The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (14 page)

“Warn me, huh? You don’t need to. We’re well trained, professional detectives. You must know criminal investigations are not an easy stroll in the woods.”

“Why are you repeating the same thing over and over again? I’ve never once said that investigation work was easy, have I? You were the one who brought up legwork. Funny how brainwork never occurred to you. Guess it’s easier to let your shoes do the walking.”

“Are you telling me I have no brain?” Takegoshi started to raise his voice. “I’ve never met a person as rude as you are! Look at you. You’re acting like a homeless person! You and the homeless are only good for making noise and squawking like old women. Well, that might be the way you make your living, but civil servants don’t have that luxury. We have a responsibility to society. And if you’re so smart, tell me, have you found a likely suspect?”

Kiyoshi paused, and then said matter-of-factly, “No, not yet.” He looked calm, but I could tell he was frustrated.

“There, you see. You’re useless!” Takegoshi laughed in triumph. “I knew you hadn’t figured anything out. I just asked because you were acting so high and mighty. Look at you. You’re just a… beginner!”

“I don’t care what you say, but let me ask you a professional favour. I would like some time before you expose your father’s note to the public. You can have the note back today, although it may make little difference to you in the end. And since it includes an incident that is embarrassing to your father, you may want to keep it a secret. Take some time to read it by yourself and understand it.”

“OK. I’ll give you three days.”

“That’s pretty fast. And I don’t think that’s giving you enough time to think it over.”

“One week then.”

“All right, one week.”

“Are you telling me?…”

“Yes, I’m telling you I will solve the case in one week. At the least, I will prove your father’s innocence, so you won’t have to expose the note after all.”

“Even though you have no suspects in mind? That’s impossible!”

“I said one week. I will solve the case in one week. Today is Thursday the 5th, so you will wait until next Thursday, the 12th, before doing anything further with the note. Is that understood?”

“I will submit this note to my supervisor on Friday the 13th.”

“Thank you. We don’t want to waste our time. You can leave through the same door you came in by. Incidentally, were you born in November?”

“That’s right. How did you know? Did my sister tell you?”

“It’s quite plain to see. I can also see that you were born between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. in the evening. OK, here is your father’s note. Take it, and please leave.”

Takegoshi slammed the door as he left. We could hear him stomping down the hall.

“Are you crazy?” I said to Kiyoshi. “Do you really think you can figure everything out by next Thursday?”

He said nothing, which made me even more anxious. Sometimes his overbearing confidence made him lose rationality. “What do you have in mind?” I asked.

“As you were talking, I just felt something click. I don’t know what it is, but it felt a little like déjà vu. I must know something. It’s not like a puzzle. It’s something very simple… I can’t remember… I may be wrong… Thank God, we have one week. By the way, do you have your wallet with you?”

“Yes…”

“Can you afford expenses for four or five days?”

“I think so.”

“Very good. I must leave for Kyoto right away. Would you like to come with me?”

“Kyoto? Now? But I can’t go on such short notice…”

“Then I’ll see you when I get back. I’m sorry, but I can’t force you to come with me.”

As soon as he turned his back towards me, he pulled out his travelling bag from under his desk.

“Wait! Of course I’ll come with you!” I shouted.

I think that was the moment when Kiyoshi began to put all his energy into the case. Once he makes a decision, he acts very quickly, sometimes impulsively, like a lightning bolt. We grabbed a map of Kyoto and the copy of
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders
and bolted out of the office.

Ninety minutes later, we were on the bullet train to Kyoto…

“So how do you think Takegoshi Jr found out about his sister coming to see you?” I asked Kiyoshi, as we settled into the ride.

“I suppose Mrs Iida must have felt guilty about consulting me without getting her husband’s approval. After she got home, she confessed what she’d done, and her husband called his brother-in-law.”

“Her husband sounds like an honest fellow.”

“Could be. Or he might just be afraid of that thug.”

