Fuminori Nakamura - Last Winter We Parted

Even when you told me that you were leaving me, I still didn’t feel like we had parted. Not even when you died, strange as it may sound. That’s why I thought I could live with your doll … It wasn’t until last winter that I finally felt apart from you. That night when I first slept with Akari Kiharazaka. The night when I resolved to become a monster. Someone who is your boyfriend should not be a monster . Isn’t that right? Last winter, we parted, and I decided to become a monster. I ceased being the person I was. I destroyed myself, so that I could take revenge on them.

… I’ll tell you about the night when we put Akari Kiharazaka to sleep. I wrapped a towel around her face, blindfolding her. That kind of thing excited her. Then, while we were having sex, I switched places. With the lawyer. The lawyer got undressed and approached Akari, who had no idea.

Had she realized that I had switched with someone else, she probably would have enjoyed it. That’s the kind of woman she was. But surely she never would have thought that the guy she was screwing was the guy she had oppressed and treated like an insect.

I smoked a cigarette in the next room, thinking about how strange it was that I didn’t feel anything.

When I went back into the room, the lawyer was already wearing his suit and waiting for me. She was knocked out and her hands and feet were tied up. After that, we held her captive for a few days. I couldn’t decide whether or not to send the video we had shot to Yudai Kiharazaka. If I sent it to him, despite his suspicions, he might still be aroused by the film, even without knowing that the man her sister was screwing in the film was the lawyer she had made to suffer.

The day of the crime. Strangely, I was not nervous. Based on my long hours of observation, I had a good grasp on Yudai Kiharazaka’s behavioral patterns. Since he wasn’t actually holding Yuriko Kobayashi captive, while he was out, we went into his studio and made sure that everything was progressing according to plan. We had made sure to have a duplicate key. Our crime took place on the day after Yuriko Kobayashi had mentioned in her diary how lately Yudai Kiharazaka had gotten bored with her, and she had the definite sense that he intended to kill her. We would set fire to his sister just as Kiharazaka was returning home and then leave through a window. It was simple. I had the lawyer film it all. Like I said before, as a precaution for any unexpected situations, he carried a pistol.

I didn’t think that what we were doing was all that strange. Within the monster I had become, the part of me that retained a trace of humanity may have dimmed any memory as a means of protecting myself. Then again, I may just be maintaining a certain outward appearance. But, you know, that’s a lie. I remember everything clearly. I remember joking with Yuriko Kobayashi, peering at her through the camera lens and shouting at her to hurry up and get Akari ready. I remember, over the course of a few days, whenever Akari would wake up from the slumber we had put her in, knocking her out again until it was time, to the point where she was almost anesthetized, almost like she was dead inside that huge trunk. I remember how I didn’t feel the least hesitation at the moment when we set the flames on her. I remember my hand moving as if I were just setting fire to some pieces of cardboard that had been lying around. Striking the match, slowly bringing my arm up from below, and then releasing it from my fingers. Watching the flame as it was about to descend on her, I was thinking to myself: This is what I did it for. I changed who I was so that I could raise my arm this effortlessly and toss the flame just so. I felt like I could do it again, even another time after that. I even vaguely remembered what had happened during the countless times we had experimented. First to burn was the surface of the cloth doused in kerosene. The cloth was flame resistant. But, of course, only to an extent — the material caught fire and when the flames reached Akari and the sofa cushions on which she was lying, which had been doused with even more kerosene, everything ignited fiercely in an instant. We had used ignit-able liquid as well as accelerant. The entire sofa was feverishly engulfed in intense flames.

Later when I saw the film, I thought it still seemed a little dangerous. Because when he came into the room, the fire had yet to grow as big as we thought it would. No matter how many times we rehearsed, the perfect timing was quite difficult to achieve. Seeing it from his shaken perspective, with the entire back of the sofa consumed in flames and her arm flung out, it must have looked like her body was already on fire. But in fact the fire had yet to spread to Akari’s body under the cloth that we had laid over her. If at that point he had pulled on the arm that was poking out, even though they both would have sustained burns, I bet he could have easily saved his own sister. But, sure enough, he took photographs instead. I felt as though I was watching the same scene as when you had died. Except, of course, this film had transformed it into an act of revenge. The lawyer had the pistol and had been watching closely from outside, but by taking his photos, Kiharazaka narrowly escaped death, even if only for a little while.

After it was all finished, we had Yuriko Kobayashi undergo minor plastic surgery. We fixed the parts of her face that had always bothered her, making them look just right. We didn’t try to make her look exactly like Akari Kiharazaka. That would have been impossible, plus I had confirmed with Akari numerous times that she had made her brother destroy all the photos of herself, and she hadn’t let him take any photos of her since they had grown up. She said that she hated the way it seemed to capture her true nature. Since from then on she had avoided having any photographs taken; if we were to destroy the few photos that she herself still had, then basically the only quasi-available photographs by which to confirm what she looked like would be her school yearbooks. And those were from quite a while ago.

The problem would be when the police tried to contact Yudai Kiharazaka’s sister to speak to her about her younger brother, that kind of thing. At that point, she shouldn’t look like Yukiko Kobayashi, whom Yudai Kiharazaka had photographed and was presumed dead. We cut her hair and dyed it black, and as for the minor plastic surgery, we just had her eyes made bigger and had a mole removed. Then, the only time she met with the police, we had her wear glasses without any makeup. Akari had always been the kind of woman who wore heavy makeup. Naturally, it would have been preferable to have more extensive surgery, but what we did was easily manageable and, when the lawyer and I saw her, we both felt like this was sufficient. The young detective who met with her may have thought that there was a vague resemblance between this “sister” and the photo of Yuriko Kobayashi, and may have thought that was the reason Kobayashi was targeted by this photographer. The police weren’t going to haul out an old yearbook to confirm what the “sister” looked like; being neither a victim nor a suspect, this “sister” was nothing more than the sibling of the perpetrator.

After Yudai Kiharazaka was arrested, he said that she set herself on fire. That she had been suicidal and, without waiting for his agreement, had done it herself. However, as a man who had previously had a similar “accident,” there was no credibility to what he said. When they showed him the diary Yuriko Kobayashi left behind, he said that she must have even been afraid of him. He ended up testifying that she was emotionally unstable and had accused him of holding her captive. Nobody believed him. The fact that he suffered from manic-depression also worked against him. To top it off, he had hired a lawyer at the request of his “sister.” Presumed to be an ally, this lawyer was in fact one of the guys who had framed him for everything. Everything at the trial worked against him.