The Gate of Sorrows

by Miyuki Miyabe

  The first reports of a corpse dumped in the woods in Mishima had aired in the early afternoon the day before. By late evening, the victim was confirmed to be a transsexual female. She had had her breasts augmented. One toe from the right foot had been severed. Those were the only details. The morning paper had nothing to add, but the eight o’clock news had the victim’s identity, adding that she’d been strangled, likely with a belt. The third toe of the right foot had been severed after death with a sharp implement, probably shears.

  The deceased was now officially a victim. Not only that, she was the “third” victim.

  Every day was Sunday for Shigenori, and he devoured the morning and evening papers front to back. He’d been following the murders since the one on June 1 in Tomakomai, Hokkaido. He was thoroughly familiar with the second murder, in Akita on September 22; after the murder, he’d started a scrapbook. He knew instinctively that the two killings were related, and that there would be more.

  His instincts had proven correct, though this hadn’t given him any satisfaction. The first two killings had been buried in the back pages of the newspapers. Now the same papers, and the news shows that specialized in celebrity love affairs and political scandals, had given themselves over totally to the story, hooting about serial psycho killers. Shigenori was appalled.

  The latest victim was Masami Tono, thirty-five. She’d owned a small bar near Hamamatsu Station called Misty. Masami was popular with her customers, who called her Mama. Regulars knew about her transition—the cosmetic surgery and female hormone replacement therapy she was undergoing. Masami also belonged to a group that advised young people coping with gender dysphoria.

  A local news team sought out a handful of regulars at Misty. All of them reacted to the news of Mama Masami’s death with shock and sadness. One young woman broke down as she spoke. “She was a wonderful person.” “Always so cheerful and full of energy.” “She could drink you under the table, and her cooking was amazing.” “Mama wasn’t the kind of person anyone would want to hurt …”

  The interviews were off-camera, but after years of sizing people up for a living, Shigenori could tell that the emotions were genuine. Masami Tono had been surrounded by people who loved and needed her. She was part of their lives. She hadn’t been in a relationship when she died, but she’d often said she was “dreaming of finding the right person.”

  She had last been seen outside Misty on December 14, just past 1 a.m., as she waved goodbye to the last two customers of the evening. A college student helped out at the bar, but only until ten. Every night, Masami closed up the bar alone and drove home. The old rented house where she lived with a pair of cats was about ten minutes away.

  From then until the next morning at just past ten, when her body was found in a storage trunk in the woods outside Mishima, her movements were unknown. The prefectural police had assembled a special investigation unit and were searching her house and bar. She was probably killed in one of these locations, or in her beloved yellow Volkswagen, her pride and joy. She’d always referred to it as her “yellow submarine,” and told everyone it was her good luck charm. Now it was missing.

  Masami was a native of Mishima. Her parents still lived there. She’d moved to Tokyo after graduating from the local high school, but returned to Shizuoka just before her thirtieth birthday to open Misty. Her decision to live and work in her home prefecture, but not her hometown, seemed connected to a lingering conflict with her parents, who refused to have anything to do with the media. When a reporter leaned on the intercom call button at their front door, her father snapped in a gravelly voice, “We’ve had nothing to do with Masayoshi for a long time.” That was his first and last comment on the murder of his child.

  Did the killer who stuffed Masami’s body into a trunk know about this family conflict? Shigenori suspected he did. That would be why the body was dumped in Mishima. Masami was born and raised there; she’d probably left because she had no choice. When her parents cut her off, she’d had no home to return to. Stuffing her corpse in a trunk and dumping it in the forest near her old home like a load of worn-out clothes seemed an act of spiteful mockery.

  As he put the clipper away and balled up the newspaper, Shigenori shook his head. He was thinking too much again. Reading too much into things. It was a habit he’d had as a professional, and his bosses and colleagues had often warned him about it.

  Shigenori had been a cop all his working life. Born in Tokyo’s old town, he’d joined the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department straight out of high school. After more than twenty years in uniform, patrolling neighborhoods out of one of Tokyo’s hundreds of police boxes, he’d became a detective at the Osaki Police Station in Shinagawa.

  That was the start of a new period in his life, years of almost pure detective work, transferring every few years from one station to another. Just before his fiftieth birthday he was transferred to Section One of the Criminal Investigation Division at MPD headquarters. It was another step up, but not because of his performance as a detective. The section chief knew Shigenori as a man who never lost his cool, even in the tensest situations. He also had a genius for dealing with people and looking after young patrol officers, who sometimes struggled with the pressures and regimentation of police work.

  With the new century, Tokyo’s violent crime rate started falling, yet this only made people more sensitive to perceived threats to their safety. The face of violent crime—shameless, cruel, and callous, often senseless and absurd—stoked the public’s worst fears. The general atmosphere of media-stoked hysteria made investigating such crimes even more trying for law enforcement and tended to put the detectives on edge about everything. To Shigenori, the younger men on the force seemed to need more psychological support than had the men of his own generation. This was why the section chief had reached out to him. His job was to be a mentor and role model.