“Yes, Takegoshi Jr was a rude bastard. Do you think his father was like that? Surely not.”

“Oh, policemen are all the same. They think because they’re cops they’re all-powerful, and they run around acting like shogun, as if it’s still the age of feudalism. The sister didn’t consult her brother before disclosing their father’s secret to a stranger. That must have infuriated him—pre-war protocol violated in modern society.”

“I think Japanese tend to be unnecessarily obedient to authorities, anyway.”

“Well, among all the Japanese I’ve met, Takegoshi Jr was as arrogant as they come. You could put him on display in a museum as a representative petty autocrat.”

“No wonder his sister wanted to keep the note secret from him. I can understand how she felt.”

“Oh, really?” Kiyoshi said, suddenly staring at me. “Tell me, how did she feel?”

“Excuse me?”

“I’d like to know. What was she feeling when she found her father’s note?”

“She wanted to protect her father’s secret, and so she decided to show it to you, hoping that the case would be solved quietly.”

“Come on, grow up!” Kiyoshi interjected. “Why did she tell her husband that she came to see me, then? She wanted him to solve the case. She probably showed him the note, but he couldn’t figure anything out, so she brought it to me. If I solve the case, she can claim the credit for her husband—and BOOM, his career is made. I think she has everything mapped out.”

“Aren’t you going too far? She didn’t look like—”

“Someone so calculating? I’m not saying she’s malicious; it’s just natural for a married woman to think that way.”

“You sound like you think all women are calculating. That’s not fair.”

“Most men are obsessed with the idea that all women should be obedient and powerless. Is that fair?”

There was nothing I could say.

“You and I will never agree on this issue,” he went on, “just like a modern person would never be able to convince a samurai of the value of air-conditioning.”

“Huh? Are you still saying that women are schemers?”

“Not all of them. There could be one good woman in a thousand.”

“One in a thousand? Oh, c’mon, can’t you change the ratio to at least one in ten?”

“No way,” Kiyoshi replied and laughed.

I remained silent for a while.

“Now, have we examined all the known facts of the case?” Kiyoshi asked, as the train sped on. “We know about Masako, Heikichi’s second wife. What about his first wife, Tae? What was her background?”

“Her maiden name was Fujieda. She was born and raised near Rakushisha, in Sagano, Kyoto.”

“Kyoto? Good, we can kill two birds with one stone.”

“She was an only child. When she was in her teens, her family moved to Imadegawa in Kamigyo Ward and opened a shop selling Nishijin brocade. Unfortunately, business was not so good, and then her mother got ill and became bedridden. They had no one to turn to for help. Her father had an elder brother, but he was in Manchuria. Her mother died, the shop went bankrupt, and her father hanged himself. In his will, he suggested that Tae should seek out her uncle in Manchuria and ask for financial assistance. Tae chose to go to Tokyo instead. I don’t know how she liquidated her parents’ debt.”

“She would’ve renounced the rights to her inheritance.”

“The rights to her inheritance?”

“Yes, then she wouldn’t inherit anything, even her parents’ debt.”

“I see. I didn’t know that. Anyway, in Tokyo, she worked at a kimono boutique as a live-in employee. When she was around twenty-two or twenty-three, her boss—who might have been sympathetic to her plight—played the role of matchmaker and introduced her to Yoshio Umezawa, Heikichi’s younger brother. And Yoshio in turn introduced her to Heikichi.”

“They were married, and fortune seemed to be smiling on her, but later Heikichi kicked her out,” Kiyoshi added, filling in the blanks.

“Some people have no luck. I think Tae accepted her fate in life as selling cigarettes in Hoya.”

“If you study astrology, you will know how unfair life is. Anything else about her?”

“I think that’s all. Oh, this may have nothing to do with the case, but she had a huge collection of
shingen
handbags—you know, those little silk bags women carry when they dress in kimono. According to her neighbours in Hoya, her dream was to go back to Rakushisha and open a boutique selling original handbags.”

