Inspector Imanishi Investigates

by Seichō Matsumoto

  Inspector Imanishi Investigates

  Seichō Matsumoto

  A police procedural featuring Tokyo homicide detective Inspector Imanishi, who is still pursuing a criminal even when the official investigation is closed, taking him across Japan in his search for justice.

  Seichō Matsumoto

  Inspector Imanishi Investigates

  First published in 1961 in Tokyo under the Japanese title Vessel of Sand (Suna no Utsuwa)

  Translation copyright © 1989 by Seicho Matsumoto.

  Translator’s note: Names in the text are in Japanese order with family name first.

  Translation of: Suna no utsuwa.

  ONE Kamata Railroad Yard

  The first train on the Keihin-Tohoku Line was scheduled to leave Kamata Station at 4:08 a.m. The engineer, the brakeman, and the conductor left the night duty room shortly after 3:00 a.m. to go to the rail yard. It was dark and cold.

  When the young brakeman shone his flashlight under the seventh car, he stiffened, stood still swallowing for a moment, and then began to run, his arms flailing. He flung himself into the engineer’s cab, shouting, “Hey, there’s a tuna.”

  “A dead body?” the engineer laughed. “We haven’t even moved the train yet. How could there be a tuna? Rub your eyes and wake up.”

  “No, I’m not mistaken.” The brakeman looked pale. “I really saw a tuna under the train.”

  The engineer and the conductor decided to go see for themselves. When the brakeman shone his flashlight under the seventh car, they saw a human form lying on the rails just in front of the wheels. It glistened in the beam of light. The engineer bent over to look closer. “Ugh, it’s horrible!” he screamed.

  The three men stood for a while staring at the body. Then the conductor said, “Call the police immediately. We don’t have much time.” It was only twenty minutes before the 4:08 departure time. The engineer ran back to the office.

  “This is an unpleasant business, first thing in the morning,” the conductor said to the brakeman. “I wonder what happened. The wheels haven’t moved at all, but his face is covered with blood.”

  The corpse’s face looked like a red devil’s mask. The head lay pillowed on one rail, the thighs across the other. If the train had started, the face would have been crushed and the hip joint severed by the wheels.

  The sky became lighter. By the time the police investigators arrived, the lamps in the railroad yard had been turned off. Chief Inspector Kurozaki Hajime of the Homicide Division was accompanied by eight members of the Homicide and Criminal Investigation divisions.

  The rail car involved was left on the tracks, while the others were detached and towed out of the yard. Criminal investigators scurried around this car. They took photographs, sketched diagrams, and drew in red lines on a borrowed map of the railroad yard. When the scene had been recorded, the body was dragged out from under the car. It was that of a man whose face had been battered to an unrecognizable pulp. The eyeballs had nearly popped out, the nose was smashed, and the mouth was split open. The gray hair was matted with blood.

  The autopsy revealed the following:

  Age: About 54 or 55; slim build.

  Cause of death: Strangulation.

  Numerous bruises and fractures on almost the entire face; on the arms and legs injuries and fractures accompanied by abrasions and welts.

  Contents of the stomach: Light yellowish brown, slightly thick liquid (including alcoholic content) mixed with partially digested peanuts. Chemical analysis indicates the presence of a sleeping powder.

  Conclusion: From the above evidence, it is presumed that the victim drank some sleeping medicine dissolved in whiskey, and then was strangled; afterward, he was beaten with great force by a blunt-edged instrument (such as a rock or a hammer).

  Time elapsed since death: Three to four hours.

  The victim had been wearing a cheap suit, shirt, and underwear, none of which had laundry markings. He seemed to have been a poor laborer, but the police found nothing to indicate his identity. It was assumed that he had been murdered between midnight and one o’clock in the morning.

  The murderer had viciously battered the victim’s face after death, indicating that the criminal was someone who hated the victim a great deal, or that the murderer had intended to destroy the face totally in order to prevent identification of the body. The investigation team concluded the crime had not been motivated by robbery but was a murder committed by an acquaintance of the victim acting out of hatred, perhaps a crime of passion.

  The first step was to identify the victim. Investigators started their questioning in the area around Kamata Station.

  The previous night, two people, who might have been the victim and his companion, had been seen at a Torys bar (one of a chain of cheap bars) located near the station. The employees of the bar and the customers who had been there were called in for questioning. According to the bartender and hostesses, the two men had never been in before. They had entered the bar at about 11:30 p.m. The time was fixed by a woman customer, an office clerk, who had been concerned about missing the last Mekama Line train. Memories were vague about the faces of the two customers. Everyone agreed that one definitely had hair that was quite gray. As to the other, some of the witnesses said he was thirty, others that he was about forty years old, and still others that he seemed much younger.

  After statements had been taken from the bar staff, bar customers, and a pair of guitar players who passed by the two men outside the bar, the only fact they all had agreed on was that the victim’s accent was of the Tohoku region in northeastern Japan, a dialect with thick zu-zu sounds. The younger man seemed to be speaking in standard Japanese.

