The Lady Killer

by Masako Togawa

  This was how he described what to me was a most precious night, the first night we made love, in the summer holidays:

  “It was cramped in the car, but I enjoyed the unnatural posture this forced upon our lovemaking. Her pants off, her skirt pulled up, one leg over the back of the front seat. It made her body tight to enter, which was extra pleasure. Good breasts; she pulled her sweater up, and I did not bother to remove her bra, but pulled it down (though later she took it off herself) and I could see them in the moonlight as I worked on her. Later, she turned over, and asked me to enter her from the back, which I did. Used her mouth on me, too.

  “I had invested all my earnings from my part-time job in that old Chevrolet, and this experience made the investment fully worthwhile.

  “Keen on foreplay, and definitely not a virgin.”

  Was that how he saw our tender and romantic congress? And what did he mean by saying “not a virgin”? I had never known any man before.

  A few months later, I read of the suicide of the key-punch operator who was one of the victims described in his diary.

  I went to her sister, Tsuneko Obana, at her apartment in Omori. The reason was that I wanted to make sure that my suspicions about the cause of the suicide were correct.

  I think it was seeing the mole on her nose that made me decide to plot against my husband. That kind of defect attracts one’s attention, even though one feels sorry for the person who has it. As she spoke, her anger was obvious; those eyes of hers glared through her double eyelids.

  “My sister was just a stupid girl. But the man who caused her doom… he wasn’t stupid, and I can never forgive him, never, never.”

  How I envied her then; she had such a clear motive for revenge against my husband. I began to wish to change myself into her, to savor the sweetness of revenge.

  I had had some cards printed that passed me off as a correspondent for a women’s magazine. She was a simple and straitlaced woman, so it was easy for me to deceive her. I offered her money to write an article on her sister’s death, and I also suggested that with my cooperation she could track down the man responsible.

  “Do you really think we could?” She looked at me anxiously as she said this, but I was in no doubt as to her hatred for my husband. So she ended up accepting my offer. Of course, I told her to tell no one about me, because this would get me into trouble with my magazine, particularly if some other magazine got wind of our project and stole it.

  Based on the diary of her sister, I suggested that she go to the bar Boi and trace the man who had sung with her. Everything went without a hitch; it all seemed too easy. She trusted me completely and did exactly what I said. Everything she found out she wrote down and gave to me.

  But still I was not satisfied. Indeed, the more our plan succeeded, the more irritated I became. I was getting jealous of this woman; somehow, her activities seemed to create a relationship between her and my husband. Of course, really I was at this time beginning to think abnormally. Jealousy is a powerful thing. And my lust for sex is so strong.

  So gradually, deep down inside myself, I began to wish that I could become Tsuneko Obana and partake of her longing for revenge against my husband.

  And the semen. That was a good idea of mine, I think. You may say that it only amounted to circumstantial evidence, but think of it this way. If, by any chance, my husband was able to clear himself despite my efforts, at least the police would not turn their attention toward me or Tsuneko Obana, for how could women produce semen?

  And when I started to collect semen from those men, it became central to the meaning of my life. Women, after all, are creatures who take semen from men… and my husband would give me none. So it was poetic justice, in a way… I was punishing my husband for not giving me the semen that is a woman’s right…

  But was I really punishing my husband; was that all? Maybe it was just an excuse to collect semen.

  And the blood. Leaving blood of my husband’s group under the nails of my victims—that was clever, wasn’t it?

  Well, my urges became stronger and stronger, and so did my jealousy of Tsuneko Obana. I led her on, used her as a puppet; she did everything I wanted, but even that did not give me full pleasure. I sent her to A.M.U. to check the blood type, which of course I knew perfectly well all along. I got her to phone the Toyo Hotel with an assumed voice. Poor cat’s-paw; she thought she was discovering things, which were perfectly well known to me all along. And just in case anyone ever checked up, it would be the woman with the mole that they would hunt.

