The Lady Killer

by Masako Togawa

  The three of them gazed down at the sick woman; an invisible barrier seemed to separate her world from theirs. She lay without any sign of vitality, staring blankly at the ceiling, her blanket drawn up over her mouth. Only the whir of the air conditioner could be heard, marking the presence of reality and the passing of time. The minutes crept slowly by.

  Eventually, Taneko moved a lifeless hand up toward her face, and the blanket slipped down to her throat. She stared at Shinji and the old man and laughed, but her face remained expressionless, giving her smile an eerie quality. And then Shinji saw it.

  On the right base of her nose was a large mole, about the size of an azuki bean! The mole of which he had heard so much!

  It sat upon her face like the symbol of some revealed sin; gazing at the black stain, he muttered to himself, “Why did no one tell me that Honda’s wife has a mole?”

  Taneko stretched her hand toward the side table and slowly picked up a silver hand mirror. She gazed vacantly at her face in the mirror, and then slowly scooped up a handful of cold cream from the jar by the pillow and rubbed it over her cheek by the base of her nose. The mole began to blur and then finally vanished. What sort of a trick was this?

  She then applied cream to her eyelids and dissolved the starchlike cosmetic that had given them a double-lidded form, reverting to narrow slits. The transformation complete, she replaced the mirror and lay back, her face once again a mask, hollow and unsmiling.

  “So now you understand,” said the old woman to Hatanaka and Shinji. She picked up the pole and made the room dark again. Silently the two men followed her out into the garden. Shinji looked back for one last time, but Taneko had once again pulled the blanket up over her face and lay as still as a corpse.

  Back in the entrance hall to the main house, the old woman handed a notebook to the old man.

  “This is her memo book in which she used to write before she got into her present state,” she said. “You can see that it would be quite hopeless to conduct a handwriting test at present, so please use this as a sample of her handwriting. I feel sure that you will find that the writing matches that on the note by the Turkish bath girl. But you must promise me not to make this notebook public—not to anyone, not ever. If you won’t promise me that, I am going to throw it on the fire.”

  “Was it you,” asked the old man, “who tore out the pages from the Huntsman’s Log—the first page and the entry on the key-punch operator?”

  “Yes, it was me.”

  “And was it you who put it in the apartment on the second floor of the house where Mitsuko Kosugi was killed?”

  The old woman nodded. “The young mistress has gone beyond the reach of the law, and by doing what I have done my duty is now complete. I thought I ought to save Mr. Honda’s life, so I went up to Tokyo six weeks ago and left the diary where you found it.”

  The old man smiled faintly as they took their leave.

  Walking down the gentle paved slope that led to the station, Shinji was still stunned by the way things had turned out and said so. “I could have sworn it was the sister; how did you know?”

  But the old man said nothing.

  Suddenly, Shinji saw the pathos of the world. Going down the slope… on either side, modern houses with red-tiled roofs. Who knew what frugal lives were lived therein, what trifling quarrels took place? Banal and monotonous lives of everyday folk—what a contrast from the room from which he had just stepped! How real were they, the sick woman smelling of death and the man whose spirit had been broken in the condemned cell? Was it not all but a bad dream, occupying but one moment in this summer’s heat? He thought back to Yasue in the Turkish bath, to Tanikawa with his forced jollity in the chicken restaurant, to the medical student who always turned his back on him. How were these puppets in the curtained drama connected with that mad woman lying in bed, the blanket drawn over her face?

  The old man hailed a taxi, and they got in.

  But still…, thought Shinji.

  Were not our experiences the same as those of Tiltil and Mytil, who found the bluebird at last in their own home? The woman with the mole, whom he had pursued so assiduously, had been in a cage all along.

  Breaking into his reverie, Hatanaka spoke. “We’re not out of the woods yet. I can’t break my promise and use this notebook. We must find some other way to get the defendant out of jail.”

  Saying which, he vigorously shook the notebook that had been written by Taneko Honda.

