and the detective realized that he was about to vomit. He rushed over to the man. “Hey, not in here. Somebody help!”

  After escorting the paramedic outside and getting him assistance, the detective went back and returned to his examination of the corridor. Peering cautiously along it, he saw that there were in fact two prostrate human forms, and it was clear that both were lifeless. He swallowed hard, pulled out a handkerchief to cover his mouth and cautiously ventured along the corridor. The floor was wet with liquid spilled from dropped glasses. He tried to touch as little as possible as he stepped gingerly, determined to commit everything he saw to memory. Outside the raging wind roared, but inside the house was heavy with the silence of death.

  It was literally deathly silent. Light spilled from a room at the rear of the house, accentuating the darkness of the corridor. The bodies belonged to two women who both wore aprons. Household help, he thought. One appeared to be in her forties or thereabouts, and the other was perhaps about sixty. At the moment of their deaths their bodies had twisted into unnatural positions. Their throats bore scratch marks and their hairpieces were out of place. Had they crawled this far? he mused. The air reeked of vomit mingled with urine. He clutched the handkerchief he was holding over his mouth and drops of cold sweat formed on his temples.

  Glancing down, his eyes lighted on a small red toy car lying at his feet. It gave him a jolt: so there were children in this house.

  Reaching the doorway to a room, he peered inside. The sight that met his eyes struck him physically, like a blow to the face. He stood rooted to the spot.

  It was a large room, with a high ceiling, and there were more – many more – people in there than he had anticipated. He ran his eyes over them all, carefully counting. Twelve in total.

  His first impression was that they were all asleep, because the scene reminded him of sleeping together in the big hall at kendo club training camp. But that impression lasted only for an instant: in the next moment he took in the meaning of what his eyes were seeing and froze in horror. Every body bore testimony to the extreme suffering of the occupants of the room in their last moments. They lay twisted with their clothes in disarray as if, incongruously, they had been dancing, and their faces had contorted in expressions of agony as, covered in their own vomit and excrement, they had kicked against tables and chairs in their dying throes.

  A woman wearing a kimono, an elderly man in a suit and a well-built man in his fifties were slumped on and behind the sofa. Another elderly man had died hugging his knees. It was pitiful to see the bitter realization of defeat writ large on their faces as the final moments of their lives ebbed away.

  He felt something clutch at his heart and trembled violently at the sight of boys lying toppled on top of one another in the shadow of the table, boys who looked to be about t
he same age as his youngest child. They lay with limbs flung out like dolls, their defenceless, ashen faces turned to the ceiling and mouths hanging slackly open.

  It was unspeakably tragic. The parents must be in here somewhere, too.

  At the sight of a teenage boy in school uniform he felt another another stab of horror.

  No, it can’t be. Yukio…?

  A fear that this was his own son impelled him to look closer at the face, but the soft brown hair and pale complexion of this youth soon confirmed that it was not. He shook with almost hysterical relief. And, close upon this reaction, a sudden comprehension of the full reality of the situation dawned – that he was in a room full of dead bodies – and made him want to scream out loud.

  The paramedic with whom he had spoken earlier must have felt the same, he realized, and most likely have been overcome not by noxious fumes but by the sight of all these corpses.

  Something in him broke as he felt overwhelmed by an intense, ominous sense of cold reality, the like of which he had never experienced before. The room seemed filled with ants crawling over ice cream mingled with the vomit scattered over the carpet. Chills coursed through his body and the ants crawled over his skin. He felt a suffocating, cold, otherworldly evil. An enormous, unshakeable evil that was capable of crushing his puny, insignificant self. For a moment, the horror overpowered him.

  Two conflicting voices clashed in his head.

  Run. Escape. Get out of here as fast as you can – now!

  Look. Imprint this in your brain. Comb the murder scene with your eyes!

  He sighed deeply into his handkerchief and made a determined effort to focus his mind. But his feet would not move. He didn’t know what stopped them from moving. Pale-faced, he forced himself to stand in the centre of the room and look all around. He saw a barely touched feast. Overturned glasses scattered here and there.

  Abruptly, a jarring sense of something out of place prompted him to turn and look behind him. He recoiled. Yet all that met his eyes was an empty rattan chair: a light-brown, comfortable, single-seat rattan chair with an indigo dyed cushion on it. What was so strange about that?