The Aosawa Murders

by Riku Onda

  The one thing I remember is that the young policeman had been drinking instant coffee and had left the spoon standing in the cup. I can’t abide spoons left in cups. But when all hell broke loose there was no time for drinking coffee.

  The cup with the spoon? It was left sitting on the desk.

  I felt like that was me in some way. As if that cup and I were the only still things in the room while everyone and everything else was moving at high speed.

  Of course the police questioned me repeatedly, but I was only inside the house very briefly before I went to get help, so there wasn’t much I could tell them. They interviewed my brother and sister a lot – especially my brother, because he’d been in and out of there all that day – but I don’t think they had much to add in the way of testimony either. I couldn’t believe we were asked the same questions over and over.

  Yes, that’s all I remember.

  IV

  That’s right. It was a terrible crime – everybody was shaking in their boots because of it – but I took a very cool view.

  You have to understand I was an adolescent at the time. And doesn’t everyone go through a cynical phase during puberty? Thinks the whole world’s against them, treats adults with contempt, behaves with hostility to everyone and everything. I was going through that phase. I didn’t care about public opinion, didn’t have the time for it.

  But I did have one thought about the whole affair.

  The way I see it is, it was inevitable.

  Yes, that’s the sum of my thoughts on it.

  Inevitable.

  That word kept going through my mind, from the moment I ran to get the police.

  Let me see… how shall I put this?

  I’ve always been very sensitive to power dynamics, ever since I was a child. Probably the result of changing schools many times and having two younger siblings. I realized at a very early age that strength lies in numbers – two is better than one, three more than two. Intuitively I understood that there are far more potential connections when the numbers are on your side.

  Power dynamics are important in the classroom, too. You have to know which kids not to get too close to and which kids not to cross in order to survive. With experience, you learn to read the lie of the land. Every place has an established hierarchy, and there are certain things you have to put up with accordingly. To rise up in the world, you have to follow the right path but not stand out too much. I think I learned that lesson very early on in life.

  So, to come back to what I said about this crime being inevitable, well, it leads you back to the invisible people I mentioned before.

  We understand instinctively that invisibility is the best strategy for survival. The new kid at school knows he or she mustn’t stick out. They should act as though they’ve been there all along, and not do anything to attract attention. Because being visible carries appalling risk. Conversely, however, those who want to set themselves apart from others actively seek to become visible.

  That house was visible. And so were the people who lived in it.

  Yes, that family had authority. The kind that infiltrates and puts down roots in every corner of the local community. Naturally they also had the aristocrats’ sense of duty and virtue to go with it, and it was a fact that the community accepted and respected this.

  But there’s a fine line between respect and contempt, admiration and jealousy.

  Over the years the numbers of the invisible would have grown.

  At some point the family started to take the service and loyalty of invisible people for granted. I’m certain of it.

  They stopped keeping track of the numbers of the invisible, and what they might think or feel.

  Hisako Aosawa, I suspect, was the epitome of this.

  Which was deeply ironic, since she couldn’t actually see.

  She acted like a queen and was treated like one in return. Of course, she was dependent on help, and it was natural that people helped her because she was blind.

  But the way I see it, is that she was symbolic of that family at the time, because the people who waited on her were literally invisible, in all senses of the word.

  I’m well aware that my analysis may come across as sour grapes.

  But think about it. The person who carried out that crime was a virtually anonymous social dropout. He was nothing if not invisible. And a total stranger to the Aosawas as well, someone whose existence they weren’t even aware of.

  Don’t you think it’s an odd coincidence that the family was brought to grief by a person like that? Does that not seem like the revenge of the invisible to you?

  I’ve played chess with Hisako Aosawa.

  Of course I admired her. You’d walk on air too if you could play chess with such a beauty. She was bewitching – intelligent and graceful. Simply being in her presence put you under her spell. Everybody was her servant. You couldn’t help but marvel at the existence of a person like that. To sit down opposite her made me as happy as I’d ever been.

  But I was also conscious of another deep-seated emotion. An awareness that people like her, who are waited on hand and foot, gradually accrue even more power and fortune that in turn leads to even more people serving under them, and feeding off the energy of society in this way brings success to only the very few.

  I know. People want to be exploited, and they want to serve. The Aosawa family was a product of invisible people who desired its existence.

  Which is exactly why this was inevitable. Nothing in this world is as we would wish it to be.

  V

  Sibling relationships are an odd phenomenon.

  Siblings spend years together in childhood, then suddenly they’re cast out in the world and become estranged, just like that. Like seeds that burst out of a seed pod, scattering in all directions after long years of being nursed inside the parental pod.

  My siblings and I weren’t especially close. But perhaps that’s normal.

  We associated with each other because we lived in the same house, but once we went our separate ways that wasn’t necessary any more.

