The Devil's Disciple

by Shiro Hamao

  Listen lawyers! I’m going to tell the truth now.

  You have condemned an innocent man to death. I am not guilty in the least. Why, then, did I confess?

  One reason was to gain eternal possession of the beautiful woman whom I loved more than life and whom I was unable even to touch in this world. Another was to take eternal revenge on the hateful witch who toyed with my pure heart. The third motive was to make use of the legal system in order to rid myself of a life not worth living. And finally, by doing so, I meant to show all of you just how much your confidence in the law is worth.

  My father died out of sheer anger over the loss of a mere hundred yen. He was well and truly conned by a certain scoundrel. He was clearly a victim of fraud but lost in court due to the other party’s superior knowledge of the law. When, having failed to get his money back, he set out to exact payment from the swindler in the form of blows, it was he who ended up somehow slapped with the charge of slander. This was more than my father could stand. Whether it was a hundred or a thousand yen, it was not about the money. My father had believed in the system. He was convinced that the authorities did not make mistakes. And how did that work out? The system that he had believed in, like a god, refused to take up his case, saying he did not have enough evidence. But while he was unable to get an indictment against the man who had swindled him, he himself was subjected to serious investigation on the charge of slander. For someone who had trusted in the law like my father, this was of course painful to endure. The dishonour of it was unbearable.

  As I sit here in my prison cell I can still picture the steady transformation of my father’s features as he slipped further each day into depression.

  My father’s health worsened every day as a result of these affairs and in the end he died – all the while shrieking curses, that the legal system be damned, to the wife and child he left behind.

  Oh, how I remember those words. The law be damned! Damn the legal system and its hypocritical standards. I curse the law. As long as the law exists in this world, I curse it. It claims to exist for the sake of justice. It brags that it is on the side of the truth. But how many laws have been made to serve the cause of iniquity! And how powerfully, how tyrannically, has iniquity yoked the law to its purpose!

  The time allotted to me is short. I must complete this manuscript as soon as possible. Let me hasten to record the facts.

  I met Michiko for the first time on an autumn day three years ago. My mother had uttered her final curse at the world and followed my father in death around the time I graduated from secondary school in my home town and I had been sent to Tokyo to continue my education under the care of my uncle. Because this uncle had once studied with Michiko’s father, who was a university professor, I visited Michiko’s house not long after I arrived in Tokyo.

  From the first time I met Mrs Kawakami and her daughter I fell in love with Michiko. She was so much more approachable than her mother. How she welcomed me, who had only just arrived from the country, into her home.

  Of course Michiko was a proper young lady then.

  If there is such a thing in this world as love at first sight, then surely that is what I experienced with Michiko. From the first time I saw her and with the first words we spoke, I was smitten.

  She responded with a warm intimacy and I became a frequent visitor at her home even after I had found my own lodgings in a boarding house. Beginning that autumn, this young man from the country lived entirely for Michiko.

  As our interactions increased I discovered that she was surrounded by quite a number of admirers. Among her visitors there were even several from the same university I attended. Surrounded by so many men, Michiko was never at a loss, and she managed these interactions with exquisite tact and social poise. For this reason it was impossible to determine whom she liked best. Idiot that I was, I trusted what her mother said, and believed that she held me in special esteem.

  Michiko, for her part, scrupulously avoided any serious communication. She was like this with everyone I think. She spoke to all of us about music, literature and theatre, and seemed to enjoy teaching us how to play bridge and mahjong.

  During all of this I was quietly in love with her. I was young. Actually I am still young. But when I first met Michiko I was even younger. Still a child really. There was nothing strange about a young man with such pure feelings loving her with all of his being. But if one thinks about it, Michiko’s attitude was also responsible for nurturing my obsession with her.

  But I confess. I did not feel confident that I would be chosen from among all those men to be her husband. Yet like all people in the throes of love I combined an extreme humility with the most outlandish hopes. For this reason, when I heard that Michiko was to marry Oda Seizō I was in no way surprised, but this did not prevent me from feeling that I had been forced to swallow boiling water. I suffered greatly. I can still remember it – on the night of her wedding (I was invited to the reception but how could I possibly stand the sight of her as a bride?), I didn’t know what to do with myself and wandered around Tokyo, going from one bar to another. In the end I passed out drunk in a filthy house somewhere in the alleys of Asakusa, putting an ugly end to a wretched evening.

  Michiko was now Mrs Oda, but she still continued to see me. At first I was determined not to see her any more, but when letters from her kept arriving my resolve faltered and our meetings brought me a potent combination of suffering and happiness.

  Michiko began to reveal her affection for me only after her marriage. She wrote to me often. Of course these letters did not contain any explicit declarations of her feelings, but to a sensitive young man in love they left a much stronger impression than any conventional love letter stringing together half-baked protestations of love. Michiko had a real gift for writing this kind of letter. Idiot that I was, I kept them with me always and even caressed them as I slept. She was particularly good at writing postscripts and could skilfully pack thousands of words worth of feeling into a two – or three-line ‘P.S.’. Before long I had made it a habit to skip straight to the postscript before I even looked at the main body of the letter.

