The Devil's Disciple (9 page)

Michiko started breathing heavily because of the pain. I decided I didn't want her making any noise and pressed her face down onto my lap. As she lay there deprived of her freedom and groaning in agony I showered her with every curse imaginable. She seemed to be suffering terribly, but Seizō had meanwhile regained consciousness and seemed to be moving about so I pointed the knife towards the location of her heart and finished her off with a single powerful thrust.

Seizō was trying to get up and get his breath back so I forced his head down onto my lap as well and stabbed him in the chest.

Just then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, so I hurriedly stood up and as I was vacillating over whether to kill myself with the knife Seizō, who had not yet died, tried to get up again. That was when the houseboy came in and cradled Seizō in his arms.

etc., etc.

This was the gist of Ōtera Ichirō's statement in the preliminary trial, which he stated as well in the presence of the prosecutor.

The preliminary trial judge also questioned Tomoda Takeshi, the houseboy Jinbei, as well as Otane and Oharu. In Tomoda's testimony, as the judge quotes in the document I just read, he categorically denied any physical relationship with Michiko and also denied that he engaged in any whispered conversation with her on the night in question. He does, however, admit to having carried on a correspondence with her by letter.

As for Jinbei, Otane, and Oharu's testimonies, they of course focused primarily on descriptions of the crime scene.

The judge focused most closely on the dying words spoken by Seizō and his wife. When he was asked about this, Jinbei responded with the following.

As I said a minute ago, when I tried to hold the boss in my arms he was already almost dead. I kept saying, ‘Boss! Boss!' and his eyes opened just barely and then all of a sudden he said, in a surprisingly loud voice, ‘Ōtera… It's Ōtera.'

He said it really loud so there was no mistaking it. He knew it was me at the time so I'm sure it was a message meant for me.

We thought Mrs Oda was already a goner but when she heard the boss say that she started to say something herself. Otane and I ran over to her and she opened her eyes too. She looked right at me and said'… Ichirō…'

Just that one word. Her voice was faint but I heard it clearly. And she didn't say it crazy like. It was like you say someone's name when they just came for a visit, not like she was calling out his name.

Otane gave a similar account.

As you have all surmised by now, everything I wanted to know was clarified by this in a most unfortunate way. My theory putting responsibility for the murder on the husband crumbled in the face of this testimony.

My doubts had disappeared for the moment. Even worse, as if to further validate the defendant's confession, a large number of letters Michiko had written to him turned up at his residence. It must be said that these letters did not contain any passionate declarations of love and therefore did not constitute any direct proof of adultery or demonstrate conclusively that the tragedy had occurred as a result of such, but there was no denying their value as indirect evidence.

Once the case had moved on from the pretrial stage I was allowed for the first time to meet the defendant as his lawyer. My first impression on meeting him was one of astonishment at his beauty. Little wonder, I thought, that Michiko had chosen him as her lover. His health did not seem to have suffered much by his incarceration; he was full of energy and fairly exuded the beauty of youth. I am a man who is quite capable of appreciating a good-looking youth, but seeing Ōtera I felt this particularly deeply. Despite all of the facts that I had gathered so far, I felt that this man could not possibly have committed such a crime. As a man of the law I knew very well that faces can be deceptive – indeed that the most heinous crimes are sometimes committed by persons who don't appear capable of harming a fly – and yet I still found myself inexplicably drawn to this young man.

I spoke to him first of the aristocrat who had engaged me on his behalf and told him that for that person's sake he should be as forthcoming as possible. Then I spoke to him of my own predisposition in his favour and strongly urged him to be honest with me. Finally, I endeavoured to ascertain as much detail from him as the limits of the law would permit.

He raised his beautiful eyebrows and pronounced himself profoundly grateful towards the aristocrat and me but at the same time asked us please not to place any hopes on his case. He spoke of many sad things, saying that he was already resigned to any and every outcome and that we should not worry about him since, even should he take this dishonour with him to the grave, he had no parents to be saddened by it.

I still remember the last day I saw him. A gentle rain was falling. Glancing from time to time with those beautiful eyes towards the sky he said sadly, ‘I am prepared, so please don't worry about me. I… have already given up.' As he said goodbye and I took my leave of him I was assailed by a wave of unspeakable loneliness and tottered home in the rain on foot, somehow unable to call a cab.

Strangely, however, I was still unable to abandon my hopes. I took every opportunity to question Tomoda, Jinbei, and the others but these efforts yielded nothing and the days flew by in vain until all that remained was to await the defendant's testimony in court.

It was true that Ōtera had confessed everything to the prosecutor and in the pretrial, but the public trial still remained. According to the laws of our country, the public trial mattered most. The defendant might have had some reason to proclaim his guilt up until now. It was still possible that in the public trial he might overturn his previous confession and deliver a different testimony altogether. Such things do happen from time to time as I am sure you gentlemen are all aware.

Thus while it might seem overly pertinacious of me, I still clung to this public trial as a last hope. I believe I can count on you all to grasp fully the difficulty of my position as his lawyer.

The public trial finally began. Since all the newspapers covered the trial you are probably all familiar with it already so I will not go into any detail here.

My last hope was dashed. The defendant wasted no time in admitting to the crime in this venue as well. Not only did he admit his guilt, he succeeded in moving the hearts of an entire courtroom full of listeners with the passionate and tearful confession of his tortured love for Michiko, told with all the feeling of a mind overtaken by a monstrous love and the fearsome monomania of youth. Of course there were surely some among his listeners who crinkled their brows in scepticism, unable to overlook his unpardonable crime and its reprehensible motive. But I believe that there were also those who, knowing what it is to be young and in love, were able to feel some measure of compassion for this unfortunate young man.