  EPILOGUE

  (A record written by the wife)

  As I take up my pen, I feel rather strange. I remember the young journalist from the woman’s magazine who used to come every day after my husband’s arrest to ask me to write an article or give her an interview. My old maid never let her past the gate, but still she came every day for nearly three months.

  But one day she stopped coming.

  Oh well, an enthusiast like her probably got married or something!

  Since she stopped calling at our gate every day, I won’t say that I didn’t become lonely, but nonetheless I must admit to being somewhat relieved. You see, I still had some unfinished business in Tokyo, and I wanted to be able to get away…

  When the news of my husband’s arrest reached me, I was painting in my atelier.

  The basic color of the painting was red.

  What would my Chicago analyst, Dr. John Wells, have said if he could have seen it?

  He’d have put it down to my repressed sexual urges again, I imagine.

  It was the local policeman who came to inform me. He had a search warrant to go through my husband’s belongings. But he was quite perfunctory about it.

  Maybe it was out of respect for my father. Or else they already had more than enough evidence to secure a conviction. Anyway, they didn’t disturb us too much.

  It was the local police chief who looked into my atelier. He was very reserved about it and didn’t even notice the half-full bottle of chloroform that was in amongst my paints and turpentine. I wasn’t even trying to hide it—why bother? Their attitude toward me was one of sympathy mixed with curiosity…

  They took it for granted that I was distraught at the discovery that my husband was a murderer with perverse tastes. That suited me very well; I hardly had to act at all; all I had to do was lie on my bed pretending to be a woman struck speechless by shock.

  After all, that’s the way the relatives of criminals are, isn’t it? The worse the crime, the more they try to bury themselves away from ordinary human society. That suited me very well.

  My worst fear was the press. What if they took my photograph? But, perhaps out of sympathy for me as the innocent victim of my husband’s crimes, they were tasteful enough to leave me alone. Some of the gutter-press tried to get my photo, but I foiled them by staying indoors. So the only photos that were published were of me when I was twenty and striking dramatic poses during my short career as an actress, or else of me as a high school girl wearing a sailor suit, my hair in pigtails. So that was all right—no way in which I could be recognized.

  My next worry was that I might be summoned to the court to appear as a witness. I decided to lose enough weight to change my appearance during the few months leading up to the trial. I started to starve myself; after a few weeks, I caught sight of my legs and was stunned. What lovely legs I used to have! All tanned and well shaped, with firm muscles, just like the legs of an antelope. How proud I had been of them! I always used to wear the shortest possible skirts when playing tennis, just to show them off. I used to let my skirts ride up, letting men see how brown my thighs were, right up to the briefest of pants, which I always wore. And underneath, right down to where the pants ended—Oh, if they could have seen how white were the secret places of my body!

  But now they were like the colorless bones of a skeleton. I pulled my negligee up; the color was the same on both my legs and my private parts. They looked like the legs of a Jew in a concentration camp.

  I took off the negligee and looked at myself
naked; I really was becoming like a skeleton with only a few wisps of hair in the middle!

  But it was affecting my health; I was taking purgatives to get my weight down and soon became too feeble even to open my mouth to issue instructions to the housekeeper. I even lacked the strength to pick up the blanket when it slipped off the bed. I was smoking heavily to repress my appetite; my right hand became a nicotine-stained claw. Having no strength, I would frequently drop my cigarette and set my bedding asmolder. The housekeeper scolded me on such occasions, but what could I do?

  If I did start a fire, the atelier would be razed to its foundations, and then that would lead to my ruin… But I had to keep on smoking.

  I dreaded that the housekeeper would stop getting me my cigarettes. I needed the smoke of those hot, dry leaves with their pungent smell and billowing, purple-colored smoke; I needed them to help the loneliness, terror, and obsessions of my lonely bed.

