The Lady Killer

by Masako Togawa

Key-punch operator.

  Fujii Apartments, XX Omori Kaigan, Shinagawa-ku.

  Employer: K Life Insurance.

  All of above obtained from identity card in her handbag.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Jan. 15.

  This victim put an end to her life six months after her affair with me. Newspapers say cause was occupational disease. Alas, poor Keiko.

  After summoning up the memory of Keiko’s face, he turned the page and began to read the next entry. The thought of any connection between himself and the girl who had killed herself after sleeping with him once never crossed his mind. The newspaper articles were but more fuel for an entry in his log.

  He remembered watching her receding back going down the narrow alleyway at Omori Kaigan, where the air is full of the fresh smell of the sea. Even he was always hurt by partings; he saw it as the price to be paid for love. He shook his head ruefully. But it was no time for such thoughts—he was ready for the hunt, and dismissed them from his mind.

  He went to the cupboard and began to dress with meticulous care. It gave him pleasure to don a dark brown herringbone jacket and to select a deep-red bow tie. He chose an overcoat of thick but loose-woven tweed made in Britain. He stood in front of the wardrobe mirror and carefully combed his jet black and slightly wavy hair. After a little reflection, he chose a dark brown hunting cap, and then as an afterthought he deliberately loosened his tie and twisted it slightly off center.

  Like most men of his type, he was a narcissist. He examined his face in the mirror, noting with approval his black eyes with their impenetrable depths and their double-folded lids. This was not merely his face; it was a mask for others to see in it what they would. But nonetheless it struck him as a charming face, and he winked at it. The face winked back at him from the mirror.

  Outside, the cold winds played at his mufflerless throat, but his feet danced merrily over the pavement. In the lanes not occupied by trams the cars thrust and jostled, so it took some time for him to find a break in the traffic and dart across the road, just in time to catch a crowded bus that arrived at that very moment.

  He got off at Shinjuku Oiwake and was immediately attracted by the beauty of a selection of musical instruments arrayed in a brilliantly lit window. It was Kotani, a well-known instrument shop, and he pushed open the door and went in. Within, all was light and gaiety; students, couples, and salaried workers crowded the counters buying audio equipment, records, or musical instruments. His eye quickly picked out a group of office girls gathered around a record stand. Most of them were just over twenty years old, but one woman stood out as being older. Although one of the group, she seemed to detach herself from their gay chatter. They obviously all worked for the same company, and from their conversation he gathered that they were English-language typists. It seemed that someone at their workplace was about to get married, and they were choosing a present.

  Watching them, he made up his mind. The old maid would be his target for tonight. He had already sensed in her a mixture of loneliness and irritation. When he heard her decline an offer to go with the younger women to a coffee shop, his mind was made up. He withdrew a little and made himself as unobtrusive as possible whilst watching the group.

  Shortly afterward, the woman left the group and made her way to the door. She left the shop alone, and Ichiro followed her.

  His victim was smartly dressed in a well-tailored mohair coat of simple design. She looked over thirty, and something in the jut of her chin revealed to him the pride of a woman who lives alone as well as the shadow that overhangs a woman who has lost the chance of marriage. He was ready to begin the night’s hunt.

  He followed her, knowing from her conversation that she was headed for Shinjuku Station. There should be plenty of time to overtake her and engage her in conversation. So far, his premonitions had never let him down; everything always went smoothly. So it would be tonight.

  He caught up with her at the pedestrian crossing just in front of Isetan Department Store. She stood waiting for the lights to change, unaware of his presence behind her, gazing at the nape of her neck. The thought of this woman, who would be his within a few hours, standing just in front of him gave him mixed feelings of joy and secret sensuality. He identified himself with a hero in a fairy story clad in a mantle of invisibility. The north wind blew in his face, foretelling winter, and old newspapers and fallen leaves whirled in the air. All around, people hurried about their business, their collars turned up against the cold.

