by Riku Onda
Isn’t this evening breeze pleasant? I say, how about we go to a small bar I know? My regular. No obligation of course, we can split the bill. It’s quiet, cheap, and the food is good. The kind of place I like, but they’re not easy to find. The bars I used to go to when I was still on the job have almost all gone now. It’s hard to find a new place, so I pray this one won’t close on me.
Come here a lot, do you?
I see, quite a bit. So you’d have a general grasp of the geography of the city then. Have you walked the streets much?
Oh, I see.
Well, I’m not one for crowds, so let me show one of my favourite routes along the backstreets.
Origami?
Never do it any more. It’s a funny thing, but the minute I retired and finally had the time for it, I lost interest completely. I used to have the concentration for it in my spare moments at work. It was an escape from the busy, brutal atmosphere, I expect.
II
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.
What I think is that everybody has a particular time in their life that they find themselves going back to in unguarded moments. Could be a period of success, or a time they can never forget, something like that. Not necessarily always a good time, though. For some it might be a period of depression or withdrawal. Whatever the case, good or bad, there’s one particular period in a person’s life that’s central to them.
For some it’s childhood. Others their student days. Or after achieving fame and recognition. Could be any one of all kinds of life experiences, but for some reason when a switch goes on that person finds themselves going back to that same time in their mind, over and over. Always the same.
Don’t you have a touchstone period like that?
For me, it was that case. Working that case in the 1970s was a defining point in my life. Sometimes I’ll be doing something and suddenly don’t know where I am. Whenever that happens, what I always see in the back of my mind is me, working on solving that case. Even after all these years.
In fact, if I’m really precise it was the first time I came face to face with her – in the hospital. That’s the moment.
My zero hour.
Am I being clear?
If my life were a book, the thickest section, the one with the most dog-eared pages, would be the one about that case. The spine would be bent from being opened to those pages so often. And the book would always fall open to that place. That’s how I see it.
III
I still don’t understand why I felt so convinced.
Call it a personal prejudice if you like – I admit it.
But I’ll be honest with you.
I wasn’t searching for who did it. I was trying to prove she did it. Every day, rushing around, doing everything I could possibly think of. All I was doing was trying to prove her guilt. That much I can tell you.
Yes, let’s say it is unbecoming of a detective to be swayed by a preconceived idea. With no supporting evidence to boot. All I had to go on was my instinct. The person under suspicion might well take exception to that. And rightly so.
Ordinarily I’d think as much, too.
But that case, and that case alone, was different.
It was the only time I felt one hundred per cent sure that I knew who did it.
My conviction never wavered. If anything, it’s only grown stronger the older I get. Most of the time I forget about it, but then something reminds me for some reason or other, and there are times I can’t sleep at night for frustration and regret.
We were defeated.
She beat me.
I put so much into investigating that case, my colleagues said I worked like a maniac. I could see they sort of admired me and assumed I was motivated by gut hatred for a mass murderer. But my real motive was different. Because from the start I knew who did it. The problem of identifying the culprit was never in my head. I didn’t want to be beaten by her, pure and simple. That was it. I didn’t want her to win. Everything I did was driven by that motivation.
You’re asking why I was so convinced?
I’ve thought about that a lot too.
Frankly speaking, even now I don’t know. All I can say is I knew the moment I laid eyes on her. I could feel a kind of transparent malice, exactly the same as I found at the scene of the crime – that’s all.
Ha ha… like falling in love at first sight?
Yes, I see what you mean. It’s like two sides of the same coin. The only difference is whether you react to her charm and virtue, or what lies behind that. Another detective who went with me once to interview her was so taken in by her beauty he kept going on how we had to protect the poor girl, and for her sake we had to do everything to catch the murderer, that sort of thing. Seeing his reaction helped convince me too. There’s a fine line between good and evil.
We both saw the same person, but our reactions were poles apart.
I can’t deny it might have been a warped kind of attraction. She got under my skin. I was bewitched by her then, and haven’t stopped thinking about her since.
IV
On the face of it the search for the man in the yellow raincoat was our main priority, but she became uppermost in my mind very early on, and I began looking into her friendships, standing in the family, et cetera.
The Aosawas were such an old, prominent local family that I expected a lot of resistance to our inquiries. I thought the local medical association wouldn’t be too happy about being scrutinized either.
But surprisingly, most people in the community were more than willing to cooperate. There was a tremendous amount of sympathy for her, being the only survivor and losing all her family, so people were happy to do anything that might lead to finding the culprit.
We interviewed more than six hundred people, ranging from those who had had long-standing connections with the family to people who had only ever exchanged a few words.
But nothing came up.
