by Jesse Ball
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Jesse Ball
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
A portion of this work first appeared in Printers Row Journal in the Chicago Tribune (January 26, 2013).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ball, Jesse.
Silence once begun / Jesse Ball.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-307-90848-3
eBook ISBN 9780307908490
1. Journalists—Fiction. 2. Americans—Japan—Fiction. 3. Secrets—Fiction. 4. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.A596S55 2013 813′.6—dc23 2013005948
www.pantheonbooks.com
Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund
v3.1
For K. Abe & S. Endo
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prefatory Material
1. The Situation of Oda Sotatsu
A First Telling of the Story
The Wager
According to His Landlady, the Next Morning
The Daughter of Oda’s Landlady
Int. Note
Seven Months of Confinement
Awaiting Trail
Interrogation 1
Interview 1 (Mother)
The Narito Disappearances
Interrogation 2
Interview 2 (Brother)
Interrogation 3
Interview 3 (Mother)
Int. Note
Interview 4 (Sister)
Interview 5 (Brother)
Interview 6 (Brother)
Interrogation 4
Interview 7 (Mother)
Interview 8 (Mother)
Interview 9 (Father)
Trial
Int. Note: Regarding the Newspaper Coverage of the Trial
Oda Trial Coverage [Ko Eiji]
Oda Trial Coverage [Ko Eiji]
Oda Trial Coverage [Ko Eiji]
Oda Trial Coverage [Ko Eiji]
Oda Trial Coverage [Ko Eiji]
Oda Trial Coverage [Ko Eiji]
Oda Trial Coverage [Ko Eiji]
Ko
Interview
Int. Note
Room Like a Gallows Tree
Int. Note: Transfer to Death Row
Interview 10 (Brother)
Interview 11 (Watanabe Garo)
Photograph of Jito Joo
Interview 12 (Brother)
Interview 13 (Brother)
Interview 14 (Watanabe Garo)
Interview 15 (Brother’s Wife)
Int. Note
Int. Note
Interview 16 (Brother)
Interview 17 (Brother and Mother)
Interview 18 (Watanabe Garo)
Interview 19 (Brother)
Interview 20 (Brother)
Document Side One: Holograph Will
Document Side Two: Letter to Father
Interview 21 (Watanabe Garo)
2. To Find Jito Joo
Int. Note
Int. Note
The House of Jito Joo
Int. Note: Speaking to Joo in Her Home
Int. Note
Int. Note
Int. Note: Letter to Jito Joo
Int. Note: Two Weeks
2.1. The Testimony of Jito Joo
Int. Note
3. Lastly, Kakuzo
Int. Note
Interview (Sato Kakuzo)
Statements (Sato Kakuzo)
Narito Disappearances: BLUEPRINT
The Invention of a Crime
Confessions & The Idea of a Confession
Joo & How It Went in Practice
Joo & How It Went in Practice 2
How It Went in Practice
How It Went in Practice 2
How It Went in Practice 3
How It Went in Practice 4
How It Went in Practice 5
Fin
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
The following work of fiction is partially based on fact.
Prefatory Material
A strange thing happened to me, to me and to the woman with whom I was living. We were in the midst of a fine life. I would look out ahead and I could see how shining, how beautiful the world was and would be. I had let go of many fears, concerns, worries. I felt many matters had been solved. We lived in a house with our daughter, we had been married for several years, and the life was so glad and bright, I can’t tell you. I can say it, but you don’t know, or I don’t know how to say it correctly. There was a garden before our house with a high gate and trellis all around. We would sit there in the garden and there was time enough for everything, for anything at all. I wish for you to guess and feel the light, as if in morning, on your eyelids.
Something happened, however, something I did not foresee. She fell silent, simply stopped wanting to speak, and that life came to an end. I clung to it, though it was gone, and sought after all understanding that could be had of silence, of who becomes silent and why. Yet it was finished. I had to begin anew, and that beginning lay in trying to understand what had happened. Of course, such things aren’t easy. No one can simply tell you what it is you don’t understand, not with a matter as strange as that.
So, I began to seek after all such occurrences. I traveled to places, spoke to people; again and again I found myself without a way forward. I wanted to know how to avoid the unforeseeable troubles that come. Of course, it was silly. They can’t be avoided. It is their nature. But, in my seeking, I found out about the matter of Oda Sotatsu. That led to the book you now hold in your hands. I am glad to present it to you, and I hope that it may do some good.