  I knew kids who were good friends with their brothers or sisters, but I never understood it. Why choose to hang out with your siblings when being with other kids was so much better? I thought it was strange.

  The three of us all had completely different personalities. I know some people get along because of their differences, but it wasn’t like that with us. We each did our own thing only because we didn’t understand each other. Our mother must have had a hard time. We had absolutely no sense of group camaraderie or unity.

  My brother was resourceful and friendly, but from my perspective that was an unfortunate compulsion. He constantly needed validation from others and was therefore never satisfied, which meant he was always moving on to the next new thing and never sticking with anything for long. On the surface it looked like he had many friends, but they were all shallow relationships. I don’t think any of those friendships lasted long. It was natural that he went to the Aosawa house often, because if he could be accepted by them his inner peace was guaranteed. He was good at finding people like that – the ones whose acceptance counted. He wanted to get in with them and be their hanger-on. That’s what being a second son will do to you.

  And my sister… to tell the truth, I don’t understand her even now.

  I never understood her when we were children. Any contact I had with her was almost always through my brother – I have few memories of direct contact with her. I always had a vague notion that she was a complete mystery.

  I never knew what she was thinking to begin with. The girls at school or in the office were far easier to figure out.

  She seemed emotionally stable enough. She liked to play by herself, but at the same time observed what other people were doing. Whenever my brother and I were working on a craft project or homework, she’d watch from a distance then quietly start copying us. She wouldn’t ask us anything. And yet her projects turned out better than ours. Somet
imes my brother used to explain to her what to do, then got her to make something and submitted it as his own work.

  You know those demonstrations you sometimes see in department stores, when they have artisans demonstrating various traditional crafts? It’s a kind of sales technique. My sister, she used to watch them for half an hour or more without getting bored. The artisans were always impressed and used to say what a patient kid she was.

  I can’t remember when exactly, but once when she was in high school I told her she ought to become an artisan, only half joking.

  She’s persistent, and could pick up everything she needed to know by watching and learning from a master craftsman.

  But she shook her head and told me, “No, I’m not cut out for that kind of work.”

  She was absolutely serious. I thought she was being modest, and told her so.

  But she just shook her head again and said in all seriousness, “All I do is imitate. I haven’t got any originality.”

  I took issue with that. I told her that everybody starts out by imitating, and anyone who can’t make a good copy has no hope of making anything original, so for her to say she could only imitate was conceited. Or something along those lines.

  But she just shook her head again. “No,” she said, “you’ve got it wrong. I don’t imitate techniques, I imitate people. All I did was imitate that person’s actions, not the technique. I only want to imitate the person.” She really meant it.

  I must have looked puzzled because she added, “Don’t you ever want to be someone else?”

  That was quite a leap. Don’t you ever want to be someone else? Why on earth would she ask that?

  Then she said, “I can only ever be myself for the rest of my life – I can’t be you, or Mother. I’ll never know my whole life what other people are thinking, only what I think – don’t you think that’s boring?”

  Can you believe it? And she meant every word of it. I was dumbstruck, as you might imagine.

  “Yeah, that’s true, but what do you expect?” I replied. “Think what it would be like if you did know what other people were thinking. I doubt any good would come of it.”

  She thought that over for a while, then said, “I suppose, maybe you’re right.”

  That was the end of the conversation at the time.

  Then there was another incident that gave me a bit of a shock, though I had heard rumours.

  I can’t remember when it was exactly, but my sister had brought some friends home, and for some reason one of them said to me, “Maki does amazing impersonations.” Hah? My sister? I thought – I couldn’t get my head around that. For one thing, she hardly ever spoke at home – she was Miss Aloof, never said anything more than necessary. When we watched TV together she hardly ever laughed. I would never have guessed she was capable of doing impersonations.

  But there was something else… What was it?… Oh, I know. The spring she graduated from high school she had some kind of part-time job doing telephone sales. One day she had to leave work early before finishing her quota of calls for the day, so when she came home she told us she was going to use the phone for a while, to call ten more people, and began ringing them.

  What an eye-opener that was.

  Her voice… it wasn’t the voice of the sister I knew. Of course, people use different voices inside and outside the home. But it wasn’t as simple as that. She literally became someone else. And, what’s more, she changed her personality every time she called another customer.

  Apparently these weren’t cold calls. She was ringing customers with a history of purchasing from this company, so it was a well-targeted group who weren’t going to hang up on her immediately. I think she might have been explaining a product to people who had expressed interest in buying it, something like that. Anyway, she had a list of names and information.

  Before each call she looked at this list, thought for a few moments, then calmly made the call. It was obvious she changed her approach with each person. One minute she was a brazen middle-aged woman, next a timid but basically decent person, then a pushy salesperson with hard logic – you would have thought a completely different person was speaking each time.

