Last Winter We Parted (12 page)

This dentist was a troubled man. Around the time when the lawyer had attempted suicide because of Akari, he had taken on a number of clients who had similar difficulties. He had resolved the dentist’s financial problems through fairly illicit means. The dentist was greatly indebted to the lawyer and vulnerable to him. But since all he had to do was change the name on a chart, this required relatively little effort when compared with such a debt.

One of the reasons the lawyer had chosen Yuriko Kobayashi was that she bore a certain resemblance to Akari. Which was why he was sure that Yudai Kiharazaka would take a liking to
her.
I’m a fan of yours
—that was how Yuriko approached him.
I’m working freelance as a model. For my next job, I want you to take photos of me. Well, the job is just an excuse. Really, I only wanted a reason to talk to you. I saw a picture of you in a magazine article about your photograph
Butterflies …

She casually mentioned how attractive the opposite sex seemed to find her. The suggestion made him gradually start to look at her lustfully. Yuriko Kobayashi was definitely beautiful. It was easy to seduce a starving man. Akari was beautiful too, but she was also a terrifying woman. If Yuriko’s life hadn’t been shackled by her debts, she might have ruined quite a number of men herself.

At the beginning of January, we had her start keeping a diary. A diary that portrayed her as an ordinary housewife. An ordinary housewife who wouldn’t give up on her dream of becoming a model. We had her write that she might be being followed. And then the day after she started staying at Yudai Kiharazaka’s house, we had her temporarily stop writing in her diary.

We had her do the same thing on Twitter. On Twitter, she hid the fact that she was a housewife, pretending that she was just a woman who worked as a model. As if she were living out her fantasy life in a virtual world. As if just by looking at her diary and Twitter account, however ordinary she may seem, you could tell how likable she was. Then she suddenly stopped
tweeting after she started staying at Yudai Kiharazaka’s house. And we made a point of sending her all the way to Chiba once, and had her shut off her cell phone there.

All of these things come from the lawyer’s madness and my own. We were both morbidly and relentlessly fixated on the details.

At the place where she had worked in the sex trade, of course she had used a false name. Since she hadn’t borrowed any money from that place itself, she was able to tell them she was taking a leave of absence. The lawyer and I took over the monthly payments on her debts. She read many of the books that I recommended. We talked about lots of stuff other than the plan. I figured we ought to know at least some things about each other.

About four days after she started staying at Kiharazaka’s house, I went to talk to the police.
Once before, she was gone for about a week without any contact. She can be a little emotionally unstable. If she knew that I had gone to the police, she’d be angry with me. That’s why I wasn’t sure whether or not to file a missing person’s report. Yet I can’t help but worry …

The police asked me if there was any sign that she was with another man. I acted flustered. It was probably true, but I didn’t want to think so, nor could I believe it … The police said, rather perfunctorily, that if I wanted to file a missing person’s report I needed to say so, and I pretended to be at a loss and
went home, only to return two days later with a photo of her when I filed the report. Being that it wasn’t a criminal case and was most likely a disappearance involving an extramarital affair, I knew that the police wouldn’t take it seriously. It’s only after an incident has occurred that police in Japan start doing anything in earnest. Despite how many women are murdered by stalkers they have reported beforehand, the police still haven’t changed the way they respond.

Nevertheless, even when they made a serious effort, I doubted they’d be able to make the connection between Yudai Kiharazaka and my “wife.” She still had with her the diary that would later become evidence, and her husband—me—wasn’t supposed to know that she had starting using Twitter. Even when they investigated her cell phone records, all they could see was that her phone had been turned off somewhere outside of Tokyo. Anyway that would fall under the jurisdiction of the Chiba police, not the Tokyo Metropolitan police department.

