The Devil's Disciple

by Shiro Hamao

  There, beneath sheets that seemed to smoulder my beautiful Sueko lay dead. She was like a white statue laid down to sleep, sprawled on her back with her right hand stretched out on top of the futon.

  When I came to my senses the man standing next to me was grabbing me by the collar.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I know this woman.’

  As I spoke, I ran my eyes over Sueko’s corpse like I was licking it. I saw the fruit of my research into the methods of murder.

  Strangely enough, at the time I didn’t feel like I was looking at the body of someone I’d lost. It was just a bizarre lump of happy-making flesh. And it was the result of all my planning.

  And then I lost it. A wave of nausea swept over me as I yelled out, ‘You’re wrong! She was murdered. Somebody drugged her. Who would ever take it by mistake?’

  I repeated these words over and over as I ran out of Sueko’s house, away from the gawking crowd.

  XI

  Sueko was dead. I had lost the one I loved, forever!

  I went home that night like a man without a soul. But how could I stay with my wife? How could I hold on in this world full of pain? I decided to escape from this hateful existence as soon as I possibly could.

  That night I threw myself onto a train at Iidamachi Station. I was headed for that desolate village in Kiso where you and I went for summer vacation. I wanted to say goodbye to the world from there.

  It was the 27th March. As I settled down on the train, alone, I began to feel like myself again. I started to think about why things had ended up this way.

  It wasn’t hard to guess. It was Sueko who knew nothing about drugs. She must have seen me take the stuff when I stayed at her house. Last night she couldn’t sleep alone, so the ignorant woman took that strong medicine just like I did. When evening came and she still hadn’t woken up the little maid panicked and ran to the doctor. And then the whole mess began.

  I thought of a million things for more than ten hours as the train swayed me back and forth. And I got all sentimental at having lost Sueko forever.

  But then I remembered the strange attraction of Sueko’s flesh-turned-corpse and in the dark train I imagined the figures and flesh of lots of women.

  It was just before noon on the 28th that I arrived in X Station in Kiso. I checked into that small hotel where you and I stayed together. And I thought about my future.

  What a bizarre coincidence! The wife I hate and the woman I love! And when will I ever get any sleep now?

  I can’t stand this pain anymore. The only escape is death or insanity. I made up my mind. This day, 28th March, would see me dead or see me insane.

  And the sleeping medication I have is just the thing. I’m going to down the whole bottle. Even if it doesn’t kill me I certainly won’t wake up in the same shape I am now. That’s what I was thinking.

  I thought I would leave behind a record of my crimes. So I spent the whole day writing down my plans to kill Tsuyuko.

  By ten at night I was finally done.

  I was about to take the medicine but then I thought again.

  There’s no reason to leave a note. It’s more interesting to leave behind a crime that will never be solved. I burned everything that I had just written. Or rather, I thought I burned everything.

  It was then that I was visited by yet another bizarre coincidence. I was anything but calm at the time and even though I thought I burned the whole letter I didn’t notice that part of it remained intact – the part that described what happened between the time I decided to kill Tsuyuko and the time I set out to do it. It was the section that begins, ‘I decided I had to get away from her. Somehow I had to kill her,’ and ends with, ‘She probably doesn’t know anything about medicine, so she won’t notice if I get her to take it.’ ‘I took my dose in front of her. She watched in silence. I measured out the same amount and gave it to her.’

  If I had written ‘my wife’ or ‘Tsuyuko’ instead of ‘her’, this letter would not be evidence of a murder plot. My failure to write her name brought about an unexpected consequence.

  I swallowed the whole bottle of sleeping powder after I finished writing that letter. I said my last goodbyes to this hateful world and the sound of the water in the Kiso River became my funeral dirge.

  Tsuchida-san. I would have been so happy if I had died then. But I suppose I had yet to repay my sins.

  XII

  I soon fell into a river of sleep. I have no idea for how many hours or days I slept. When I opened my eyes and looked around, my head throbbing with pain and overcome by a wave of nausea, I found myself in what I now know to have been a police headquarters near the X Station in Kiso.

  The cops must have followed me after I shot off my mouth at Sueko’s place. The people at the inn in X Village must have alerted the local police when I didn’t wake up for so long.

  In any case, I woke up from a tortured sleep in an unfamiliar place. I was in sorry shape.

  I’m sure you know how unpleasant it is to wake up after taking even a small overdose of sleeping medication. But I had taken twenty days’ worth or more in a single dose. It was a miracle that I had come back to life at all. So you won’t be surprised to hear that I had lost all memory and all powers of understanding.

  I was like a man without a soul and it was in this condition that I found myself loaded onto the train. Now I know that I was being sent back to Tokyo.

  Until that point I was unable to give a coherent answer to any of the questions they asked me. Everything was clouded in mist. I could not understand myself. Or, to put it in more extreme terms, I could not even recall clearly who I was.

  It seems they had a doctor look after me for a time after I came back here. He must have determined at some point that there was nothing physically wrong with me, so I found myself sitting across from a police detective.

  Right off I was confronted with those unburned pages of the suicide note I had written in Kiso.