  For a time I fasted on no more than a little thin gruel, but I needed more substance to make the cigarettes taste good, so I would occasionally take a little breast of chicken fried in a good-quality oil or else eat a quarter of a sugar-sprinkled doughnut.

  Eventually, I couldn’t hold on to anything. I dropped everything I touched—a water jug, an ashtray full of butts, even the expensive antique German fountain pen that I had bought in Chicago.

  But I couldn’t give up the cigarettes.

  I always kept a big tin of Westminster by my bed, but it soon got empty. The old housekeeper used to complain about the smoke-filled atmosphere and open the windows. One cold February night, she didn’t close them properly, and the draft was freezing me, so I got up and tried to shut them. But I just didn’t have the strength.

  That was when I was weakest, I think.

  In those days, I was not bothered by visits from the dead. No, it was sex that dominated my mind: his sex, and my sex.

  What dreams do men have who have been soldiers and who have killed? What do they think, falling asleep alone at night, of those whom they overcame after struggling hand to hand? Or those ancient warriors, naked between the sheets, dreaming of their youth and well-oiled nakedness, the bulging muscles of youth, the struggles… now all gone. What did they think of in bed?

  I thought of the touch of his naked body, drenched with the sweat of the women that he had mounted…

  I thought of myself, naked and giving myself to men to collect the evidence I needed. My palms still seemed to feel the flesh of those men to whom I had submitted…

  Well, at any rate, it turned out that I would not have to appear in court. A clerk of the court came to see me, armed with a tape recorder to ask me about our married life together. He mainly asked about our sexual relations, or rather lack of them, since my husband became impotent with me. It seemed that our family doctor had already been questioned, so all of the questions were very much to the point. There were a few medical terms that I didn’t understand, but all I had to do was nod.

  When he came to the word spasm he used the German word kampf, blushing as he spoke.

  Perhaps he had a lascivious imagination; perhaps he imagined me naked and lying under him.

  I can’t blame him or our family doctor, because how could they know the real reason for my fear of pregnancy?

  Nobody knows… except us, and the alcoholic doctor in Mexico who swindled us out of two thousand dollars… Only we three know about the baby born without bones, the baby we disposed of.

  Mad, that’s what it was, to go sightseeing in Mexico in the ninth month of my pregnancy. Why didn’t we go back to Japan instead? Then we would never have fallen into the clutches of that doctor… Then I would not have had to dye my hands with the blood of my infant.

  And two weeks after the birth. I had recovered enough for sex. I lay under my husband, in his arms, in a hotel built like a mountain hut by the side of a lake.

  We were just reaching our climax… and I went into a spasm. My body gripped his like a vise… he screamed with pain… I was in agony, too. Somehow, I managed to get hold of the phone, locked together as we were.

  That boorish fathead of a doctor, looking at the nude yellow couple clasped in the first embrace shown in marital textbooks… just as if we were a pair of copulating monkeys or dogs. Because of the pain, we didn’t feel embarrassed. He injected a depressant, and eventually we were able to separate.

  Well, when we got back to Chicago, Dr. John Wells diagnosed the reason for my convulsive spasm. It was, he said, a fear syndrome directed against pregnancy. He said the same thing would happen in the future if I made love to my husband, and that it would happen just as he was about to ejaculate. He said, “It’s like having a nervous pain in your muscle. You’ll get it even if you use contraceptives. You’ll get it with other men, too.” Unless I could overcome my fear of pregnancy. As it was all in English, it was less embarrassing to listen to.

  Thus began the agony of the centaur. Does not the head wish to make love to a woman, whilst the lower parts can only cover a mare?

  Or we were like the starving figure in Greek mythology, buried up to his neck with plates of delicious food just in front of his nose.

  First we would look at each other’s bodies… exchange caresses… at last give up in desperation. Always so fruitlessly tired… always, the stain of our sweat on the sheets, full of the sorrowful smell that symbolized our barren love.

