‘Is this all I’m good for?’ he whispered.
She blinked and stepped away from him.
‘Is it?’ Kaitarō followed her, backing her into the wall. His warmth and urbanity had vanished; there was only the man she loved, the man she was walking away from. His hand reached out and took hold of her arm. He was angry, she realised, angrier than she had ever seen him.
‘If you are going to throw what we have away, at least look at what you are sacrificing us for.’ His voice was quiet but filled with rage. ‘Ask yourself what you really want from this life.’ His hand came up to the beaded edge of her collar and he hooked his finger beneath it to reach the smoothness of her skin, stroking her there, watching her eyes flicker up to his, the desire she could not hide. ‘You do not need these things to be happy; they have only made you lazy.’
Rina pulled away from him. ‘You cannot judge me. You have nothing to lose.’
‘I have everything to lose,’ he hissed. ‘You – your circumstances,’ he said, lingering over the word, ‘have made you a coward. You would rather have the illusion of security than the autonomy to lead your own life.’
‘No,’ Rina whispered, squaring up to him. ‘No one depends on you and you need no one.’ She was shaking as she said this. ‘What would you do with me and my daughter? You cannot even look after your mother.’ She pushed at him then, shoving him back with the flat of her palm. Surely now he would go away, and to her horror he did. She felt him mentally withdraw from her, and then he stepped back towards the window and looked out into the night.
‘You can throw me away, Rina. You can tell me that you don’t want me or anything I have to offer, but I wanted to tell you that I have listened to your advice. I have resigned from my job and I am leaving Tokyo. I’m going home to my family. I will try to repair things there.’
He didn’t even look at her as he said this, as though unaware of the impact his words would have. Rina closed her eyes. The pain burned in her chest, so searing it should be an end in itself, but it was not. He was looking to the future, a future she could not be part of, and suddenly she wished she had not pushed him away. She wanted to wrap her arms around his shoulders and feel the strength of him, to have the peace she knew when she was with him just one more time, but he was leaving and she could not bear that now he might refuse her touch.
‘I go tomorrow,’ he said, turning to face her once more. ‘If you want to change your mind, if you want a life with me, now is the time.’
Rina stood still, the buzz of the party loud in her ears. If he was trying to make her aware of the desolation his loss would bring, he was succeeding, but still she fought against it. She looked away from him, suddenly aware that anyone could have walked past their alcove and seen them.
Almost as if he had read her mind, Kaitarō’s mouth twisted. ‘You are safe,’ he said. ‘Nothing will prevent you from going back in there and returning to your marriage.’
Rina swallowed. She wanted to say something to him, something that would communicate all she was feeling, to ask him to at least give her more time, but she could not. ‘Goodbye,’ she said. She felt his gaze travel over her, from her powdered skin to her neat chignon, the beads at her neck.
‘Goodbye, Rina,’ he said, and even though she had said it first, it hurt her anew.
She moved to leave the alcove but for a second he grasped her arm, his fingers pressing into her skin. ‘Listen,’ he said, looking her in the face, ‘I want to be with you, but after tonight, if you mean this, do not come looking for me. Do not think about me, because I will not be there for you, do you understand?’ He reached up and his fingers uncurled to touch her cheek. She could feel his skin rough against hers, his thumb where it came to rest at the corner of her mouth, almost a caress.
Rina saw the eyes that she loved growing cold; his touch withdrawing from her. She nodded, and before she could do anything more he left her alone in the alcove, with only the faint trace of his cologne to prove he’d been there.
In the car on the way home, Rina held Sumiko tight against her. Satō was silent, as the driver put the Lexus in gear. Rina knew that Sumiko wanted to talk, to relive the party, but Rina covered her small hand with her own and squeezed it. Satō rested his elbow on the window and leaned towards the night air. He did not look at his wife and daughter.
Rina shifted on the leather seat as Sumiko leaned into her. For a moment Sumi lifted her face and frowned as though puzzled; then she returned to snuggling against her mother, closing her eyes.
