Masako Togawa - The Lady Killer

“Take us somewhere where we can get a good night’s sleep,” he said to the driver. His voice sounded exhausted, almost monotonous.

“Yes, sir. Western or Japanese style?” The driver plunged dangerously into the traffic. Perhaps she heard the exchange between her partner and the taxi driver, perhaps she did not. She lay motionless in his arms, her eyes tightly closed.

She was hanging on to the windowsill with her hands but her mind was elsewhere, remembering her encounter at the bar six months ago. A cold breeze chilled her bare feet.

I don’t regret having slept with him , she thought. For in her daily life, which had come to seem like hell to her, that one encounter stood alone, a perfect experience.

She hung against the rough concrete wall; it pressed hard on her nose, her cheeks, her small breasts, and her swelling belly, all the way down to her knees. As each moment passed, her body seemed to pull more heavily on her skinny arms. Once her arms could no longer take her weight, once her already numb fingers gave way to the strain, she would let go and fall from this seventh-floor window. Only a little more patience was needed—perhaps two minutes, perhaps three…

She wondered why the man with the deep voice had withdrawn from her life after that one encounter. And yet she felt no grudge against him for it; rather, she was grateful, for into her short, gray life he had brought the only light ever to shine on it.

He was not responsible for the growing pain in my ring finger , she thought. And every evening, when dusk falls, it seems as if the right half of my body belongs to someone else. But he is not to blame for that, either . It was tapping those keys, thousands of times a day, which was responsible, not the man. I owe it to him that I was able to bear to live for another six months , she thought. Memories of his voice gave me the will to carry on. I could survive the ringing in my head, like an amplified motorcycle, because of that voice that seemed to put cotton wool into my inner ears, blocking out the sound. The bass voice overwhelmed me, body and soul. But why did he plant his seed in me and then go away? To this last question she had no ready answer.

She felt the child stir in her belly. Was it this power inside her that was so oppressive, she wondered, or was it the pressure of the wall?

Her arms were now completely numb. If only she could see him in her mind’s eye again, hear his voice, then perhaps she could endure the torture for a little longer. But try as she would, he was gone, and his image was lost to her. Instead, inside her head she heard those other sounds begin again, faintly at first, like the droning of a swarm of midges. And her vision was restricted to the coarse concrete wall.

Suddenly, for the first time she felt terror: the surge of fear of her impending extinction. Frantically, she tried to grip the windowsill more tightly, but it was no good; her fingers had lost all sensation. Her arms were numb, too, her shoulders dead. The chill wind blew up under her dress, freezing her lower parts into insensitivity. One by one, her fingers let go of the sill.

Now that romantic encounter at the bar with the man with the rich bass voice was forgotten. Forgotten, too, the nagging presence in her belly. In those last moments, she was wafted back to her primary school days, when she had hung from the beam, trying to chin herself yet again, every muscle in her body aching. How long every second had seemed then, how long now…

Last of all, the callused finger that should one day have worn a wedding ring slipped and lost its grip. All contact with reality lost, she plunged to the earth below.

The shattered body of Keiko Obana, aged nineteen, a key-punch operator working for the K Life Insurance Company, was found by the side of the building by a security guard working for that company just after 1 p.m. on Adults’ Day, January 15, a public holiday.

Was it suicide? Or was it, perhaps, murder? There was much discussion until the police announced their conclusion. After the autopsy they declared that it was suicide caused by neurosis. They found that her ring finger exhibited a mild case of tendonitis, the occupational disease of key-punch operators.

The evidence of the security guard was that, although it was a holiday, he had let Keiko Obana into her office as she had said that she wanted to copy some sheet music for her choral group. The official view of the company was naturally to deny the possibility of suicide, for there was no sign of a suicide note. The room had been sprayed with a strong insecticide shortly before; Keiko must have tried to open the window, they reasoned, and had fallen to her death.

However, the police had two reasons for determining that this was a case of suicide. Firstly, there were the marks on the windowsill, which clearly showed that she had hung from it before falling.

And secondly, there was evidence that was not made public. At the time of her death, she was six months pregnant.

Although that would have convinced everybody that the police were right, not a word was allowed to leak to the press on this point. This decision was made by the section chief in the local police station who was in charge of the Keiko Obana case. He did so on grounds of delicacy, and the only person to whom he revealed the fact of Keiko’s pregnancy was the sole surviving relative, her elder sister, when she came to receive the body.

“Did she have a fiancé or anything like that?” he asked in a roundabout sort of way. The sister sat opposite him, wringing her handkerchief between her hands.

“No, not that I was aware of. She never said anything about getting married. She never even mentioned a boyfriend. Of course, she may have kept silent out of deference to me; I am still single, you see. But… you know, she was still very much like a child.”

The sister looked up at the police officer dubiously.

“You were like a mother to her, were you not?”

“Yes. Both our parents were killed by the atom bomb at Hiroshima. I brought her up and supported her from my income as a dressmaker. She fully understood how hard it was for me, and always did her best not to cause me any worry. And I think she always told me everything.”

The elder sister, Tsuneko Obana, was a spinsterish type, simply dressed, with no makeup, and her hair drawn back in a bun. There was something faintly erotic about her double-lidded eyes, but otherwise she seemed to have no more than a stoic personality. She sat with her head inclined downward and seemed overcome with grief at her sudden bereavement.

To lose one’s only sister in this way was indeed tragic, thought the inspector, and he tried to temper his questions as far as possible.

“Did you notice anything special about her?”

“What do you mean? Is there something I should know?” She looked at him uncertainly.

“Well, for instance, did she occasionally stay out all night?”

“Oh, no, never… but yes, once only. She came home in the morning and said that she had missed the last train and had spent the night at an all-night café with a friend.”

“About when would that have been?”

“Well, let me see… about six months ago, I think it was. But does that have any bearing…?”

“Well, yes, I’m afraid it does. I’m sorry to have to tell you this but your sister was pregnant.”

The sister’s eyes almost popped out of her head with shock. “I can’t believe it,” was all she could say.

“Yes. She was, in fact, six months pregnant. I think the worry made her kill herself.”

Tsuneko Obana burst into tears. The inspector averted his eyes; it had been hard for him, but he felt he had to tell her. He gazed out of the window. If Keiko had been a respectable young woman, as seemed to have been the case, if she was a girl with no boyfriends who came home every night, then on that night she spent in the all-night café she must have been seduced by a gangster or some such person. There were only too many such cases of which he was aware. Normally, they were about as emotional as traffic accidents, but in this case the girl had killed herself. What could he say to soothe the sister now that the truth was out? Nothing. He turned his gaze back upon the sister.