by Kōji Suzuki
“Oh, I’m sorry. It was such a corny joke.”
As if to cling to her, Takanori followed her from the corner of his eyes. Guiding another visitor to the counter, she glanced at him, as though she’d read his mind. It was only for a brief moment that her eyes met his through the glass, and soon she reverted her gaze as if no one was there.
She had a blank look on her face, completely different from her expression when she’d cracked that out-of-place joke just a while ago.
“Best wishes,” she’d told him, but now he almost felt those same lips were murmuring, “My condolences.”
CHAPTER THREE Ring
1
What kind of clothes should he wear to a meeting with a renowned nonfiction writer?
After some vacillation, Takanori settled on a safe bet: black cotton pants, a white polo shirt, and a dark-blue jacket. Considering that the person he was meeting was a freelancer, a suit and tie might be too much.
Takanori would be taking the subway to Shinjuku, transferring to the Yamanote line, and riding it to the second stop, Takada-no-baba. The office address was on the map he’d printed out. Whenever he needed to walk to a destination, Takanori preferred to rely on a map printed out on paper rather than his cell phone’s small display. The office was less than five minutes on foot from the station.
Since getting the appointment, Takanori had gathered as much info on Tsuyoshi Kihara as possible from the internet and from books.
Kihara was born in 1953 in Kodaira City, Tokyo, which meant he was sixty-two now. After graduating from the Second Department of Literature at W University, he’d started working at a publishing company and gone on to edit more than a hundred nonfiction titles, five of which became bestsellers. After quitting the company over union issues and earning a living as a freelance weekly magazine writer, he built rich personal connections and acquired a knack for tracking criminal cases to emerge as a fully independent nonfiction author.
He’d gotten his break with his third hardcover, The Birth of the Gods.
It was about the founder of a religious cult that had brought about social problems. A major work, it appealed to the public to consider the contradictions of modern Japanese society and depicted the struggles of the devotees who’d sought to show the strength of their faith through acts that were a hair away from being crimes. The book had won him the Ooya Prize that year. Afterwards he’d become a household name and appeared often as a commentator on TV gossip shows. As for his personal life, at the age of forty-seven he’d gotten married to a woman ten years his junior who ran a bar and restaurant, and although they didn’t have any children, they were a loving couple. One of his hobbies was standing behind the bar and entertaining customers in between bouts of writing.
Takanori had actually never seen him on TV but knew Kihara’s face from a newspaper photo.
It had appeared alongside a column Kihara had written calling the capital-punishment system into question. Takanori had been moved by the piece.
Kihara was opposed to capital punishment. When he’d worked at the publishing company on true crime titles, coming face-to-face with so many brutal cases had built up his hatred for the perpetrators, and he’d maintained a position in favor of the death penalty. Yet, after becoming a freelance writer, the more he gathered information on criminals and probed into their lives, the more inclined he’d become to oppose the system.
In the column, he cited two reasons why.
To explain the first, Kihara used a hundred apples in a box as an example.
The number didn’t matter, and it could have been strawberries, rather than apples. Say there were a hundred apples lined up in a wooden box. Left outside in the elements, at least one of the apples would start to spoil and become rotten. Call this first rotten apple “A.” If one got rid of A when it started going bad, the decay could be prevented from spreading, but if one did nothing, the decay would be transferred to the next apple and then the next apple, and thus the damage would spread everywhere.
Now, assuming that the good apples had the right to isolate apple A, which had gone bad, there were two conceivable ways to stop the infection from spreading. You could transfer the bad apple to another box and cut off contact forever, or burn the apple and erase its existence completely.
Nevertheless, apple A hadn’t wished to become rotten. It was simply a law of nature that one apple in every hundred goes bad, and in keeping with this law, it gathered up all of the other apples’ potential to become spoiled and borne their sins all by itself. The good apples should sigh with relief that decay had come not to them but to apple A first, and they ought not demolish it out of hatred.
Could there even be a society where not one of the hundred apples would ever go bad? Trying to make it so would necessitate the use of a lot of very powerful antiseptics, and then things such as liberty, vitality, pleasure, and joy would all vanish. Making a perfect society where rotten apples never existed represented a dilemma in that all apples would be deprived of the chance to be happy.
One could either agree to a society where decay would arise according to the laws of nature, or agree to a draconian, fascist society, where the causes of decay would be suppressed and removed beforehand.
If one desired the former, then the good apples should bear no hatred toward apple A’s misfortune. Rather, they should isolate it out of a sense of sympathy, mercy, and pity. The only ones permitted to abhor apple A were the ones directly harmed by it, and it would not be right for the entire box of apples to uniformly adopt the emotions of those individuals.
That was the first reason Kihara opposed the death penalty.
As a precondition for applying the apple example to human beings, he noted that people would have to have almost no free will, but space considerations didn’t allow him to go into the issue in detail.
The second reason was more practical in nature: the capital punishment system wasn’t serving to deter heinous crimes.
