Masako Togawa - The Lady Killer

But her usefulness was past. Now I must take the law into my own hands, and she could prove an obstacle. She knew too much. So I suggested that she should move out of her apartment and take another in her sister’s name. She had to vanish for good; I had to become Tsuneko Obana, and then I would acquire the fullest motive for revenge upon my husband.

Dr. John Wells would have attributed my lust for revenge against my husband to repressed sexual desire, I suppose. Those psychiatrists have one-track minds…

I set my trap with the semen I took from those men and the Rh-negative blood I stole from the cosmetics salesman in the inn, whom I chloroformed first. I also used chloroform on my victims so that they did not resist when I strangled them.

The woman in Kinshicho. She was just a sort of hors d’oeuvre to begin the process of terror on my husband. So there was no need to leave blood under her fingernails.

In the case of Fusako Aikawa in Koenji, I chloroformed my husband as he lay sleeping at my side and took his blood. I was worried about that blood, because it coagulated in the test tube on the way to Tokyo, even though I had packed it in dry ice. Would it fool them? I could but try.

Well, I went to visit Fusako Aikawa, but before I could make my escape, my husband turned up! I hid in the closet until he left, but my heart was freezing with terror. However, it was all right in the end, but I had to make a quick getaway just in case he called the police.

As for Mitsuko Kosugi, she was in my pay all along. She didn’t mind kissing my husband at Tokyo Tower, prudish little girl that she was, because she knew that I was watching. I had to confront my husband, invisibly, as it were, to terrify him the more. Did it work, I wonder? But I doubt if she ever had sex with him; she wasn’t the type. She had to die anyhow, poor girl.

The trick with the blade in the wardrobe; now that was neat. It drew blood, just as I intended, though I thought there was no better than a one-in-ten chance. Frankly, when I saw how well it worked, I was a bit scared. Was there not some other invisible hand moving me in my pursuit of revenge?

All that I did thus became a sort of ceremony, one that I had to perform regardless of whether it worked or not. Killing three or four people thus became nothing to me; my psychology knew no limitation.

So much for Dr. John Wells and his comfortable theories. He can forget his statistics, forget about suppressed sexual drives. What do people like him know?

November 5.

At the Minami apartment in Kinshicho.

I waited for two hours in my car.

At three a.m. I was ready. I put on a mask, the kind one wears when one has a cold, and got out of the car. Even though I had looked the place over by daytime, I still stumbled over the lumber stacked in the lane.

She woke up when I went in, but was still half-asleep. Her eyes were swollen and there was saliva around her mouth.

“I want to talk about Sobra,” I said. She just rolled over and turned her back to me.

I pressed the chloroform-soaked handkerchief to her nose; the liquid ran down my right hand.

A little struggle, and she was unconscious.

I stripped her naked and produced a syringe without a needle.

As I slipped it between her thighs and began to inject the semen, suddenly I began a convulsive spasm.

A chill of death settled over the room. I buried my fingernails in her body. The room smelt of chestnut flowers.

I passed the drawstring of her sleeping gown around her neck.

Somewhere, my husband, too, was bending over the body of a victim.

As I drew the drawstring tight, I got another convulsion.

The power of my hands… I pulled with all my might.

Her face turned purple. It was done. I lost consciousness for a while…

My husband’s hunting days were limited to Tuesdays and Thursdays, I found.

After the first time, it was easy. I, a passive woman who normally trembles with fear at the slightest thing, drew closer and closer to my victims.

Why am I writing this? I began to want to do it when I heard that my husband had been sentenced to death.

That woman student I hired—she did her job well. She set up her canvas at the museum to lure my husband as I suggested, and it worked. At Tokyo Tower, she was my decoy; she knew that I was watching from the shadows and was not afraid to kiss him. She summoned him to her room late at night; she was not afraid, for I told her that I would be there.

She had to die, poor, blameless thing. At the very least my husband deserves to die for the murder of that innocent woman. For husband and wife are one, are they not? So it really doesn’t matter if he, my better half, goes to the gallows in my place.

Today, my father phoned to say that the bed in the hospital is now ready for me. By tomorrow, I’ll be in the hospital. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow… all those mornings, I will awake in a hospital bed. It’s my destiny.

And some day, perhaps when I am long gone, this atelier will be torn down. They will rip up the concrete foundations, and what will they find? Human bones; no more, I daresay. And certainly the mole will have vanished in the decomposition. Nothing to identify Tsuneko Obana by. Unless science has made progress by then; perhaps they will detect the aftermath of a mole. Tsuneko Obana. I had to do it. I had to become her.

But all that is in the future.

Today, I know that I am going farther and farther away from myself, drawn by those invisible powers that have controlled me more and more of late. Those sounds in my head—how I wish they would go away! Perhaps they can do something about it in the hospital. If a policeman came to question me today, I know that I could give him no answer.

And talking of the future, what does it hold in store for me? Today I am all skin and bones, but in ten or twenty years’ time it will be different. I shall be a fat nymphomaniac lying in a hospital bed, eating chocolates or my own excretur—what does it matter? In the corner of the psychiatric ward, I will be known as the woman who winds her drawstring around the bedstead and pulls with all her might.

Nearly 4 p.m. Time for me to become Tsuneko Obana again.

I get my makeup box. With skill I fix my eyes; there, nobody will recognize my face now! Carefully I brush black ink onto the base of my nose.

Inside my head, as persistent as a sutra, I hear Tsuneko Obana’s monologue:

“Silly, silly little girl. Don’t say you cried in his arms; don’t tell me that you were crushed under his body…”

Shinji closed the notebook and gazed at the old man, who was impassively smoking his cigar.

“It will take time, of course,” Hatanaka said, “but that should be enough.”

“But can you use it? Your promise…”

“From which I regard myself as being released. That old housekeeper hanged herself after we left. I half expected it; do you remember what she said? ‘My duty is now complete.’ Well, that feudal type, you know it can only mean one thing. A pity not more Japanese are like her nowadays.”

“And you did not try to stop her?”

“Ah well, you are so young, you see. You modern people; I wonder if in time you will become real Japanese again! No. To frustrate the loyalty of a retainer is a sin for which one should burn in hell! She wrote a note to me, however: ‘Everything is now in your hands.’

“And the wife is now in a mental home, of course. Non compos mentis —and this notebook proves it. They can never bring her to trial—if they try, I will take great pleasure in defending her. They doubt if she will ever recover her physical strength, too.”

The old man blew a smoke ring, and suddenly Shinji was reconciled to the grinding routines of the law. To work for such a man, and someday, perhaps, to become like him…