Masako Togawa - The Master Key

I can’t put up with such treatment. I feel as if the pride and spirit of the human race is being trampled on. However amusing the upshot might be, it’s worth remembering that some human is seeing his important plans crumble before his very eyes.

Well, this present case has been so thoroughly reported in the press, on the radio and in the periodicals that I daresay everyone knows all the details backwards.

Briefly, it was like this. A retired woman with time on her hands was living in the K Apartments for Ladies, a place with some history behind it. Having nothing better to do, she took to writing to all her former pupils, and found that one of them had married a foreigner and had her child kidnapped seven years back and never seen again. And this old teacher suddenly rushes out, at the very moment the building is to be moved, shouting out that the body is buried under the bath. And so they dig up the bath in the basement, and what do they find but a body of a child, just as she said! But, and here’s what caused all the excitement, it wasn’t the body of the kidnapped child at all! It turned out to be the child of a resident of the apartments. He was born deformed so she couldn’t bear to bring him up and killed him and buried him!

The mother committed suicide; the old teacher who discovered all this was held by the police for enquiries because she had made unlawful use of the master key; and the celebrated priest and founder of a new mystic religion who had prophesied about the buried child was exposed as a fraud. So you can imagine what a field day the papers and so forth had!

There’s no longer any doubt in my mind that the press, in spreading news, takes no account of the bare facts but rather prefers to call everything in question by means of irresponsible reporting. Maybe the gossip of housewives at the laundry, or of strap-hangers in the trams, is true as far as it goes but it doesn’t go beyond the surface or get at the real truth behind the facts.

Nonetheless, there was a lot of coincidence involved—what I referred to as ‘tricks of fate’ earlier. In setting forth this record for future readers, I want to go beyond the different coincidences and their final result. I want to look at what various human beings planned, and what came about as a result.

What follows is in its own way a tiny saga.

The tale begins thirty years ago. A young girl, raised on a farm in Hyogo prefecture, went to Kobe at the age of eighteen and worked as a housemaid in the home of a Christian missionary. By an irony of fate, at the age of twenty-five, instead of marrying a young man, she settled down as receptionist-manageress of an apartment block full of young women. Day in and day out she sat at the front desk, dreaming her dreams, and determined to better herself. She would watch the young ladies of her own age going out to their work, and she would secretly read and read—several books a day, sometimes, keeping them hidden on her knee under the desk. Well, the whole of human life is contained in books. Love, desire, success and failure, death and grief… they’re all there, in the world of books.

So she went on sitting at that desk, and her straight little back gradually began to bend a bit, but still she went on reading books and fed and nourished her mind in that way. And one day, before she had time to notice what had happened, she woke up to find that she was forty years old. Suddenly, the shadow of tragedy passed over her at that moment—she didn’t know why it was so, but she felt it, and that’s what matters.

Apart from her, there was one other receptionist, who was over the regulated age for the job. Just at that very time, the old receptionist suddenly died. The heroine of our story, if we can call her that, was left to clear up the old woman’s room and discovered something she had never suspected. You see, there was only supposed to be one master key, but the receptionist who died had a spare. It then became clear to the younger receptionist that her senior had used it to steal into the residents’ apartments and snoop around. It had become her secret pleasure to spy on the residents when they were out. And, after a year or so, our heroine became addicted to the same perverse pleasure. But she was cleverer and more cautious than her predecessor, and one day, when she slipped on the staircase and twisted her ankle, she feigned lameness even when her foot was better and thereafter went everywhere on crutches. So everyone thought she really was lame.

One more thing contributed to the success of her activities. The new receptionist who joined after the old one died was an amiable body who had the habit of catnapping.

Well, our heroine had one other trick up her sleeve to ensure that she could wander around the apartments at will without attracting too much attention. This was to take on a dual identity and become a resident, at least to outward appearances. During the years she had worked there, at least half the residents had changed. So she chose a vacant room next door to people who didn’t talk too much to strangers, and created for herself a second personality. It was quite easy to do, when you think of it, because all the necessary procedures for creating this new identity lay within her purview as receptionist. The apartment was confiscated during the war as enemy property; afterwards, it became a charitable trust and the rents were pegged at wartime levels so our receptionist found it quite easy to maintain her double life.

Well, over a period of years, she got to know the secrets of every room, and thus of every resident. Within their thick walls, and behind their strong doors, what a sedimentation of life those rooms contained! Most people would have broken under the weight of such knowledge, but our heroine was versed in the ways of life from her reading and so she could withstand the pressures of her secret knowledge.

One night, she was in the basement when she saw two women burying a heavy brown leather case in the bottom of the broken tiled bath. They were a resident of the fifth floor and a girl entered in the visitors’ register as her younger cousin. Just at that time, the kidnapping of a mixed-blood child became a major topic in the press. Our sagacious heroine was quick to link all these facts and draw her own conclusions. But she kept it all a secret—without realising in what good stead this would stand her seven years later.

Well, she had a younger brother whom she hadn’t seen for years. One day, he suddenly appeared, and announced that he was going to found a new religious order together with the Thumbelina vestal. He said he’d studied spiritualism in America, but our heroine didn’t believe him for one moment. He was the type who always made a botch of whatever he did. He’d had great ambitions as a boy, but everything had somehow gone wrong. She felt for him the love one can only feel for a close blood relative.

She thought how she could make use of all the secrets she had discovered whilst living her double life, by passing them on to her brother. It may well have been the temptation of the devil.

By now, I am sure that the reader understands that I am that receptionist, the ‘heroine’ of our story as I called her above.

The breaches of the trust inherent in my job, the immoral actions, or, let’s not beat about the bush, the crimes which followed should be seen against the background of my sisterly love. You readers who have grown up in happy homes will not be able to understand the feelings of someone like me who, after living alone for so long, suddenly encounters a chance of escape from this solitude. You will not therefore understand that in such circumstances one is prepared to give up everything rather than lose that chance. All I wanted to do was something, or rather anything, which would help my brother.