  But her usefulness was past. Now I must take the law into my own hands, and she could prove an obstacle. She knew too much. So I suggested that she should move out of her apartment and take another in her sister’s name. She had to vanish for good; I had to become Tsuneko Obana, and then I would acquire the fullest motive for revenge upon my husband.

  Dr. John Wells would have attributed my lust for revenge against my husband to repressed sexual desire, I suppose. Those psychiatrists have one-track minds…

  *

  I set my trap with the semen I took from those men and the Rh-negative blood I stole from the cosmetics salesman in the inn, whom I chloroformed first. I also used chloroform on my victims so that they did not resist when I strangled them.

  The woman in Kinshicho. She was just a sort of hors d’oeuvre to begin the process of terror on my husband. So there was no need to leave blood under her fingernails.

  In the case of Fusako Aikawa in Koenji, I chloroformed my husband as he lay sleeping at my side and took his blood. I was worried about that blood, because it coagulated in the test tube on the way to Tokyo, even though I had packed it in dry ice. Would it fool them? I could but try.

  Well, I went to visit Fusako Aikawa, but before I could make my escape, my husband turned up! I hid in the closet until he left, but my heart was freezing with terror. However, it was all right in the end, but I had to make a quick getaway just in case he called the police.

  As for Mitsuko Kosugi, she was in my pay all along. She didn’t mind kissing my husband at Tokyo Tower, prudish little girl that she was, because she knew that I was watching. I had to confront my husband, invisibly, as it were, to terrify him the more. Did it work, I wonder? But I doubt if she ever had sex with him; she wasn’t the type. She had to die anyhow, poor girl.

  The trick with the blade in the wardrobe; now that was neat. It drew blood, just as I intended, though I thought there was no better than a one-in-ten chance. Frankly, when I saw how well it worked, I was a bit scared. Was there not some other invisible hand moving me in my pursuit of revenge?

  All that I did thus became a sort of ceremony, one that I had to perform regardless of whether it worked or not. Killing three or four people thus became nothing to me; my psychology knew no limitation.

  So much for Dr. John Wells and his comfortable theories. He can forget his statistics, forget about suppressed sexual drives. What do people like him know?

  November 5.

  At the Minami apartment in Kinshicho.

  I waited for two hours in my car.

  At three a.m. I was ready. I put on a mask, the kind one wears when one has a cold, and got out of the car. Even though I had looked the place over by daytime, I still stumbled over the lumber stacked in the lane.

  She woke up when I went in, but was still half-asleep. Her eyes were swollen and there was saliva around her mouth.

  “I want to talk about Sobra,” I said. She just rolled over and turned her back to me.

  I pressed the chloroform-soaked handkerchief to her nose; the liquid ran down my right hand.

  A little struggle, and she was unconscious.

  I stripped her naked and produced a syringe without a needle.

  As I slipped it between her thighs and began to inject the semen, suddenly I began a convulsive spasm.

  A chill of death settled over the room. I buried my fingernails in her body. The room smelt of chestnut flowers.

  I passed the drawstring o
f her sleeping gown around her neck.

  Somewhere, my husband, too, was bending over the body of a victim.

  As I drew the drawstring tight, I got another convulsion.

  The power of my hands… I pulled with all my might.

  Her face turned purple. It was done. I lost consciousness for a while…

  My husband’s hunting days were limited to Tuesdays and Thursdays, I found.

  After the first time, it was easy. I, a passive woman who normally trembles with fear at the slightest thing, drew closer and closer to my victims.

  Why am I writing this? I began to want to do it when I heard that my husband had been sentenced to death.

  That woman student I hired—she did her job well. She set up her canvas at the museum to lure my husband as I suggested, and it worked. At Tokyo Tower, she was my decoy; she knew that I was watching from the shadows and was not afraid to kiss him. She summoned him to her room late at night; she was not afraid, for I told her that I would be there.

