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
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.