Yuriko Kobayashi was playing a dangerous game. But she had no choice other than to go along with our scheme. Here before her was the chance to escape a life in the sex trade, drowning in debt, for a life where she might attain a certain degree of affluence. Akari Kiharazaka didn’t have a driver’s license or a passport. The only things that could prove her identity were her insurance card and her pension account book, along with the sort of certificate of residence that was archived
in the local government office. None of these included a head-shot. As long as Kobayashi had Akari’s insurance card and her pension account book, she could request an official copy of her family register from the municipal office where her permanent residence is as if it were her own, and with a copy of her resident card she could then apply for and receive a passport with a photo of herself attached. Why is it that insurance cards in Japan don’t have photos? Or why don’t they require people to carry a photo ID? Wouldn’t it be a good strategy for the auto industry if a driver’s license became the typical form of identification? I don’t know, but it seems like there are a number of major loopholes like this in the system here in Japan. But then again, even with a photo attached, any number of documents can be forged. And if Yuriko Kobayashi were to die, her debts would be discharged, and she could go on living as Akari Kiharazaka. I was never really worried, despite the fact that I was now her husband, because even though it was a personal loan from a gangster, I wasn’t a cosigner, and what’s more, it was an illegal contract to start with, so there wouldn’t be any obligation to pay it. Because of the kind of person Akari was, she didn’t have any friends. And since she lived off of her inheritance, she didn’t have a job either. She was a woman on her own in Tokyo, a woman who occasionally lured a man into her solitary life. I often wondered, if she were to disappear, would anyone other than her brother Yudai even notice?
I knew that the PIN number for her ATM card was 0789, and that the one for her credit card was 2289. Yuriko Kobayashi would be able to assume her identity and live her life indefinitely. After the incident, she could go into hiding to avoid the media, while providing her “brother” with that lawyer and leaving Yudai Kiharazaka to take the brunt of it all. Later, when the time was right, she could get a passport and disappear to South America, where she had always yearned to visit.

But there would be major discrepancies between the diary Yuriko Kobayashi left behind and Yudai Kiharazaka’s testimony. That’s why we decided to have her ask him to kill her.

“Even just sometimes, I want to die. Maybe when I die, I’ll think of you. Then take a picture of the place where I die.” “I’m kidding—what I said before was a joke. I don’t want to die yet.” “… I don’t know why, I just want to give it all up.” “I feel like I’m being held prisoner by you … I’m kidding, it’s a joke—what am I talking about?” “… I’m running out of pills. I need more.” “You want me to die? But wait. I’ll write a suicide note, that way it won’t cause any trouble for you.” “I hate you. I’m kidding, I love you.”

Looking back on it now, it seems like she was protecting herself by being the one to bring up “death” herself. Because in Yudai Kiharazaka’s mind, her murder—and his retaking of the photographs he had failed at—was clearly supposed to happen. But, if she were going to write a suicide note, then
it was best to wait until then. Looking at it from Kiharazaka’s perspective, she must have seemed like an emotionally unstable woman. She took a lot of pills in front of him. But they were just vitamins.

We also prepared the notes for her to throw out the window because her legs were tied and she was being held captive. We cut locks of hair. Akari’s hair. Naturally, this hair would be identical to the DNA of the dead body.

While Akari Kiharazaka was abusing and heaping invective upon me, at her core, she was falling for me. Of course, the feelings that she had for me were nothing more than her own particular kind of sentimentality. She came to me for sex repeatedly. You probably think that I would have been disgusted to be with a woman like her. But, well, I wasn’t. To be honest, I enjoyed it—sleeping with a woman that I knew was going to die soon. I enjoyed it even as I pitied her. It was as if my feelings of pity spiced up the sex. Giving sexual pleasure to someone whom I would soon kill, I had the feeling of having control over this woman, of being able to do whatever I liked. I was no longer the person I had been. I needed to become even more monstrous than this brother and sister. I was forcing myself to become accustomed to this version of me.

Even when you told me that you were leaving me, I still didn’t feel like we had parted. Not even when you died, strange as it may sound. That’s why I thought I could live
with your doll … It wasn’t until last winter that I finally felt apart from you. That night when I first slept with Akari Kiharazaka. The night when I resolved to become a monster.
Someone who is your boyfriend should not be a monster
. Isn’t that right? Last winter, we parted, and I decided to become a monster. I ceased being the person I was. I destroyed myself, so that I could take revenge on them.

… I’ll tell you about the night when we put Akari Kiharazaka to sleep. I wrapped a towel around her face, blindfolding her. That kind of thing excited her. Then, while we were having sex, I switched places. With the lawyer. The lawyer got undressed and approached Akari, who had no idea.