  At first, it seemed as if the woman was bound for the station, but then she stopped in front of the Meigaza Cinema and gazed at a poster of an old French film that was showing. He stood in the window of the bookshop next door and watched her. The bell signifying the start of the last performance began to ring, and as if this made up her mind for her, the woman went in, just as Ichiro’s sixth sense had told him she would. Despite her telling her companions that she had somewhere else to go, she was just another of his victims starving for love. All he need do would be to set a little snare, and she would be his.

  For this aging spinster had undoubtedly been upset by the topic of her colleague’s marriage, drinking the stale blood of her own missed romance. All he would have to do would be to talk to her and to listen to whatever she had to say. That would be all.

  After her back vanished into the entrance, he counted five slowly and then followed her up the steps. He paused to let her get far enough ahead for him to overtake her on the staircase. If no one else interfered, it would be easy.

  He steadied his breathing and then began to trot up the steep, narrow stairway to the fifth floor, taking the stairs two at a time.

  3

  Fusako Aikawa, an English-language typist at the Sato Trading Company, was quite unaware of the fact that Ichiro Honda was pursuing her up the stairs of the Meigaza. She was thinking back to her college days, when she had been a regular frequenter of this cinema. In those days, the five-floor climb had not worried her one little bit. Indeed, it had given her pleasure to climb the stairs in those days, for she had believed that an enchanting world of mystery awaited her at the top; that once there, she would be wafted away to a land of real life. How she had pined for real life in those innocent days, she thought. And when she had got it, what had it turned out to be? What had the last ten years brought her other than going to work and then going home to sleep every evening?

  Of course, she had had one or two relationships with men, but what had they signified? They had been no more than boring love affairs—not the real life that she craved, the life of the silver screen. She put them out of her mind. And so she had developed into a trusted, long-service employee who saved half her salary every month, a confirmed old maid who turned up her nose at pleasure. Even she herself did not know at what point she had finally become like that.

  What had made her an old maid? Her alarm clock every morning; the crowded trains commuting to work; the monotonous repetitions of the menus at the office cafeteria.

  What was more, she was angry with herself for escaping with a spurious excuse from the other girls in the music shop, just running away from the painful topic of her colleague’s wedding. Why had she had to pretend that she had another engagement? Why such an obvious lie? Why not tell them that their sentimental chatter disgusted her?

  She stopped halfway up the stairs to catch her breath. The bell stopped; in the cinema, the lights would be going down, and she felt as if she was trapped in a vacuum. And then she heard Ichiro Honda’s footsteps pounding on the staircase. She stepped to one side to let the stranger pass.

  That was not Honda’s idea at all, of course, and he cannoned into her, thereby giving himself the chance to talk to her. She slipped and nearly fell, supporting herself against the wall. She turned to glare at him, but was disarmed by the halting Japanese of his apology: “So sorr-eee.” It made her smile. He extended a helping hand.

  “No, I’m quite all right, really.” Little did she understand the hunter’s technique.
To the contrary, she formed, as she was intended to, a good first impression of this young man with a sporty hat and his tie twisted a little to one side.

  “Is cinema more further?” came the deep, attractive voice.

  “Yes, a bit.” For some reason, perhaps because she was talking to a foreigner, Fusako also adopted a peculiar accent, but this, in a strange way, relaxed her and made her lower her usual guard against unknown men. Somehow, this collision halfway up the stairs with a stranger who spoke broken Japanese seemed a most natural event. She went on:

  “It’s inconvenient not having an elevator, isn’t it?” and set off again up the stairs with him at her side. It never crossed her mind that he was not a foreigner. Even though his features looked rather Japanese, somehow his manner was quite different from that of the men at her workplace. The way he held himself and moved, his special brand of sweet openness, made him clearly a foreigner. She had already stepped into Ichiro’s trap.

  “This film my country.”

  He pronounced each word with careful slowness, making sure she could grasp his meaning. As if to answer her unspoken question, he said, “Why I want to see.”

  “Are you from France?”

