‘Now that this has got about, people are coming from all over the building asking if a seance can be held for them. Miss Ueda from the fifth floor is joining us—Miss Santo, one of our most faithful believers, has persuaded her to come. Miss Santo says we all have a positive duty to persuade our neighbours to come, but you know how it is with neighbours—the closer you live to them, the harder it is to make such approaches.’
And she was off to spread the tidings amongst the believers on the third floor.
The news that Chikako Ueda was to attend the next seance gave Yoneko fresh hope. If she had joined the group, then she must be hoping to find out something by means of a seance. So if Yoneko went on attending, then one day Chikako might ask for a seance, and her secret might be revealed. It would take time, but seemed the best and least risky course of action under the circumstances.
Yoneko had thus all but given up her original plan to use the master key to search Chikako’s room when, as luck would have it, something happened that very evening to make her change her mind again.
Yoneko had been out to the public bathhouse, and was returning just before the front door was to be locked at eleven pm. Passing into the hall, she suddenly noticed something which she had overlooked before.
Just inside the door was a full set of mail boxes, one for each apartment. On the flap of each there was a tag, marked ‘In’ on one side and ‘Out’ on the other, the original purpose having been for residents to change the tag around as they went in or out. Now the paint was faded and on some of them one could no longer read the writing, and so recently people had given up changing the tags when they went out.
Yoneko was looking at the hundred or so boxes and contemplating on how the old practice had died out when she suddenly realised that there was one exception to this rule—Chikako Ueda! Her box read ‘Out’.
At that time she imagined it was just an oversight, but the next day she couldn’t help looking when she went downstairs, and saw that Chikako’s box now read ‘In’.
Unless someone was playing practical jokes—and this seemed unlikely—there was only one solution to the problem: Chikako Ueda, who was said never to leave the building, had gone out last night and deliberately changed her tag around!
From this fact, Yoneko could develop two hypotheses. Firstly, Chikako probably took great pains to switch around her tag when she went in or out. This could not just be from force of habit. Yoneko, who had lived a life of solitude for so long, was nonetheless still a good judge of human nature. She reasoned that at first, in the pride of one’s new room, one would change the tag every time one entered or left, and that this would go on for a day or so, but would wear thin after a week or so and more or less vanish after two months. And after two years of solitude, who on earth would bother with such a little thing?
And so it wasn’t just habit. There had to be a reason, and Yoneko guessed that Chikako was waiting for a visitor.
Her second hypothesis was based on the fact that Chikako only went out just before lock-up time. There had to be a reason for this, too.
She found the answer to this one quite simply. Miss Tamura told her that Chikako would go out once or twice a week to a nearby late-night drapers and obtain her supplies for the embroidery she did in her apartment to keep body and soul together.
‘You know, she’s so worried about someone calling when she’s out that she even leaves her key in the mail box every time she leaves the building! But no one has visited her for years and years. She’s an odd one, that’s for sure,’ confided the receptionist.
When she heard this, Yoneko wished that Miss Tamura had told the story much sooner, although there was no way she could complain about it to her! Perhaps she need never have stolen the master key and undergone the subsequent tribulations. But then, even if Chikako left the key in her mail box, it was right opposite the receptionists’ desk, and so it would have been no easy task to remove it and replace it without being seen.
She resolved once again to use the master key to get inside Chikako’s room.
As far as the master key was concerned, Yoneko could detect no change in Miss Tojo’s attitude towards her since she had switched the keys under her nose, and so presumed that she was not under any suspicion. Also, since the committee had tried the false master key in every door in the building and it had failed to fit even one lock, there was a general presumption that the key had come from outside, and on this vague basis the matter had been allowed to rest. So Yoneko felt that it would now be quite safe for her to use the master key whenever the opportunity presented itself.
She changed her tactics, and no longer went patrolling around Chikako Ueda’s room on the fifth floor. Instead, she made it her habit to pass by the front door between half-past ten and eleven every night and check up on Chikako’s letter box.
Three days later, her plan worked. She went downstairs to find that Chikako’s tag read ‘Out’.
She looked out of the front door. There was no sign of Chikako. Around the building, the earth excavated for the move lay in damp brown piles around the conveyors, and the air smelled of freshly turned soil. It was time to make her visit.
She hurried back into the building. The tag on Chikako’s box was still moving slightly, so she could not have been gone long. Yoneko hurried to her own room on the fourth floor and collected a torch, a pencil and a notepad. She felt quite calm about what she was going to do. Even if someone saw her going into Chikako’s room, she would act as if it was the most natural thing in the world; the last thing she should do would be to look guilty about it. If she behaved like that, then no one would suspect her. She felt quite courageous and resolute as she climbed the staircase.
She passed a woman in a nightdress in the corridor of the fifth floor. The woman was carrying a toothbrush, and disappeared into the communal washplace. Without letting this disturb her, Yoneko went straight to Chikako Ueda’s door and inserted the key in the lock. There was nobody around, and Yoneko felt how easy it had turned out to be. She stepped inside the darkened room, closed the door, switched on the torch and looked at her watch. It was ten-forty pm. That gave her ten minutes, during which she must complete her search of Chikako Ueda’s room. But what should she concentrate her searches on in that short time?
She swung the torch around the room, focussing the beam on the dusty walls. Obviously the first thing to look for would be a diary. On one side of the room there stood a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. She decided to look inside the drawers.
In the middle of the room there was a low table with a linen towel spread over crockery. It looked like a place setting under the towel, and she lifted it up to find that this was indeed the case, but it was not the kind of setting she had expected in this spinster’s room, for the cup was a large one and the chopsticks were of black lacquer and also large. In short, the place was set for a man and not for a woman.
Beside the setting were a few cans of food, a tin opener and a rice tub.
Yoneko felt a cold shiver run down her back. She was inexplicably frightened by this discovery. In order to confirm her suspicions, she opened the rice tub; as she had guessed, it was empty.
When one lives alone, one gets into the habit of talking to oneself. This gives the illusion that one has a companion, and so helps overcome the feeling of solitude. What Yoneko had now discovered seemed to be more or less the same thing. Chikako Ueda, by making a little ritual of setting out dinner for a visitor every night, was fighting her loneliness. But a meaningless ritual would not have this effect—it had to have some basis of fact upon which the fantasy could be built. Some years before, Chikako must have prepared supper for a man who had gone out and never come back. There could be no other rational explanation and Yoneko was convinced that she had discovered something of import.