I followed her in silence. Through the walls I could hear the thud of feet and limbs on tatami mats, the daily judo practise that was compulsory for every officer in the force.
‘I will skip mine today,’ my guide said with a smile.
‘You are not an active officer?’ I asked.
‘I am nearing retirement.’
We continued down a corridor to an open-plan office. The woman held the door for me and I followed her inside, taking the spare seat by her desk.
‘Thank you for your help,’ I said as she sat down beside me. I looked at the file in front of us. It was impossibly slender, as though it contained nothing at all. ‘Could you please confirm for me what Kaitarō Nakamura was charged with in relation to my mother?’ She looked slightly startled by my question, as though she could not imagine that I did not know. ‘There has been some debate in my family as to the exact charge,’ I added.
The woman nodded and opened the file, turning over the first page. ‘According to the notes, the public prosecutor did not charge him for a long time,’ she said, ‘but eventually they filed for homicide.’
‘Homicide?’ I asked. I could hear a dull pounding in my ears, the beat of my blood.
‘Ms Sarashima, can I get you some water?’
I looked up at her and shook my head. ‘Is this the only charge against him?’
The woman nodded, but still I watched her, waiting for her to contradict me, to tell me that my mother had died in an accident while driving alone.
‘I’ll just be a minute,’ the woman said, leaving me with the file open on the desk. I could see the charge sheet clearly. There was his name, Kaitarō Nakamura, and beneath it his occupation: Wakaresaseya. As I read the word and mentally traced its origin, I began to understand how he had become involved with my parents and the role he had played in their divorce. I looked at the characters again: wakaresase – ‘to split couples up’ and ya – ‘professionally’. It is hard to believe, but such services exist all over the world today in honey trappers, hustlers, con artists, friends and family for hire. Where there is a desire, there are people willing to fulfill that desire for a price. Consequences are not necessarily part of the deal. My hand shook as I held the piece of paper. At the bottom of the sheet was the official charge: homicide of Rina Satō.
My throat closed. The fluorescent light was too bright for my eyes. I thought of my grandfather and all the storeys he had told me, the family storeys that everyone has which eventually transcend into myth. I thought of my mother, who had been taken from me not by accident, but by another person.
I swallowed, wanting to ask the officer if there was any more information on the case, but I knew that the rest of the documents would have been sent to the Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office in preparation for the trial. Nothing of the investigation remained with the police, only the names of those involved and the charges.
The policewoman returned with a glass of water and I sipped it slowly. ‘Do you have the name of the prosecutor who handled the case?’ I asked. ‘Or the opposing counsel?’ The woman pulled the file towards her and flipped to the back. There were two business cards stapled to the final page and, beneath them, a newspaper article. The one cutting my grandfather had never given me. The policewoman apologised and moved to tuck it away, but I asked to see it, holding out my hand.
She watched me as I read over the paragraphs. There were scarcely more than two hundred words there and yet they defined me and my family so completely. ‘Please keep it, if you like,’ she said, before turning back to the file and noting down for me the names and office addresses of the prosecutor and the defence attorney.
‘They will have moved on, I expect,’ she said, handing me the slip of paper.
I nodded. ‘Thank you, I am very grateful.’ I rose and gave her a deep bow. She bowed in return and would have spoken, but I shook my head and stepped away. ‘Please do not trouble yourself. I can find my own way out,’ I said, turning and heading for the doors, unable to bear the sympathy in her eyes.
In the corridor I leaned my head against the cold tinted glass of the window. Night had fallen over the city and the ward of Shinagawa lay sprawled out before me. I could see my reflection sharply delineated by the fluorescent lights, and beyond it the expanse of Tokyo prickling in the darkness. I looked at my face in the glass, a young woman with large dark eyes and high cheekbones. Around my neck was a string of pearls that had belonged to my mother. Under the glare of the lights the opalescent orbs gleamed as I touched them.
For so many years I had not known what I was, that there is a term that defines me, even today. I had first seen it while studying in the library at Tōdai, not realising at the time that I was studying myself – a ‘forgotten party’.
During the investigation of a crime, the family of a victim may be questioned repeatedly by police and prosecutors preparing their cases for trial. At the time of my mother’s death, the legal system determined that after the interviews, these people and their descendants should be ‘forgotten’, so as to protect the criminal defendants. Families were not informed of court proceedings so they could not attend. They were not told the outcome of sentencing or even the perpetrator’s date of release from prison. My grandfather and others like him were required to bury their dead and continue with their lives with no knowledge of what befell the people who had harmed them.
Today the newly bereaved are still known as forgotten parties, but they have more rights. Families can access trials and even hire a lawyer, such as myself, to defend them in court or influence sentencing, and there is one final privilege that is also available to them.
In the Imperial district, where mirrored offices and skyscrapers surround the royal park, and the palace that nestles shrunken at its centre, is the Public Prosecutors Office. On the ground floor, set back from the reach of the sun, is a room filled with single desks and chairs. For up to three years after a criminal has been sentenced, case records and court judgements, even redacted trial documents, can be accessed there by a victim’s family. I had reviewed several cases during my training with the Supreme Court. But as I stood alone in the corridor of the police station in Shinagawa, I knew that I would never be granted access to that room on my own account. For those of us who live in the past, whose loved ones were murdered years ago, old cases cannot be reopened or their content released. Everything I needed to know – who Kaitarō Nakamura was, what he had meant to my mother, how she had died – would remain filed away out of reach, and nothing, neither emotional nor legal appeals, would retrieve them.
I am a forgotten party. That day I realised that I had been forgotten twice: once by the law and once by my grandfather, who had taken away my history and erased it from view.
Alone in the corridor, I shivered; the adrenaline of the afternoon had left a film of sweat on my skin that had cooled in damp patches beneath my clothes. I was tired of storeys. I wanted the facts themselves, unadulterated and clear. I wanted to get as close to my mother’s life as possible. I wanted to witness the events that led to her death.