  Shigenori was assigned to Division One, Section Three, Squad Two. Everyone called it the Edano Squad, after its leader. He expected to be rotated to another squad in due course, but he never dreamed that, in the end, he would be the one to request the transfer.

  In his sixth year on the Edano Squad, Shigenori started noticing occasional tingling and numbness in his legs. At first it only happened when the seasons changed or when there was a marked difference between the day’s high and low temperatures. But over time it became a constant problem. Eventually the tingling became a stabbing pain in the back of his left thigh that made it hard to walk.

  Shigenori’s annual police physical didn’t cover orthopedic problems. He hated hospitals anyway, and didn’t have time to fool with doctors. He chalked his symptoms up to advancing age. Many of his fellow detectives were suffering from herniated disks. Lower back and knee pain were part of life for men who spent hours on their feet. There wasn’t a man on the force who wasn’t coping with, or more often ignoring, some kind of physical complaint. Shigenori visited a massage therapist whenever he could. Otherwise he made do by plastering his legs with medicated patches.

  Gradually the pain increased to the point where massages and patches didn’t help. When winter’s cold deepened toward the end of each December, Shigenori could barely climb out of bed in the morning. Now the pain was constant, not only when he walked, but even while standing.

  It was hard enough for Toshiko to watch her husband cover his legs with medicated patches every day. Eventually she’d had enough. She made an appointment with a nearby hospital. When the day came, she’d almost had to drag him to the examination.

  The verdict: a minor disk herniation. Shigenori was treated with a nerve block and had to spend a night in the hospital. Afterward the numbness remained but the pain was gone, almost miraculously. He passed the holidays in an upbeat mood, but by early spring the pain was back. Another injection and the pain lessened—then a few months later it was back, worse than ever.

  After the third nerve block had worn off and th
e pain and numbness again made it hard to use his leg, he saw the writing on the wall. He would just be a burden to the Edano Squad if he hung around longer. He wrote out a summary of his medical history and attached it to his transfer request. His new posting was back to Osaki Police Station, where he’d started his career as a plainclothes detective. He was assigned to the crime prevention section and served three years as an advisor. At fifty-nine, with retirement near, they sent him to the records section. By then he needed a cane to get around.

  It was just bad luck. This was the body he was born with. His mother had had a bad back and ended her life bedridden. His father had also struggled with lower back pain. Shigenori accepted his fate stoically, but Toshiko refused to give up. She started pestering him to see a specialist. He pretended not to hear.

  On his retirement, the Metro Police found Shigenori a position as a security supervisor at a supermarket. The job was a thank-you for decades of service; he showed up three days a week, read the papers, and occasionally met with the rep from the security company. He could take it easy and there was no stress. Even the pain was not as bad as before, or at least it seemed that way, which made him even less inclined to pay attention to Toshiko’s suggestions that he see a specialist. He hated anything having to do with doctors and hospitals.

  Shigenori had purchased the apartment for his retirement. It was only 650 square feet, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a dining room. The building was old but solidly built, and the price was affordable despite the location near the center of Tokyo. Shigenori had spent his younger years as a foot patrolman out of a police box not far from the apartment. Somehow it felt like coming home.

  The Tsuzukis were childless. Neither had wanted to own a home, but they’d worried that landlords would be reluctant to rent to pensioners. The apartment would be their final residence. Shigenori thought he would live out his days here, always depending on a cane.

  But in mid-May he’d caught a cold, which was unusual. After a night with a temperature of 100.4, both legs were so numb he couldn’t make it to the toilet in the morning. He’d been able to sit up with Toshiko’s help, but couldn’t stand; his left bicep femoris was so swollen, it felt like an iron plate was embedded in his leg.

  “I need another nerve block,” Shigenori had said. Toshiko didn’t listen. She got on the Internet, found an orthopedic surgeon with a stellar reputation, and dragged her husband to an examination. The diagnosis: yes, he had a slightly herniated disk, but that was not the cause of his numbness and pain.

  Shigenori had spinal stenosis. His lumbar vertebrae were out of alignment and pressing on one of his spinal nerves.

  “It’s common in postmenopausal women, but we see it in men from time to time. Athletes and orchestra conductors are prone to it too,” the surgeon had told him. Toshiko remembered a television personality who’d had an operation for the same thing years before.

  “We still don’t understand what causes it, but it’s treatable,” the surgeon had told him. “We can adjust your spine and stabilize it with an implant. If you’d come to me sooner, you could’ve avoided years of unnecessary pain. The longer you leave this untreated, the longer it will take your nerves to recover after the operation.”

  What kind of medical condition is this? thought Shigenori. My legs are killing me but the problem’s in my back. He had never had back pain. He never dreamed that was where the problem might lie.

  There was another reason the surgeon had admonished him for not having a proper examination sooner. The hospital Toshiko had found after a determined search was indeed one of the top centers for treating spinal stenosis. To prove it, there was a long waiting list for the operation.

  “You’ll have to wait three to six months before a bed opens up,” the surgeon had told him.

  Now it was December and Shigenori was still waiting. He’d already quit his job with the supermarket. For the first time in his adult life, he was unemployed.

