“But you must have done some babysitting?”
“Babysitting?”
“Yes, with your mother out working in those clubs and bars. You must have taken care of your sister when she was out of the house at night?”
Masumura rubbed the bottom of his nose. “I dunno. Don’t remember.”
Kusanagi shuffled the pieces of paper he was holding, moving the bottom one to the top. On the second sheet, there were edited excerpts from the records of Masumura’s manslaughter trial.
“Talk me through your job history after you left junior high school.”
“My job history?”
“You didn’t go to high school, did you?”
“Uhm... no, I got a job with an electronics manufacturer in Kanagawa prefecture.”
“How long did you work there?”
“I dunno... twelve years, give or take.”
“And why did you quit?”
“I had no choice. I was fired. You really want to go there?”
“You were found guilty of manslaughter. Sentenced to three years.”
“Yes,” growled Masumura.
Kusanagi looked carefully at the paper in his hand.
Masumura had just moved into a new apartment. There was friction between him and one of the residents on the floor below, who thought he made too much noise.
The downstairs neighbor showed up at his door one night, roaring drunk and holding a beer bottle. Yelling incoherent insults, he threw himself at Masumura and began raining punches on him. The bottle he was holding hit something and broke. There was glass everywhere, but the neighbor didn’t slow his assault.
There was a kitchen knife on the drainage board by the sink in Masumura’s apartment. Instinctively, Masumura grabbed it. He only meant to use it to threaten the other man, but when the neighbor came at him in a frenzy, he stabbed him without really knowing he was doing so.
The knife buried itself deep in the other man’s belly. Vast quantities of blood poured out of him. He crashed to the floor.
Although Masumura called an ambulance, the man was past saving.
Those were the bare facts of the case.
“It was the middle of Japan’s high-economic-growth period at the time. The production line of the factory where you worked was running twenty-four hours a day. One of your coworkers made the following statement about you at your trial. ‘For us, Saturday is a workday like any other day. There are three shifts a day, every day. We do day shifts for two weeks, followed by a week of night shifts. In the course of that one week, we all lose weight — about four to five pounds — which we put back on while we’re doing the day shift. Swings and roundabouts. Many of the guys try to get away with doing as little as possible, but Masumura is serious: He works hard, never complains, never slacks off. He was sending most of what he earned to his family — it can’t have been easy for him.’”
Masumura gave a dry cough. “That’s all old news. I’d rather not think about it.”
“You’d been on the job about ten years, when Kimiko, your mother, died from a subarachnoid hemorrhage. Your little sister, Yumiko, was still in ninth grade. So what did you do?”
Masumura said nothing. He knew that Kusanagi would see through any lies he told immediately.
“You sent Yumiko to a girls’ boarding school.” Kusanagi was reading from the document in his hand. “You paid for her tuition fees, living expenses, room and board, everything. According to the trial record, on your salary, the money left over was barely enough for you to scrape by on. Yumiko provided testimony to the same effect. ‘My brother was willing to sacrifice his quality of life to protect mine,’ is what she said.”
Masumura snorted. “That’s just tactics.”
“Tactics?”
“The lawyer was trying to plead extenuating circumstances. It was one of the tricks he came up with. Yes, I looked after Yumiko until she graduated high school, but that was all I did. After that, I’d had enough of caring for her, so we broke off contact.”
“After high school, Yumiko got a job with an auto manufacturer in Chiba. At the trial, however, she testified that you always used to tell her she was smart and should go to college.”
“Yeah, because that—” Masumura’s voice was getting louder. “Because that was my lawyer’s strategy. He wanted to work the whole sob-story angle as hard as he could.”
“You’re saying that Yumiko provided false testimony to the court as part of that strategy?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. That’s what trials are all about. That shows you what trials are worth.”
“Yumiko must have adored you if she was willing to perjure herself for you.”
Masumura grunted. He groped around for a reply and, when that proved hopeless, he waved his hand dismissively from side to side. “That’s not how it was,” he finally said. “She did it for herself. Having a murderer in the family can seriously fuck up your life. She thought that getting a lighter sentence for me would help make things easier for her. That’s all it was.”
“Did Yumiko visit you in jail?”
“No, she didn’t. Why should she? After going to jail, I never saw Yumiko again. She never contacted me, either. It’s only natural. I mean, who wants to fraternize with a jailbird?”
“Did you tell her not to come? Refuse her visits?”
“That’s bullshit. It wasn’t like that. I’d completely broken off contact with her. I had no idea what she was doing with her life. She didn’t know anything about mine. That’s how it was.” He delivered this speech so forcefully, it was clear that he would never give ground on this point.
“Were you aware that Yumiko is dead?”
“What? You’re serious?” Masumura’s eyes widened. “I’d no idea. When did it happen? Did she get sick?”
“No, she committed suicide. Over twenty years ago, in fact.”
Shocked, Masumura exhaled long and loudly. “I can’t believe it. I really had no idea. We weren’t in touch.”
At this point, Kusanagi realized that Masumura was committed to a strategy of all-out lying.
Did he know that Yumiko had a daughter called Yuna? Did he know that a man by the name of Hasunuma had been arrested for Yuna’s murder? Did he know that ultimately Hasunuma was found not guilty? Kusanagi had a whole series of questions he wanted to ask Masumura, but he decided against it. He would never get the truth from him at this rate.
Kusanagi put down his papers and looked at the small man sitting in front of him. His perceptions had been flipped on their head.
Masumura was doing his best to come across as a tough guy. In reality, he was a good man who’d been prepared to go to any lengths to take care of his little sister. Kusanagi was ready to believe that the positive character testimony at his trial was probably all true. Yes, he had been declared guilty, but the manslaughter itself was an unavoidable accident.
A man like this would never be able to sit quietly on the sidelines when someone had driven his darling baby sister to suicide. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him nursing his hatred for almost twenty years. And there was something almost surreal in the fact that he should have a connection to the current case. Kusanagi was now convinced that the stone-faced man in front of him was the person Yukawa had directed Utsumi to look for: the hinge between the old case and the current case.
“How’s life in the business hotel?”
The question caught Masumura briefly off guard. His expression softened and he grunted, “Pretty darn good. I’d like to stay on, if I could.”