  She had to die, poor, blameless thing. At the very least my husband deserves to die for the murder of that innocent woman. For husband and wife are one, are they not? So it really doesn’t matter if he, my better half, goes to the gallows in my place.

  *

  Today, my father phoned to say that the bed in the hospital is now ready for me. By tomorrow, I’ll be in the hospital. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow… all those mornings, I will awake in a hospital bed. It’s my destiny.

  And some day, perhaps when I am long gone, this atelier will be torn down. They will rip up the concrete foundations, and what will they find? Human bones; no more, I daresay. And certainly the mole will have vanished in the decomposition. Nothing to identify Tsuneko Obana by. Unless science has made progress by then; perhaps they will detect the aftermath of a mole. Tsuneko Obana. I had to do it. I had to become her.

  But all that is in the future.

  Today, I know that I am going farther and farther away from myself, drawn by those invisible powers that have controlled me more and more of late. Those sounds in my head—how I wish they would go away! Perhaps they can do something about it in the hospital. If a policeman came to question me today, I know that I could give him no answer.

  And talking of the future, what does it hold in store for me? Today I am all skin and bones, but in ten or twenty years’ time it will be different. I shall be a fat nymphomaniac lying in a hospital bed, eating chocolates or my own excretur—what does it matter? In the corner of the psychiatric ward, I will be known as the woman who winds her drawstring around the bedstead and pulls with all her might.

  Nearly 4 p.m. Time for me to become Tsuneko Obana again.

  I get my makeup box. With skill I fix my eyes; there, nobody will recognize my face now! Carefully I brush black ink onto the base of my nose.

  Inside my head, as persistent as a sutra, I hear Tsuneko Obana’s monologue:

  “Silly, silly little girl. Don’t say you cried in his arms; don’t tell me that you were crushed under his body…”

  Shinji closed the notebook and gazed at the old man, who was impassively smoking his cigar.

  “It will take time, of course,” Hatanaka said, “but that should be enough.”

  “But can you use it? Your promise…”

  “From which I regard myself as being released. That old housekeeper hanged herself after we left. I half expected it; do you remember what she said? ‘My duty is now complete.’ Well, that feudal type, you know it can only mean one thing. A pity not more Japanese are like her nowadays.”

  “And you did not try to stop her?”

  “Ah well, you are so young, you see. You modern people; I wonder if in time you will become real Japanese again! No. To frustrate the loyalty of a retainer is a sin for which one should burn in hell! She wrote a note to me, however: ‘Everything is now in your hands.’

  “And the wife is now in a mental home, of course. Non compos mentis—and this notebook proves it. They can never bring her to trial—if they try, I will take great pleasure in defending her. They doubt if she will ever recover her physical strength, too.”

  The old man blew a smoke ring, and suddenly Shinji was reconciled to the grinding routines of the law. To work for such a man, and someday, perhaps, to become like him…

  *

  It was at the end of October that Ichiro Honda was finally released from prison. He gazed appreciatively at the autumn tints and breathed deeply of the chill wind that blew against the gray stones of the court building that he had put behind him.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MASAKO TOGAWA (1931–2016) was one of Japan’s foremost writers of crime fiction. Born in Tokyo, she worked as a cabaret performer before beginning to write crime fiction backstage, during her breaks. Her debut thriller The Master Key (also available from Pushkin Vertigo) won Japan’s prestigious Edgowa Rampo Prize, and Togawa went on to become a hugely successful author, while continuing to lead a colourful parallel life as a singer, actress, feminist, nightclub owner and gay icon.

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  COPYRIGHT

  Pushkin Press

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  London, WC2H 9JQ

  Original text © 1963 by Masako Togawa

  Translated by Simon Grove

  Every effort has been made to contact the owner of the rights to this translation. Please contact Pushkin Press if you are the copyright holder.

  The Lady Killer was first published in Japanese by Kodansha in 1963

  First English translation published by Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986

  First published by Pushkin Press in 2018

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  eISBN 13: 978 1 78227 410 0

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press

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