Masako Togawa - The Lady Killer

In the corner stood an old-fashioned iron bedstead, upon which a woman was lying. The housekeeper fetched a couple of wooden stools, which looked as if they were meant for children rather than adults, put them by the bed and invited the two men to sit on them with a silent gesture.

Shinji looked at Taneko, the wife of Ichiro Honda, for the first time. Although she was said to be under thirty, she looked like a sick woman in her forties. Was it his imagination that told him that the room was suffused with the smell of death, just like a cancer ward?

“Your husband has withdrawn his appeal,” said the old man in measured tones. The woman on the bed made no reply. She seemed to be quite insensible to their presence. The old woman bent over the bed and whispered something in the woman’s ear; there was no response, and she straightened up and shook her head at the two men.

The three of them gazed down at the sick woman; an invisible barrier seemed to separate her world from theirs. She lay without any sign of vitality, staring blankly at the ceiling, her blanket drawn up over her mouth. Only the whir of the air conditioner could be heard, marking the presence of reality and the passing of time. The minutes crept slowly by.

Eventually, Taneko moved a lifeless hand up toward her face, and the blanket slipped down to her throat. She stared at Shinji and the old man and laughed, but her face remained expressionless, giving her smile an eerie quality. And then Shinji saw it.

On the right base of her nose was a large mole, about the size of an azuki bean! The mole of which he had heard so much!

It sat upon her face like the symbol of some revealed sin; gazing at the black stain, he muttered to himself, “Why did no one tell me that Honda’s wife has a mole?”

Taneko stretched her hand toward the side table and slowly picked up a silver hand mirror. She gazed vacantly at her face in the mirror, and then slowly scooped up a handful of cold cream from the jar by the pillow and rubbed it over her cheek by the base of her nose. The mole began to blur and then finally vanished. What sort of a trick was this?

She then applied cream to her eyelids and dissolved the starchlike cosmetic that had given them a double-lidded form, reverting to narrow slits. The transformation complete, she replaced the mirror and lay back, her face once again a mask, hollow and unsmiling.

“So now you understand,” said the old woman to Hatanaka and Shinji. She picked up the pole and made the room dark again. Silently the two men followed her out into the garden. Shinji looked back for one last time, but Taneko had once again pulled the blanket up over her face and lay as still as a corpse.

Back in the entrance hall to the main house, the old woman handed a notebook to the old man.

“This is her memo book in which she used to write before she got into her present state,” she said. “You can see that it would be quite hopeless to conduct a handwriting test at present, so please use this as a sample of her handwriting. I feel sure that you will find that the writing matches that on the note by the Turkish bath girl. But you must promise me not to make this notebook public—not to anyone, not ever. If you won’t promise me that, I am going to throw it on the fire.”

“Was it you,” asked the old man, “who tore out the pages from the Huntsman’s Log—the first page and the entry on the key-punch operator?”

“Yes, it was me.”

“And was it you who put it in the apartment on the second floor of the house where Mitsuko Kosugi was killed?”

The old woman nodded. “The young mistress has gone beyond the reach of the law, and by doing what I have done my duty is now complete. I thought I ought to save Mr. Honda’s life, so I went up to Tokyo six weeks ago and left the diary where you found it.”

The old man smiled faintly as they took their leave.

Walking down the gentle paved slope that led to the station, Shinji was still stunned by the way things had turned out and said so. “I could have sworn it was the sister; how did you know?”

But the old man said nothing.

Suddenly, Shinji saw the pathos of the world. Going down the slope… on either side, modern houses with red-tiled roofs. Who knew what frugal lives were lived therein, what trifling quarrels took place? Banal and monotonous lives of everyday folk—what a contrast from the room from which he had just stepped! How real were they, the sick woman smelling of death and the man whose spirit had been broken in the condemned cell? Was it not all but a bad dream, occupying but one moment in this summer’s heat? He thought back to Yasue in the Turkish bath, to Tanikawa with his forced jollity in the chicken restaurant, to the medical student who always turned his back on him. How were these puppets in the curtained drama connected with that mad woman lying in bed, the blanket drawn over her face?

The old man hailed a taxi, and they got in.

But still …, thought Shinji.

Were not our experiences the same as those of Tiltil and Mytil, who found the bluebird at last in their own home? The woman with the mole, whom he had pursued so assiduously, had been in a cage all along.

Breaking into his reverie, Hatanaka spoke. “We’re not out of the woods yet. I can’t break my promise and use this notebook. We must find some other way to get the defendant out of jail.”

Saying which, he vigorously shook the notebook that had been written by Taneko Honda.

As I take up my pen, I feel rather strange. I remember the young journalist from the woman’s magazine who used to come every day after my husband’s arrest to ask me to write an article or give her an interview. My old maid never let her past the gate, but still she came every day for nearly three months.

But one day she stopped coming.

Oh well, an enthusiast like her probably got married or something!

Since she stopped calling at our gate every day, I won’t say that I didn’t become lonely, but nonetheless I must admit to being somewhat relieved. You see, I still had some unfinished business in Tokyo, and I wanted to be able to get away…

When the news of my husband’s arrest reached me, I was painting in my atelier.

The basic color of the painting was red.

What would my Chicago analyst, Dr. John Wells, have said if he could have seen it?

He’d have put it down to my repressed sexual urges again, I imagine.

It was the local policeman who came to inform me. He had a search warrant to go through my husband’s belongings. But he was quite perfunctory about it.

Maybe it was out of respect for my father. Or else they already had more than enough evidence to secure a conviction. Anyway, they didn’t disturb us too much.

It was the local police chief who looked into my atelier. He was very reserved about it and didn’t even notice the half-full bottle of chloroform that was in amongst my paints and turpentine. I wasn’t even trying to hide it—why bother? Their attitude toward me was one of sympathy mixed with curiosity…

They took it for granted that I was distraught at the discovery that my husband was a murderer with perverse tastes. That suited me very well; I hardly had to act at all; all I had to do was lie on my bed pretending to be a woman struck speechless by shock.

After all, that’s the way the relatives of criminals are, isn’t it? The worse the crime, the more they try to bury themselves away from ordinary human society. That suited me very well.

My worst fear was the press. What if they took my photograph? But, perhaps out of sympathy for me as the innocent victim of my husband’s crimes, they were tasteful enough to leave me alone. Some of the gutter-press tried to get my photo, but I foiled them by staying indoors. So the only photos that were published were of me when I was twenty and striking dramatic poses during my short career as an actress, or else of me as a high school girl wearing a sailor suit, my hair in pigtails. So that was all right—no way in which I could be recognized.