The Lady Killer

In summer, the bars and small restaurants in Kabuki-cho, Shinjuku, usually greet the first customers of the day at about 4 p.m. However, trade at this hour is listless; the place has only just opened, and the air conditioner has not begun to bite, or else the floors are still glistening with fresh-sprinkled water. The customers huddle at the end of the counter and get on with the serious business of drinking; they certainly do not revel at that hour or spend money on itinerant street musicians.

These wandering minstrels usually turn up in the entertainment districts after 8 p.m. But on a certain day a violin player known since his youth as “Ossan”—“the old fellow”—set out early and was cruising the area by 6 p.m., when the sun was still high in the sky. This was because he had taken the previous day off and needed the money. Both the old fellow’s low-heeled shoes, the soles of which were worn to paper-thinness, and the sandals of his partner were spattered with white dust.

“Hey! Old fellow!” They were passing the Bar Boi just behind the Koma Theater when a waiter came out and called them. “One of our customers wants music. She says only a violinist will do.”

“She really wants a violinist? That’s unusual.” Nowadays, no one seemed to want violin music, what with the craze for the guitar. They followed the waiter into the cool and almost deserted bar.

He led him to a table where there sat a female customer wearing dark glasses and a wide-brimmed hat. The old fellow bowed to her.

“What would you like me to play, madam?” He studied his client’s face carefully, noting the large mole on the side of her nose.

“Can you play ‘Zigeunerliedchen’?”

“Ah, now, if you ask me for a classical piece I can play anything you want.”

“Go ahead, then, let’s hear you.” Her voice seemed strangely toneless.

Getting his instrument out of its case, the old fellow reflected that he’d heard of a woman who made this request to some of his colleagues. None of them could play it, which was a pity for them, as the woman offered to pay a thousand yen just to hear that one tune. It must be the same woman, he thought. But the old fellow was a far better hand at the classics than at modern music. The guitarist began to strum, and he embarked upon the haunting melody.

The woman just sat and listened, without making any effort to sing the words. Yet she didn’t seem to be drunk, just odd. When they came to the end of the tune, she merely said, “Once more.”

He complied, and when he finished he asked, “How about something else?”

But the woman was silent. There was certainly something odd about her: mad, perhaps. Here she was at a Shinjuku bar wearing a large hat and sunglasses, just as if she was on the beach. It was impossible to read the expression on her face, tricked out as she was in that manner.

At last she broke her silence, and when she spoke her voice seemed artificial.

“Do you play that often?”

“Well, it’s not a common request.”

“But surely you play it sometimes?” The woman spoke almost aggressively, as if trying to force his answer. I know the type, the old fellow thought. Kindergarten teachers, they’re like that.

“I used to play it a lot in the old days.”

“But how about recently? How about a year ago, for instance?”

This question was so preposterous that the old man could not prevent himself from laughing.

“Well, if you say so. I mean, I play every day, so I can hardly remember what I played when.”

“Surely you remember. It was in this very bar, right?”

“Here?”

“Yes, in the Bar Boi, on the ground floor. A man and a woman sang the song, and only that song, several times over.”

“Can you remember?” He turned to his partner, a much younger man with heavily oiled hair.

“Search me.” The guitarist plainly did not like her interrogative approach.

She stood up suddenly and pointed to a corner of the room. She had the posture and tone of a prosecutor in court.

“It was over there. There was a man sitting alone who asked for that song. Now think back. He looked a bit foreign—he had very sharp features. You must remember him, he was so handsome.”

The two strolling players were astonished. They looked at her in a puzzled manner, but she went on, ignoring their bewilderment.

“He was singing down here. And upstairs there was a young girl. She joined in the singing, and after the first duet she came down and joined him and they sang it again. Surely you can remember! Think! Think!”

The old fellow did his best to remember, but his partner was plainly bored.

“An unforgettable voice,” she went on. “Unusually deep—not at all typically Japanese. Now do try and remember. I’m asking about a man with a deep bass voice.”

“Ah,” said the old fellow in a relieved tone. “You’re talking about Mr. Honda. Yes, that’s who it will be. Haven’t seen him around much recently.”

“What does he do for a living, this Mr. Honda?”

“Oh, I really couldn’t say. I mean, I address all my customers either as ‘professor’ or as ‘president,’ and think no more of it. I used to call him ‘professor,’ that’s all I can tell you. He likes singing, though, and has a good voice. I think he once told me that he was the leader of the choral society when he was at college.”

“Which university was that?”

“Now, let me see. A.B.C.—was that it? No, not quite, but it was something like that—three letters of the alphabet. Maybe it wasn’t in Japan at all, but overseas, with a name like that.”

