I hate them. I hate them all…
That is why their unmarried daughter is fiddling with her wristwatch. That is why she has been fiddling with it since we sat down. That is why I reach across their hearth to grab her wrist –
Why I hold this watch on her wrist up to her face –
‘Is this what friendly Mr. Kodaira gave you?’
Chiku-taku. Chiku-taku …
This watch I now tear from her wrist. This watch I turn over in my hand to the light. This watch with an inscription on its back –
An inscription that states, Miyazaki Mitsuko …
This watch that was not Kodaira’s to trade –
That screams, Miyazaki Mitsuko…
This watch. This watch…
Not theirs to keep –
This watch …
That I stuff into my knapsack as I get to my feet to leave –
Tachibana asking, ‘But who is Miyazaki Mitsuko?’
*
The daylight blinding, my eyes squinting, in this Land of the Living, in this Land of Plenty, before their mountains, before their trees, before their fields, their leaves and their flowers, their rivers and their streams, their greens and their blues, in this Land of the Living –
Before his mountains, his trees, his fields –
I say, ‘Miyazaki Mitsuko was a nineteen-year-old girl from Nagasaki whose naked body was found on the fifteenth of August last year in an air-raid shelter of the Women’s Dormitory Building of the Dai-Ichi Naval Clothing Department near Shinagawa in Tokyo.
‘The autopsy revealed that she had been raped and then murdered around the end of May last year. At that time, Kodaira Yoshio was working at this Women’s Dormitory.
‘The autopsy on Miyazaki was performed by a Dr. Nakadate of the Keiō University Hospital. Dr. Nakadate also performed the autopsies on the body of Midorikawa Ryuko and on the unidentified body found near Midorikawa in Shiba Park. Dr. Nakadate believes that all three women were murdered by the same man; Kodaira Yoshio. As you know, Kodaira Yoshio has already confessed to the murder of Midorikawa Ryuko…’
Tachibana nods. ‘But not to the second unidentified body from Shiba Park?’
‘No.’
‘And not to this Miyazaki Mitsuko…?’
‘He’s not been asked.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I have not mentioned Miyazaki to either Chief Kita or Chief Inspector Kanehara, who is leading the interrogation team.’
‘But why not?’ asks Tachibana again.
I look at Ishida as I say, ‘Two reasons; the Miyazaki case is officially closed and, secondly, the case file is missing.’
Tachibana is shaking his head, glancing from me to Ishida and back again. ‘Someone was actually charged?’
‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘They were.’
Tachibana asks, ‘Who?’
‘A Korean labourer…’
A Yobo …
‘And so what happened to this Korean labourer?’
‘He was shot and killed resisting arrest…’
‘Shot by whom?’ asks Tachibana. ‘An officer from the Kempei.’
‘Case closed, then?’
‘Yes,’ I tell him, still looking at Ishida; Ishida saying nothing, Ishida asking nothing. ‘Until today…’
Chiku-taku. Chiku-taku …
Her watch in my hand –
Chiku-taku.
*
Beyond another pine grove, beyond more dwarf bamboo, the next house, the next family, the same as the last house, the same as the last family. The grove after that, the house after that, the family after that, the same as the last grove, the same as the last house, the last family –
I look back down the mountainside, at the mainly thatched roofs and the odd tiled one on the odd two-storey house, at the crops in the fields and the leaves on the trees and I wonder where I am, where this place is, this place of plenty, this land of the living –
No dead without name, dead without number …
This place of mountains. This place of rivers –
Piled up high along the riverbanks …
In this place of greens and blues –
No stench of rotten apricots …
In this place of colour where Kodaira came with his many pickings from the dead, with his trophies and his spoils, the trophies and the spoils he had brought to barter –
From the dead…
Every house Kodaira ever visited, every family he spoke to, every thing he traded, every single house, every single family, every single thing he showed them –
His trophies…
But in the next house, the next family, the house after that, the family after that, they sit in shame, sit in silence and they will not remember, will not try –
His spoils …
‘Because so many people come,’ they tell us. ‘So many people, so many things, every day a different person comes, every day with different things…’
So many people…
And in the next house, the next family, the house after that, the family after that, they shake their heads when we say his name, they shake their heads when we describe his face, they shake their heads when we ask for dates, they shake their heads and tell us –
‘So many people come, so many things…’
*
We stand beside the truck and wipe our faces and wipe our necks, the cicadas deafening and the mosquitoes ravenous, the sun high in the sky but there is a darkness here now, in the shadows from the mountains, from the trees and in the fields, darkness and shadow –
The slopes are purple, the leaves black now, the grass grey …
In the rivers that do not flow, the streams that stand still –
There are no currents and there are no fish, only insects …
Tachibana asks, ‘What do you want to do now?’
Insects feasting in the still and stagnant pools …
I look up at the sun then back down at the shadows and I say, ‘Take me to the place where you found Baba Hiroko.’
*
Up the side of another small mountain and down its other side, then up and down another until the truck stops on the narrow road where the woods at the foot of this small mountain look out over a ditch onto a patchwork of fields and ditches, more fields and more ditches, and Tachibana says, ‘These are the woods. This is the place.’
Nishi Katamura, Kami Tsuga-gun, Tochigi …
Tachibana, Ishida, and I climb out of the truck and wipe our faces and wipe our necks and turn away from the fields and the ditches to stare up into the woods on the slope of the mountainside, up into the shadows of the black trunks of the trees –
Their branches and their leaves …
Tachibana points up the slope and says, ‘It’s that way…’
‘But I thought Baba was found in a field?’ I ask him –
‘It seems that she was attacked down here,’ he says. ‘But then her body was dragged from the field up this way…’
Now I follow Tachibana as he climbs up off the narrow road and into the woods, waving away the mosquitoes and the bugs with the file in his hands, Detective Ishida following behind –
He walks behind me. He walks behind me …
Tachibana leads us through the trees to a slight hollow in the side of the mountain; a slight hollow surrounded by fallen logs and filled with broken branches and dead leaves –
He walks behind me, through the trees …