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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Jonathan Ames
You Were Never Really Here
Augusto De Angelis
The Murdered Banker
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María Angélica Bosco
Death Going Down
Piero Chiara
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Frédéric Dard
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Martin Holmén
Clinch
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I Was Jack Mortimer
Boileau-Narcejac
Vertigo
She Who Was No More
Leo Perutz
Master of the Day of Judgment
Little Apple
St Peter’s Snow
Soji Shimada
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders
Murder in the Crooked Mansion
Masako Togawa
The Master Key
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Emma Viskic
Resurrection Bay
Seishi Yokomizo
The Inugami Clan
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