Fuminori Nakamura - Last Winter We Parted

She casually mentioned how attractive the opposite sex seemed to find her. The suggestion made him gradually start to look at her lustfully. Yuriko Kobayashi was definitely beautiful. It was easy to seduce a starving man. Akari was beautiful too, but she was also a terrifying woman. If Yuriko’s life hadn’t been shackled by her debts, she might have ruined quite a number of men herself.

At the beginning of January, we had her start keeping a diary. A diary that portrayed her as an ordinary housewife. An ordinary housewife who wouldn’t give up on her dream of becoming a model. We had her write that she might be being followed. And then the day after she started staying at Yudai Kiharazaka’s house, we had her temporarily stop writing in her diary.

We had her do the same thing on Twitter. On Twitter, she hid the fact that she was a housewife, pretending that she was just a woman who worked as a model. As if she were living out her fantasy life in a virtual world. As if just by looking at her diary and Twitter account, however ordinary she may seem, you could tell how likable she was. Then she suddenly stopped tweeting after she started staying at Yudai Kiharazaka’s house. And we made a point of sending her all the way to Chiba once, and had her shut off her cell phone there.

All of these things come from the lawyer’s madness and my own. We were both morbidly and relentlessly fixated on the details.

At the place where she had worked in the sex trade, of course she had used a false name. Since she hadn’t borrowed any money from that place itself, she was able to tell them she was taking a leave of absence. The lawyer and I took over the monthly payments on her debts. She read many of the books that I recommended. We talked about lots of stuff other than the plan. I figured we ought to know at least some things about each other.

About four days after she started staying at Kiharazaka’s house, I went to talk to the police. Once before, she was gone for about a week without any contact. She can be a little emotionally unstable. If she knew that I had gone to the police, she’d be angry with me. That’s why I wasn’t sure whether or not to file a missing person’s report. Yet I can’t help but worry …

The police asked me if there was any sign that she was with another man. I acted flustered. It was probably true, but I didn’t want to think so, nor could I believe it … The police said, rather perfunctorily, that if I wanted to file a missing person’s report I needed to say so, and I pretended to be at a loss and went home, only to return two days later with a photo of her when I filed the report. Being that it wasn’t a criminal case and was most likely a disappearance involving an extramarital affair, I knew that the police wouldn’t take it seriously. It’s only after an incident has occurred that police in Japan start doing anything in earnest. Despite how many women are murdered by stalkers they have reported beforehand, the police still haven’t changed the way they respond.

Nevertheless, even when they made a serious effort, I doubted they’d be able to make the connection between Yudai Kiharazaka and my “wife.” She still had with her the diary that would later become evidence, and her husband — me — wasn’t supposed to know that she had starting using Twitter. Even when they investigated her cell phone records, all they could see was that her phone had been turned off somewhere outside of Tokyo. Anyway that would fall under the jurisdiction of the Chiba police, not the Tokyo Metropolitan police department.

Yuriko Kobayashi was playing a dangerous game. But she had no choice other than to go along with our scheme. Here before her was the chance to escape a life in the sex trade, drowning in debt, for a life where she might attain a certain degree of affluence. Akari Kiharazaka didn’t have a driver’s license or a passport. The only things that could prove her identity were her insurance card and her pension account book, along with the sort of certificate of residence that was archived in the local government office. None of these included a head-shot. As long as Kobayashi had Akari’s insurance card and her pension account book, she could request an official copy of her family register from the municipal office where her permanent residence is as if it were her own, and with a copy of her resident card she could then apply for and receive a passport with a photo of herself attached. Why is it that insurance cards in Japan don’t have photos? Or why don’t they require people to carry a photo ID? Wouldn’t it be a good strategy for the auto industry if a driver’s license became the typical form of identification? I don’t know, but it seems like there are a number of major loopholes like this in the system here in Japan. But then again, even with a photo attached, any number of documents can be forged. And if Yuriko Kobayashi were to die, her debts would be discharged, and she could go on living as Akari Kiharazaka. I was never really worried, despite the fact that I was now her husband, because even though it was a personal loan from a gangster, I wasn’t a cosigner, and what’s more, it was an illegal contract to start with, so there wouldn’t be any obligation to pay it. Because of the kind of person Akari was, she didn’t have any friends. And since she lived off of her inheritance, she didn’t have a job either. She was a woman on her own in Tokyo, a woman who occasionally lured a man into her solitary life. I often wondered, if she were to disappear, would anyone other than her brother Yudai even notice? I knew that the PIN number for her ATM card was 0789, and that the one for her credit card was 2289. Yuriko Kobayashi would be able to assume her identity and live her life indefinitely. After the incident, she could go into hiding to avoid the media, while providing her “brother” with that lawyer and leaving Yudai Kiharazaka to take the brunt of it all. Later, when the time was right, she could get a passport and disappear to South America, where she had always yearned to visit.

But there would be major discrepancies between the diary Yuriko Kobayashi left behind and Yudai Kiharazaka’s testimony. That’s why we decided to have her ask him to kill her.

“Even just sometimes, I want to die. Maybe when I die, I’ll think of you. Then take a picture of the place where I die.” “I’m kidding — what I said before was a joke. I don’t want to die yet.” “… I don’t know why, I just want to give it all up.” “I feel like I’m being held prisoner by you … I’m kidding, it’s a joke — what am I talking about?” “… I’m running out of pills. I need more.” “You want me to die? But wait. I’ll write a suicide note, that way it won’t cause any trouble for you.” “I hate you. I’m kidding, I love you.”

Looking back on it now, it seems like she was protecting herself by being the one to bring up “death” herself. Because in Yudai Kiharazaka’s mind, her murder — and his retaking of the photographs he had failed at — was clearly supposed to happen. But, if she were going to write a suicide note, then it was best to wait until then. Looking at it from Kiharazaka’s perspective, she must have seemed like an emotionally unstable woman. She took a lot of pills in front of him. But they were just vitamins.

We also prepared the notes for her to throw out the window because her legs were tied and she was being held captive. We cut locks of hair. Akari’s hair. Naturally, this hair would be identical to the DNA of the dead body.

While Akari Kiharazaka was abusing and heaping invective upon me, at her core, she was falling for me. Of course, the feelings that she had for me were nothing more than her own particular kind of sentimentality. She came to me for sex repeatedly. You probably think that I would have been disgusted to be with a woman like her. But, well, I wasn’t. To be honest, I enjoyed it — sleeping with a woman that I knew was going to die soon. I enjoyed it even as I pitied her. It was as if my feelings of pity spiced up the sex. Giving sexual pleasure to someone whom I would soon kill, I had the feeling of having control over this woman, of being able to do whatever I liked. I was no longer the person I had been. I needed to become even more monstrous than this brother and sister. I was forcing myself to become accustomed to this version of me.