The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (24 page)

My mother was questioned about my alibi. She believed I still had that hospital job, so she insisted I was with her all night. Her intention was to protect me from the Umezawa women. She had a heart of gold.

Now I shall explain Kazue’s murder. I killed her shortly after that because I didn’t want her to have time to compare notes with Masako. I had previously paid her a visit alone to check out the house. I had experienced incredible fear and anxiety when I killed Heikichi, but killing Kazue was more like walking on a tightrope. I murdered her, and then waited for Mr Takegoshi to get off work. I was afraid he might not show up or would take a different route home that night.

I had wanted to wear the same kind of kimono that Kazue wore, but I couldn’t afford it. So once she was dead, I had to take hers off and put it on myself. While I was waiting for Mr Takegoshi on the street, I found some bloodstains on the collar. So I looked for a dark place for the planned encounter. Fortunately he turned up. I led him back to Kazue’s house. I could smell the pungent odour of blood, but he seemed oblivious to it. I asked him not to turn on the lights. He thought I was being shy; in fact it was a ploy to keep the bloodstains hidden.

When the investigators said Kazue must have died between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., Mr Takegoshi must have been horrified—but it was lucky for me. In fact I’d killed her just after 7 p.m.

When I attended Kazue’s funeral, I hadn’t finished putting her house back in order. I had washed the bloodstains out of the cushion covers and hung them to dry in the house. I wanted it to look like there was still work to do—that would be a good reason for the Umezawa women all to go to the house on the way back from Mount Yahiko.

By that time, I was already getting used to killing. I even enjoyed it, as if I was playing some kind of game. I never liked spending time with the Umezawa women, but going to Mount Yahiko with them was part of my plan, and I was looking forward to it. Fortunately, the police hadn’t released Heikichi’s note, so nobody knew about the Azoth story. This time, everything worked smoothly. When I proposed the trip, Masako immediately agreed, and then, during our visit to the hot springs, the girls all wanted to stay longer—which I was going to suggest if they hadn’t. Just as I had expected, Masako left us and went to Aizu-wakamatsu to see her parents. I knew she wouldn’t go out to see anyone while she was there because she knew
everyone would be curious about the Umezawa family. My only obstacle was that Masako told me and her nieces, Reiko and Nobuyo, to go back to Tokyo separately. But it was important for my plan that the six of us should travel together. We ended up taking the same train, but Tomoko, Akiko and Yukiko sat together, away from Nobuyo, Reiko and me. Nobody saw the six of us together.

I suggested we might all go to Kazue’s house to finish the cleaning up, but Tomoko and Akiko said that I could do it by myself. How could they say a thing like that to me? Kazue was their blood relative, not mine. They were not only selfish, but had ugly dispositions, too. We lived in the same house and took ballet lessons together, but they were terrible dancers. Among all of them, Tomoko and Yukiko were especially bad. When I danced well, they would walk out of the practice room. When my time on the floor was over, they would all come back in and start to dance, laughing and chatting away.

To get them to go to Kazue’s house, I acted like I really needed them. “Please come with me. I’m scared to go into that house alone,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything. I bought some fruit; I can make some nice fresh juice for you.”

We arrived at Kazue’s house just after 4 p.m. on 31st March. I immediately went to the kitchen, squeezed the fruit, and put the poison in the juice. I did it quickly so that they would be dead before dark. If they were still alive and it got dark, they would turn the lights on, and the neighbours would know that somebody was in the house. All five of them drank the poisoned juice, and died instantly.

I was going to take the antidote beforehand, in case they asked me to try the juice first, but I had had no chance to
obtain it. However, my worst-case scenario didn’t come true, because the girls didn’t have the slightest thought of coming into the kitchen to help or watch what I was doing.

I stored their bodies in the shower. It was not really safe to leave the bodies there, but the shower was the only place I thought secure. And I couldn’t store five bodies somewhere else and bring them back the next day. If the police found the bodies, I would give up the whole plan and kill myself with arsenic; the police would have thought the killer was trying to make Azoth with six bodies. If the killer remained unknown, my mother would never be involved. Fortunately, nobody noticed the bodies in the shower.

