The Gate of Sorrows (8 page)

On his retirement, the Metro Police found Shigenori a position as a security supervisor at a supermarket. The job was a thank-you for decades of service; he showed up three days a week, read the papers, and occasionally met with the rep from the security company. He could take it easy and there was no stress. Even the pain was not as bad as before, or at least it seemed that way, which made him even less inclined to pay attention to Toshiko’s suggestions that he see a specialist. He hated anything having to do with doctors and hospitals.

Shigenori had purchased the apartment for his retirement. It was only 650 square feet, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a dining room. The building was old but solidly built, and the price was affordable despite the location near the center of Tokyo. Shigenori had spent his younger years as a foot patrolman out of a police box not far from the apartment. Somehow it felt like coming home.

The Tsuzukis were childless. Neither had wanted to own a home, but they’d worried that landlords would be reluctant to rent to pensioners. The apartment would be their final residence. Shigenori thought he would live out his days here, always depending on a cane.

But in mid-May he’d caught a cold, which was unusual. After a night with a temperature of 100.4, both legs were so numb he couldn’t make it to the toilet in the morning. He’d been able to sit up with Toshiko’s help, but couldn’t stand; his left bicep femoris was so swollen, it felt like an iron plate was embedded in his leg.

“I need another nerve block,” Shigenori had said. Toshiko didn’t listen. She got on the Internet, found an orthopedic surgeon with a stellar reputation, and dragged her husband to an examination. The diagnosis: yes, he had a slightly herniated disk, but that was not the cause of his numbness and pain.

Shigenori had spinal stenosis. His lumbar vertebrae were out of alignment and pressing on one of his spinal nerves.

“It’s common in postmenopausal women, but we see it in men from time to time. Athletes and orchestra conductors are prone to it too,” the surgeon had told him. Toshiko remembered a television personality who’d had an operation for the same thing years before.

“We still don’t understand what causes it, but it’s treatable,” the surgeon had told him. “We can adjust your spine and stabilize it with an implant. If you’d come to me sooner, you could’ve avoided years of unnecessary pain. The longer you leave this untreated, the longer it will take your nerves to recover after the operation.”

What kind of medical condition is this?
thought Shigenori.
My legs are killing me but the problem’s in my back.
He had never had back pain. He never dreamed that was where the problem might lie.

There was another reason the surgeon had admonished him for not having a proper examination sooner. The hospital Toshiko had found after a determined search was indeed one of the top centers for treating spinal stenosis. To prove it, there was a long waiting list for the operation.

“You’ll have to wait three to six months before a bed opens up,” the surgeon had told him.

Now it was December and Shigenori was still waiting. He’d already quit his job with the supermarket. For the first time in his adult life, he was unemployed.

Shigenori had had a job as long as he could remember. Now he had to find a different way of life, and he attacked the problem with the same tenacity he’d brought to his work. Housework, he discovered, was something he could get lost in. He found new hobbies. In the final years of his career, he’d spent a lot of time thinking about what he would do after leaving the force. He wanted to make life easier for Toshiko, who hadn’t had an easy time of it all these years. Maybe they should travel all over Japan. He could learn to cook, give her a chance to relax. He wasn’t allergic to the kitchen. He just hadn’t had a chance to cook since he was young.

Now all these plans, or maybe dreams, were on hold. In police work, and not just detective work, patience was the number one requirement. Stamina and tenacity were no less important than courage. In that sense, Shigenori was an exceptional cop. He knew it, and the men he worked with knew it too.

One more time.

That was his motto during his years on the Edano Squad. It even became a byword for detectives in other units. When investigations were going nowhere and the search for witnesses couldn’t get off the ground, when there was no way to trace a piece of evidence back to the criminal, when everyone was ready to give up because further effort seemed pointless, Shigenori would say:
One more time. Let’s interview the witnesses one more time. Let’s visit the crime scene one more time.