“But Tae inherited Heikichi’s estate. After the war, she must have received a lot of money from the sale of his paintings.”

“Yes, she did, but she fell ill and didn’t spend it on herself. She spent it on housekeepers and gifts for neighbours who were kind to her, and she also put a bounty on the head of the person who committed the Azoth murders. She probably could have opened a boutique in Rakushisha, but being realistic about her poor health and her age, she stayed in Hoya for the rest of her life.”

“I see. What happened to her estate?”

“It was amazing. One of her relatives, who had never been close to her, suddenly came to see Tae on her deathbed. This woman was a granddaughter of Tae’s uncle in Manchuria. Probably she stayed and took care of Tae for a while. Tae put the woman in her will. The story is that all the neighbours cried at Tae’s funeral, because Tae had been so generous to them.”

“Then, someone who didn’t get any money killed her!… Just kidding. What about Yasue Tomita, the owner of the De Médicis gallery? Any more information on her?”

“She came from a rich family. That’s all I know.”

“What about Ayako, Yoshio’s wife?”

“Her maiden name was Yoshioka. She was born in Kamakura, and had one older brother. Yoshio was introduced to her by his mentor, a man whose father was a priest. Do you need any more?”

“No, that’s probably enough. Ayako wasn’t a woman with a past, was she?”

“Not as far as I know.”

Kiyoshi sat silently looking out of the window with his chin resting on his hand. It was dark now, and the window was like a mirror, reflecting the brightness of the train’s interior.

“I can see the moon,” Kiyoshi said quietly. “I can see some stars, too. Ah, it’s good to get away from the Tokyo smog. Can you see that star that never blinks, right next to the moon? Well, that’s not a star, actually—it’s the planet Jupiter. If you can see the moon, then you can always locate the planets easily. Today is 5th April and the moon is in Cancer, soon to move into Leo. Jupiter is also in Cancer at 29 degrees. The moon moves just like the planets. You know, watching the movement of the planets every day makes you realize how small and insignificant our daily lives are. We argue. We fight. We struggle. We compete to increase our wealth. Look at the universe. Its movement is so dynamic, like a huge clock. The earth is just a cog in the gears of the clock, and humans make no more difference than bacteria do. Millions and millions of bacteria living their short lives battling their petty battles. They don’t stop
to think that without the mechanisms of the universe, none of us would exist. Look at what people do—they kill each other for a deposit in the bank, which they will never spend before they die. It’s ridiculous.” Kiyoshi had been speaking seriously, but suddenly he giggled. “Well, here’s one bacterium getting excited by a foolish and petty thing. He’s riding this ‘bullet train’ to Kyoto, trying to show up another fat, arrogant bacterium.”

I laughed.

“People live their lives committing one sin after another,” Kiyoshi said, lightening up.

“By the way, what exactly are we going to do in Kyoto?” I asked.

“We’re going to see Tamio Yasukawa. You do want to see him, don’t you?”

“Well, yes, if we can.”

“He was in his late twenties in 1936, so he must be about seventy now, assuming he’s still alive. Time has passed.”

“Yes, indeed. Anything else?”

“So far, that’s the only thing I’m thinking of. We’ll stay with a friend of mine called Emoto. He’s a nice guy. You’ll like him. He’s only twenty-five, but already a fully trained chef.”

“How do you know him?”

“I used to live in Kyoto several years ago. It’s a great city. Each time I visit, I feel inspired. It has a kind of special energy, and, of course, it’s one of the few cities that wasn’t bombed in the war. So there’s the new Kyoto, which is like any other modern city, and there’s also the old Kyoto, with its temples, traditional houses and geisha. It’s like going back in time a hundred years—like to the London of your beloved Sherlock Holmes, except that it’s Japanese!”

“Hey, Emoto!” Kiyoshi called out, seeing his friend waiting for us on the platform of Kyoto Station.