As they travelled through the brightly lit streets and neon signs, the evening played out in Rina’s mind, each moment up until he had found her in the alcove. She did not think that Satō had noticed her absence; certainly Sumiko had said nothing when Rina reappeared at the party, although her eyes were red. She tried once more to block the joy she’d felt at seeing Kaitarō and the reality of the car she was in now. She thought of her fear that they had been seen, that he might jeopardise her reputation, her marriage, but then it occurred to her that what she had chosen was perhaps more frightening.
As always, they had stayed late into the night, past Sumi’s bedtime. Satō loved a party, his work never done. But when the silver buffet service had grown cold and the waiters began to talk among themselves, they finally left. As they had walked through the ballroom, the lights seemed too harsh to Rina’s tired eyes; the space had lost its soft, romantic glow. The large glass windows looked cold, even dangerous, and beyond them the night was black. Empty plates and glasses littered the tables alongside half-eaten canapés of butterflied prawns, blinis and caviar, chicken teriyaki, and in little piles everywhere there were tiny cocktail sticks, gnawed and abandoned. After such an elegant gathering, this was what remained.
The memory of that room stayed with Rina as they took the lift up to their apartment. She could see that exhaustion had kicked in for Sumi, that her eyelids were drooping. But under the gaze of Satō, Sumiko kept her posture straight. She placed her shoes neatly in the rack by the door and put on her house slippers. Rina moved into the living room, making it ready for Satō, turning on a lamp that cast a warm and familiar glow about the apartment. She walked to the sideboard to fix Satō a drink, her hand reaching for the Scotch, but when she looked up, her husband was glaring at her. For a moment she thought he was going to ask her about her absence that evening, her silence among his friends, then she caught sight of Sumiko’s toys cast across the coffee table. She had asked her daughter to put them away before the party, and in their haste to get ready Sumiko must have forgotten. Satō raised an eyebrow at Rina. She saw Sumiko’s slinky on the drinks trolley and palmed it before Satō could notice it, but she could not hide the other things. Satō took the glass of whisky from her and sat down on the sofa. Rina moved about the room, picking up a pair of trolls and a doll, plumping the pillows that had been flattened earlier in the day. As she turned towards her daughter she saw the wariness with which Sumiko was watching her father. Rina wanted to smile and reassure her, to tell her that it was all right about the toys, that there was nothing to be afraid of, but just then Satō turned and snapped at Sumi to get to bed and leave them alone. Swiftly, Sumiko darted forward, scooping up a toy Rina had missed, and hurrying with it into her bedroom. Satō had turned on the news and did not notice, but Rina did.
part three
There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body’s sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever.
– Dumas
Sumiko
Temporary Ruins
The next morning I woke at dawn. There was something in the light filtering through the blinds that reached beneath my eyelids and flicked them open. In seconds, I was wide awake. There was urgency in the air as I rose from tangled sheets. Sleep no longer came easily, and it vanished in the blink of an eye.
Unable to face the tapes and case file, I went to a small café in
the city. The presence of other people with their daily routine calmed me. I sat at the counter with my thick slab of white toast and peanut butter, watching the small café buzz with life in a mall on the edge of Tokyo Bay. It was still early, the water beyond the windows a shifting grey, but as it lightened I left my seat, placing a few coins on the bar, and took the ferry across the bay to the island of Odaiba.
On the beach I walked to the water’s edge and knelt, running my fingers through the shallows. It was cold and dense, as though lulled by the unexpected chill of the night. Such nights are deceptive in summer; they lead to kiln-hot days, where mist curls into the air, burning off the surface of the sea. I knew that day would be the same.
Walking to the thin strip of parkland that faced the city, I climbed onto a rock to watch the sun rise over Tokyo. It began up over the skyscrapers and the needle point of Tokyo Tower and then the light spread across the bay, illuminating the white span of the Rainbow Bridge.