  ‘Looks familiar doesn’t it, mate? You wrote it, right?’

  I stared at them for a while without saying anything. It was my handwriting all right. After a while I started to remember having written them. But aside from that I drew a complete blank.

  ‘Don’t play stupid, wise guy!’

  I don’t know how many times I heard those words. But I wasn’t playing dumb. At the time, I mean all the way up to yesterday, I had no clear memory of the facts. That powerful drug had robbed me of the ability to think and to remember.

  After they showed me my suicide note I sat in my cell alone and tried to think. At a certain point I dredged up the memory of Sueko; dead Sueko, looking so beautiful I wanted to eat her up. Her right hand stretched out, face up in her futon. Dead, but looking for all the world like she was asleep.

  Ahh. The girl is dead. I tried to kill her. That’s it. I was thinking of how to get her to take the medicine. And then…

  Slowly, the gears started turning in my enfeebled brain and settled on the idea that I myself might have killed her.

  Then I started to talk about how I felt, pulling together the delicate threads of my memory. But I couldn’t come up with much detail. I couldn’t remember when I’d met her or why I wanted to kill her.

  They must have had evidence placing me at Sueko’s house that day. At some point they put me before an examining judge.

  But how was I supposed to tell the judge anything more than what I had said already? All I could do was answer his questions with yes or no.

  I didn’t know myself whether I had killed her or not.

  If I hadn’t been in confinement the stimulation of the outside world might have jogged my memory earlier. But I spent every day inside my jail cell. Even had I tried to remember, I couldn’t.

  Then, one day, a strange thing happened.

  My wife Tsuyuko finally got permission and came to visit me.

  You might find this hard to believe, but up until that point I had forgotten that I even had a wife.

  The
sight of her sad, timid face across from me gave me an uncanny feeling. But then my eyes were riveted to the obi of her kimono.

  There’s a piece of paper tucked into her obi. Now I realise that she’d probably just been to the doctor for it. It’s a paper packet of sleeping powder, peeking half-way out of her obi.

  Then it hit me like a bolt of lightning.

  That’s it! That’s it! The obi! The paper!

  I’ve seen it somewhere before. I must have seen it somewhere before!

  When? Where?

  Still as a stone I sat staring at the paper packet.

  Like a man possessed I wrung every drop of memory from my brain.

  That’s it! I tried to kill this woman. She’s the one, Tsuyuko. She was my intended victim.

  Storms, thunder, and lightning raged on inside my brain. And without a word to Tsuyuko, I fled back to my cell.

  I mustn’t forget this. Don’t forget what you just remembered!

  I spent all day yesterday and all night last night trying to remember the whole story.

  Tsuchida-san, the awful truths I have written here are what I managed to reconstruct after a night spent remembering and tracing the trail of my thoughts.

  That’s right. These are the facts and there is no mistaking them. I wanted to kill my wife. I didn’t try to kill Sueko. Nor did I kill her.

  From what I can tell, Sueko died by accident.

  Once I recovered my memory fully, I recalled that you, my old friend, happened to be in the prosecutor’s office of this very court.

  You may be the only person who will believe what I have recounted here. I know I can count on you to believe that nothing I have said here is untrue.

  The facts may be incredible but facts are facts. There’s no changing that.

  As I mentioned before, I am about to meet with the examining judge and explain the whole situation to him. Most likely, this will clear me of the suspicion of having murdered Ishihara Sueko. Indeed, it must clear me.

  But I cannot escape my responsibility towards Tsuyuko in the eyes of the law. Nor do I intend to escape.

  Please forgive me for taxing your patience with such a long-winded letter. Tsuchida-san. Three times I call out to you in the name of that friendship we once shared. Please believe me. And in believing me, please believe what I say.

  Did He Kill Them?

  I

  If I were a detective novelist like you gentlemen, I would take this story I’m about to tell you and fashion it into a gripping novel. But seeing as I am just a humble barrister, I’m afraid I’d end up botching the job and making a fool out of myself. So I’m just going to tell the whole thing to you exactly the way it happened. And when I’ve finished my tale I want to read you a strange manuscript that has never yet seen the light of day. Of course my involvement in this case was as a barrister so my account of it will not include any suppositions or speculations aside from the facts I was able to gather in that capacity. For this reason it may not be as interesting as the novels you write, but if you do find it interesting I encourage any one of you to write it up and publish it. I think it’s a story worth telling.

  I’ll start with the basic timeline of the case. The case in question is that tragic event that occurred one night at the height of summer last year in the town of ‘K’ in Sagami. The Tokyo newspapers were all over it at the time so I’m sure you have all heard of it, but allow me to review it again from the beginning to help jog your memory.

  Last year, on the night of 16th August, or to be more precise around one-thirty on the morning of the 17th – some of you may remember there was a terrible storm that night in the Tokyo area – a terrible tragedy took place at a villa in the busy resort town of ‘K’. Now ‘K’ has always been well known as a spot for bathing and a place to escape the heat but lately it has become even more lively as people from the upper and middle classes have begun to build houses there. In summertime, in particular, it’s full of all the smartest people from Tokyo. So it was all the more shocking that something so horrific should happen at such a jolly place.