“Have you seen him around recently?”

“No, come to think of it, not for quite a while. He used to be a regular in the local bars, but not anymore. Moved on to some other area, I suppose.”

At this, the woman looked disappointed, but she opened her handbag nonetheless and pulled out a thousand-yen note. As she handed it to them, she added, “If there are any other bars around here where he used to go, please tell me.”

“Other bars? Yes, there were one or two; now, let me see.” And after a little thought, he reeled off the names of several bars. The woman wrote them down carefully in a notebook and left.

“I suppose it was all right to tell her that much,” said the old fellow.

“You mean, maybe she’s got it in for the professor and wants to make trouble?”

“Yes, but no need to worry, I suppose. I mean, it was all true, what I said, and nothing bad about him. She didn’t look like a policewoman.” He pocketed the thousand-yen note. “All that matters is that we got well paid.”

Thereafter, whenever he went into one of the bars, the names of which he had given to the woman, the old fellow always made sure to ask about her, but never with any result.

“No sign of that woman? The one who asked about the professor, the man with the deep bass voice?” Always, the answer was no.

“An odd one, she was. Anyway, we did our best to help. But what’s she up to, I wonder?” He racked his brains to no avail. “Well, that’s life, I suppose. People are here today, gone tomorrow. Just like the wind, people are. I mean, they go and drink at the same place for a while, and then just vanish. Plenty of cases like that, come to think of it.”

“Well,” said his young companion philosophically, “that’s the entertainment business for you. A chancy trade, with customers always coming and going.”

And there they left it. After a while, they forgot all about the inquisitive woman with the mole on her nose.

Asia Moral University is located on a hill outside Tokyo, some fifteen minutes by bus from K Station on the Chuo Line. It is generally known as A.M.U.

It stands in broad grounds amidst the woodlands of the plain of Musashi. In the center of the campus stands a fine, three-story building, the center for studies, and in the surrounding grounds there are spacious dormitories for students and the faculty, who all live in. The student body includes many from elsewhere in Asia and even from Africa, so not much Japanese is heard on the campus. English is the most common language used at A.M.U.

The students are allowed out to the local centers of amusement on Sundays and national holidays; otherwise, they pass their lives in this monastic atmosphere concentrating on their studies.

It was at 1 p.m. on the tenth of October that a bus drew up at the bus stop in front of the university, depositing a single female passenger there. The university operates a two-semester system, and it was still vacation time. As the cloud of dust thrown up by the bus settled, the woman removed the handkerchief that she had kept pressed to her face, replacing it in her handbag and straightening the collar of her kimono before moving on.

She walked down the narrow country road for about five minutes, which brought her to the gates and the broad drive leading to the university. She stood there for a while, gazing in, and then, seeming to change her mind, turned and went back the way she had come. Just beyond the bus stop was a shabby store selling candy, bread, cigarettes, and other small necessities of daily life. It also had a public telephone. It was an unprepossessing sort of a shop; a thin film of dust covered the goods. It did not seem likely to attract many customers.

The woman went to the phone and picked up the receiver. Immediately an old crone emerged from the shadows at the rear of the shop, her eyeglasses slipping down her nose.

“Calling Tokyo?” she asked sharply. “If you want long distance, I’ve got to do it for you.”

The woman shook her head and covered her face with her handkerchief. The old woman withdrew into the shadows but continued to watch her. It seemed that the woman was calling the university.

She got through to the switchboard. She had a list of faculty members open in front of her.

“Professor Matsuyama, please. He is responsible for the choral society, isn’t he?”

“Yes, madam. Putting you through now.”

Saburo Matsuyama, Professor of the History of Church Music, was studying ancient scores in the library when the phone call reached him. Although he was a recognized authority in his field, he was now over seventy, and lecturing was no longer easy for him. He was also rather deaf, and nowadays his chief pleasures were playing the organ and conducting the choral society.

“Hello,” he said into the mouthpiece. “Matsuyama here. Who’s that?”

“Professor Saburo Matsuyama?”

“Yes, yes, who’s that?”

“I am from a matrimonial agency, Professor. I am ringing to inquire about one of your former pupils, a Mr. Ichiro Honda, who I understand used to lead the choral society.”

“Speak up, I can’t hear you.” Although the voice was polite, the woman seemed to be speaking through her nose. She repeated herself twice, raising her voice at the last occasion until he could hear.

“Oh, I see. Yes, ask me whatever you want to know.”

Guided by the woman’s questions, he began to expatiate on the university career of Ichiro Honda. Fortunately, Honda had been an excellent student, and the professor remembered him well. Also words of praise, so important on these occasions, came easily to him. He talked enthusiastically of the diligence, the musical aptitude, and even the good looks of his former pupil. What else could he say?

