On the way back to the office, Shinji wondered what the old man was going to do with the diary. What was the old man thinking about, his head on his chest, a cigar in his mouth?
Shinji, for his part, felt the slow stain of jealousy creep toward his heart. All of that diary that he wished to read was the passage referring to Michiko Ono.
About a week passed, and then there was a sudden development that took Shinji by surprise. Honda asked for an interview with the director of the prison and confessed his guilt, asking to be allowed to withdraw his appeal.
“Just what I feared,” said the old man mysteriously. “We’re off on our travels—get ready at once.”
“Where are we going?”
“To Osaka. I’ve got to talk to the father-in-law of our client.”
They left Tokyo that evening, and on the next day Shinji waited at the hotel whilst the old man went off to see Ichiro Honda’s father-in-law. Before leaving, Hatanaka had been once more to Sugamo Prison, but Honda would say nothing about the missing page, merely asserting his guilt. Even Shinji understood that the reason for Honda’s new stance was based upon the missing page at the front of the diary.
The old man had been to Osaka already, on his own, for five days from the day after the two of them had interviewed Honda in prison. He was uncommunicative about his trip, and Shinji did not feel that he could question him about it, confining himself to grumbling to Mutsuko Fujitsubo about the old man hogging the case now that it was getting interesting. He did at least gather that the objective had been to visit Honda’s wealthy father-in-law as well as his wife. He had to admire the vigor of the old man, now over seventy, in undertaking this trip.
Now Shinji waited in the Osaka hotel. An hour passed, and the old man returned. Where had he been? Shinji did not ask, but got into the car and accompanied his chief to Ichiro Honda’s wife’s home.
They were met by the old housekeeper. She was plainly expecting them and conducted them immediately to the atelier at the back of the garden. Within, it was almost dark despite the brightness of the day outside; the only sound to be heard in the otherwise cavernous silence was the hum of the air conditioner. The old retainer took a long pole and slid back the cover to the skylight; immediately the room was flooded with light.
In the corner stood an old-fashioned iron bedstead, upon which a woman was lying. The housekeeper fetched a couple of wooden stools, which looked as if they were meant for children rather than adults, put them by the bed and invited the two men to sit on them with a silent gesture.
Shinji looked at Taneko, the wife of Ichiro Honda, for the first time. Although she was said to be under thirty, she looked like a sick woman in her forties. Was it his imagination that told him that the room was suffused with the smell of death, just like a cancer ward?
“Your husband has withdrawn his appeal,” said the old man in measured tones. The woman on the bed made no reply. She seemed to be quite insensible to their presence. The old woman bent over the bed and whispered something in the woman’s ear; there was no response, and she straightened up and shook her head at the two men.
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.