In destitute prewar Japan, someone might have had the simplistic motive to commit murder and steal the victim’s money. In such an era, capital punishment might have been an effective deterrent to some degree. The prospect of paying the ultimate price would probably have put a stop to such barbarous crimes.
Yet now, decades into the postwar years, murders motivated by robbery or rape and other brutal cases had sharply declined, and the motives had become vastly more complicated.
Especially in the case of heinous crimes committed by young people, their childhoods and household environments had influenced them in complex ways, giving rise to a certain darkness in their hearts, and simply obtaining money could no longer be established as the motive.
After interviewing a certain youth who had committed murder and hearing his laments, Kihara had come to oppose the death penalty.
“You’re still young,” he’d said, “so there’s no way they’ll give you the death penalty.”
“Huh?” the youth had replied, a lump in his throat. “You mean I won’t be executed?” he’d asked with a look of disappointment on his face.
Knowing nothing of the Juvenile Act, he’d assumed that anyone who committed murder would be put to death.
Now, it was difficult enough for any criminal to analyze his or her motive in perpetrating the crime. But this was even truer of the very young and tender for whom accurately discerning one’s own motive was a herculean task.
It was because Kihara was an observer that he could understand something of the young man’s motive. Somewhere in his heart, the youth had hoped to receive the death penalty.
In his life thus far, he’d never enjoyed any moments in the spotlight and always been shoved into the corner. His mother’s love had been reserved for his siblings, and he’d been baptized in violence by his father. He’d had no friends, nor had he ever known a girl’s affection. When he hoped to shock the world and prove that he’d been alive, at least at the end there, and to die spectacularly, the only option available to him was to commit a h
orrendous crime and be sentenced to death.
A criminal act intended to announce him to the world and to establish his identity…that was how Kihara evaluated the young man’s crime.
When someone perpetrated a heinous crime with the express desire of receiving the death penalty, the point of that penalty was naturally called into question. Not only was it not a deterrent, it arguably even promoted such behavior…
Takanori got off the Yamanote line at Takada-no-baba, took a passage under the tracks, and then turned left, recalling Kihara’s column as he walked, and without even realizing it he arrived at a bridge spanning the Kanda River.
As soon as he crossed it, he spotted the condominium he was looking for on his right. Actually, he thought, the three-story condo facing the river was more just an ordinary apartment building.
Takanori didn’t have a solid opinion on whether or not capital punishment should exist. He’d discussed it with his friends before but maintained a noncommittal position the whole time. It was true that after reading Kihara’s column, he’d strongly sympathized with his ideas, but that didn’t mean Takanori was now against capital punishment.
Having sensed an ominous shadow stalking Akane over the past few days, there had been moments when he let his imagination run away. Akane was carrying his child in her womb. If somebody showed up and tried to harm his wife and child, he wondered, would he be able to protect them?
If his wife and child were murdered by a criminal, he was sure he’d scream, “I’ll kill you!” with a visceral rage. If it were allowed, he’d probably want to kill him with his own hands. Lacking that power, all he could do was to rely on the judgment of the law.
He could understand Kihara’s assertion and felt the author was right about that. Yet, another part of Takanori felt it was perfectly natural for a member of society to put himself in the victim’s shoes and be furious enough to favor the death penalty. It was understandable if the waves of hatred emanating from the victims and their loved ones resonated with society at large.
Kihara’s idea didn’t seem realistically achievable unless people were saints. To view every point on a two-dimensional plane, you needed to stand at a higher, three-dimensional vantage point. Likewise, you needed to be able to view the entire world with a fair mind to cast away your emotions.
But that would be akin to a god’s view—could every member of society reasonably be expected to adopt such a perspective? As long as you lived in the real world, where good and evil coexisted, it was natural to be lost between reason and emotion, ideals and reality, and questions like capital punishment had no simple answer.
Takanori came to a halt in the middle of the bridge and looked at his wristwatch. Just as he’d thought, it was five minutes or so earlier than the designated time. Kihara had promised to spare an hour for him, from 11 a.m. to noon. Arriving too early would be like breaking a promise, too.
He put his hands on the balustrade, bent forward, and stared at the river to kill time. Black sludge had gathered here and there where the shallow current got slowed down by the concrete bulkheads. When he shifted his gaze upstream, above the railroad bridge of the Yamanote line, he could see small patchy patterns made by the summer clouds in a sky cropped out by the buildings.
Wanting to stretch out his body, Takanori raised his arms up toward that sky.
No matter how far he tried to reach, he couldn’t grab any of the clouds floating by. Nor could he dip his hands into the water and grab the black sludge. The moment he began to wonder why he’d gotten those strange ideas, a chill ran through his spine.
When the chill slowly formed into a distinct fear, he couldn’t identify the source at first.
His shivering was getting more severe and synchronizing with the vibration of a two-ton truck driving past behind him.
He couldn’t see the true form of whatever was trying to harm them; the ominous mood that enveloped him and Akane was like dark mud and as nebulous as a cloud.
“I’ll kill you!” only worked if your enemy was a flesh-and-blood person. He couldn’t combat something that wasn’t human, some unknown presence.