“Oh, yes, there’s one other thing I’ve just remembered, which goes to show what a fine young man he was. Honda has a rare blood type—only about one in several thousand have it, I gather. Yes, well, he donated blood when he was a student and saved the life of a baby. Yes, it was in all the newspapers at the time, I seem to remember. How did we know he had blood in that group? Well, madam, we have an American Institute of Biology here, of which we’re very proud, and we note every student’s blood type.”

“What type was it? Can you tell me?”

“I can’t remember exactly. But if you ring the Institute, they’ll certainly have it on record.”

The professor suddenly realized that having a very rare blood type was not necessarily conducive to marital negotiations and tried to rectify his error.

“Well, an unusual blood type shouldn’t affect his married life, you know. Just ring the Institute and they’ll tell you. By all means use my name when you talk to them if you like. The switchboard will put you through. By the way, how is Honda nowadays? I gather he went to the United States and studied computer sciences there. I heard that he’s working in that field now and is very busy; we haven’t seen him for years.”

“Ah, yes, well… I’ll certainly tell him to visit you soon,” said the nasal voice hurriedly. She then excused herself and put the receiver down, cutting the professor off.

She dialed again, only this time the old woman could not make head or tail of what she was talking about. It seemed to be about blood, but it was all very complicated. It was not just the complexity of the conversation that was to stick in the old woman’s mind, causing her to remember the incident; rather, it was the disagreeable impression left with her by a customer who bought nothing and monopolized the telephone for so long. She watched the woman leave, sliding her glasses up from the tip of her nose, and it was then that the old woman noticed the mole at the base of one nostril.

The old woman was superstitious. Surely, she thought, only great wickedness could be denoted by a mole like that on a woman’s face.

It was a few hours later that Professor Matsuyama began to entertain doubts about the phone call.

He was talking to his secretary. “I had an inquiry just now about one of my graduates,” he said. “It was from a matrimonial agency.”

“Who was it about?”

“Ichiro Honda.”

His secretary expressed astonishment. “That’s most odd,” she said.

“Why?”

“If I remember right, he got married some years back. Let me see. It was when he was in America, wasn’t it? A Japanese girl from a rich family, if I remember aright. She was studying at the same university. Quite a beauty, I gather. You’re too wrapped up in your work, Professor, that’s the trouble with you. Fancy forgetting something like that!”

The professor mumbled something and changed the subject. Come to think of it, he did remember having received a notification of marriage on a beautiful card printed in both Japanese and English some five or six years before.

He went into the corridor outside and gazed across the school grounds. The fine buildings stood serenely in their landscaped surroundings, each casting its shadow in the fading sun. It seemed to him that some dark shadow also lay over his former student, whom he remembered so clearly singing vigorously in the back row of the chorus.

He felt strangely uneasy. Pressing his head against a marble pillar, he began to pray, as a good Christian should, for the safety of his old pupil.

“Front desk. Hello!”

Junji Oba, reception clerk at the Toyo Hotel, answered the phone with the soft voice he reserved for business transactions. He moistened his lower lip with his tongue, just in case it was a foreigner and he had to switch to English.

“J.C. Airlines here,” said a woman’s voice. “Could you give me the room number of a Mr. Honda who is staying with you, please.”

“Honda? Yes, certainly. What would his first name be, please?”

“Ichiro. I-chi-ro.” She spelled out the three syllables of the name, pausing between each.

Junji Oba was new to the job. He had many years’ experience, but an unfortunate error at his last place of work had brought him to the Toyo Hotel. So despite his experience, he was forced to concentrate like a beginner in order to avoid error.

He searched the register diligently, running his fingers down the five hundred names that were listed floor by floor. Soon he discovered Honda’s name—corner room, third floor. Age twenty-nine, Japanese national, occupation engineer.

“Mr. Honda is in room 305,” he told the woman. He was about to hang up when the voice came back with an inquiry that was so strange that he had to ask her to repeat herself.

“I said, does he have a low voice?”

“A low voice, did you say? Or did you ask if he is short?”

“Yes, a low voice… a deep voice… an unforgettable voice.”

The reception clerk thought quickly. What a peculiar line of inquiry. If one wants to confirm that one has the right person, one doesn’t normally ask about his voice. One might ask about the person’s occupation—Mr. So-and-So of such and such a company, for example. Or Mr. Honda from America, or Mr. Honda from England. And yet this woman said she was from an airline company. So this was not a routine inquiry; it was aimed at research, detective work perhaps. He thought for a moment and remembered an Oriental with a deep voice amongst the guests, a man who normally spoke in English.