There was no trace of scandal. You often find with old families that there’s some kind of skeleton in the closet. But we didn’t find anybody with a grudge – medical negligence, for example – or children with the wrong sort of friends, or good-for-nothing relatives. They were so clean it was almost unnatural. No matter how deep we dug, we couldn’t find any dirt.
So then I thought, well, what if there was some kind of issue in the immediate family? Something that wouldn’t leak out. It was my belief that for her to be the culprit, there had to be something that would smoulder away – a family dispute, or some kind of grievance with the household environment.
I put together a list of schools the children attended, workplaces and private friends, and methodically went through the whole list interviewing people.
But I couldn’t dig up anything from there either.
The parents were of good character. The children got along fine. They all did well at school, were cheerful, bright, admired by everybody. That can’t be right, I thought. I started to worry I might be way off the mark.
What was the motive? I couldn’t find any reason to believe her to be the culprit. Was it a murder without motive, perhaps? Or an impulse crime?
Those thoughts just didn’t correspond with my impression of the girl I saw in hospital.
I couldn’t believe I was wrong about her.
I just couldn’t be.
I racked my brains over it, day after day.
One theory I considered was that she’d intended to kill herself and take the whole family with her. Once she had made sure everyone else was dead, she would follow.
That seemed more like her than anything else.
But in that case, what would be the motive for killing herself?
Was she depressed about her future?
As far as motive went, that line of thought was a dead end.
She’d been blind since she was little and was used to it, not to mention that the Aosawa family were so well off there was no need for her to work. In fact, she could live a life of luxur
y without ever having to work.
In which case, maybe getting exclusive control of the family money was the simplest explanation. But I wasn’t convinced of that either. It would have been much easier and more convenient to have a family member as a guardian.
Gradually, the investigation began to stall.
Everyone was starting to get in a panic.
That was when a random killer theory was floated. A killer who wasn’t particular about location. Any house with a large number of people in it would have served the purpose.
But that theory didn’t fly either. Namely because of the delivery slip. The slip with the sender’s and recipient’s names and addresses on it. It was because of the delivery slip that nobody thought twice about serving the drinks. The existence of that slip put paid to any random killer theory.
So we were clutching at straws by then, and the scope of the investigation was widened to include victims’ past friendships and medical associations from other prefectures.
By golly, that inquiry dragged out painfully, with no end in sight. Hopeless, it was – we didn’t even know what to look for any more. It felt like the summer was never going to end.
When I look back now on that case, I think of the moment I met her in hospital as my zero hour, and the rest was simply footwork, plodding the streets in the heat. Fed up, knowing it was useless, but not knowing what else to do. That summer I nearly lost heart.
I have this abiding image of my colleague and me, sheltering from the sun under a canopy outside a small grocery, where I bought us adzuki bean ice creams to eat. We were exhausted from the heat and too tired even to talk after trudging the streets since early morning with nothing to show for it.
I suspect a part of me still walks those summer city streets. Sometimes that’s what it feels like.
V
That’s why when that young fellow suddenly turned up as a corpse I was furious more than anything.
What – the culprit turns up from somewhere off the radar, complete with suicide note…
It was like he came from another planet. We hadn’t been even remotely close to finding him. That’s what it felt like.
But now we had the baseball cap and all the other physical evidence, so it was no wonder the top brass brightened up all of a sudden.
After I checked it all out, there was no doubt in my mind he was the one who had delivered the poison drinks.
But what was his motive? And what about the delivery slip?
So then I started to probe his connection with the Aosawa family, and I was sure I’d find something this time.
But we drew a blank again.
We turned every stone, but there was no point of connection between him and the Aosawas that I could find.
So I was over the moon when I heard about the boy living nearby who had seen him take a memo into his flat. This is it, I thought.
I’ve never worked harder at dragging through mud, literally, than I did then. I even got thanked for making the town cleaner! It’s fair to say I was like a man possessed by the thought of that memo. Nearly drove me mad not being able to pass by without checking any scrap of paper I happened to see dropped in the gutter. Wherever I went, I always had my eyes glued to the ground, looking for those scraps of paper. Didn’t matter how far it was from where he lived, if I saw a bit of paper on the ground, I couldn’t be satisfied till I’d turned it over to check. I was that obsessed.
But in the end we never found that memo.
I don’t think the boy was lying. I believe what he saw was a copy of the information that was written on the delivery slip.
But ultimately we could never prove it because we didn’t have the physical evidence.
The bosses were counting on that memo, but the mood changed once it became clear nothing would turn up, and everyone started saying the boy had made a mistake. Then opinion at the top began leaning towards the theory that the man had acted alone.