Foolishly – and yes I do mean foolishly – our young man did not stop at admitting his guilt in the crime but also stated that he still hated Michiko. He even intimated that if she came back to life and spoke those same words to him that he would murder her a dozen or even a hundred times all over again.

In other words, it did not appear that the defendant was experiencing any remorse over having killed Michiko or even for having done away with Seizō.

Given that the defendant, whom I had made every effort to protect, was stating all of this in court without hesitation and, to borrow the words of the prosecutor's closing argument, with an ‘incomparably brazen and shameless attitude', my position as his defence barrister was pathetic indeed.

But despite all of that, I continued to do what I could for him. I requested that the court permit me to call as witnesses Tomoda Takeshi, Jinbei, Otane and Oharu.

My last desperate efforts were focused on the words that the Odas had spoken as they died. In the end, Jinbei was the only witness who was called but unfortunately with no positive effect. In his testimony Jinbei only repeated what he said at the pretrial. With the consent of the chief judge I asked the witness directly if he believed that Michiko was calling to her lover, but Jinbei insisted that she seemed to be saying Ichirō's name to herself.

I then shifted the emphasis to the question of why Michiko would have used his first name ‘Ichirō' rather than his family name ‘Ōtera', but Jinbei clearly stated that she was in the habit of calling him ‘Ichirō' rather than ‘Ōtera – san'. After this I did not pursue the matter further.

There was no longer even a single point of doubt. All of the witnesses' testimonies suggested that Ōtera Ichirō was the murderer. And the most damning evidence of all was the defendant's own confession. As I stated earlier, I had hoped that the defendant might overturn his earlier confession in the public trial, but the result was instead as I have described it.

I, of course, have no experience as a policeman, nor as a prosecutor or a judge, so I know very little of the internal procedures of crime investigations. One does often hear that the police have a tendency to extract confessions at times by force and violence. But no matter how much I might oppose them, I do believe that defendants are treated reasonably well by the prosecutor's office and during the pretrial process. In the case of public trials everything is open to public scrutiny and this is even more true. For these reasons it was clear to me that the defendant in this case had not made his confession under duress.

I am of course aware that defendants have been known intentionally to make false confessions. You gentlemen are no doubt also aware of this. This tends to happen in the following cases.

In some instances, defendants do this in order to attain notoriety.

Human beings never seem to lose their love for the theatrical, and it sometimes happens that people confess to serious crimes in order to shock the public and make themselves famous. But they rarely wish to sacrifice their lives for such fame and often end up retracting their confession in court. They are also usually aware that the facts will overturn them once they get to court.

Many of these criminals have committed other petty crimes or, when that is not the case, have committed another crime the gravity of which has already placed them at serious risk of the death penalty. As for Ōtera Ichirō, however, he had not committed any other crimes and he was too well educated to have done it simply for the notoriety it would gain him. For these reasons it seemed unlikely that he would number among this category of criminals.

In other cases, criminals will use a false confession of a minor crime in order to cover up a more serious one. By ensuring that they are imprisoned for the minor crime they hope to avoid prosecution for the major one. Of course the crime to be covered up in these cases tends to be many times more serious than the crime that is falsely confessed to. But since the crime that Ōtera Ichirō was confessing to was itself already a major one, it was unlikely that he was doing so in order to conceal another.

There are also other cases, often met with in detective fiction, especially French detective fiction, in which the defendants sacrifice themselves in order to protect a lover who is the true guilty party. It is actually more common for women to do this than men. But what about Ōtera Ichirō? In this case it is clear that no one entered the Oda home from outside and Jinbei and the two maids could not possibly have committed the murders. Even if Ōtera was in love with one of the maids and she had done it, it would have been impossible for him to cover up the crime. There does not appear to be another criminal here for whom he might be covering. It is also unlikely that he was trying to protect the reputation of the woman he loved. Indeed, far from protecting her, as I have explained at length already, he continued to abuse the woman he loved even in death in his confession until not an inch of her remained unblemished.

In light of all of this it is exceedingly unlikely that Ōtera Ichirō's confession was untrue. The logic and precision of his statements, moreover, made it unlikely that he was suffering from some form of delusion. (The court was particularly careful to establish the state of his mental health.)

So the public trial proceeded without any further complications and the inquiry was brought to a close. The prosecutor moved to his closing argument, which was just as clear cut as everyone anticipated it would be. After noting how clear the facts in the case were, he castigated the defendant for his ‘brazen and shameless attitude' in not only having committed such a crime but in feeling no remorse for it and then asked the judge for the harshest penalty the law would allow. How feeble was the defence I mounted against the prosecutor's accusations! I have never considered myself particularly eloquent but I believe that was the most pathetic performance I have ever given in court. All I could say was to emphasise the defendant's youth and argue that his crime was that of a young man spurred by the anger of the moment. The defendant listened calmly and quietly to the prosecutor's arguments and my own, never once losing the composure of his beautiful face.

Then the day for the reading of the verdict arrived.

As you all know, the verdict called for the death penalty. I knew this the moment I realised that the chief judge had reversed the order of the judgment by reading the facts and reasoning first. The beautiful defendant listened to it being read without showing the slightest sign of surprise.

Once the death penalty had been handed down I made one last effort to convince him to file for an appeal, but the defendant rejected this out of hand. As you are probably aware the penalty was carried out one day this spring and Ōtera Ichirō ended his young life atop the gallows.

The case about which I wanted to tell you was just as I have related it.

After Ōtera died, however, I unexpectedly came into possession of a manuscript that he had written in jail. It is his last will and testament. Since they are irrelevant to the story, I will spare you the details of how exactly I obtained the manuscript.