Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (19 page)

Left alone in his box, Hideyoshi wished he could sleep. But there was no sleeping here. No possibility of escaping through dreams or nightmares.

He touched his
chinko
,
but it just lay there flaccid. Nothing new. He had become impotent over the past several years. It could have been his age or just being in solitary confinement for so long. Atsumi never came to visit him, and even if she had it would have been behind glass. During his trial she dutifully came to court, sitting in the second row. Her face had taken on a strange yellowish tint, and to make it worse she sometimes even wore an ill-fitting yellow sweater. She had stopped coloring her hair and she looked old enough to be his mother, not his wife.

She came to court out of duty, nothing more, nothing less. She didn’t try to divorce him, as her lifetime job was to be his wife. He wondered why she had done the things that she had, both in support of him and against him. He figured out now that she, like Yoshi, was good at following directions. Once she realized that she was the wife of a serial killer, she wore that title the best she could.

A father-son relationship was different than a husband and wife’s, though, right? It was the blood, the
ki,
that was the extra connection. In spite of sexual relations, Hideyoshi and Atsumi couldn’t really be one. But Yoshi, with his Osumi-ness, was a mirror, a duplicate. When Hideyoshi looked at Yoshi, he gazed at himself.

His son’s absence now was acutely felt, even more than when he was incarcerated. He loved his son. Adored him. He began to cry. No tears came out of his eyes, but he cried nonetheless.

“Psssss. Hideyoshi,” came the voice next to him.

Hideyoshi turned his back to the voice.

“What is causing you so much grief?”

“You are not an Osumi,” Hideyoshi said. As soon as he said it out loud, he knew that it was true.

“I may not officially be an Osumi, but I work on behalf of all Osus. Osumi, Osuna—even some O’Sullivans,” the voice said.

Hideyoshi considered the list of names and was confused.

“Punctuation,” the voice explained. “Damn punctuation.”

“What, is there some kind of union in Hell?”

“Not a union. I’m part of quality control. Making sure each newcomer is properly handled. And something obviously went wrong with you.”

“I’m worried about my son. He should be here with me.”

“Yes, yes,” the voice said. “We are looking into that.”

“What is taking so long?”

Hideyoshi’s last victim was single like the others, but unbeknownst to Hideyoshi, she was a social butterfly. She had taken pictures of various tables and chairs in the store and texted those images to various friends. She wanted them to give her input, let her know which ones would work in her new apartment.

Of course, when the girl went missing, these friends immediately contacted the police. “When did you last see her?” the detectives asked.

“We were supposed to meet for dinner that Wednesday evening,” the teary-eyed women reported, “but she never showed up. She did text us some photos from a used furniture shop. That’s the last time we heard from her.”

The detectives thus paid Hideyoshi a visit. He was surprised to see that the lead detective was the same female who had come by when Chie Toyama had disappeared. Instead of the bowl cut, her hair had grown out and was layered, wispy at the ends. He pretended that he didn’t recognize her and she did the same with him. Hideyoshi considered it a very bad sign that she didn’t reference their first meeting.

“Do you recognize this woman?” The detective showed a color image of a woman with caramel-colored hair. In the photo, she had bangs; they had since grown out.

“Hmmm,” Hideyoshi said. “She may have come through the store. I don’t believe she bought anything.”

“A lot of women seem to frequent your store, Mr. Osumi,” the female detective said.

“Well, of course. I sell items for the house. That would mean female customers.”

Yoshi was called into the living room next. As he walked in, it was as if Hideyoshi was seeing him for the first time. Yoshi had become tall and lanky with a protruding Adam’s apple and a shock of thick black hair. Before, he usually mumbled and looked down when he spoke to strangers. But that was not the case now. At age twenty-one, with four murders under his belt, he had become more confident, self-assured.

Hideyoshi went upstairs during the interview, stuck in the same bedroom as Atsumi.

“It’s the same woman detective that came that day. The time when Chie Toyama went missing,” Atsumi observed.

It surprised Hideyoshi that Atsumi had remembered the first victim’s name.

“I didn’t realize your memory was so sharp,” Hideyoshi commented. He pretended to read a book on strategy related to the game of
go
.

“Surely Yoshi had nothing to do with that missing girl.”

“He was only twelve,” Hideyoshi commented.

“No, I mean this girl, the one the police are here about.”

Hideyoshi glanced at his wife. She had certainly diminished over time. Her shoulders had become rounded and her belly slack. She had become an old woman.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Hideyoshi casually said.

“There sure has been a lot of crime here in Okayama,” she stated, twisting the edge of her apron. “For being such a small town.”

