Another point of contention was how he knew the name of Dr Aosawa’s friend in Yamagata. That doctor was cleared of suspicion, but he had no connection with the culprit either. That was another unsolved mystery.
General opinion was the man had delivered the sake, but some raised the possibility of someone else having actually put the poison into the drinks.
His acquaintances testified to his long medical history, his lack of confidence, and personality traits such as a tendency to dwell on things and be easily suggestible. There was speculation that he could have been persuaded by someone into believing he was responsible, and that that someone had planted the poison and baseball cap in his room.
It was only speculation, though – there was never any evidence to support this theory. In the end, the man who committed suicide was deemed the culprit.
XI
Impressive, isn’t it? For a house of this kind the ceiling is quite high, and the stairs are rather wide.
The garden is magnificent too.
See how the wide eaves along this walkway are entirely unsupported? It’s held up by a kind of cantilever structure. Wouldn’t it be nice to take a nap here? It looks so cool and pleasant with the breeze blowing through.
What do I think? I don’t know what the truth is really. I don’t even know if I believe that the man who committed suicide is the culprit. Though I do think he is connected somehow.
The Forgotten Festival doesn’t have a conclusive ending. I was criticized for leaving it open-ended, but I couldn’t reach a conclusion. I never even thought I would reach one.
If I may speak frankly – and please don’t misunderstand me – I wonder if a crime like this, something beyond our comprehension, is more of an accident than anything else. At some point it begins to roll down a slope, like a snowball, rapidly picking up speed. Moment by moment it gets bigger until, before anyone knows it, anyone at the base of that slope gets mowed down by it. Of course, human agency and contrivance are at the centre of this particular snowball, and probably repressed emotions have something to do with it as well, but I believe that terrible things – terrible beyond anything that humans could devise – can happen due to a series of circumstances coinciding with some kind of trigger. Such events are then presented to us in the form of a great calamity, as if to mock our puny human desires. Do you see what I mean?
My feeling is that this crime was something like that.
XII
Look at this room. It’s so elaborate for such a small space.
It’s called the ultramarine room. See how the walls are bright blue. That’s lapis lazuli, a colour used a lot in ancient Egypt, apparently. It’s made by grinding up highly prized minerals.
The author and scholar Kenichi Yoshida mentioned this room in his writings about the city. He said it was probably contrived so that when you go upstairs and walk along the veranda past the tatami-mat rooms to reach this corner room, your eyes will fall on the bright-blue walls, whose colour is enhanced by the slanting light from outside.
I don’t know if it’s a calculated effect or not, but in this city the walls of old houses are usually painted a deep red, so these blue walls are unexpected.
The light in winter reaches as far as that wall. It’s an unusual, unsettling kind of room.
When she – Hisako, that is – was questioned, she was confused at first, and apparently started talking about this room all of a sudden. No matter what the policewoman said to her, she’d only speak of things she had seen as a child.
I can well believe it. She’d been alone and listening to her family dying all around her with no one to tell her what was going on. It must have been terrifying. Of all the people who lived in that house, only she had survived.
Hisako Aosawa… She was in her first year of middle school at the time, so she would have been around twelve.
Hisako was very beautiful. When she started middle school she had her long, straight hair cut short into a bob. It suited her – made her look like one of those traditional dolls. It also highlighted the contrast between her pitch-black hair and pale, delicately textured skin.
She was smart, and very composed. All the children in the neighbourhood admired her. My brothers, too. They idolized her.
But she had health problems, a condition called autointoxication. She turned pale sometimes and had to lie down. She was often absent from school, but the teachers weren’t strict about that as she was a good student.
Autointoxication… Apparently children with unstable autonomic nerve systems often have it. The body manufactures toxins, just like with pre-eclampsia in pregnancy. Hisako said that on the day she had been sitting in her special chair with the armrests because she was feeling exhausted and drained of energy. Isn’t it strange the things that can decide your fate one way or another? That day she didn’t put anything in her mouth because of the autointoxication, which had always been an affliction but turned out to be her saviour.
I have to say, that was very like her. I realize she must have suffered, but that weak, delicate air did suit her perfectly. It added to her mystique. She was quite the young lady from a grand house.
I know how insensitive this sounds, but it was my impression that even the aftermath of such an awful tragedy was in keeping with her image. It was dramatic. She was the survivor of a tragedy – a role she was made for. Nobody actually said it, but I think the other children thought so too. She was a tragic heroine in our eyes, and the crime only ensured that she was imprinted that way in our memories forever.
XIII
When I did my research for The Forgotten Festival I spoke with Hisako only once.
She ended up living in that house for a long time afterwards, but when I met her she was packing up to leave.
She was about to be married. Her fiancé was a German guy who she had met at graduate school, and they were going to live in America, where he’d found a post. Apparently he was planning to have her eyes examined again by doctors in America.
She was happy to meet me again, and we spent a whole day together.
My conversation with her then was central to The Forgotten Festival.
Hisako’s powers of memory were outstanding. She hadn’t forgotten anything of what she’d touched and heard that day. Ten years after the event her memory was still astonishingly sharp. So much so that I felt able to recreate her experience in my own mind as she had lived it.
If she had been sighted, things would have been different, I think. I’m sure the case would have been solved much more quickly if she had been able to see the culprit. She heard somebody walking in the kitchen. She heard the letter being put on the table, and a glass being placed on top of it. If she had been so inclined, she could have seen the person’s face.
If she had been able to see, of course.
Her thoughts ran along the same lines as mine.
She told me she couldn’t have endured seeing everybody’s suffering as they died. To have seen that would have destroyed her and made it impossible to keep on living afterwards.
She also said that she had always felt the weight of two conflicting emotions in equal measure. One was frustration that the perpetrator might have been caught earlier if she had been able to see, and the other was the certainty that she would never have survived if she had.
I think so too. If she had been sighted, she also would have died, either from having drunk the poison or being killed by the culprit.