  The doctor thought that my fear of childbirth was due to the failure of my first pregnancy—we had put it about that I had had a miscarriage in Mexico—and suggested that all would be well if we changed our environment. But my husband and I, knowing the real cause, knew better. Our future as man and wife had ended in a brick wall.

  My husband found a post in Tokyo, and we came back to Japan. We lived apart, except for Saturday nights.

  And so, once a week, we would sometimes search for each other’s body in the darkness, dreaming that a miracle might occur. However, after a while, we gave up. My husband told me that when he was with me, he was no longer a complete man.

  With a weak smile like an old man’s, he would stroke the thick hair on his chest and say ruefully, “I am impotent. I have lost all interest in women. Sometimes I go to a strip show or look at nudes in magazines, though. That’s about it, I’m afraid.”

  And like a fool, I pitied him, still young and handsome, and yet already impotent.

  When we first met, he was a melancholic man, but in spite of that he was very quick-witted and seemed to be able easily to make others believe in love between men and women. I remember him well, standing in front of the redbrick university building in Chicago, wearing a red woolen shirt; he struck such a fine pose, his head slightly to one side, that he seemed to match the American scenery around him, and I immediately fell in love with him. I always loved him—the first man I ever knew.

  So, one day, when our separation had gone on for six months (and it was my idea originally; I thought that if we were together every night, the torture would be too much), I was overcome by a sudden desire to see him. I got into my Mercedes and set off for Tokyo without ado. All those six hundred kilometers on the road I was in a dream.

  It was almost dawn when I got to the Toyo Hotel, where he was staying. It was still winter, and outside it was cold and dark. I parked in front of the hotel and switched off the headlamps. I sat and finished my cigarette, looking at the hotel; later, when it was not too early, I would go in. And then suddenly I saw a familiar figure getting out of a taxi; surely it couldn’t be… but yes, it was my husband.

  He paid his fare; his face was expressionless under the lamplight. And somehow, looking at him, I saw about him a dark shadow, suggestive of tiredness after secret lovemaking. Why didn’t I follow him immediately and accost him? I still don’t know.

  If only he had come back ten minutes earlier! Or later, when I was more composed and could have approached him; we would have had our customarily meaningless chat; a cup of tea together, and I would have said goodbye.

 
After all, there’s no contending with fate, I know that. It was fate, wasn’t it, which brought me there at that precise time, to turn out the headlights and find myself in a position just overlooking the entrance to the hotel at the moment that he came back.

  I stayed in the car, my coat collar turned up, rubbing my feet together to keep them warm. At that sort of hour, if one has something on one’s mind, you go into a sort of trance without sleeping. I wonder why.

  The sun came up, and the first car in the lot had its engine started, clouds of white exhaust filling the icy air. Finally, I could bring myself to move, and I drove back to Osaka without taking any sleep on the way.

  That weekend, my husband came back as usual. I greeted him as if nothing had happened, and we spent our usual weekend together. I made no attempt to cross-examine him or catch him out.

  For the next two weeks, I resolutely closed my mind to what I had seen and immersed myself in my painting. Even if my husband did have a mistress, I thought, it was my duty to forgive him. But nonetheless I could not resist the temptation, and two weeks later I drove up to Tokyo again.

  This time, I arrived in Yokohama about noon and parked my car at a hotel near the seafront, one which usually has a lot of foreign guests. Then I rented an inconspicuous car; I had decided, against the voice of reason, to spy on my husband.

  Words are not enough for me to explain the bottomless sense of humiliation and despair that crept over me when I saw the Huntsman’s Log at my husband’s hideout at Yotsuya.

  I wish I had never found the key to that apartment in his jacket pocket. I wish I had not had my maid get a spare key made. I wish I had not followed him there…

  It would have been much better for me to have known nothing.

  It wasn’t all his different women who made me feel that I could not forgive my husband. About those victims I did not particularly care. I could not forgive him because he had listed me as his first victim. And I could not forgive him because he was not afraid to make any of those other women pregnant.