I went back to the Umezawa house alone. I put a piece of rope and a bottle of the poison in Masako’s room. Then I spent the night in my room alone. The next day, I returned to Kazue’s house. The muscles of the girls’ bodies had begun to harden. In the moonlight coming in through the bathroom window, I began to saw and slice through the bodies. It was very lucky for my idea of Azoth that all the Umezawa women, including myself, were blood type A. It was something I had found out when we went to donate blood one day. Then I wrapped the body pieces in oilpaper, took them to the storeroom in the garden, and covered them with a cloth. I had cleared up all the dust and straw in there on the day of Kazue’s funeral, so that the bodies could not easily be traced back there.

The problem was the girls’ travel bags. How was I going to get rid of them? They were not so large, but there were six pieces altogether. I couldn’t tell Mr Takegoshi to take them with him. I put some rocks in them and threw them into the Tama River. I got rid of the saw and the knife in the river, too.

I had already prepared the blackmail letter to Mr Takegoshi. I killed the girls on 31st March and mailed the letter on 1st April, the same day I cut their bodies up. Everything had to be done quickly, because of the decomposition setting in. Also Mr Takegoshi needed time to carry out his mission.

I don’t have a birthmark; Yukiko did. In Heikichi’s note, I described Yukiko’s birthmark as if it was mine. In order to complete the fiction, I hit myself on the side of my stomach with an iron rod to make a bruise and I mentioned to my mother that I had a birthmark. She was so surprised, she tried to rub it off! So when she saw the real birthmark on Yukiko’s torso, she identified the body as mine.

After the murders, I changed my hairstyle and clothes and stayed in cheap hotels in Kawasaki and Asakusa, working wherever I could. My heart ached when I thought of my mother being so sad and alone.

I could have continued to live that way with my savings, but there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t be traced and captured. I thought the best thing would be to flee from Japan for a while, and return later. Of all the Japanese colonies, I thought Manchuria would be the best place to hide. It was hard for me to part from my mother, but even if I stayed in Japan, I wouldn’t be able to see her for a while anyway. And if she knew what I had done, I felt sure she wouldn’t have been able to keep it a secret. So for her sake and mine, I made the decision to leave.

While working in a hotel, I had met a woman who was going to join a settlers’ unit in Manchuria with her brothers. I begged her to let me accompany them. It was said that Manchuria was a prosperous, wonderful place to live, and many Japanese were moving there to work on the land. I was
one of the dreamers; I later found the dream was far from perfect. There was no shortage of land in Manchuria, but we had to endure a very harsh climate. The temperature went down to minus 40°C.

After a while, I quit working on the farmland and got a job in the city. It was extremely difficult for a single woman to make a living there. I can’t describe what happened to me. Let me just say that I understood why my mother didn’t want to go to Manchuria. When I suffered, I always thought it was God’s punishment.

At the end of the war, I returned to Japan. I lived for a while in Kyushu. The Umezawa murders were still famous, and I learnt that my mother had inherited a lot of money from Heikichi’s estate. I was ecstatic with the news, because now she’d be able to fulfil her dream of opening her own boutique in Kyoto. I couldn’t stop myself from visiting her. So in 1963, I went to Sagano. I searched the area in vain but came up empty—no mother and no shop. I can hardly describe my disappointment. There was nothing for me to do in Kyoto, so I went to Tokyo.

Tokyo had changed completely. The streets were crowded with automobiles and many highways had been constructed. There were colourful signs and banners everywhere announcing the upcoming Olympic Games. I went to Meguro, where the Umezawa house was located. Among the trees, I could see a new apartment building on the Umezawa property. Then I went to Komazawa to see my favourite creek and trees and the spot where I had buried the murder weapon. I had heard there was now a golf course in the area. When I got there, I was shocked. The woods and creek had completely disappeared. There was
just a vast open stretch of land, with the characteristic red soil of the Kanto area. Bulldozers and trucks were running around, holes being dug, and earth was being hauled away. There were some huge cement pipes, which were going to be used for the sewage system. Perhaps that was where the creek had been. The construction workers told me they were building an arena and a park for the Olympic Games. It was a hot summer day, and I was sweating under my parasol. Everything was so different. I couldn’t believe it was the place where I had spent a night shivering in the snow. Even the sun seemed to be shining differently. The serenity which had surrounded me that winter day was gone.