  None of the witnesses questioned knew what the subject of the men’s conversation had been. They had sat in a booth near the door leading to the rest room. The staff and customers, going back and forth, had overheard only fragments, a few words, a phrase. But Sumiko, a bar hostess, recalled that the younger man had said to the victim, “Kameda must be the same even now.” A second bar hostess had also overheard the word “Kameda.”

  What had been meant by “Kameda”? The investigation team concluded that the victim and his assailant were old acquaintances who hadn’t seen each other for a long time, that they had accidentally run into each other, and then stopped off at a nearby bar. In their conversation, the topic of their mutual friend, Kameda, had come up. It could be inferred that the gray-haired man had either recently seen or had kept up his friendship with Kameda, while the younger man had not seen Kameda for a while.

  Other bits of the conversation included phrases such as “nostalgic.” “since that time things haven’t gone as I had hoped,” and “I’ve finally gotten used to this kind of life.” These were spoken mainly by the victim, the man with the heavy accent. Hardly any of the younger man’s words had been heard because he spoke in a low, muffled voice and, whenever someone walked by to go to the rest room, averted his face. The only words attributed to this man were “Kameda must be the same even now.”

  The young man who had appeared in the Torys bar with the victim was considered to be the prime suspect. It was decided that inquiries would be made for him and the victim at cheap apartments and inns in the Ota-ku area of Tokyo, where the Torys bar and Kamata Station were situated.

  The evening papers carried large articles on the crime. If the victim had a family, relatives would surely contact the police. But two days later no missing persons report had been filed, and the investigation team that had searched Ota-ku had found no leads.

  A meeting of the investigation team was called. Someone suggested, “Just because he was drinking in a bar near Kamata Station doesn’t necessarily m
ean that he lived in the area. Kamata Station is the junction of the National Railway Line, the Mekama Line, and the Ikegami Line. The victim could have lived near the Mekama or Ikegami lines.” That would expand the area of investigation but general opinion favored this hypothesis.

  “The statements of the witnesses confirm that the victim spoke in a Tohoku dialect, but what about the accent of the assailant?” the chief asked. “The man with the victim, the one we are assuming is the murderer, is the person who asked the victim about Kameda. Though he spoke in standard Japanese, the bar hostess said there might have been a slight northeastern tone to his words. From the content of their conversation, it would seem likely that they knew each other from their hometown in the northeast, rather than having met in Tokyo.”

  The investigation team reached a consensus on these two points and agreed to proceed on these assumptions.

  One week passed and the identity of the victim was still unknown.

  The name Kameda was no doubt quite common in the northeast. Finding every person with this name would be tedious, but it was decided to undertake the search. Headquarters asked the Northeastern District of the National Police Agency to locate every person named Kameda within the jurisdictions of the prefectures of Aomori, Akita, Iwate, Yamagata, Miyagi, and Fukushima.

  Residents along the Mekama and Ikegami lines were questioned. Since the victim appeared to be a day laborer, investigators reviewed all records of the daily job placement officers in the vicinity. The inexpensive apartments and inns that might have housed the victim were also checked thoroughly. No one fitting the victim’s description turned up. From the violent nature of the murder, headquarters had suspected that the murderer would have been splattered with quite a lot of blood. Every taxi company in Tokyo was notified to see if someone fitting such a description had been picked up as a passenger, without result. The murderer might have hidden somewhere, washed his clothes, and then escaped on an early-morning train. Inquiries made of the train conductors were fruitless. The area surrounding the scene of the crime was combed. There were many vacant lots full of weeds, in which, it was thought, the murderer might have hidden. But no objects related to the murder were found.

  Responses to headquarters’ request to the Northeast District bureau of the National Police Agency for lists of persons named Kameda started trickling in:

  “Kameda Shuichi, Kameda Umekichi, Kameda Katsuzo, Kameda Kameo…” Kamedas living in villages all over the six prefectures were listed. There were thirty-two men named Kameda living in northeastern Japan. Headquarters requested that local police forces check out each of these men. Five days later the last responses were received. All thirty-two Kamedas said that none of their family, relatives, friends, or acquaintances was the victim.

  “I don’t have any idea what to do now,” said the perplexed chief of investigations. “The problem may be that we have limited the search to the northeast Tohoku region. The mutual friend named Kameda may not be from that region. He could live in Tokyo or in western Japan.”

  The team decided to ask the newspapers to stress the name Kameda in articles and to refer replies to the police. But there were none.

  The movements of the victim and the murderer before their arrival at the Torys bar were still under investigation. Day after day weary detectives trudged from place to place making inquiries, and came back to headquarters tired out. When detectives were close to capturing a criminal, their expressions were bright no matter how fatigued they were. But when there was no clue, they just looked exhausted.

  Imanishi Eitaro was one of these worn-out policeman. The forty-five-year-old detective was hesitant even to return to headquarters for a cup of tea. He was in charge of making inquiries at the cheap apartments and inns along the Ikegami Line. For the last ten days he had walked that area. Again, today, he returned to headquarters without any leads.

  At the daily meeting the investigation team reviewed information brought back by the detectives, but there were no developments. The mood in the meeting room was one of intense frustration, of futility.

