Malice (25 page)

You weren't with him at the assault?

No way, man. I heard someone was there, but it sure wasn't me. What does all this old crap have to do with your case, anyway?

Look, I can tell you one thing. You said that Hidaka guy was the one who got killed, right? I might not have seen Fujio after he left, but I did see him—Hidaka—once, just about three or four years ago. He came over to my place, said he wanted to know about Fujio and the assault.

He told me he was writing a novel about Fujio. Can you believe it? I didn't take him too seriously, so I didn't think much about it. I guess if it became this big seller, I shoulda asked for more money! (Laughs)

What did you tell him?

Just what I knew. He didn't seem like he held anything against me in particular, so what's the harm?

What exactly did you know?

Hardly anything. But he was persistent, wanted to know if I remembered any detail at all. Turns out he thought I was the one with Fujio, too.

On the photograph:

I don't know anything about a photograph.

I heard you might have it.

Who would say something like that? That's crazy.

Okay, okay … maybe Fujio did give me one, just before they got him. It was blurry as hell.

You kept it?

Yeah, what's the harm in that? Doesn't mean I did anything. It's not like I was holding on to it special or anything, either. I just forgot to throw it out. I bet if I searched your house, I'd find a few photos from when you were a kid, Detective.

Do you still have the photo?

No way. I threw it out a little while after Hidaka visited.

Did you show it to him?

Yeah, I showed it to him. I figured I owed him that much at least, what with our past, and him coming all the way out to see me. He wanted to borrow it, so I let him have it for a while. He sent it back a few days later in an envelope, though, with a note about him not believing in saving photographs or something. I just threw the thing in the trash, envelope and all.

Did you see Hidaka after that?

Nope.

Were there any other photographs?

Just the one. I don't know if Fujio even took any more photos than the one.

We done here?

Interview: Heikichi Tsujimura

Note: For this interview, I spoke with Mr. Tsujimura's granddaughter, who acted as his interpreter, since Mr. Tsujimura has difficulty speaking clearly
.

How old is your grandfather?

Um, ninety-one, I think. His heart's strong, but he can't walk around anymore. Still sharp as a tack though, if a little hard of hearing.

When did he retire?

He stopped making fireworks about fifteen years ago. It was less his age and more a problem of supply and demand. They stopped doing fireworks shows down by the river so work got really slow. We think it was probably good timing, though. And since my father wasn't in the business, we didn't feel there was any need to keep it going.

Have you seen this book?

An Unburning Flame
? Oh, it's by Kunihiko Hidaka! No, I hadn't heard of it. I don't think anyone in my family's read it.

Could you ask your grandfather?

I'll try, though I'm pretty sure I know the answer.

… No, he's never heard of it either. He hasn't read a book in years. What about it?

It's based on your grandfather's work.

Really? It's about a fireworks maker?

… Grandpa says that's a strange thing to write a book about. Not many people know much about his line of work, he says.

On Hidaka's visits:

Really? Well, Grandpa used to have his workshop right next to the shrine in town. So Mr. Hidaka saw my grandfather work when he was a kid and wrote his novel about it?

… Grandpa says some of the neighborhood kids would come and play nearby sometimes. He tried to keep them away because it was dangerous, but some of them were persistent so he let them inside once or twice.

Were there many of these kids?

… Actually not that many, he says. He just remembers one.

Does he remember a name?

… Sorry, no. He says he didn't forget it, he never knew it in the first place.

Would he recognize the boy from a picture?

I'm not sure … it was a long time ago. I'll ask him, though.

… Okay, well, he says he remembers what the boy looked like. Do you have a photograph with you? Okay, let's show it to him.

… He says the boy he remembers was smaller than any of these kids. What is this? A middle-school yearbook? So the boy is one of the ones in this group here? But wouldn't he have been younger than this when he visited the workshop? Right, that's what I thought. Okay, well, I'll try to explain it to him.…

 

8

THE PAST (PART THREE)

KYOICHIRO KAGA'S STORY

 

I believe I've met with everyone I can who has anything notable to contribute about Osamu Nonoguchi's and Kunihiko Hidaka's past, particularly their time in middle school. I'm sure there are others I haven't been able to track down, but I feel I've obtained all I need for now. Though the evidence and testimony add up to something like a box of unassembled jigsaw-puzzle pieces at the moment, I do have at least an idea of the completed picture in my mind, a picture that I believe reveals the full truth behind this case.

At the heart of everything is the bullying that took place during Nonoguchi's and Hidaka's middle school years, and which defined their future relationship. Once I realized the significance of those events, several other parts of the story fell into place. I'm now convinced that it is impossible to understand what happened on the day Hidaka died without first understanding this troubled history.

*   *   *

I know something about bullying, though not firsthand (as either victim or aggressor—at least, not so far as I'm aware). My experience is secondhand. Over ten years ago, I was a homeroom teacher at a middle school, in charge of a class of ninth-graders.

Toward the end of the first semester the first signs appeared. The semester-end exams provided the first clue: according to an English instructor, five of the students from homeroom had given the exact same incorrect answer to a problem.

I knew the English teacher to be a thoughtful man who kept a clear head. Indeed, he didn't seem upset or angry in the least when he came to me.

“It's almost certainly cheating. They were all sitting together in the back of the classroom when they took the test. I can talk to them myself, but I thought I should let you know first.”

After considering it for a while, I asked if he was willing to let me handle it. If there was cheating going on, it probably wasn't limited to English class.

“Act quickly,” he advised. “Let them get away with it once and there will be more students involved when it happens next time.”