  Towards the end of the year two years ago she would come to visit me every time she left ‘K’ and we would go out for a walk in the Ginza. She never said much during these walks. For my part, I kept the feeling of being in love with another man’s wife tightly wrapped in the sentimentalism of youth and remained silent, hoping my feelings would somehow reach her by osmosis.

  When I think back on it now I marvel at how pretentious I was. I had purchased the Reklam edition of The Sorrows of Young Werther and carried it with me everywhere in my pocket. With my beginner’s German I couldn’t read a word of it but I would open it from time to time and let out a sigh.

  Oh how the Werther of those days curses his Lotte now!

  One evening, as we walked through a certain neighbourhood in Tokyo Michiko said the following to me.

  ‘I love people like you Ichirō. Really I do. How lucky the woman will be who marries you!’

  In my mind I cried out, ‘It’s too late! Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?’, having interpreted her words in a truly stupid fashion. But how else were these unexpected and craftily formulated words to resonate in the mind of the young man that I was?

  There was also the following incident.

  I had been invited to play bridge at a friend’s home and Michiko was also there. At around five o’clock she said, ‘It’s time for me to go,’ and stood up from her chair.

  I was ready to go myself and as I was saying so to our host and about to get up, Michiko interrupted me midsentence and said, looking straight at me, ‘I don’t mind taking Ichirō with me but lots of people are watching today so maybe that’s not such a good idea.’

  Being told this in front of so many people, all I could do was stand there in silence, blushing furiously. I had not asked to go with Michiko in her car.

  But I couldn’t understand if these words of hers were meant as
a joke or whether she was serious.

  She only began to speak to me seriously about six months before the incident.

  It was a conversation on a winter night at the beginning of last year that I once remembered with a sweet yearning but that I now recall with bitterness and extreme discomfort.

  On that day Michiko had called me from the Ginza saying she had just come to Tokyo. We went to see a moving picture and afterwards had tea on the first floor of a cafe. Perhaps moved by the unhappy family in the film we’d seen, she said to me, ‘Ichirō, do I seem happy?’

  ‘Well…’

  I am not very eloquent in situations like these and as I struggled over what to say she said, with a coquettish look in her eyes, ‘Well I’m not. I’m not happy actually. Seizō is so mean to me. My husband doesn’t love me.’

  I had of course heard rumours that Seizō didn’t love her. But this was the first time I had heard her complain of it herself.

  ‘But is that really such a problem? At least Seizō doesn’t play around with other women behind your back.’ I finally managed to produce these words.

  ‘But that’s not enough for a woman! What about you Ichirō-san? If you were my husband you wouldn’t act like Seizō does, would you?’

  I felt my heart leap up into my chest. It was beating furiously. I felt like that ancient Spartan youth with the stolen fox hidden beneath his cloak, allowing it to devour his heart rather than risk discovery. All I could say was, ‘Well…’ and gaze silently into her eyes. I was entranced by my own amorous suffering. What a fool I was!

  I gave her a look of passion and our gazes locked. She looked back, her eyes also aflame, and said, ‘Look at this.’

  And without giving me a chance to avert my gaze she pulled up her left sleeve and thrust her bare arm in front of my eyes. The smell of her made me woozy at first, but then I saw a set of snake-like scars that seemed to have been burned into both of her arms.

  For a moment we both sat there in complete silence.

  ‘Did Seizō do this to you?’ I said unthinkingly, immediately reaching out with my right hand to touch Michiko’s plump arm. She did not retract it, and silently nodded while offering it for my inspection.

  Oh, you devil! How could you abuse this goddess of a woman? You are not fit to be her husband – nay, not even to be her manservant!

  I cursed Seizō’s very existence. I railed against him. I cursed her marriage.

  In fact I did not go quite that far, but I was in such a state of agitation that I made no bones about my anger at Seizō.

  Michiko merely listened in silence and nodded, and when I had finished she said, ‘You’re the only one I’ve told so please keep this to yourself.’

  Michiko! You were the despicable one! When I think now that you played this trick not just on me but on so many other men as well it makes the blood course backwards through my veins!

  From that day on I resolved to defend her from the devil who tortured her. I would fight for her no matter what. I was her slave. What a fool I was!

  Now Seizō was not all that happy about the freedom he had given Michiko. Apparently he made Michiko suffer for the time she spent with other men like me. Even Seizō, it seemed, could be jealous. But his cool self-regard prevented him from ever addressing this with Michiko directly. Once I had understood this I began to copy Michiko’s behaviour towards him. I would purposely say things in his presence to make him uncomfortable. I found pleasure in thus making him miserable. In this way beginning in the spring of last year I met Seizō quite often and relished his unhappiness on each occasion.

  On that day, the 18th of August, that accursed day, Seizō’s unhappiness was very much in evidence!

  I don’t know for sure how Michiko was treating Tomoda. But considering that Seizō was being much friendlier to Tomoda than to myself, I assume that he, Tomoda, had not become as close to her as I had.

  And yet I cannot be sure of this since Seizō was the kind of man whose attitude often expressed the reverse of his true feelings.