Had she realized that I had switched with someone else, she probably would have enjoyed it. That’s the kind of woman she was. But surely she never would have thought that the guy she was screwing was the guy she had oppressed and treated like an insect.

I smoked a cigarette in the next room, thinking about how strange it was that I didn’t feel anything.

When I went back into the room, the lawyer was already wearing his suit and waiting for me. She was knocked out and her hands and feet were tied up. After that, we held her captive for a few days. I couldn’t decide whether or not to send the video we had shot to Yudai Kiharazaka. If I sent it to him, despite his suspicions, he might still be aroused by the film,
even without knowing that the man her sister was screwing in the film was the lawyer she had made to suffer.

The day of the crime. Strangely, I was not nervous. Based on my long hours of observation, I had a good grasp on Yudai Kiharazaka’s behavioral patterns. Since he wasn’t actually holding Yuriko Kobayashi captive, while he was out, we went into his studio and made sure that everything was progressing according to plan. We had made sure to have a duplicate key. Our crime took place on the day after Yuriko Kobayashi had mentioned in her diary how lately Yudai Kiharazaka had gotten bored with her, and she had the definite sense that he intended to kill her. We would set fire to his sister just as Kiharazaka was returning home and then leave through a window. It was simple. I had the lawyer film it all. Like I said before, as a precaution for any unexpected situations, he carried a pistol.

I didn’t think that what we were doing was all that strange. Within the monster I had become, the part of me that retained a trace of humanity may have dimmed any memory as a means of protecting myself. Then again, I may just be maintaining a certain outward appearance. But, you know, that’s a lie. I remember everything clearly. I remember joking with Yuriko Kobayashi, peering at her through the camera lens and shouting at her to hurry up and get Akari ready. I remember, over the course of a few days, whenever Akari would wake up from the slumber we had put her in, knocking her out again until it was
time, to the point where she was almost anesthetized, almost like she was dead inside that huge trunk. I remember how I didn’t feel the least hesitation at the moment when we set the flames on her. I remember my hand moving as if I were just setting fire to some pieces of cardboard that had been lying around. Striking the match, slowly bringing my arm up from below, and then releasing it from my fingers. Watching the flame as it was about to descend on her, I was thinking to myself: This is what I did it for. I changed who I was so that I could raise my arm this effortlessly and toss the flame just so. I felt like I could do it again, even another time after that. I even vaguely remembered what had happened during the countless times we had experimented. First to burn was the surface of the cloth doused in kerosene. The cloth was flame resistant. But, of course, only to an extent—the material caught fire and when the flames reached Akari and the sofa cushions on which she was lying, which had been doused with even more kerosene, everything ignited fiercely in an instant. We had used ignit-able liquid as well as accelerant. The entire sofa was feverishly engulfed in intense flames.

Later when I saw the film, I thought it still seemed a little dangerous. Because when he came into the room, the fire had yet to grow as big as we thought it would. No matter how many times we rehearsed, the perfect timing was quite difficult to achieve. Seeing it from his shaken perspective, with the entire back of
the sofa consumed in flames and her arm flung out, it must have looked like her body was already on fire. But in fact the fire had yet to spread to Akari’s body under the cloth that we had laid over her. If at that point he had pulled on the arm that was poking out, even though they both would have sustained burns, I bet he could have easily saved his own sister. But, sure enough, he took photographs instead. I felt as though I was watching the same scene as when you had died. Except, of course, this film had transformed it into an act of revenge. The lawyer had the pistol and had been watching closely from outside, but by taking his photos, Kiharazaka narrowly escaped death, even if only for a little while.

After it was all finished, we had Yuriko Kobayashi undergo minor plastic surgery. We fixed the parts of her face that had always bothered her, making them look just right. We didn’t try to make her look exactly like Akari Kiharazaka. That would have been impossible, plus I had confirmed with Akari numerous times that she had made her brother destroy all the photos of herself, and she hadn’t let him take any photos of her since they had grown up. She said that she hated the way it seemed to capture her true nature. Since from then on she had avoided having any photographs taken; if we were to destroy the few photos that she herself still had, then basically the only quasi-available photographs by which to confirm what she looked like would be her school yearbooks. And those were from quite a while ago.