And yet, and yet. Waiting endlessly like this, in his condition, was genuinely hard to bear. One more day. Hold on for one more day. Day after day, the accumulated weight of time pressed on his emotions like the displacement in his spine pressing on his nerves, gradually leaving him numb. Day after day, that look of impassive suffering began to wear on Toshiko too. Maybe things had been easier for her when he’d been busy and hardly ever home. The thought only made Shigenori more frustrated.

With nothing to do all day, even minor tasks like cutting his nails were becoming tiresome. He listlessly tossed the balled-up newspaper in the trash, sat down heavily on the sofa and stared at the blue December sky outside the sliding doors to the balcony. Just as he was thinking that perhaps he should’ve gone for a walk after all, the wireless extension for the video intercom chimed. Toshiko had had the intercom installed so she could see who was at the door without getting up.

Shigenori peered at the tiny screen. It was Shigeru Noro.

“Good morning,” Shigeru said politely when Shigenori opened the door. “Sorry to trouble you this early. Something’s come up.”

Shigeru was seventy-eight. He had been born and raised in Wakaba. Other than a few years of school in northern Japan, keeping out of harm’s way during the Pacific War, he’d been a fixture in the neighborhood. For many years he’d also been the head of the district association.

“Come in, then.” Shigenori bent to get the guest slippers.

“That’s all right, this will just take a minute,” said Shigeru cheerfully. “Please sit down.” Shigenori kept a stool in the entryway to help him put on his shoes. “There’s something I want you to take a look at.”

Shigeru ran a little tobacco stand out of his house. Business had been bad enough, he said, as more and more people insisted on smoke-free environments, but it nosedived when even vending machines started requiring electronic cards with proof of age. But he also managed an apartment building and was comfortably well-off.

Shigeru looked warm and chic in his trademark multicolor alpaca coat and hood. His brand-name sneakers were emblazoned with a flashy logo. He pulled a new-looking digital camera from his coat pocket and started scrolling through the images with a practiced hand.

“You remember the tea caddy building in Ida, don’t you?”

Ida was a district of Shinjuku just north of Wakaba. Not far from one of Tokyo’s biggest shopping areas, Wakaba and Ida were islands that time seemed to have passed by, with houses dating from before the war still occupied by the same families, and “modern” apartment blocks built just after the war. In the bubble economy of the mid-eighties to early nineties, both districts were roiled by speculators whose tactics for persuading owners to part with their property ranged from persistent to unscrupulous. Many old buildings disappeared, replaced by condominiums and apartment buildings—but before the empty lots were filled the bubble collapsed, the speculators disappeared, and many orphaned lots stood empty, like missing teeth. This didn’t make the neighborhood safer from crime.

Twenty years out from the implosion of the bubble, the neighborhoods had gradually recovered. The empty lots had mostly filled in with apartments, tiny condominiums, and metered parking lots. Things had returned to normal, more or less. The bubble had been a dream, after all, and a foolish one at that. No one expected things to change much in the future, because a bubble like that wasn’t going to come again anytime soon. Just as disease progresses more slowly in the aged, an aging town changes slowly too.

The tea caddy building was built on the site of a parking lot in Ida during the tech bubble that got rolling early in the new century. Its four cylindrical stories looked for all the world like one of those everyday containers of green tea. The name caught on quickly.

The tech bubble was different from the stock and real estate bubble of the 1980s and 1990s. That one had raged like a typhoon; this was like a summer downpour that drenched one street but left the next one over dry. It didn’t last long, and the benefit—or damage—was limited to certain people and companies and locations. The people who made money made it in buckets, and one of them was a young founder of a software company who decided he needed a building shaped like a tea caddy in Ida.

Shigeru had dug around and discovered that no one was living there. It had been used more like a club where the owner and his tech industry friends could throw lavish parties. It seemed astonishing that someone would erect an entire building for such a purpose. It definitely didn’t seem designed as a commercial property. The owner had probably planned to find someone to live there once he tired of it.