Atsumi at first didn’t respond when the police came knocking on their bedroom door. “Mrs. Osumi,” the assisting detective’s voice was heard through the cheap processed wood. “You are next.”

She slowly got up from the bed. Narrow wooden stairs squeaked as she made her way downstairs.

When she returned to the bedroom, she was without her apron. “They’re gone,” she announced and slowly prepared to go downstairs for a bath.

Hideyoshi couldn’t stand it any longer. “What did they ask you?”

“The usual,” she responded, choosing a clean pair of pajamas. “Except one strange question from that policewoman. She remembered that when she first came here seven years ago, she couldn’t use the downstairs bathroom. She was asking why.”

“What a ridiculous question.” Hideyoshi felt his gut grow cold.

“You had just finished a plumbing project. I told her that you always fix things on your own.”

The next day, Hideyoshi was called to the police station, and both he and the detective knew that it was only a matter of time. More police were called in and dismantled their floorboards. Only a few attempts with a shovel and the skeleton of Chie Toyama was discovered. Within the week, the furniture store and storage container had been taken over, the mysterious four concrete blocks cracked open.

Detectives found cement—the same kind of cement that had encased the four bodies—in the treads of both Hideyoshi’s and Yoshi’s shoes. Even more incriminating were items found in Yoshi’s bedroom: a wash towel, woman’s panties and flared knit skirt, all mementos that Hideyoshi had been hiding in his glove compartment. Hideyoshi had no idea when his son decided to remove the incriminating evidence from his van. And now, with the second woman’s clothing discovered, the Osumis were implicated in six murders, not five.

All Yoshi had to do was to say that it had been all Hideyoshi’s doing. But he refused to say anything. Hideyoshi was truly touched. He loved his son and it greatly grieved him that he really wouldn’t get an opportunity to express his affection.

Hideyoshi was arrested first, but the prosecutor also wanted Yoshi’s head, which he eventually got. Atsumi secured a separate attorney for Yoshi, but it didn’t make any difference.

They were sentenced at the same time: death by hanging. Atsumi wanted Yoshi to appeal the sentence, but he refused. Not to be outdone by his son, Hideyoshi allowed his death sentence to stand as well.

On death row, Hideyoshi mostly spent time in solitary confinement. Other than the guards, he neither saw nor heard the voices of others. Occasionally someone would pound on the walls. He had no idea who they may be, but in his mind, he imagined it to be Yoshi. He wished that they had learned Wabun code or even the Latin equivalent, Morse, when Yoshi was a child. With the back of his hand, he pounded the wall in increments of three. Sometimes the prisoner on the other side reciprocated. He convinced himself that the pounding was from his son, desperately trying to make a connection through concrete walls.

“So, Mr. Osumi, I regret that an error was made,” the voice who claimed to be an Osumi said one day in Hell.

“What are you talking about? Is it about my son?”

“He was to be sent here. We were ready to process him. But he was recalled.”

“To where?”

“It happens from time to time.”

“Is he dead? Or is he somewhere else?”

The quality-control man refused to answer Hideyoshi’s question. “Actually, I’m here to talk about you. You weren’t fully demagnetized when you entered here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a quick procedure. We’ll have to move you in your box. But it will be quick.”

As the quality-control man had said, the box was pulled out and placed on something hard, almost metallic. Hideyoshi was shaken back and forth a few times—a familiar experience—and then it was over.

Before the guards took him to be hanged, they had him stand before a statue of Kannon, the goddess of mercy. In terms of religion, Hideyoshi said that he didn’t have any, but probably leaned Buddhist because he was Japanese. He refused to meet with a Buddhist priest but agreed to see the statue, which he immediately regretted.

Instead of making him calm, the statue agitated him. Kannon, with her narrow face, curved eyes, and serene expression, seemed to mock Hideyoshi.

Why did he need mercy from this woman?

They fastened a blindfold over his eyes, and instead of visualizing Yoshi, Atsumi, or his victims, he only saw that sanctimonious face of Kannon. They led him forward over something soft and carpeted. Hideyoshi could also hear the hum of instrumental music. Something with a Buddhist religious tone.

Regret, a new feeling, washed over him. He shouldn’t have rejected appeals. He should have fought for his life more. He should have fought for his son.

Hideyoshi felt his legs shaking as something—the noose, of course—was placed around his neck. He could not give the guards the satisfaction of him weakening.
Those girls deserved what they got. They should have never let him in,
he told himself. But his son, his beloved son! At least they will be together in death. Even if it ended in nothingness, he would not be alone in it. That was his only consolation.