  I was not actually invited on that day but, having nothing else to do, had gone there of my own accord. Tomoda happened to be there as well so we began a game of mahjong in the evening.

  During this game I was awash with sentimental emotions – on the one hand I was happy to be able to spend so much time with my lover, and on the other I felt sorry for myself for having fallen in love with a married woman and being forced to extract as much pleasure as I could from this silly game.

  Once the storm picked up outside I knew I was stuck there for the night and so devoted myself all the more single-mind-edly to the mahjong while indulging myself fully in this potent lover’s mixture of joy and sadness.

  After eight rounds it was still not clear who was winning. It was in the ‘west wind’ hand that Michiko suddenly did very well.

  Or rather someone arranged it so that she did very well. Seizō was the dealer for that hand. I was next to Seizō and just across from Michiko.

  It was the eighth and last round and no one had yet made any big wins or losses. The ‘prevailing wind’ was west when Michiko put together an excellent hand.

  Or perhaps it would be better to say that circumstances conspired in such a way that she got a good hand. Seizō was the dealer at the time. I was to Seizō’s left and opposite Michiko. After we had gone around four times, Michiko discarded a four and a five character. Then she put down a one and a three dots, followed by one of her south wind tiles. By this time we had discarded quite a few honor tiles and although Michiko was playing a concealed hand she had not given away any of her bamboos, so it was obvious to everyone that she was trying for a full bamboo flush. No one among the other three of us had a ready hand. Seizō, being the dealer, looked particularly vexed and seemed to be in a hurry to finish the round. But he wasn’t having much luck, especially with Michiko hanging on to all of her bamboos, making it hard for him to get rid of his. Then it was time for Michiko to pick a tile from the wall. She had lined up all fourteen of her tiles on their sides, with no exposed melds. After thinking for a moment, she discarded a seven bamboo.

  ‘She’s got extra,’ Seizō mumbled to himself, half out of what seemed genuine anxiety and half to warn the other two of us.

  After Tomoda it was my turn. Luckily or not, I drew a three bamboo, the only tile that completed the one-two-three series I was waiting for. All I needed to do then was to discard a superfluous eight bamboo that would leave me with a perfect no-point hand that could go out on either the one, four or seven dots.

  In most cases when someone has thrown out a seven bamboo and looks like they are waiting for only one more tile it is risky to discard the eight bamboo. This was all the more true in this case since Michiko was going for a full bamboo flush with a concealed hand using only tiles that she had drawn herself. This was clearly a situation where the general rule that it is better to discard higher numbers did not apply. The eight bamboo that I held in my hand was unquestionably a dangerous tile to discard.

  And yet it was my beloved Michiko who sat across from me and the dealer was my nemesis Seizō. Figuring I had three chances to complete my dots chow, I went ahead and discarded the eight bamboo and Michiko got her full flush. I will never forget the sour look on Seizō’s face at that moment. Michiko was sure to win now but he refused to give up. The result was that we ended up playing four extra rounds.

  In the last and final round of this match something else happened to make Seizō unhappy.

  It was at the very end of the last, north wind round. Seizō was the dealer and I was next to him again but this time Tomoda was sitting opposite me. I had been pretty unlucky up until that point but suddenly things started to go my way. I was dealt a fantastic set of tiles.

  After we had gone around twice, Seizō discarded the north wind tile. I ponged it of course, since north was both the prevailing wind for the round and my seat wind. Then I ponged the green dragon Tomoda played and when he played the nine character I ponged that as well
. This made all of the terminals and honours possible limit wins for me as well as the whole character suit.

  At this point I was waiting for a four or a seven character, but since no one wanted to discard a character tile and risk paying me the bet by themselves I had no choice but to choose a winning tile from the wall.

  It was at this moment that Michiko, who was to my left, mistakenly knocked over two of her tiles. They were both east winds and both limit-winning tiles for me.

  ‘Oh shoot! You saw them didn’t you!’ she said, as she picked them back up again.

  Looking in my direction, Seizō said, ‘So that’s where they were! I guess you weren’t waiting for an east wind after all.’

  As he said this, he showed me an east wind from his own hand. He was in the east position but he was having trouble getting rid of it. Michiko did not seem to sense the danger and, saying, ‘I guess I’ll get rid of them since you saw them,’ she inexplicably discarded one of her two east winds. It was my turn to pick from the wall next. And what do you know? - I drew the last east wind. I immediately changed strategy to wait for the east wind and discarded a seven character. Seizō, not noticing that my hand had changed, or perhaps simply thinking it was very unlikely that I had drawn the last east wind, thought he was completely safe and discarded his last east wind. I won handily. And Seizō had to pay me the entire score by himself since he had discarded the winning tile.

  He was clearly angry about it, and said to me, ‘Why didn’t you play that when Michiko discarded her east winds? Didn’t you want to win off her?’

  I told him that I had only just drawn the east wind and that’s why I had only played it when he discarded his, but he clearly didn’t believe me.

  ‘Never seen anything like it,’ he burst out, and the mahjong game was over. I don’t know what Michiko thought of my excuse, but she looked over at me and smiled. She seemed convinced that I had purposely refrained from winning using her tiles.