“It’s been a long time!” Emoto said as he greeted Kiyoshi, shaking his hand. There was a big smile on his face. “How are you?”

“Unfortunately,” Kiyoshi grinned, “I’m not very fine, but I’m glad to see you.” He introduced me to Emoto.

“Wow, you travel light!” Emoto said when he picked up our bags. He was quite tall, had neatly trimmed short hair, and seemed to have a pleasant, laid-back manner.

“Yeah. We just jumped on the train.”

“Well,” Emoto said, looking at Kiyoshi. “Your timing’s perfect. You’re just in time for the cherries.”

“The cherries?” replied Kiyoshi, looking confused. “Oh, yeah, it’s the cherry blossom season! Kazumi will be very happy.”

Besides its cherry blossoms, the city of Kyoto is famous for the way it was designed—in a grid, like a chessboard. Every street goes north–south or east–west, like New York. Emoto lived in Nishi-kyogoku, south-west of the city centre. As he drove us home, I gazed out at the city view. There were lots of neon signs and office buildings. Some parts of Kyoto looked just like Tokyo.

Emoto had a two-bedroom apartment. Apparently, Kiyoshi and I would be sharing a bedroom for the first time in our lives.

“We’ll be busy tomorrow. Let’s get some sleep,” said Kiyoshi, slipping into his futon.

Emoto’s voice came from behind the door. “Would you like to use my car?”

“No, thanks,” Kiyoshi replied, already under the blanket.

The next morning, we took a Hankyu Line train to Shijo-Kawaramachi, close to the address we had for Tamio Yasukawa.

“Yasukawa’s address is Rokkaku-agaru, Tominokoji. Do you know how they find a house from its address here in Kyoto?”

“Sorry, in case you’ve forgotten, I’m from Tokyo.”

“OK, a quick lesson, then. His house is on Tominokoji Street, which runs north–south. And Rokkaku runs east–west. Where the two streets cross is the location we’re looking for. ‘
Agaru
’ means the house is a little ‘up’ from Rokkaku—in other words, to the north.”

“Ah, I see.”

“It’s very simple and convenient.”

We got off the train and climbed the stairs. “Shijo-Kawaramachi is the busiest area of Kyoto. However, Kyoto lovers are in unanimous agreement it’s the second worst place in the city. The worst is Kyoto Tower.”

“How come?”

“Because it doesn’t match their image of Kyoto.”

True to his word, when we reached ground level we could only see modern buildings lining the streets. Obviously this was the new Kyoto. I wondered where the old Kyoto was.

Kiyoshi walked rapidly, and I followed. Crossing the busy street, we came to an avenue that ran along a narrow, shallow
stream. The water was amazingly clear, the stones at the bottom perfectly visible. Waterweed was gently dancing in the flow of the water, which was reflecting the beams of the morning sun. We certainly couldn’t find anything like that in Tokyo.

“This is the Takase River,” Kiyoshi said. “Really it’s a canal. Merchants dug it out to transport their cargo.” That was the extent of his explanation, as we continued walking. Before long, Kiyoshi came to an abrupt stop before a building.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“A Chinese restaurant. Let’s eat.”

As we ate, not much was said. We were both lost in thought. I was trying to imagine what Yasukawa’s life had been like. Since his name was mentioned in
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders
, no doubt he’d been plagued by uninvited visitors seeking interviews with him. He must have wanted peace and quiet. Sadly, the image of him I kept imagining was a lonely man who had lost himself in drink. No matter. My own interest was to prove that Heikichi Umezawa was alive—or at least had not been murdered.

Who knows what Kiyoshi was thinking.