  The incident took place at the villa of a young businessman by the name of Oda Seizō. The victims were Oda himself (who was thirty-three years old at the time) and his wife Michiko (who was twenty-four). Sometime over the course of that night both of them lost their lives in a gruesome fashion.

  Oda’s father had amassed a tidy fortune in the trading business, but he died when Seizō was still in secondary school and the mother was left to raise the boy on her own. Seizō was always a little sickly and ended up dropping out of college in order to take care of his health. Of course he was kept fairly busy managing all that money, but he had his mother handle most things and spent most of his time at the villa in ‘K’. He was spoiled and self-centered like most people brought up with lots of money and it didn’t help that he had also been coddled all of his life because of his delicate constitution. But he was also a quiet type and was not known to have quarrelled with people. He had no close friends and seems to have led a rather lonely life despite all his money. At the end of the year before he died, his lungs started to get worse and he suffered a bout of neurasthenia as well, so he and his wife holed up in the place in ‘K’ and never came to Tokyo.

  Michiko was the daughter of a well-known university professor named Kawakami who passed away some years ago. She was wise even as a child and a real beauty to boot. Some of you may even have had the pleasure of meeting her. From the moment she took up residence in ‘K’ she was said to be the queen of the place. For a barrister like me it’s hard to find words to describe her, but let’s just say she was extremely beautiful and liberally endowed with what these days goes by the name of ‘sexual appeal’. She was known for her beauty since her days as a student at a girls’ school and it was said that one look at her would make a devotee out of anyone. As a result she attracted a crowd of young admirers. Since the death of her father had left her quite to her own devices, these young admirers, particularly the male ones, had only increased in number. Among them was a young count, a bachelor with a taste for music, with whom she was often to be seen strolling through the Ginza. There was also an important politician’s son with literary ambitions in whose company she often went to the theatre. This aroused the envy of many and gave rise to widespread speculation as to who would be lucky enough to marry her. As the lovely daughter of a distinguished professor whose sensibilities were refined by music and literature, who ran in such rarefied circles and whose elegant comportment was beyond reproach, it was generally assumed that she had but to choose whether she would become a countess, marry into a powerful political family or perhaps become the fashionable wife of a captain of industry.

  Thus it was no small surprise to many people when three years ago she suddenly married Oda Seizō. Of course there was no reason to think it was not a proper match given that the gentleman was extremely wealthy and the lady a great beauty and the daughter of an influential family. But these were not the points that made the match so puzzling.

  The puzzling fact was that the two barely knew each other before they were married. In other words, theirs was an arranged marriage in the traditional Japanese style. For those who knew Michiko well this was understandably unfathomable. Why on earth would a modern woman like her agree to such a marriage? The news of her engagement came as a great disappointment to all those who prided themselves on knowing Michiko.

  But despite all the astonishment it occasioned, the negotiations between the two families proceeded apace and soon the couple was joined in matrimony.

  Among those who knew Michiko there were some who assumed that the marriage was not of her own choosing – that despite the prosperous appearance of her family they must have fallen on hard times and Michiko had been sacrificed and married off to the man for his money. And indeed this was not a baseless speculation. Wise women in particular are apt to think this way.

  II

  The first year of their marriage left little grist for gossip. The
young couple seemed to be leading a perfectly placid and peaceful domestic life. And yet the fact that Mrs Oda had continued to socialise with her young male friends did raise a few eyebrows.

  After a year Seizō suffered from a serious bout of pleurisy and was confined to his bed for six months. After this the couple stopped going out in the town of ‘K’ and led a quiet domestic life enlivened only by the company of their servants.

  It was just at that time that strange rumours began to circulate to the effect that Michiko was leading a pitiable existence. For one thing it was rumoured that her husband Seizō not only did not love her, but failed to understand her as well. And for another it appeared that, having the kind of temper that often comes with chronic illness, he often abused her verbally and sometimes even struck her. On a number of occasions the servants were said to have witnessed the master of the house in the act of beating his wife.

  Michiko was said to suffer her husband’s violent behaviour and to be getting along as well as she could. Many began to pity Michiko as a result of these rumours – all the more so because it made her habitual cheerfulness seem like an attempt to put a brave face on her situation. Of course she did confess to a few close friends how perfectly horrid her married life had become and when this information did eventually become more widely known it came as no surprise to most people. Everyone simply reconfirmed their belief that nothing good could come from an arranged marriage, and much less so one motivated by money. As people’s sympathy for Michiko increased, her husband and her mother, who had sacrificed her for financial gain, suffered a corresponding decline in the public’s estimation.

  But before another six months had passed Michiko herself became the subject of unsavoury rumours.

  For despite the fact that Seizō was said to be abusing his wife, it was also clear from Michiko’s manner that he was in no way restricting her movements. Perhaps it was the fact that her husband was completely ignoring her that enabled her to have such an attitude. But however indifferent her husband might be to her free ways, they were of a nature that the rest of society could hardly fail to notice.