Our word for landscape is Fūkei. It combines the characters for ‘flow’ or ‘wind’ with ‘view’ – a ‘flowing view’, something constantly in motion that will never stop.
The view before me was not what my mother would have seen when she came here as a university student to hang out in the park or at the newly built malls. For her, the water would have been an uninterrupted expanse of blue with the rivers – the Tsurumi, the Tama, the Arakawa – pouring into the bay. There was no bridge.
Perhaps in those heady months when she was with Kaitarō she might have seen the pylons sticking up into the air and the road in progress, stretching between them. But in the end, she would not have known the ‘Rainbow’ so beloved by our city, for it was completed late in 1994, the year of her death.
The air remained cool as the sun rose in the sky, and for a while a sharp breeze blew across the island, providing a barrier between me and Tokyo. Still, as the hours passed, the city began to shimmer, and I watched the haze rising slowly from the baking concrete until it reached me on the wind: sulphurous heat.
You know that my mother was a photographer. Perhaps, if she had not married and had me, she would have been a great one. She told me once that when she went out with her camera her aim was to capture the essence of a scene, one moment on a particular day. Yet exposure after exposure, her photographs only ever borrowed from nature – they represented one part of the view, a mere fragment of what the eye can see.
The sun was painfully bright, and as I watched the city wavering in the distance, I wondered if one could truly photograph the heat, how my mother might have done it. Some things you can borrow from life and imprint onto film, but surely not what I felt that day, nor the baking fire of my skin, the sweat seeping out from under my hair and running down my neck, the glare of Tokyo in August.
I looked out across the water towards the buildings that my mother would have known, the condominiums of the eighties sitting alongside skyscrapers with fanciful Bubble Economy-era names like Golden Plaza or Sunshine Towers, from the days when Japan was wealthy.
It was strange to look at my home as she would have known it. The once fancy buildings with their tinted glass windows were outdated now, and the office blocks that filled the city centre were crumbling at the edges, encrusted black with smog.
There are traces of the past that linger in Tokyo, but nothing remains for long. If you want to see the vanished rivers, moats and canals of Edo you must look for the bridges, motorways and overpasses set into their beds.
It was in my mother’s lifetime that the evolution of our city accelerated. When she married my father and shortly after she had me, wealth propelled our home into the future. Land was reclaimed from the silt of the bay, and the ancient fishing posts, once so popular, vanished. The harbour was transformed. Train tracks and highways snaked above ground, and the earth bristled with skyscrapers. Brick apartment blocks and art deco buildings that had survived both the Kanto earthquake and the firebombing of the city during the war were ripped up by the roots. In the fever of redevelopment everything was made new, subordinated to a bright clean world. As the months passed, gradations of history, past and present, were dismantled; there was no time for them to decay. There is nothing permanent in Tokyo, only temporary ruins.
People often think that buildings will exist longer than an individual’s life. They seem indestructible, but in truth they are as fragile as people. Relics of a scrap-and-build city that can be torn down and eradicated easily, like a parent.
That afternoon, as the wind blew across my face, lifting the strands of hair from my neck, I saw reflections glinting off the new towers in the bay – one temporary ruin mirrored by another – and I knew that all that was before me would soon be gone.
The wind blew around me in gusts, whipping up the sea until tiny crests of white foam curled on the waves, and I wondered if the transmutations of our world were not visible all at once to the naked eye, then perhaps they could be preserved in a story. The city’s sense of memory and my own intertwined. I thought of the tapes and documents waiting for me at home. Only they could tell me what was still standing.
Paper Trials
People like to believe that they are ‘innocent until proven guilty’, but if you are a defendant on trial, do not make this mistake. You are guilty from the moment of arrest. Even the media encourage this view: their articles at the beginning of a case, during the rounding up of suspects, the charging of the guilty, are long and lurid, but once the trial has begun, these same reporters produce little more than a paragraph or two in summary, a sentence on a defendant’s likely fate.