When we finally got to Yasukawa’s address, Kiyoshi was perplexed. “This is Tominokoji… and that is Rokkaku… but something’s wrong. We can’t go any further; that’s a different street over there. This is the only apartment complex in this area. Perhaps he doesn’t live in an apartment…”

On the ground level there was a bar called the Butterfly. Our options being limited, we climbed the narrow stairs to the second floor where the apartments were. It was not the cleanest or newest of buildings. We examined the postboxes in the corridor; none bore the name of Yasukawa.

Kiyoshi was starting to look frustrated, but he quickly regained his usual composure as he knocked on the nearest door. There was no answer, so he tried the next door. No luck there, either.

“This is not good,” he said. “They probably think we’re door-to-door salesmen. Let’s try the other end of the hall.”

The tactic worked. When we knocked on the farthest door, a fat old woman answered.

“Excuse me, madam, we’re not selling anything. I wonder if you could help us,” Kiyoshi asked, his best manners on display. “We’re looking for an old gentleman by the name of Tamio Yasukawa. Does he live in this building?”

“Mr Yasukawa?… Let me think… Oh, yes, I remember him. He moved out a long time ago.”

Kiyoshi turned to me as if he already knew this.

“Oh, did he? Do you happen to know where he moved to?”

“I have no idea. Why don’t you ask the manager downstairs? His name is Okawa, but maybe he’s out now. He owns a bar in Kita-shirakawa. When he’s not here, he’s usually there.”

“What’s the bar’s name?”

“The White Butterfly.”

Kiyoshi thanked her, and we left. But, as she predicted, no one answered when we knocked on the door below.

“All right, let’s go to Kita-shirakawa and find Mr Okawa.”

As our bus headed towards the north of the city, many temples and old buildings came into sight. The view was so pretty that I began to picture what life would be like living in that area.

The bar was right next to the Kita-shirakawa bus stop. Before we could knock, a man opened the door.

“Excuse me, are you by any chance Mr Okawa?”

The man froze when he heard Kiyoshi’s voice and he looked at each of us in turn.

We explained the reason for our visit and asked our questions.

“Hmm… Let me see… Can I remember that far back?” he said, viewing us cautiously. “Maybe I have it in my records, but they’re in my apartment in Kawaramachi. Are you something to do with the police?”

Kiyoshi was as cool as could be. “Well,” he grinned, “what do we look like?”

“May I see your business card?”

I was a bit flustered by Okawa’s request, but Kiyoshi was on a roll. He knitted his brow and said to Okawa in a hushed voice, “To tell you the truth, Mr Okawa, we’re not allowed to present our business card to any civilian. I apologize. Have you heard of the Public Security Investigation Agency?”

“Um, yeah, I think I’ve heard of it…” mumbled Okawa. It was his turn to look nervous.

“Well…” Kiyoshi paused for a moment before continuing. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it, really. Please forget that I mentioned it at all. When can you find Mr Yasukawa’s current address?”

Okawa’s attitude was suddenly cooperative. “I have to go to Takatsuki now, but I’ll be right back. I’ll get his address by 5 p.m. Could you call me around that time? I’ll give you my number…”

“You were marvellous,” I whispered to Kiyoshi, as we walked back to the main street. “I didn’t know that you were a con man!”

“Oh, just common sense,” he responded casually. “Would a private eye reveal who he really was?”

His tactic had worked well, but I was anxious. We had four hours to kill—four hours that would be wasted. And it was already Friday the 6th.

We walked along the river until we came to a bridge with heavy traffic. I recognized a tall building; we were returning to Shijo-Kawaramachi, where we’d started the day’s activities. I was just thinking how good a cold drink would taste when Kiyoshi started talking.

“Something’s missing… And it’s probably something very, very simple,” he said, his eyes to the ground. “The case was grotesque and incomprehensible, but I have a hunch that it’s not so incomprehensible after all. When we uncover the missing link, we will understand the whole story. We may have to review the case from the beginning, especially the first half of it. Yes, I think it’s all about that one missing link. For forty years, detectives throughout Japan have been stymied. Well, I am one detective who will not give up!”