+
An incident occurred in a village near Sakai in Osaka Prefecture. I call it an incident because it is so singular. At the same time, as you will see, there are elements that make it common to all who share our human life. When I read of it, many years after it had happened, I traveled there to unearth what more I could and discover the full story.
Most of the principals were still living, and over a series of interviews, I gathered the material that now allows me to relate this tale. The names of the individuals involved have been changed to protect their identities and the identities of their loved ones and descendants. Dates, as well as particular periods of time, have also been altered as a further protection.
++
In the pages that follow this, I may occasionally refer to myself as Int. or Interviewer, or may give a note to elucidate some situation. However, most of the book’s text is drawn from interviews recorded via tape-device. The book is in four accounts: the first from various people connected with (2) Oda Sotatsu, including family members and members of the metropolitan (Sakai) and local police; the second of my search for Jito Joo; the third from (3) Jito Joo; and the fourth from (1) Sato Kakuzo.
The first two sections are by necessity a narrative, with the data bound together and expressed in an at times novelistic fashion (although trouble has been taken to indicate sources). The latter sections for the most part do not necessitate this failing, as the materials alone proved sufficient to my task.
—Jesse Ball, Chicago, 2012
A First Telling of the Story
The story of Oda Sotatsu begins with a confession that he signed.
He had fallen in with a man named Kakuzo and a girl named Jito Joo. These were somewhat wild characters, particularly Sato Kakuzo. He was in trouble, or had been. People knew it.
Now this is what happened: somehow Kakuzo met Oda Sotatsu, and somehow he convinced him to sign a confession for a crime that he had not committed.
That he should sign a confession for a crime that he did not commit is strange. It is hard to believe. Yet, he did in fact sign it. When I learned of these events, and when I researched them, I found that there was a reason he did so, and that reason is—he was compelled to by a wager.
There were several accounts of how that evening went. One was the version that had been in the newspapers. Another was a version told by Oda Sotatsu’s family. Still a third was the version held to by Sato Kakuzo. This final version is stronger than the others for the reason that Kakuzo taped the proceedings and showed the tape to me. I have listened to it many times, and each time, I hear things that I have not heard before. One has the impression that one can know life, actual life, from its simulacrums by the fact that actual life constantly deceives and reveals, and is consistent in doing so.
I will describe for you the events of that evening.
The Wager
When I listened to the tape, the conversation was, in places, difficult to make out. The music was loud. As the night wore on, the party drank and spoke quite rapidly. In general, the atmosphere was that of a bar. Someone (Joo?) repeatedly gets up, leaves, returns, scraping her chair loudly against the wooden floor. They spoke inconsequentially for about forty minutes, and then they reached the matter of the wager.
Kakuzo led into it quietly. He spoke fluidly and described a sort of comradeship that they shared, the three of them. He acted as though they were all fed up with life. Joo and he, he said, had been doing things to try to escape this feeling. One of those things was to wager on cards, in a private game between the two of them. He said when he would lose, he would cut himself. Or Joo would cut herself, if she should lose. He said they went from that to other things, to forcing each other to do things, in order to feel alive again. But it all revolved around the wagering, around letting life hang in a balance. Did Sotatsu not think that was fascinating? Was he in no way stirred to try it?
All night, they were at him, Joo and Kakuzo, and finally, they convinced him. In fact, they had chosen him because he had appeared to them as someone who might be convinced, who could be convinced of such a thing. And indeed, it proved true; they were able to make him join their game.
He and Kakuzo made a wager. The wager was that the loser, whoever he was, would sign a confession. Kakuzo had brought the confession. He set it out on the table. The loser would sign it, and Joo would bring it to the police station. All that one could feel in life would be gathered up into this single moment when the wager went forward and one’s entire life hung on the flip of a card. Kakuzo had brought the cards as well, and they sat there on the table beside the confession.
The music in the bar was loud. Oda Sotatsu’s life was difficult and had not yielded to him the things he had hoped for. He liked and respected both Kakuzo and Joo and they were bent entirely on him, and on his doing of this thing.
This is how it turned out: Oda Sotatsu wagered with Sato Kakuzo. He lost the wager. He took a pen and he signed the confession, there on the table. Joo took it with her and she and Kakuzo left the bar. Oda went home to his small apartment. Whether he slept or not, we do not know.
According to His Landlady, the Next Morning
everyone in Oda Sotatsu’s building woke up to a forceful knocking on the door of Oda Sotatsu’s apartment. When he did not get to the door quickly enough, the door was broken down. When he did not get onto the ground quickly enough, he was thrown to the ground. Handcuffed and in great distress, he was removed and taken to a van. A witness I spoke to said he did not struggle or declare his innocence. He merely went along quietly. The landlady recalls that he was not wearing a jacket.