Any lawyer, particularly a defence lawyer, will tell you this is so. For if you are taken into custody, the chances of regaining your freedom decrease by the day. Our very language endorses this. Once the police make an arrest, sometimes even before charges have been brought, the polite titles attached to a surname, such as san, the equivalent of ‘Mr’, are no longer used. In the national press, san is replaced with ‘yogisha’; in the corridors of power and the interrogation rooms of the police, ‘higisha’. These terms, one colloquial, one legal, mean the same thing. And so, all at once, a person is transformed, no longer an ordinary citizen but Higisha Nakamura: Criminal Suspect Nakamura.
OFFICE OF THE TOKYO METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT
O¯i Police Station, Shinagawa Ward, Case # 001294-23E-1994
Incident Report
Date of Offence: 23 March, 1994
Time Reported: 2042 (JST)
Name of Victim: Rina Satō
Extent of Injury: Fatal
Complainant: Mr Yoshitake Sarashima
Relationship to Victim: Father
Time Officers Arrived: 2118 (JST)
Officers in Attendance:
Reporting Officer: Detective Ichiro Soma
Police Coroner: Akihiko Ito
Assisting Officer: Masashi Hikosaka
Forensics Officers: Keigo Miyabe, Natsuo Murasaki & Akio Ogawa
Location: 03-08-20 Higashioi, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo
2045 Detective Ichiro Soma was dispatched to the above location.
2118 On arrival Detective Soma made contact with the complainant, the victim’s father, Mr Sarashima, who discovered the body of his daughter, Rina Satō.
Mr Sarashima reported that his daughter had been due to meet him at his home in Meguro that afternoon. When she did not arrive, his granddaughter, the child of the deceased, who is currently living with Mr Sarashima, became agitated and distressed. Mr Sarashima waited for approximately two hours and when he was still unable to reach his daughter by phone, he made the decision to travel to her apartment in Shinagawa. He accessed the apartment using a key his daughter had given him, and, upon entering, found her home in a state of disarray with furniture and various items strewn across the floor. Mr Sarashima reported that his daughter was sitting against a wall in the living room but that her posture was limp and unnatural
with her head hanging forward. He recalled that her boyfriend, Kaitarō Nakamura, was standing near the body, holding a duffel bag containing some of his and the deceased’s belongings. According to Mr Sarashima, his appearance was also much disordered – his hair was mussed and sweaty, his clothes torn, and he was bleeding from a scratch to his face.
Mr Sarashima reported that he ran to his daughter to check for a pulse but finding none called for an ambulance and performed a citizen’s arrest on Kaitarō Nakamura, who confessed to the murder of the victim.
At 2138 Emergency Medical Technicians arrived and declared the victim to be deceased. The area was secured and photographs of the exterior and interior of the apartment were taken. The contents and positioning of all items within were also recorded. Environmental conditions at the scene were: exterior ambient temperature 60°F, relative humidity 70%, interior ambient temperature 70°F, relative humidity 40%.
At 2200 Police Coroner Ito visually examined the deceased, noting that while rigor mortis was not yet evident, there were early indications of livor mortis in the hands, legs and distal portions of the limbs indicating that death had most likely occurred approximately two to four hours prior. Police Coroner Ito declared that the injuries sustained and markings on the body were consistent with manual and ligature strangulation and determined the case to be a homicide.
At 2230 District Prosecutor Kurosawa arrived on the scene and consulted with Det. Soma and Police Coroner Ito and the witness, Mr Sarashima.
2245 Mr Sarashima explained that his granddaughter was waiting for him at home. He asked permission to leave the scene and agreed to come to the police station the following day to give a full statement.
At 2315 The body of the deceased was removed from the scene and transported to Tokyo-Shinagawa Hospital for autopsy and formal identification.
What's Left of Me is Yours Page 15