  Shigenori had had a job as long as he could remember. Now he had to find a different way of life, and he attacked the problem with the same tenacity he’d brought to his work. Housework, he discovered, was something he could get lost in. He found new hobbies. In the final years of his career, he’d spent a lot of time thinking about what he would do after leaving the force. He wanted to make life easier for Toshiko, who hadn’t had an easy time of it all these years. Maybe they should travel all over Japan. He could learn to cook, give her a chance to relax. He wasn’t allergic to the kitchen. He just hadn’t had a chance to cook since he was young.

  Now all these plans, or maybe dreams, were on hold. In police work, and not just detective work, patience was the number one requirement. Stamina and tenacity were no less important than courage. In that sense, Shigenori was an exceptional cop. He knew it, and the men he worked with knew it too.

  One more time.

  That was his motto during his years on the Edano Squad. It even became a byword for detectives in other units. When investigations were going nowhere and the search for witnesses couldn’t get off the ground, when there was no way to trace a piece of evidence back to the criminal, when everyone was ready to give up because further effort seemed pointless, Shigenori would say: One more time. Let’s interview the witnesses one more time. Let’s visit the crime scene one more time.

  And yet, and yet. Waiting endlessly like this, in his condition, was genuinely hard to bear. One more day. Hold on for one more day. Day after day, the accumulated weight of time pressed on his emotions like the displacement in his spine pressing on his nerves, gradually leaving him numb. Day after day, that look of impassive suffering began to wear on Toshiko too. Maybe things had been easier for her when he’d been busy and hardly ever home. The thought only made Shigenori more frustrated.

  With nothing to do all day, even minor tasks like cutting his nails were becoming tiresome. He listlessly tossed the balled-up newspaper in the trash, sat down heavily on the sofa and stared at the blue December sky outside the sliding doors to the balcony. Just as he was thinking that perhaps he should’ve gone for a walk after all, the wireless extension for the video intercom chimed. Toshiko had had the intercom installed so she could see who was at the door without getting up.

  Shigenori peered at the tiny screen. It was Shigeru Noro.

  “Good morning,” Shigeru said politely when Shigenori opened the door. “Sorry to trouble you this early. Something’s come up.”

  Shigeru was seventy-eight. He had been born and raised in Wakaba. Other than a few years of school in northern Japan, keeping out of harm’s way during the Pacific War, he’d been a fixture in the neighborhood. For many years he’d also been the head of the district association.

  “Come in, then.” Shigenori bent to get the guest slippers.

  “That’s all right, this will just take a minute,” said Shigeru cheerfully. “Please sit down.” Shigenori kept a stool in the entryway to help him put on his shoes. “There’s something I want you to take a look at.”

  Shigeru ran a little tobacco stand out of his house. Business had been bad enough, he said, as more and more people insisted on smoke-free environments, but it nosedived when even vending machines started requiring electronic cards with proof of age. But he also managed an apartment building and was comfortably well-off.

  Shigeru looked warm and chic in his trademark multicolor alpaca coat and hood. His brand-name sneakers were emblazoned with a flashy logo. He pulled a new-looking digital camera from his coat pocket and started scrolling through the images with a practiced hand.

  “You remember the tea caddy building in Ida, don’t you?”

  Ida was a district of Shinjuku just north of Wakaba. Not far from one of Tokyo’s biggest shopping areas, Wakaba and Ida were islands that time seemed to have passed by, with houses dating from before the war still occupied by the same families, and “modern” apartment blocks built just after the war. In the bubble economy o
f the mid-eighties to early nineties, both districts were roiled by speculators whose tactics for persuading owners to part with their property ranged from persistent to unscrupulous. Many old buildings disappeared, replaced by condominiums and apartment buildings—but before the empty lots were filled the bubble collapsed, the speculators disappeared, and many orphaned lots stood empty, like missing teeth. This didn’t make the neighborhood safer from crime.

  Twenty years out from the implosion of the bubble, the neighborhoods had gradually recovered. The empty lots had mostly filled in with apartments, tiny condominiums, and metered parking lots. Things had returned to normal, more or less. The bubble had been a dream, after all, and a foolish one at that. No one expected things to change much in the future, because a bubble like that wasn’t going to come again anytime soon. Just as disease progresses more slowly in the aged, an aging town changes slowly too.

  The tea caddy building was built on the site of a parking lot in Ida during the tech bubble that got rolling early in the new century. Its four cylindrical stories looked for all the world like one of those everyday containers of green tea. The name caught on quickly.

  The tech bubble was different from the stock and real estate bubble of the 1980s and 1990s. That one had raged like a typhoon; this was like a summer downpour that drenched one street but left the next one over dry. It didn’t last long, and the benefit—or damage—was limited to certain people and companies and locations. The people who made money made it in buckets, and one of them was a young founder of a software company who decided he needed a building shaped like a tea caddy in Ida.

  Shigeru had dug around and discovered that no one was living there. It had been used more like a club where the owner and his tech industry friends could throw lavish parties. It seemed astonishing that someone would erect an entire building for such a purpose. It definitely didn’t seem designed as a commercial property. The owner had probably planned to find someone to live there once he tired of it.