It’s to protect the moss. That’s moss, not grass. Isn’t it superb? That fishing line must keep the birds away, too. I expect it prevents large birds from landing there.
That large wooden building over there is the Seisonkaku Villa. It was built by a feudal lord as a retirement house for his mother and is listed as an Important Cultural Property. Shall we go inside? It’s rather interesting.
Traditional houses are so dark inside, aren’t they? The houses I lived in as a child always were. I remember the gloomy, mysterious interior of my grandmother’s house in the daytime. There was always a sickly sweet-sour smell, a mixture of incense and medicinal poultices and food simmering on the stove, which used to make me feel depressed for no particular reason.
Chilly in here, isn’t it? The sweat soon dries once you’re out of the sun. What a relief. But it would have been cold in winter. The cold creeps in upwards from the feet. People in the olden days must have been chilled to the bone.
As I was saying, over a hundred police were assigned to the murder investigation. Naturally, since the whole city was in a panic. People in the neighbourhood were questioned so often it quite wore them out. My mother was a bundle of nerves. She wouldn’t let us buy any snacks or cold drinks outside the house. All we were allowed to drink was green tea made at home. I suppose it was much the same in all households with children.
I was in grade five at primary school at the time, so I must have been ten or eleven. My brothers, who were very close in age, were thirteen and fourteen and in their second and third years of middle school.
The police interviewed us repeatedly. A detective and policewoman came to the house and had us talk about the same thing over and over. They questioned Junji many times, because he was at the house on the day. He was a sociable boy by nature, but even he became tired of it. I understand why the police did that, though. Almost everybody who was in the house had died, and the doctors didn’t allow survivors to be questioned for quite some time afterwards.
As nothing was taken from the house, the police’s first line of inquiry was a revenge crime. But the family was highly respected in the community, a family of doctors going back generations. They were all upstanding people, so it was hard to think of anyone who might have a grudge against them. The investigation soon reached an impasse.
When the investigation stalled, the atmosphere became tense. Despite a huge investment of manpower, and persistent questioning by police to the point that everyone was fed up with it, no picture of the suspect had emerged. Police and residents alike were stressed by the situation.
We were all on edge. A mass murderer was among us and we didn’t know who. All anyone knew was it had to be someone nearby.
And of course the murderer was close.
The man in the black baseball cap and yellow raincoat.
Although he’d become notorious, no one had actually seen his face. Police created a composite photograph based on neighbours’ testimonies, but it wasn’t very useful.
The man who had ridden a delivery motorbike loaded with a case of drinks.
He wasn’t the usual man from the liquor shop, but he gave a convincing impression of having been asked to bring the drinks round. As I told you before, the name he gave as the sender was a friend of Dr Aosawa’s, the head of a hospital in Yamagata Prefecture who was a friend from the doctor’s medical school days. So the doctor didn’t question it.
Yes, it was raining at the time. A low-pressure system was approaching, and it was working up to a storm, blowing wind and rain. That’s why nobody thought it odd that the man’s face was hidden by rain gear.
Next day, the yellow raincoat was found in the river downstream. The man must have discarded it immediately after delivering the drinks. Apart from that strange letter, that’s all the physical evidence the culprit left behind.
IX
We were in limbo, that white summer, while the police investigation dragged on through the late summer heat.
The longer it went on, the more worn out and depressed people became.
Practically the whole Aosawa family had been wiped out in one fell swoop, and the house looked like it was slowly crumbling away.
I crept past that house many times, but it was always deadly silent. You’d never have guessed there was anybody in there, although relatives from Fukui and Osaka had come to deal with the aftermath.
After the murders everybody treated the place like a haunted house – nobody went near it.
But of course it wasn’t unoccupied.
She was still living there. And the people who took care of her.
I caught sight of her in the window a few times, but always sneaked away quietly, though she couldn’t have seen me.
There was a large crepe myrtle tree out the front of that house. Crepe myrtle is most often associated with red flowers, like the decorative paper flowers used on sports days, but the flowers on that tree were pure white. And it always used to be in spectacular bloom over summer.
I remember walking past the house and staring at the crepe myrtle.
Maybe that’s why I associate that summer so strongly with the colour white.
X
I think it was around the end of October that the investigation finally picked up.
The trigger was a suicide. A man living in a rented apartment hung himself. When the landlord who found him read the suicide note he called the police.
In his note the man confessed to being guilty of the mass poisoning at the Aosawa house. He wrote that he had delivered the poison after receiving notice that he had to kill the Aosawa family. This man had been plagued by headaches from an unknown cause for many years, and suffered from insomnia and delusions. He also had a history of psychiatric treatment.
Understandably, the police didn’t take it seriously at first, because several other people had made similar claims by then. But they saw things differently when a black baseball cap, the keys to a motorbike and the dregs of an agricultural poison exactly the same as that used in the crime were found inside a cupboard in the apartment.
The clincher was the discovery that his fingerprints matched those found on a glass and the letter left at the scene. All at once the police and mass media were fired up again, and all people could talk about was the discovery of the culprit. But the excitement didn’t last long, since he was already dead.
It was something of an anticlimax after the investigation had stalled for so long.
People had mixed emotions. Relief for one thing, but also a feeling of being let down. And, equally, an overwhelming emptiness.
They were glad the culprit wasn’t a neighbour or acquaintance, and relieved that there was no reason to hold a grudge against the Aosawa family, but they still couldn’t make sense of why all those people had died. Of the absurdity of so many innocent people losing their lives because of one man’s delusion. Quite a few people became depressed once the crime was solved. It seemed so pointless. If the culprit had at least had a strong motive, it might have been easier to understand.
Once it was all over, people felt as if they had been left in limbo.
Yes, they did. Many people expressed doubt as to whether the man who committed suicide really was the culprit.
The biggest sticking point was his connection with the Aosawa family – what was his link with them, where and how had he met them? He didn’t live near the Aosawas, and ultimately it wasn’t clear how he knew them. In the end it was put down to an indirect connection through the Aosawa Clinic. It was a large facility, and there was also the possibility he’d seen an advert for it somewhere.