The Devil's Disciple (10 page)

As soon as I received the manuscript I read it from start to finish without even pausing for breath. What a frightful testament it was! Until now, I have not shown it to anyone else. Allow me to share it with you now. I do so because I believe that the defendant himself would have wanted it to be read in your presence. Without this document, moreover, nothing I have told you up until now has any meaning.

In the manuscript, Ōtera uses various words for ‘I', including the formal
watakushi,
the casual and masculine
ore,
and the neutral
jibun.
These choices seem to reflect in each instance his changing mood as he sat in prison.

It was just as I expected.

The verdict called for the death penalty. My ignorant lawyer keeps telling me to appeal. But why would I ever do that? If I were going to appeal now I would have told the truth from the beginning. There would have been no need for me to perpetrate the enormous lie that I worked so hard to concoct during that day in the police headquarters.

Now I will lose my life when the court decides.

Having thrown away my life and my honour, what have I to gain? That hateful, hateful and yet dear, dear Michiko. Oh, Michiko! So many memories, Michiko. I wagered my life on our love. My life, my everything! It was all you, Michiko.

How you teased and toyed with me! Yes – you plucked out my young heart, set it aflame with love and then proceeded to have your way with it.

But now you're a corpse and you have no power over me. What a pitiable woman you are now.

The moment your gorgeous flesh was tied up and died in agony you belonged to me and me alone. Yes – the world believes that you were mine. As long as people remember this story, your name will forever be celebrated along with mine.

Yes, your body might lie next to your husband's. But you – the real you – are here with me. You're with me behind your husband's back. Unfaithful wife! Adulteress! The brand is burned forever into your brow and you must suffer in hell with me forever. What bounteous joy that brings!

Now that I have lost you, o hateful and dear one, how could I possibly live on? What point is there in holding on for years like a living corpse? In any case, I have the same disease as your husband. I am not a well man. It is clear what would happen if I tried to live in society.

Is it so strange that I should want to die now that I have lost you? Besides, I stand to gain something great by dying in the right way. Along with my loss of honour, I am about to gain something far more desirable. I am about to make you into my permanent possession, you on whom I couldn't lay even a finger while I was living.

Yes! And at the same time I will show all the solemn-faced lawyers of the world – including the poor bastard who tried so hard to save me – the true powerlessness of the law that they depend on as if it were a fortress of steel.

How they scurry around, going on and on about evidence! Evidence! Without it, injustice cannot be punished! But the moment they find something that looks like evidence they don't hesitate to send any number of people to their deaths. I wonder if they can possibly understand the fantastic script I have put together for them?

Listen lawyers! I'm going to tell the truth now.

You have condemned an innocent man to death. I am not guilty in the least. Why, then, did I confess?

One reason was to gain eternal possession of the beautiful woman whom I loved more than life and whom I was unable even to touch in this world. Another was to take eternal revenge on the hateful witch who toyed with my pure heart. The third motive was to make use of the legal system in order to rid myself of a life not worth living. And finally, by doing so, I meant to show all of you just how much your confidence in the law is worth.

My father died out of sheer anger over the loss of a mere hundred yen. He was well and truly conned by a certain scoundrel. He was clearly a victim of fraud but lost in court due to the other party's superior knowledge of the law. When, having failed to get his money back, he set out to exact payment from the swindler in the form of blows, it was he who ended up somehow slapped with the charge of slander. This was more than my father could stand. Whether it was a hundred or a thousand yen, it was not about the money. My father had believed in the system. He was convinced that the authorities did not make mistakes. And how did that work out? The system that he had believed in, like a god, refused to take up his case, saying he did not have enough evidence. But while he was unable to get an indictment against the man who had swindled him, he himself was subjected to serious investigation on the charge of slander. For someone who had trusted in the law like my father, this was of course painful to endure. The dishonour of it was unbearable.

As I sit here in my prison cell I can still picture the steady transformation of my father's features as he slipped further each day into depression.

My father's health worsened every day as a result of these affairs and in the end he died – all the while shrieking curses, that the legal system be damned, to the wife and child he left behind.

Oh, how I remember those words. The law be damned! Damn the legal system and its hypocritical standards. I curse the law. As long as the law exists in this world, I curse it. It claims to exist for the sake of justice. It brags that it is on the side of the truth. But how many laws have been made to serve the cause of iniquity! And how powerfully, how tyrannically, has iniquity yoked the law to its purpose!

The time allotted to me is short. I must complete this manuscript as soon as possible. Let me hasten to record the facts.

I met Michiko for the first time on an autumn day three years ago. My mother had uttered her final curse at the world and followed my father in death around the time I graduated from secondary school in my home town and I had been sent to Tokyo to continue my education under the care of my uncle. Because this uncle had once studied with Michiko's father, who was a university professor, I visited Michiko's house not long after I arrived in Tokyo.

From the first time I met Mrs Kawakami and her daughter I fell in love with Michiko. She was so much more approachable than her mother. How she welcomed me, who had only just arrived from the country, into her home.

Of course Michiko was a proper young lady then.

If there is such a thing in this world as love at first sight, then surely that is what I experienced with Michiko. From the first time I saw her and with the first words we spoke, I was smitten.

She responded with a warm intimacy and I became a frequent visitor at her home even after I had found my own lodgings in a boarding house. Beginning that autumn, this young man from the country lived entirely for Michiko.

As our interactions increased I discovered that she was surrounded by quite a number of admirers. Among her visitors there were even several from the same university I attended. Surrounded by so many men, Michiko was never at a loss, and she managed these interactions with exquisite tact and social poise. For this reason it was impossible to determine whom she liked best. Idiot that I was, I trusted what her mother said, and believed that she held me in special esteem.