  It was nearly midnight before Imanishi reached his home that night. Through the slats of the front door he could see that the lights had been turned off. The door was locked from the inside because he hadn’t been expected. He rang the buzzer. The light went on inside, and his wife’s shadow was cast across the glass door.

  “Who is it?” his wife asked.

  “It’s me.”

  The door slid open and Yoshiko appeared in the shadows.

  “Welcome home,” she said.

  Imanishi entered and slipped off his shoes. Over the past few days, his heels had become worn and scuffed, so his shoes tilted awkwardly on the stone stand. From the two-tatami-mat entry, he entered directly into the four-and-a-half-tatami-mat room. There were three futon mattresses laid out on the tatami. The face of his sleeping son peeked out of one. Imanishi knelt down and tapped his son’s cheek.

  “Don’t wake him up,” his wife scolded gently, standing behind him.

  “I haven’t seen my son awake for ten days.”

  “Will you be late again tomorrow, too?” Yoshiko asked.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Imanishi walked into the next room and sat down.

  “I guess you’d like something to eat?” Yoshiko asked.

  “Just some tea over rice would be fine,” Imanishi answered.

  “I’ll warm up some sake.” Yoshiko smiled and stepped down into the kitchen.

  Imanishi rolled over on his stomach and unfolded the newspaper. He closed his eyes. He could hear sounds in the kitchen, then he dozed off for a while.

  “It’s ready.” Yoshiko shook him to wake him.

  When he looked up, the table was set with a warmed carafe of sake. His wife had covered him with a blanket while he was asleep. He threw it off and sat up.

  “You must be very tired,” Yoshiko said as she lifted the sake to pour it.

  “I’m exhausted.” Imanishi rubbed his eyes.

  He drained the cup and picked at the salted fish set out for him. “It tastes good. Why don’t you have some, too?” He handed his sake cup to his wife.

  She drank just enough to make him feel comfortable and returned the cup to him.

  “It still isn’t solved?” she asked.

  “Not yet.” Imanishi shook his head as he drank another cup of sake.

  Since he had been assigned to the Kamata case, he had come home late every night. Yoshiko was more concerned about her husband’s accumulated fatigue than about the solution to the case. She looked up at him and said, “The newspapers say that you’re searching for a person named Kameda. You still haven’t come up with anyone?”

  Yoshiko almost never asked him about the cases he worked on. He made it a point to try not to talk about work at home.

  “Mmm,” Imanishi responded noncommittally.

  “I wonder why nothing comes up when there is so much written about the case in the newspapers?”

  Imanishi did not respond to this either. He had no desire to talk over his work with his family. Yoshiko had once pressed him about a case he was working on. Imanishi had scolded her, saying she shouldn’t pry into cases under investigation. Since then, she had been more reserved. But her curiosity about this case made her forget. Yoshiko asked, “Are there many people named Kameda?”

  “I guess it’s not that common a name.” Imanishi felt that he couldn’t scold his wife tonight, but he continued to give vague answers.

  “I went to the fish store to run an errand today and checked their telephone book. There were a hundred and two Kamedas listed in the Tokyo telephone book,” she said. “A hundred and two isn’t that large a number, but it’s not that small either.”

  “I wonder,” Imanishi mumbled, as he reached for the second carafe of sake.

  He was tired of hearing the name Kameda. No one could appreciate the effort headquarters was making to find this man. Tonight, he wanted to forget about the case and go to sleep
.

  “I wonder if I’ve gotten a bit drunk.” His body felt warm.

  “You’re so tired that the alcohol has hit you very quickly.”

  “Maybe I should eat after this one.”

  “There isn’t much to eat. I didn’t know whether you’d even be home tonight.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Yoshiko went to the kitchen again.

  Imanishi felt a little light-headed. “Kameda, eh?” he said, without realizing that he was saying the name aloud. It was on his mind after all. He didn’t think he was really drunk, yet he repeated the name several times.

  The next morning Imanishi slept late. It was almost nine o’clock when he got up. His son had already left for school.

  Imanishi washed his face and sat at the dining table. He had slept soundly for a change and felt rested.

  “What time do you have to be at work today?” Yoshiko asked as she scooped some rice into his bowl.

  “I have to show up by eleven.”

  “So you can take your time.”

  The morning sun shone on their small garden. The sunshine had become quite strong. Droplets of water glistened on the leaves of the miniature bonsai plants. Yoshiko must have watered them.

  “Will you be early tonight?”

  “I’m not sure when I’ll be home.”

  “I hope you’ll be able to come home early. Too many late nights in a row can’t be good for your health.”

  “But that can’t be helped in my line of work. Until the case is solved I can’t tell whether I’ll be early or late.”

  “And when this case is solved, there’ll be the next one. There’s never an end to them.” Yoshiko seemed mildly displeased. But this was just her way of showing that she cared for her husband.

  Imanishi pretended not to hear and ate his breakfast of rice and miso soup, pouring the soup over the rice. Having been raised in the countryside, he had never abandoned this custom. His wife criticized his bad manners, but to Imanishi this was the way it tasted best.