Then I went to Hoya to see my mother. I felt sure she would be there. She would have been seventy-five years old at that time. When she inherited the money, she was already over sixty. I had neglected to think of that. How could she have started a new business alone at that age? I loathed my thoughtlessness. On the way to the cigarette shop, my knees were trembling. When I turned the corner, I expected to see her sitting in her shop window as she always used to… but she wasn’t there. The shop was still there, but not her. All the stores on the street now had modern aluminium windows and doors, making my mother’s old, worn cigarette shop look very pitiful. No one was minding the shop. I slid the window open and called out to see if there was anybody there. A middle-aged woman appeared, and I told her I was a relative of Tae’s from Manchuria. The woman let me in the house and then left.

My mother was lying in bed in the living room. She looked like she was on her last breath. I sat down beside her. Her eyes were so weak, she didn’t recognize me.

“Thank you, ma’am,” she said. “You’re always so kind.”

I couldn’t stop the tears from running down my cheeks. What a fool I had been! I realized that my revenge on the Umezawas hadn’t done any good. I hadn’t been able to make my mother happy after all, nor had I changed her life for the better. I had been completely mistaken.

I stayed to look after her, waiting patiently in the hope she would recognize me. Several days later, she suddenly called out my name. “Oh, you’re Tokiko… Tokiko!” she cried with delight. She didn’t seem able to comprehend the situation, or how long it had been since we had seen each other. It was just as well. I didn’t want her to know anything more than that I was back.

The Tokyo Olympic Games were going to be held the following year. I bought a colour television, hoping to please her, but she was almost comatose, her life dwindling. Her house became the television haven of the neighbourhood. Few people were able to afford a colour television back then. On the day of the Opening Ceremony, the house was filled with people from the neighbourhood excitedly watching the spectacle on TV of the acrobatic planes creating five interlocking circles of smoke. The Olympic Games represented a new era for Japan. But for me, all it meant was that my mother had completed her own circle of life; like the smoke from the planes, she drifted away peacefully, surrounded by her neighbours.

I felt I had many obligations to my mother, and one of them was to open a boutique in Sagano. Fulfilling her dream was the only reason left for me to live. I had no regrets about the murders. If I had thought I would one day feel regret, I would never have done them. I am sure you can understand that.

Running my shop with two young employees brought pleasure, but it seemed too good for me. So I decided to make myself a bet. Because you are an astrologer, you will understand this. I was born in Tokyo at 9.41 a.m., on 21st March 1913. In the first house, I have Pluto, the symbol of death and reincarnation. My inclination for bizarre things must come from the influence of this planet. Also, I have Venus, Jupiter and the moon making a triangle in my horoscope. I was born lucky. Probably my plans worked so well because of my luck. However, the fifth house—which means family and a love relationship—is diminished. At the same time, the eleventh house—which controls friendship and desire—is also diminished. In fact, I have no friends, no lovers and no children.

I was not interested in having property or money or status. My only desire was to find a man who would spend his life with me. I decided that if I ever met that man, I would devote my body and soul to him for ever. I stayed in Sagano, betting that he would come… waiting for him. He would solve the mystery, and he would find me. It was strange, but even though I knew I wasn’t blessed with love or romance, I believed that my fortune would change after middle age. I was born under a lucky star, so if I stayed there, something wonderful would happen to me. No matter who it was, I knew he would be a smart person, and he would be someone to love. I wouldn’t care what kind of family he came from. I would love him. I thought that was to be my fate. That was my bet.

But now I think I was just being stupid. Time passed, and I grew old. Suppose a man did find me: I would be too old for romance. My murder plans had been so perfect that I couldn’t
satisfy my desire. I lost my bet. It was a real punishment for a woman like myself.