Michiko, for her part, scrupulously avoided any serious communication. She was like this with everyone I think. She spoke to all of us about music, literature and theatre, and seemed to enjoy teaching us how to play bridge and mahjong.

During all of this I was quietly in love with her. I was young. Actually I am still young. But when I first met Michiko I was even younger. Still a child really. There was nothing strange about a young man with such pure feelings loving her with all of his being. But if one thinks about it, Michiko's attitude was also responsible for nurturing my obsession with her.

But I confess. I did not feel confident that I would be chosen from among all those men to be her husband. Yet like all people in the throes of love I combined an extreme humility with the most outlandish hopes. For this reason, when I heard that Michiko was to marry Oda Seizō I was in no way surprised, but this did not prevent me from feeling that I had been forced to swallow boiling water. I suffered greatly. I can still remember it – on the night of her wedding (I was invited to the reception but how could I possibly stand the sight of her as a bride?), I didn't know what to do with myself and wandered around Tokyo, going from one bar to another. In the end I passed out drunk in a filthy house somewhere in the alleys of Asakusa, putting an ugly end to a wretched evening.

Michiko was now Mrs Oda, but she still continued to see me. At first I was determined not to see her any more, but when letters from her kept arriving my resolve faltered and our meetings brought me a potent combination of suffering and happiness.

Michiko began to reveal her affection for me only after her marriage. She wrote to me often. Of course these letters did not contain any explicit declarations of her feelings, but to a sensitive young man in love they left a much stronger impression than any conventional love letter stringing together half-baked protestations of love. Michiko had a real gift for writing this kind of letter. Idiot that I was, I kept them with me always and even caressed them as I slept. She was particularly good at writing postscripts and could skilfully pack thousands of words worth of feeling into a two – or three-line ‘P.S.'. Before long I had made it a habit to skip straight to the postscript before I even looked at the main body of the letter.

Towards the end of the year two years ago she would come to visit me every time she left ‘K' and we would go out for a walk in the Ginza. She never said much during these walks. For my part, I kept the feeling of being in love with another man's wife tightly wrapped in the sentimentalism of youth and remained silent, hoping my feelings would somehow reach her by osmosis.

When I think back on it now I marvel at how pretentious I was. I had purchased the Reklam edition of
The Sorrows of Young Werther
and carried it with me everywhere in my pocket. With my beginner's German I couldn't read a word of it but I would open it from time to time and let out a sigh.

Oh how the Werther of those days curses his Lotte now!

One evening, as we walked through a certain neighbourhood in Tokyo Michiko said the following to me.

‘I love people like you Ichirō. Really I do. How lucky the woman will be who marries you!'

In my mind I cried out, ‘It's too late! Why didn't you tell me this sooner?', having interpreted her words in a truly stupid fashion. But how else were these unexpected and craftily formulated words to resonate in the mind of the young man that I was?

There was also the following incident.

I had been invited to play bridge at a friend's home and Michiko was also there. At around five o'clock she said, ‘It's time for me to go,' and stood up from her chair.

I was ready to go myself and as I was saying so to our host and about to get up, Michiko interrupted me midsentence and said, looking straight at me, ‘I don't mind taking Ichirō with me but lots of people are watching today so maybe that's not such a good idea.'

Being told this in front of so many people, all I could do was stand there in silence, blushing furiously. I had not asked to go with Michiko in her car.

But I couldn't understand if these words of hers were meant as a joke or whether she was serious.

She only began to speak to me seriously about six months before the incident.

It was a conversation on a winter night at the beginning of last year that I once remembered with a sweet yearning but that I now recall with bitterness and extreme discomfort.

On that day Michiko had called me from the Ginza saying she had just come to Tokyo. We went to see a moving picture and afterwards had tea on the first floor of a cafe. Perhaps moved by the unhappy family in the film we'd seen, she said to me, ‘Ichirō, do I seem happy?'

‘Well…'

I am not very eloquent in situations like these and as I struggled over what to say she said, with a coquettish look in her eyes, ‘Well I'm not. I'm not happy actually. Seizō is so mean to me. My husband doesn't love me.'

I had of course heard rumours that Seizō didn't love her. But this was the first time I had heard her complain of it herself.

‘But is that really such a problem? At least Seizō doesn't play around with other women behind your back.' I finally managed to produce these words.

‘But that's not enough for a woman! What about you Ichirō-san? If you were my husband you wouldn't act like Seizō does, would you?'

I felt my heart leap up into my chest. It was beating furiously. I felt like that ancient Spartan youth with the stolen fox hidden beneath his cloak, allowing it to devour his heart rather than risk discovery. All I could say was, ‘Well…' and gaze silently into her eyes. I was entranced by my own amorous suffering. What a fool I was!

I gave her a look of passion and our gazes locked. She looked back, her eyes also aflame, and said, ‘Look at this.'

And without giving me a chance to avert my gaze she pulled up her left sleeve and thrust her bare arm in front of my eyes. The smell of her made me woozy at first, but then I saw a set of snake-like scars that seemed to have been burned into both of her arms.

For a moment we both sat there in complete silence.

‘Did Seizō do this to you?' I said unthinkingly, immediately reaching out with my right hand to touch Michiko's plump arm. She did not retract it, and silently nodded while offering it for my inspection.

Oh, you devil! How could you abuse this goddess of a woman? You are not fit to be her husband – nay, not even to be her manservant!

I cursed Seizō's very existence. I railed against him. I cursed her marriage.

In fact I did not go quite that far, but I was in such a state of agitation that I made no bones about my anger at Seizō.

Michiko merely listened in silence and nodded, and when I had finished she said, ‘You're the only one I've told so please keep this to yourself.'