  Only Mother and I were home at the time, and we couldn’t believe our ears. Neither of us had ever heard her speak like this before. I remember Mother looking at me and saying, “Well, this is a surprise.”

  When she finished I said to her, “Hey, aren’t you something. Where did you pick up those voice techniques?” But she just looked mystified. So I pointed out that she’d used a different voice and personality each time.

  “Ah,” she mumbled, “I just imitated Aunt in Takasaki, and then the girl behind the counter in the cake shop, and the lady in the office at high school.”

  That’s when it all started to make sense to me at last.

  I remembered what she’d said in the past about wanting to become other people. She genuinely wanted that.

  What we’d overheard wasn’t her changing the sales pitch each time, it was her identifying completely with another person.

  “So that’s how you do it,” Mother said. I think she was rather naive. “I thought she reminded me of somebody and now I know who – my sister!” She was laughing about it.

  Once Mother had pointed the resemblance out, I saw it. She had sounded just like our mother’s sister who lived in Takasaki. The aunt who had been selling insurance for many years and could be quite pushy.

  That call in our aunt’s voice had given me a real start. It was essentially a faultless imitation.

  I was a bit disturbed by this. Mother laughed about it, but I couldn’t. Ever since then I’ve kept in mind that my sister has peculiar ambitions.

  Maybe it’s not unusual. Probably everybody secretly wants to be someone else. Actors have the clearest outlet for that desire in their profession.

  But my sister didn’t quite fit that category either.

  She wanted to be someone else. Literally. That gave me an uncomfortable feeling.

  VI

  When the book came out?

  Floored. In a word.

  I had no idea she was so obsessed by the affair. We’d all forgotten about it. My brother and I had both left home by then, and the three of us didn’t see each other any more, so it seemed surreal that the person who wrote that book was family.

  The content, too. Yes. Whenever I tried to read it I became agitated by the thought that one of my own family had written it, I kept seeing her face.

  After my sister went to university we became even more distant. Same thing happened with my brother. I was working by then, and we led very different lives.

  The book sold well but I didn’t tell anyone close the author was my sister. My brother told his friends he was in the book, which was a rather low-key reaction for him, so perhaps he too was still uncomfortable about being associated with the murders. Or perhaps deep down we both doubted that our sister really had written it.

  To tell the truth, I was more concerned about what she did with all the money that she made out of it. But I heard later from Mother that a large part went towards gratuities for all the interviewees, and after taxes she gave the rest to Mother. She sent us some too, for having used us in it.

  My brother and I were both glad she’d given the remainder to Mother.

  Mother had had a hard time after the divorce.

  Yes, after the murders my father was transferred to Nagano, and then some time after that my parents divorced.

  VII

  Their relationship had been strained for quite a while before the murders, that was true.

  It was the usual story – another woman. Father had been seeing this woman before we moved there, and my parents used to argue over that. But he declared he was going to make a clean break, so moving to the city was meant to be a turning point for the family. I think he really did mean it at first.

  Things seemed to go well when we moved. I was relieved that the home situation looked like it might settle down
at last.

  As it turned out, though, he hadn’t ended it after all.

  That fact came out shortly before the murders. It turned out the woman had been coming there to see him and staying in a hotel. It wasn’t such a big city, so eventually they were seen and the news reached Mother.

  The atmosphere at home immediately soured, and it stayed that way. There were a lot of tears, which made things worse as it was an old Japanese-style house with thin walls and we could hear everything that went on.

  I mentioned before that I was going through a cynical stage at that time. That was due in large part to my parents’ relationship. I threw myself into study as a way of escaping the conflict.

  The reason Mother insisted I go to the Aosawa house that day was because Father was expected home early and she planned to talk with him. I was vaguely aware it was some kind of important discussion – nothing that would affect us immediately, but preparation for when the time came, apparently.

  Father was never home much as he was always either busy with work or spending time with the other woman when she was in town. Mother had asked to have this discussion many times, and finally it was going to happen – on that day. That’s why I couldn’t refuse her when she asked me to take the other two to that house. But you know how the day turned out, so I don’t know what happened with their discussion.

  Secretly I hoped the murders might be an opportunity for them to patch things up. I thought it might make them see how lucky we were to all be together as a family, compared to what happened to the Aosawas.

  Though it did bring us together temporarily, in retrospect I can see that the murders were just the final straw.

  When it came to the crunch, it wasn’t Mother that Father wanted to be with, but the other woman. It was obvious in the end that he preferred her.

  Oddly enough, Mother kept hoping they could patch things up, but I had the feeling she gave up once the case was solved. I remember hearing her say to herself No chance now when it was announced that the perpetrator had committed suicide. I still don’t understand what that was supposed to mean.