Masako Togawa - The Master Key

A deep red glow could be seen in Noriko’s window. Suwa had remained icy calm throughout the preparation and execution of her plan, but now for the first time she felt her flesh creep. She rushed out of the toilet and, reaching the landing of the floor above, tried to shout ‘Fire! Fire!’ with all her might, but her vocal chords seemed paralysed.

Just at that moment, she tripped over a small, round black object, and the shock overcame her paralysis. The cat, for such it was, reared up and hissed before escaping. Suwa beat at the nearest door to hand and then, hearing screams from a room down the passage, turned and fled back to her own room as if in a trance. Her teeth chattered, and she had lost control of her senses. She threw herself down and burrowed between her bed-covers without bothering to undress. After a minute or so she heard a siren approaching in the distance. She covered her head with the pillow and remained, trembling, in her bed.

After an hour, the red dawn light filtered into her room through the window. She heard the bustle subside and the last fire engine drive away in the street below, its bell still ringing. But still the building echoed with the coming and going of many feet.

She put on a coat and made her way to the confusion that raged on the floor above.

The corridor outside Noriko Ishiyama’s room was crowded by other residents of the building, many of them from other floors who were already dressed to go to work. A small group was standing outside Noriko’s room, peering in. The floor of the passage was covered with the drenched ashes of burned quilts and clothing. Everywhere there was the stench of scorched cloth and cardboard.

The interior of Noriko’s room was a swamp of burnt rubbish, on top of which, here and there, an empty milk bottle floated. The walls and ceiling were coated with small scraps of charred cardboard. Suwa peered over the shoulders of the crowd, dreading what she might see But there was no sign of a burnt corpse, nor was there any trace of a violin case.

‘They took her away in an ambulance,’ said someone knowingly. ‘She slept in the cupboard, you know, so she was very badly burned before they could get her out. The whole room was full of old paper, and it went up like a bonfire. The firemen said that it’s sheer madness to use a pot-bellied stove in such conditions—it’s bound to lead to a fire in the long run.’

It seemed that no one suspected the real cause of the fire. Suwa went back to her room. But it was a long time before she could overcome her dread of a sudden call by the police. She stayed behind locked doors, and gradually her pupils ceased to come.

Noriko Ishiyama’s life was saved, but she spent a long time in hospital. Miss Tamura opined that she would have to spend the rest of her days in an old people’s home.

Suwa Yatabe abandoned all hope of ever seeing the Guarnerius again.

The violin case lay under the pile of ashes in the incinerator, just as Noriko had left it. From time to time, people kindled fires above it, never dreaming that it was there.

That morning, as was her unvaried custom, Yoneko Kimura left her room at precisely ten-thirty, holding a letter and fifty yen in cash.

When she had first retired from her post as a teacher of the Japanese language at the Takebayashi Girls’ School, she hadn’t known what to do with the time which suddenly hung so heavily on her hands. After a while, she began to devise ways of occupying herself.

At first, she used to go out at eight-thirty am, just as in the old days of her employment, and stroll to Ikebukuro. Once there, she would visit the cinema at the specially reduced price for the morning show and then wander around one or other of the department stores. This certainly killed time, but after a short while she had to give up this routine for two reasons.

First of all, it cost money—more than she could really afford. She had to pay to go into the cinema, and after window-shopping in the department store she would buy some hot sweet drink or other to restore her energy, or to prevent her throat from drying. (In reality, she was really fond of such drinks, and so these pretexts were rationalisation.)

Then in addition, mixing with the busy crowds brought home to her more than ever her real sense of loneliness. It even seemed better to stay in her little concrete cell of a room, contemplating whatever the future might have in store for her, and for a while she tried that. At least she could give her imagination free rein, and at least it was better than sitting on the department store benches by the urns where green tea was served free, and where she suffered the pangs of looking about her at the other old women of her age who also gathered in such places.

After confining herself to her room for a month, she became listless and lost her appetite, and so took to going out again just for the sake of the exercise. This time, she went in the opposite direction from Ikebukuro. She felt like a convalescent after a long illness, viewing the outside world with a fresh vision. Every few hundred yards along the way there was a red postbox; these became landmarks of her daily voyage, identifying for her the distance she had gone and how far she still had to go. And so it came about that day after day she would, almost subconsciously, take in the presence of the postboxes… until one day a thought suddenly struck her.

After all, postboxes were not just set up along the road as landmarks or as milestones. Why shouldn’t she use them for their proper purpose? Why not write letters to people?

Going back to her room, she opened her closet and got out the old graduation magazines from her former school. They made a heavy pile on her desk.

Her former pupils were almost too numerous to count. She determined to write to each in turn, one per day, starting with the earliest ones and working through them in alphabetical order. It wouldn’t matter if she got no replies.

And in that instant of decision, the purposeless emptiness of her recent existence fell away and she felt a deep sense of satisfaction as she thought of the task which would occupy the hours and days ahead.

Thenceforth, not a day passed but she wrote a letter to one of her former pupils. Generally, she wrote in the evening, spending about four and a half hours on the task. When the letter was complete, she would fold it carefully and put it in the addressed envelope, but she would not stamp it. She would leave it on her desk and go to bed. She got a particular satisfaction from once again employing the skills of her former profession, taking the due care in composition to be expected of a teacher of Japanese.

When she got up the next morning, she never re-read the letter. She would instead open the graduation list and underline the name of her latest addressee in red ink, and number it in sequence. This businesslike procedure gave her the satisfaction and security of routine. Then she would set out on her morning walk. She would stop at the small tobacconist at Otsuka Nakamachi and buy twenty Shinsei cigarettes and a ten-yen stamp. She would then stamp the letter and post it in a different box every day; the box, too, was predetermined according to the order of its position along her route. As for the rest of her day, it was spent in her room, so that her life was structured by the actions of writing and posting her daily letters. Her mind was concentrated, each new day, upon the former pupil to whom she was writing. First she would repeat the name of the girl over and over again until the image of her arose in her mind like a bubble of gas long trapped at the bottom of a swamp. At that instant, she could once more see her correspondent as she had been all those years ago, and remember everything about her clearly in her mind.