There was no mistake that he’d done it, and I think they just wanted to put an end to an investigation that had grown too big.
But I was against it.
The existence of that delivery slip was evidence of an accomplice. I maintained that considering the mental state of the man who had actually carried out the crime, the main culprit must be tied in with that somewhere.
A lot of colleagues working the case thought so too, but the top brass had a different opinion.
It was clear they wanted the investigation wrapped up. And in fact it did end, with the conclusion that the crime was the work of a single perpetrator.
VI
I had a lot of sympathy for the other survivor, the woman who helped at the Aosawa house. She copped a double blow.
She suffered the after-effects of the poison for a long time, and on top of that was the butt of vicious rumours that she was the one who had done it.
After regaining consciousness she was so overcome with guilt at having survived that she often said she wished she had met her end too. It was tough for the family, as you can imagine, being looked at suspiciously by everybody, but they all pulled together and did a fine job of getting her through it all.
The only time I felt any kind of rage, I suppose what you’d call ordinary human anger, was when I was with that woman and her family. When I was with them they made me feel like I was carrying out my job like any responsible person.
She was tormented by guilt something terrible after leaving hospital.
When the investigation closed I went to pay a final visit, and she broke down in tears, howling, saying she shouldn’t have survived. It really made me see red again, I tell you.
That same day I went to see the other survivor as well.
I wanted to see her before my anger cooled off.
She was already back at home by then, without her family of course.
I still think about it sometimes.
I wonder if in truth she really could see. I couldn’t help thinking that, and I know a few other people who thought the same.
That day was no exception.
When I opened the door, there she was, standing there, waiting in the entrance hall as if she’d seen me coming.
And she called me by name before I could give it myself.
She wore a navy-blue dress. It looked like a mourning outfit but was very becoming. Made her look quite the stunning beauty.
She knew I suspected her.
Probably from the first time we met.
She had sharp instincts, that girl. From the moment I laid eyes on her I thought she did it, and likewise, she knew from the moment we first spoke that she was under suspicion.
We spoke a number of times. I had her repeat her testimony and asked a lot about her family. Of course, on the surface of it I never mentioned my suspicions. But we both understood the game. We both knew this was a chase, and that one of us was hunting the other. That was our secret.
That day I informed her that the investigation was closed, much to my regret.
That’s all I said.
But I know she understood.
I took her hand and put an origami crane in it. I gave one to the other survivor too. It was a piece called the Dream Path, two cranes joined at the stomach and facing each other, as though one has landed on a lake and sees its own reflection.
I explained this to her and she felt it to check the shape for herself.
Then she looked at me with a smile.
“Detective, we’re like these cranes, aren’t we,” she said.
Calm as anything.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Just a feeling,” she said, and tipped her head at me.
Then there was silence. I had a feeling she had told me something very important, but for the life of me I didn’t know what.
After a bit she asked if I thought people’s dreams are connected.
I told her that the dreams of people who are thinking about each other are.
“Gosh, that’s nice,” she said.
/> And that was it.
I haven’t seen her since.
VII
I wasn’t in the country when that book came out.
I was in Malaysia at the time. Did a stint as an instructor for an information and training exchange with the Malaysian police. It was part of one of those vague workplace education schemes that large organizations tend to set up every now and then.
So I didn’t know about it for a while until after I got back.
A former colleague told me. Someone who had also worked on the case. He told me that a young woman from the neighbourhood who’d been a child at the time had written a novel about it.
Even then I wasn’t keen to read it. That case had been nothing but a bitter defeat for me, so I had no desire to see it rehashed and twisted into any kind of fiction. And I was also annoyed by the thought of reading something I didn’t really want to.
But deep down, I was curious to know.
So finally I bought it one day when I went up to the National Police Agency in Tokyo and wanted something to read on the train. But I ended up having work discussions both ways on that trip and I didn’t read it then.
It wasn’t till a few months later I finally got round to it.
Then I kicked myself. To be frank, even now I’m still ticked off I went on that Malaysia trip.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with Malaysia itself. I was just shattered that when the book came out I wasn’t in the country.
If only I’d read it as soon as it was released. Just a bit sooner – six months, even – I might have been spared all those sleepless nights, tossing and turning.
VIII
My first thoughts about the book were how well the author had captured the atmosphere of the time, despite having been so young when it happened.
It was obvious she’d done her work. She described the townscape and the social setting in great detail. As I was reading I could see clearly in my mind how things had looked back then.
You know how quickly cities change here. Buildings being knocked down and new ones going up before you know it. Commercial tenants coming and going, with new exteriors every time a new business moves in. You’re always seeing places you know are new, but you can’t quite remember what used to be there before.