Masako Togawa - The Lady Killer

So, one day, when our separation had gone on for six months (and it was my idea originally; I thought that if we were together every night, the torture would be too much), I was overcome by a sudden desire to see him. I got into my Mercedes and set off for Tokyo without ado. All those six hundred kilometers on the road I was in a dream.

It was almost dawn when I got to the Toyo Hotel, where he was staying. It was still winter, and outside it was cold and dark. I parked in front of the hotel and switched off the headlamps. I sat and finished my cigarette, looking at the hotel; later, when it was not too early, I would go in. And then suddenly I saw a familiar figure getting out of a taxi; surely it couldn’t be… but yes, it was my husband.

He paid his fare; his face was expressionless under the lamplight. And somehow, looking at him, I saw about him a dark shadow, suggestive of tiredness after secret lovemaking. Why didn’t I follow him immediately and accost him? I still don’t know.

If only he had come back ten minutes earlier! Or later, when I was more composed and could have approached him; we would have had our customarily meaningless chat; a cup of tea together, and I would have said goodbye.

After all, there’s no contending with fate, I know that. It was fate, wasn’t it, which brought me there at that precise time, to turn out the headlights and find myself in a position just overlooking the entrance to the hotel at the moment that he came back.

I stayed in the car, my coat collar turned up, rubbing my feet together to keep them warm. At that sort of hour, if one has something on one’s mind, you go into a sort of trance without sleeping. I wonder why.

The sun came up, and the first car in the lot had its engine started, clouds of white exhaust filling the icy air. Finally, I could bring myself to move, and I drove back to Osaka without taking any sleep on the way.

That weekend, my husband came back as usual. I greeted him as if nothing had happened, and we spent our usual weekend together. I made no attempt to cross-examine him or catch him out.

For the next two weeks, I resolutely closed my mind to what I had seen and immersed myself in my painting. Even if my husband did have a mistress, I thought, it was my duty to forgive him. But nonetheless I could not resist the temptation, and two weeks later I drove up to Tokyo again.

This time, I arrived in Yokohama about noon and parked my car at a hotel near the seafront, one which usually has a lot of foreign guests. Then I rented an inconspicuous car; I had decided, against the voice of reason, to spy on my husband.

Words are not enough for me to explain the bottomless sense of humiliation and despair that crept over me when I saw the Huntsman’s Log at my husband’s hideout at Yotsuya.

I wish I had never found the key to that apartment in his jacket pocket. I wish I had not had my maid get a spare key made. I wish I had not followed him there…

It would have been much better for me to have known nothing.

It wasn’t all his different women who made me feel that I could not forgive my husband. About those victims I did not particularly care. I could not forgive him because he had listed me as his first victim. And I could not forgive him because he was not afraid to make any of those other women pregnant.

This was how he described what to me was a most precious night, the first night we made love, in the summer holidays:

“It was cramped in the car, but I enjoyed the unnatural posture this forced upon our lovemaking. Her pants off, her skirt pulled up, one leg over the back of the front seat. It made her body tight to enter, which was extra pleasure. Good breasts; she pulled her sweater up, and I did not bother to remove her bra, but pulled it down (though later she took it off herself) and I could see them in the moonlight as I worked on her. Later, she turned over, and asked me to enter her from the back, which I did. Used her mouth on me, too.

“I had invested all my earnings from my part-time job in that old Chevrolet, and this experience made the investment fully worthwhile.

“Keen on foreplay, and definitely not a virgin.”

Was that how he saw our tender and romantic congress? And what did he mean by saying “not a virgin”? I had never known any man before.

A few months later, I read of the suicide of the key-punch operator who was one of the victims described in his diary.

I went to her sister, Tsuneko Obana, at her apartment in Omori. The reason was that I wanted to make sure that my suspicions about the cause of the suicide were correct.

I think it was seeing the mole on her nose that made me decide to plot against my husband. That kind of defect attracts one’s attention, even though one feels sorry for the person who has it. As she spoke, her anger was obvious; those eyes of hers glared through her double eyelids.

“My sister was just a stupid girl. But the man who caused her doom… he wasn’t stupid, and I can never forgive him, never, never.”

How I envied her then; she had such a clear motive for revenge against my husband. I began to wish to change myself into her, to savor the sweetness of revenge.

I had had some cards printed that passed me off as a correspondent for a women’s magazine. She was a simple and straitlaced woman, so it was easy for me to deceive her. I offered her money to write an article on her sister’s death, and I also suggested that with my cooperation she could track down the man responsible.

“Do you really think we could?” She looked at me anxiously as she said this, but I was in no doubt as to her hatred for my husband. So she ended up accepting my offer. Of course, I told her to tell no one about me, because this would get me into trouble with my magazine, particularly if some other magazine got wind of our project and stole it.

Based on the diary of her sister, I suggested that she go to the bar Boi and trace the man who had sung with her. Everything went without a hitch; it all seemed too easy. She trusted me completely and did exactly what I said. Everything she found out she wrote down and gave to me.

But still I was not satisfied. Indeed, the more our plan succeeded, the more irritated I became. I was getting jealous of this woman; somehow, her activities seemed to create a relationship between her and my husband. Of course, really I was at this time beginning to think abnormally. Jealousy is a powerful thing. And my lust for sex is so strong.

So gradually, deep down inside myself, I began to wish that I could become Tsuneko Obana and partake of her longing for revenge against my husband.

And the semen. That was a good idea of mine, I think. You may say that it only amounted to circumstantial evidence, but think of it this way. If, by any chance, my husband was able to clear himself despite my efforts, at least the police would not turn their attention toward me or Tsuneko Obana, for how could women produce semen?

And when I started to collect semen from those men, it became central to the meaning of my life. Women, after all, are creatures who take semen from men… and my husband would give me none. So it was poetic justice, in a way… I was punishing my husband for not giving me the semen that is a woman’s right…

But was I really punishing my husband; was that all? Maybe it was just an excuse to collect semen.

And the blood. Leaving blood of my husband’s group under the nails of my victims—that was clever, wasn’t it?

Well, my urges became stronger and stronger, and so did my jealousy of Tsuneko Obana. I led her on, used her as a puppet; she did everything I wanted, but even that did not give me full pleasure. I sent her to A.M.U. to check the blood type, which of course I knew perfectly well all along. I got her to phone the Toyo Hotel with an assumed voice. Poor cat’s-paw; she thought she was discovering things, which were perfectly well known to me all along. And just in case anyone ever checked up, it would be the woman with the mole that they would hunt.