I took his warning to heart.

I went to the teachers who had these students for other subjects and asked if there had been anything suspicious in the exam answers they'd received. I also reviewed the tests I'd given them in the subjects I taught: social studies and geography.

Despite some similarities in the five students' answers, I could find no clear evidence of cheating in composition, science, or my subjects.

The science teacher's opinion:

“They're not idiots. They wouldn't do anything too obvious. Kids can be crafty when they put their minds to it.”

Yet their craftiness failed them when it came to math.

The mathematics teacher:

“A student who doesn't get math in their first or second year won't suddenly start getting it in their third. I generally know before they take a test which students are going to be able to answer which questions. For example, I know that the final proof on the latest test is beyond Yamaoka's abilities. But look at his answer: ‘A D E F.' The correct answer was actually ‘
Δ
D E F.' It's obvious that he looked at someone else's paper and mistook their delta for an
A
.”

It was the sort of elegantly convincing argument you'd expect from a mathematician.

Clearly, I had no reason to be optimistic about the situation, but I had to consider my response. School policy was not to punish students for cheating unless a teacher actually caught them in the act. Yet we had a responsibility to let the students know that we'd noticed what was going on. In other words, to give them a warning. So one day after class, I told the students involved to remain behind.

I told them that they were suspected of cheating, then revealed the reason for our suspicion—that they had all made the exact same mistake on their English exam.

“Well, do any of you have anything to say?” I asked.

No one responded. I singled out Yamaoka and asked again.

He shook his head. “I didn't cheat.”

I then asked each of the other students in turn, and all of them denied cheating.

Lacking proof, I couldn't do much more. But they were obviously lying.

All five students looked downcast the whole time I was talking to them, but one in particular, Maeno, was red around his eyes by the time I'd finished. Knowing the students and their previous performances, I was pretty sure that his test had been the source for everyone else's answers. School rules dictated that the one who let his test be copied was just as culpable as those who copied from it.

That night, I received a call from Maeno's mother. She said her son was acting strangely and wondered if anything had happened at school. I told her about the cheating incident, and I could hear her gasp at the other end of the line.

“I suspect your son was the one who showed the others his answers, which unfortunately still counts as cheating. However, because we lack proof of cheating, there won't be any punishment this time. I just gave all five of them a warning. Did your son seem shocked?”

“He came home with his clothes all muddy,” she said with tears in her voice. “And now he's locked himself in his room and won't come out. However, I caught a glimpse of his face and it was all swollen, Mr. Kaga. I think he was injured and he might have been bleeding.”

The following day, Maeno was out sick. When he came in the day after, he had an eye patch over one eye. The bruises and swelling made it clear someone had beaten him up. I had an idea who.

At this point I finally understood that Maeno wasn't a friend of the students who'd cheated off his test. They'd coerced him into giving them his answers on the test, then pummeled him as punishment for making a mistake that gave them away. At the time, I didn't know whether the bullying had started before the cheating or not.

Soon after this incident, summer vacation started, and the timing couldn't have been worse. Just when I'd opened my eyes to what was going on in my class, they drifted out of my sight. I suppose I could have reached out to them over vacation, but I didn't. I was busy. I had to do a lot of work to help all of my students get into the right high schools in the next half year. I had school pamphlets to gather, and a mountain of recommendations and forms to fill out. But this is just an excuse. Yamaoka and his buddies extorted and stole over a hundred thousand yen—which is a huge amount for a schoolboy—from Maeno over the summer. Even worse than that, the tangled web of power and coercion between them grew ever stronger and more complex. I didn't learn about this until sometime later.

At the beginning of the second semester I became aware, both from a sudden drop in Maeno's grades and because some concerned students confided in me, that the bullying was getting worse, was happening daily. But how bad, I couldn't have imagined. I found out later that Maeno's hair had hid no fewer than six cigarette burns on his scalp.

Some of my colleagues thought that, since the students were about to graduate and go their separate ways, it was best to ignore bullying in the senior class. In other words, let graduation solve the problem. But I didn't feel this was an option. I was still relatively new as a teacher and it was the first year I had a senior class assigned to me for homeroom. I didn't want any of my students to regret having been assigned to my class.

I decided to talk to Maeno first. I wanted to find out how the bullying had started, and what had happened so far.

He refused to talk. Clearly, he was worried that if he did, the bullying would only escalate. From the sweat running down his brow and the trembling in his fingers, I could plainly see the boy was terrified.

I decided the thing to do was to try to improve his self-confidence. My first idea was kendo. I was in charge of the kendo club at school, and I'd seen many timid young boys take up the sport and transform before my eyes.

As it was a bit late in the year for him to join the kendo club officially, I offered him private lessons in the mornings before school. Though he didn't seem particularly eager, he showed up for those lessons every morning. Maeno was smart enough to realize what I was trying to do.

He took to kendo fairly well, but showed a far keener interest in something else: knife throwing.

I had taken up the practice of knife throwing as a way to help develop focus. The idea is simple enough: throw a knife at a tatami against the wall and try to make it stick. I sometimes threw with my eyes shut, or even with my back turned to the mat. I found that doing this well required absolute concentration—being aware of everything around me, yet maintaining an intense focus on the knife, on its balance, and on the target. To avoid accidents, I always practiced before anyone else showed up at the gym; but Maeno came early one day and saw me. He told me he wanted to try it, too. It was against school rules, letting a student carry or handle an edged weapon such as a knife or sword, so I had to refuse. But I did let him watch me practice. He would stand a safe distance away, a serious look on his face as he studied my movements.