The proportions were indeed like a tea caddy, but the details were ornate, with projecting bay windows adorned with fancy ironwork, reliefs on the outer walls, and a rooftop encircled by a crenellated wall like the turret of a medieval castle. To Shigenori, the building looked like a cheap imitation of an old European castle, or perhaps a monastery. In the building’s heyday, the entrance had actually been flanked by stone statues—a knight in a suit of armor and a robed goddess.

When the tech bubble popped and the young tycoon’s business sense proved to be a myth, the building was left to its fate. Perhaps because it was a tax dodge, the building had multiple layers of ownership, and multiple people came forward claiming to own it, with each denouncing the others as imposters. A civil suit ensued, and the trustee sealed the building temporarily; then, when a resolution had seemed to be in sight, the building was reopened, gutted and remodeled several times by a series of commercial tenants—a beauty salon, a bar, a restaurant—with each new business going bust almost as soon as it opened its doors. Then another hasty renovation would follow, with another grand opening and another business failure.

Around the time Shigenori moved to Wakaba, these attempts to do business at the tea caddy building came to an end, and it stood abandoned and empty. Rumor had it that the ex-wife of the original owner had managed to capture half the rights to the building, but without the other half she couldn’t sell it. It wasn’t close to any station, and its history seemed to put potential tenants off. The building’s doors were locked, but it was empty and unwatched, and it soon became a hangout for local teenagers, who seemed to have a talent for spotting opportunities of this kind. A year earlier there had been a minor panic over a small fire that had broken out. Since then the Ida District Association and associations from neighboring districts had taken to regularly patrolling the building, though all they could do was check the outside.

“Is there something wrong with the building?” Shigenori asked. “Did the patrol run across something?”

“It’s not easy to explain, actually,” said Shigeru. “In fact, it’s rather odd.”

He found the image he had been searching for and held the camera out so Shigenori could see the screen. “Take a look.”

It was a photo of the building, but not from the ground. It had been taken at roof height, from about ten yards away. “I took this from Tae’s living room window,” Shigeru said. Tae Chigusa was the vice-chair of the Ida District Association. She was in her seventies and lived alone.

Shigenori blinked, puzzled. “Am I supposed to see something?” Without a doubt, the image was odd, but not in a way anyone familiar with the building would’ve thought surprising. “It’s just that bizarre statue.”

A monster out of European legend perched on the edge of the roof. It had astonished Shigenori when he saw it for the first time.

It was a gargoyle, a demonic creature with wings sprouting from its back. The face and ears were not those a Japanese demon would’ve had. It looked more like an evil bat. Shigenori had looked it up; gargoyles were a decorative element of Gothic architecture. They usually decorated drain spouts that kept rainwater from flowing down the sides of buildings.

The tea caddy building’s gargoyle was pure decoration. It sat almost directly above the entrance, and there were no visible rainspouts or gutters anywhere near it. If it had been a drain spout, people using the building entrance would’ve been soaked.

Shigeru smiled like a mischievous child. If his manner of dressing belied his age, so did his youthful vigor. It was a smile that suited him perfectly.

“It’s the statue, but can you spot the problem? It’s not quite like the one I’m used to seeing.”

Shigenori took the camera for a closer look.

“Tae noticed it. She can see it from her window, whether she likes it or not.”

There it was. Shigenori nodded and kept looking at the monitor. “He’s holding something, isn’t he?”

“Very good,” said Shigeru brightly. “Holding, or maybe shouldering it. It looks like a pole.” The long object projected backward at an angle from the right shoulder of the crouching form. It hadn’t been there before.

“A pole, or maybe the handle of something,” Shigenori said. “How long has this been here?”

“About a week, according to Tae. Remember the big storm?”

Shigenori nodded. A tropical storm had hit Tokyo in the middle of December, but the rain had been cold as ice.

“Next morning she’s brushing her teeth and looking out the window. That’s when she sees this thing sticking out over the statue’s shoulder. At first she thought there was something wrong with her eyes. Tae is old and her eyes are none too good, but when she looked the next day, there it was again. She thought it was odd, so I dropped by and took the picture.”