The Daughter of Oda’s Landlady
related to me:
—You can know nothing about Oda if you do not know how kind he was and how the kindness that he was and had was in his body, really. It was not a thing of thinking or deciding. He was simply kind and did the right things many times. To show you how—I was not old enough, but my mother, she told me that when the woman who lived above him, an old woman, and he was young, Oda, maybe in his early twenties, this old woman she had some kind of furniture moved into her house. The furniture was too large for the door and it got stuck in the door and the movers had to do something with it. It was late in the day. The workday was finished. They would come back in the morning. But the old lady, she could not go in or out. She was very concerned. She was there by the door trying to peer out through whatever little holes were left. She kept saying things, all kinds of things, but the workmen had already gone. So, Oda, what does he do? He goes up there with a little lamp and he sits on one side of the door and he talks to the old woman the whole night, doesn’t leave until the morning. You know, I don’t think he even liked her. He was just that way. A kind boy. Matter of fact, no one liked that old woman.
Int. Note
I am trying to relate to you a tragedy. I am attempting to do so in the manner least prejudicial to the people involved, those people who were survivors of the tragedy, but also the agents of it.
Oda Sotatsu signed a confession. He did not clearly understand what he was doing, perhaps. Or perhaps he did. Nonetheless, he signed it. The next day, Saturday the fifteenth, he was dragged off to jail. Because of the comprehensive nature of the document, the confession, his guilt was never in any doubt. The trial, when it happened, was a rapid affair in which Oda Sotatsu did little, certainly nothing on his own behalf. The police attempted, over the course of the time he was in jail awaiting trial, and the time when he was on death row thereafter, to get him to speak about the crimes he had confessed. He would not. He carried a sort of tent of silence with him, and out of it he refused to come.
Oda was visited many times during the next months by Joo. He never saw Kakuzo again.
Our story continues with information related to me by officers, guards, priests, journalists (present at the time), and by the Oda family. This is how Oda Sotatsu’s story is told.
SEVEN MONTHS OF CONFINEMENT
Awaiting Trial
Interrogation 1
Interview 1 (Mother)
THE NARITO DISAPPEARANCES
Interrogation 2
Interview 2 (Brother)
Interrogation 3
Interview 3 (Mother)
Int. Note
Interview 4 (Sister)
Interview 5 (Brother)
Interview 6 (Brother)
Interrogation 4
Interview 7 (Mother)
Interview 8 (Mother)
Interview 9 (Father)
Trial
Int. Note: Regarding the Newspaper Coverage of the Trial
ODA TRIAL COVERAGE [Ko Eiji]
ODA TRIAL COVERAGE [Ko Eiji]
ODA TRIAL
COVERAGE [Ko Eiji]
ODA TRIAL COVERAGE [Ko Eiji]
ODA TRIAL COVERAGE [Ko Eiji]
ODA TRIAL COVERAGE [Ko Eiji]
ODA TRIAL COVERAGE [Ko Eiji]
Ko
Interview
Int. Note
Room Like a Gallows Tree
Int. Note: Transfer to Death Row
Interview 10 (Brother)
Interview 11 (Watanabe Garo)
Photograph of Jito Joo
Interview 12 (Brother)
Interview 13 (Brother)
Interview 14 (Watanabe Garo)
Interview 15 (Brother’s Wife)
Int. Note
Int. Note
Interview 16 (Brother)
Interview 17 (Brother and Mother)
Interview 18 (Watanabe Garo)
Interview 19 (Brother)
Interview 20 (Brother)
Document Side One: Holograph Will
Document Side Two: Letter to Father
Interview 21 (Watanabe Garo)
Interrogation 1
Fifteenth of October, 1977. Oda Sotatsu brought in on suspicion of participation in the Narito Disappearances. This suspicion having to do with the confession signed by Oda, submitted to the police force anonymously. Conversation conducted in a room of the local police station. Inspector Nagano and another inspector, name unrecorded.
[Int. note. Transcript of session recording, possibly altered or shoddily made. Original recording not heard.]
OFFICER 1
Mr. Oda. I assume you know why you are here. I assume you know why we took the trouble to bring you here, and I assume you know what the penalties are for lying to us.
OFFICER 2
Mr. Oda, if you have any information about the whereabouts of the individuals mentioned in your confession, or if you know any of them to still be living, tell us now. It could help your case greatly, such information.