  “No. Algeria. My name Sobra. I come Japan to study.”

  The thought of a student from a developing country made Fusako feel protective.

  “Oh. I see. This film is set in Algeria, then. Do you still have the Foreign Legion?” She made conversation as they climbed the steps together, and for some reason her heart began to sing.

  When they got to the top, the ticket office was closed. Ichiro shrugged his shoulders, and the sight of this so-foreign gesture melted her heart. A girl on the other side of the room called her over to the place where tickets were now being sold, and so she ended up paying for both of them. He argued a bit, but as the newsreel had just started they hurried into the theater.

  During the two hours that the film was being screened, he sat bolt upright, his eyes never straying from the screen. He did nothing menacing or suggestive, such as trying to take her hand. In the presence of this quiet foreign student, she felt more and more at ease, and her feelings toward him became warmer.

  The film ended, and they left by the emergency staircase at the back. Borne along by the crowd, they found themselves in a narrow back street where there was a jumble of small bars and dustbins. Just like the Casbah, she thought, her mind still on the film. Was the man walking beside her born in a place like this? The very thought made her feel romantic. On the spur of the moment, she said, “Shall we have a drink?”

  He accepted, and they went into a bar. Instead of a sweet cocktail, she ordered a highball. She felt quite capable of holding her drink tonight, and in any case she was determined to see this adventure through to the end.

  When they left, the man paid.

  “Let me stand you one this time,” she said, and led the way into another bar. She felt rather proud at having a foreigner in tow, quite apart from which such travelers should be treated with hospitality. Also, she wanted to eat something.

  Bit by bit she became a little drunk, and the alcohol made her talkative. She began to tell him everything—about her work, the other people there, the story of her background and childhood, the apartment in Koenji where she lived alone. He asked no questions, but she kept talking. All the things bottled up inside her came out; if he did not fully understand, then so much the better. He just sat and listened, looking at her and smiling, never losing his smile. He was an ideal listener, and so she kept on talking.

  She had not realized that the bar was one that stayed open all night, so it was with a sense of shock that she realized that it was already 2 a.m. She had to go home. She stood up unsteadily and nearly fell. As she was recovering, the man paid the bill. Drunk as she now was, she felt loath to part with the foreigner. She clung to his arm; she seemed to be floating, though her heels kept catching on the pavement. She had never been like this before. Half regretfully, she began to coquet him.

  “You have nowhere to go tonight, have you?” He shook his head. This childish response reminded her of a stray dog. She stopped a taxi.

  “Get in. We’ll go to my apartment. I have never taken anyone there before, but you are an exception.” She tried to whisper, but her voice came out loud and drunken.

  When the taxi reached her apartment, the familiar streetlights at the crossing and even the potted palm at the entrance danced before her eyes like ghosts. For a moment, she could not recognize it and thought that she had come to the wrong place.

  At last, though ten years too late, the cinematic real life of which she had dreamed when she was twenty was beginning to happen to her. She unsteadily climbed the uneven steps; the paint was peeling off the plaster. The man was supporting her with one arm; she leaned against him and felt his hand on her breast through the thick overcoat.

  She unlocked the door and staggered in. He was still holding her. There was no fire, and the apartment was as cold as ice. She switched on a small foot warmer and sat him beside it while she busied herself making a cup of tea. He got up and stood awkwardly; what an inexperienced young man he seemed! She took two mattresses from the cupboard, two bed covers, clean sheets, and pillowcases and made up the beds. She was rationalizing all the while—nothing to be ashamed of in sleeping quietly next to a man, and anyway she would stay up all night. She called him over.

  “Bring the foot warmer. It’ll keep you warm; Japan is much colder than your country.” What less could she offer a young man from a faraway land of deserts?

  The man stood gazing at her with burning eyes. “If he desires me,” she thought drunkenly, “do I give him everything?” He began to undress slowly, and she went to take his clothes, only to be seized in a tight embrace. How strong his arms were, even though he looked so quiet! Algerians were certainly different. For a moment she felt afraid and struggled, but then he kissed her. They fell onto the bed, and her struggling stopped. She gave herself to him.