Can I really fight this? Can I remove a threat menacing my wife and child without having grasped it?
No matter how powerful the enemy, it was better to have one you could fight physically. If you could beat it with a weapon, then there was a way.
Just visualizing facing a ghost devoid of flesh—and imagining how ghastly that would be—made him shiver uncontrollably.
Takanori started walking. After crossing the bridge and entering the building, he saw rooms lined up on both sides of the hallway.
He walked to the middle and stood in front of a door.
The plate said Apartment 104. That was Kihara’s office for sure.
Taking a deep breath to calm his fears, Takanori rang the bell.
2
When he entered the room, the first things that caught his eye were two garbage bags, so full they seemed ready to explode. Facing the entrance door as if they were huge daruma dolls squatting on the floor, they seemed to be watching out for strangers.
He could tell through the translucent plastic that most of the trash inside was paper.
Takanori introduced himself at the entrance door, and then took his shoes off and went inside. When prompted, he sat down in a chair in front of the table. Moving only his eyes, he looked around the room. It seemed rude to stare at everything, but since this was the office of a famous nonfiction writer, it was filled with fascinating things, and Takanori found it difficult to suppress his curiosity.
“Doesn’t it stink in here?” Kihara asked as he made coffee.
He probably asked because he’s aware of the garbage bags sitting there.
“No, not particularly.”
To be honest, he did notice an odor, but it wasn’t too offensive. Just as Studio Oz was filled with the peculiar smells of a video production company, so too did this office smell like the workplace of someone who wrote for a living.
“I’m not sure if you know this…but many serial killers aren’t sensitive to foul odors.”
Takanori felt an urge to rephrase what he’d said—he did detect a faint smell—but since it didn’t seem like Kihara had meant any offense, kept his mouth shut.
“No, no, I’m not talking about you,” Kihara said. “I’ve been doing this work for so long that I really can’t smell anything at this point, so every now and then I ask people to make sure, that’s all.”
His tone was very gentle toward Takanori, who was young enough to be his son.
In some ways, Kihara bore a resemblance to Yoneda at Studio Oz. His height and apparent age were about the same, and he also shared Yoneda’s comforting aura, which didn’t put people on edge when they first met him.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Takanori said. “I can faintly make out a pleasant smell here that has a human touch.”
Kihara gave a big smile, nodded, and looked at his wristwatch.
“I’m sorry to have to rush, but I’ve got a meeting with my editor in an hour. So, how about we get down to the business at hand?”
Though a little surprised at this abrupt transition, Takanori briefly touched on his impression from reading Kihara’s nonfiction book about the Kashiwada case, Beyond the Darkness, and described how a video that seemed to be a live broadcast of the execution got uploaded to the internet.
“Oh, did that really happen?” asked Kihara. “Well, I guess it was about a month ago that Kashiwada was executed.”
“That’s right. The sentence was carried out on May 19th.”
“A similar incident happened once before. An anti-death penalty group illegally obtained the video of an execution from the Ministry of Justice and put it online. This is probably the same sort of thing, right?”
“I can’t really explain it well,” Takanori replied, “but it wasn’t like an execution video got leaked. I can’t help thinking that some effects were added to it. To me, it looks like some footage
shot in a totally different place got edited in.”
“I see. So, what’s the connection between that video and you? You wouldn’t be thinking of turning it into a book, would you?”
Takanori was at a loss for words. He hadn’t a shred of confidence that he could make anyone believe the series of events that had beset him and Akane concerning the Kashiwada case. Even so, he needed to give a clear reason, or else Kihara’s interest would evaporate, and Takanori might not be able to ask the writer for help.
Sympathizing with Takanori’s struggle to come up with an answer, Kihara continued.
“It’s quite rare these days for me to meet one of my readers. Nothing good ever comes of it. Lots of folks—and I mean lots—have given me an idea and told me to write a book about it, when really they’d just brought me some boring old drivel. When I got that phone call from you, at first I thought, ‘Here we go again,’ but I could sense that something was different this time. In your words I could hear a sort of desperate cry, like you’d been dragged into the Kashiwada case and gotten stuck in a bind. At the same time, it gave me some hope. I thought that maybe, you would bring me some hint to solve these questions that I’ve been dealing with for years now…So that’s why I decided to go ahead and meet you.
“The Kashiwada case is the most mysterious of all the subjects I ever dealt with. That remains true even now. I myself am not convinced by what I wrote. You might call it unfinished business.
“A moment ago, you told me about the impression you’d gotten from Beyond the Darkness. Is it true? I want you to tell me your honest thoughts about it, without any hesitation.”
Takanori made up his mind. He knew that if he made something up or misled him with words of praise, they’d never have a relationship of trust. “In all honesty, it left me with a hazy impression.”
“Oh, why is that?”
“When I read the first part, I felt that the author was clearly convinced that Seiji Kashiwada was the one who’d kidnapped and murdered those young girls. But after making it three-quarters of the way through the book, I got the impression that your conviction had been shaken somehow.”