  The man took a long time, seeming to taste all of her body. Was this the Algerian way? This put her off for a moment, but the aversion faded away, turning to joy as she felt his lips crawl all over her body. She smelled his sweat; it seemed redolent of the deserts of North Africa that she had seen in the film a few hours before. She was carried to a primitive land, became an animal, and submitted.

  4

  At about five in the morning, Ichiro Honda turned in the bed and touched the naked woman. She slept on, but he awoke.

  For a moment he could not remember where he was, but then he realized that he was in the woman’s apartment and not in his bed in the hotel. He raised his left hand in front of his eyes and looked at his self-winding Omega. The date had changed; tomorrow already, he thought. Being careful not to awaken the sleeping woman at his side, he slipped out from under the coverlet.

  The icy air hit his naked body, raising goose pimples. He rubbed his chest and powerful shoulders vigorously and quickly dressed. A small light was still burning by the bed, and he looked around the room. There was a portable typewriter on the desk; he thought for a while and then slipped a piece of paper into it and began to type slowly. He kept looking at the woman to see if the rattle of the keys awoke her, but she slept on. He could just see her face above the coverlet; even in sleep she seemed exhausted. Not even the chatter of the typewriter could awaken her. He left the paper in the typewriter and slipped out of the room and into the hall outside, where he was overcome by the sour smell of the apartment. To him it suggested the melancholy of strange places, evoking a sensation he had had many years before in someone’s flat in Chicago. He stepped into the street and breathed deeply of the fresh morning air, tasting a refreshing sense of release from the adventure of the night before, but this sensation did not last for long. By the time he had reached the broad thoroughfare of Olympic Street after feeling his way along the misty lane, it was gone.

  He hailed a cab, took it to the Meikei-so, where he changed his clothes, and arri
ved back at the hotel at about 6 a.m. The clerk at the front desk suppressed his curiosity and pretended not to look at him as he handed over the key. Honda thanked him curtly and went upstairs.

  All day long, as he tried to get on with his work, Honda sensed a postcoital lassitude that lingered in his body like the dregs of a good wine. He felt too exhausted to go out in the evening and stayed in the hotel. After dinner, he sat on a sofa by the wall in the lobby reading a newspaper in a heavy binder. Idly, he cast his eye over the local news section, when suddenly one item leaped out of the page and caught his eye. He read it carefully; at 2 a.m. on the previous night, it said, a cashier at a supermarket who lived alone had been strangled in her apartment at Kinshibori. The name and address seemed familiar. It seemed to be the same as one of his recent victims, a girl whom he had picked up about two months ago at a dance hall in Koto Rakutenchi.

  He lay back and gazed up at the ceiling, his brows furrowed in thought. The cheap apartment in a district full of lumber wholesalers came back to his mind. A foreigner passed by close in front of him striding long and heavily, followed at a trot by a page carrying his suitcase. This brought Honda out of his reverie, and he replaced the newspaper in its rack and walked out of the hotel. He made his way to the newsstand at the underground station and bought every evening edition that he could find. In the train, he avidly read every article concerning the murder of the cashier.

  The photographs of the girl certainly looked different from the face that he remembered. The girl he had met, if he recollected aright, had a puffiness around her eyes and cheeks that did not show up in the newspaper photos. Perhaps it wasn’t the same girl, but he had to know. He would not relax until he had checked the name and address in his Huntsman’s Log.

  Getting off the crowded car at Yotsuya Sanchome Station proved difficult; he had to push his way through the throng, and in doing so he felt the body of a young woman press against his thick overcoat. This unconsummated experience appealed to his sensuality. At last he forced his way out onto the empty platform, where he was overcome by a deep sense of unquiet, for it seemed as if everyone remaining in the train was gazing at him accusingly and might set off in pursuit of him at any moment.