“Yes, I think he does have a low voice. We have so many guests staying, you see… it’s hard to remember.”

“But he really is staying there, isn’t he?” The clerk fancied he heard a tone of relief in her voice, as if she had tracked down the man at last after many difficulties. She went on: “Do you know how long he’s staying for?”

“Wait a minute and I’ll see.”

He put down the receiver and checked the reservation for room 305. It turned out that Ichiro Honda was a long-stay guest who had spent the last three months in the hotel. Maybe she’ll make it worth my while, Oba thought; he looked around carefully to see that he was not overheard before picking up the receiver again.

“Hello. Mr. Honda is a long-stay guest. I was just thinking, maybe I could give you any information you need face to face. It’s not very suitable for the phone, you know. I could meet you somewhere outside and give you good information.”

“What do you mean by that?” The woman’s tone hardened as if he had put her on her guard.

“Well, I was just thinking… I thought that if you wanted, I could possibly… I mean, I was just…” he stammered, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead.

“All I was asking was how long Honda will be staying for.” The voice was relentless. He tried to apologize for his misunderstanding, but to no avail. The woman became sterner and sterner. Now she had even dropped the polite “Mr.” from Honda’s name, speaking as if he was a criminal.

“Well, I really don’t know what his plans are. All I know is that he has stayed here for three months so far. If you ring again tomorrow, we could ask him what his plans are.”

“That will not be necessary,” she snapped, but behind her arrogant tone he thought he detected some uncertainty. Plainly, she was from a detective agency or something like that. Maybe she had been put on the job by a business rival, or else a prospective client.

“If you prefer, I could find out without reference to the guest himself. How about that?”

She did not reply, so he went on: “I am Oba, reception clerk. Over the years I’ve helped a lot of inquiry agents, you know; I usually get a small fee for my services, of course. If you are interested, I go off duty at eight tonight, and I’ll be waiting at the coffee shop over the road from this hotel—it’s called ‘Konto,’ and if you ask for me at the desk, they know me. If you’re interested, turn up there.” And he replaced the receiver rapidly before she could say anything more, but she was too fast for him and hung up even before he did. The negotiation was plainly over, but would she come?

“Lying bitch!” he muttered. Then he looked up and saw a foreign guest approaching the counter. He put on his practiced smile and greeted the customer in English.

Before he went off duty, by dint of inquiry amongst his fellow reception clerks and the room boys responsible for 305 he had acquired some interesting information about Ichiro Honda.

This guest certainly did have a deep voice. Although a long-stay guest, he paid his own bills in cash. He only used the hotel room to sleep in and usually came back late at night. He was a fluent speaker of English; though his name and appearance were Japanese, he rarely used that language, but was often to be seen conversing with foreigners in the lobby or coffee shop.

Even that should be enough for him to earn some money, Oba thought. And there was one more suspicious circumstance: Mr. Honda always went off somewhere for the weekends. He went to the coffee shop across the road and waited.

At eight forty-five he was called to the phone. He picked up the receiver and heard the same cold voice he had listened to earlier in the day.

“I checked, and your guest Mr. Honda isn’t the one I’m looking for, so I won’t bother to come and see you.”

“But madam!” he spluttered. “There must be some mistake! My Mr. Honda certainly does have a deep voice!”

She said nothing but hung up. He paid his bill, cursing the money wasted on his coffee and cake.

THE FIRST VICTIM (NOVEMBER 5)

He awoke before seven; someone, a traveler with an early start, no doubt, was walking down the corridor wearing slippers. It was now three months since Ichiro Honda moved into the Toyo Hotel.

He reached over to the portable alarm clock on the bed-side table and turned off the alarm. Recently, he felt, he had become a light sleeper—just like an old man. Why was this so? He presumed it was because of his nightlife, and particularly his experiences with women.

He got out of bed and, still in his pajamas, went into the bathroom. He followed the same routine every morning. He would take a fresh towel from the rack, dry his face and then crumple the towel like a paper ball and hurl it carelessly into the corner. Self-consciously, like an actor in an American film, he took a suit out of the closet and threw it onto the bed. Little by little he dressed: a well-starched shirt, a slim tie, tasteful and in solid colors; pearl cuff links. He dressed with his usual care. Today, having looked at himself in the mirror, he undid his tie and retied it, but otherwise it was his practiced routine; watching him, one knew that he was an habitué of hotel life.

On the luggage rack there was a blue suitcase covered with first-class stickers from the world’s best airlines and the most famous hotels in the United States. It was a very expensive case and his only luggage apart from another case in the closet.

In this hotel, he was known as a long-stay traveler. Even he thought of himself as a traveler. Once a week he would commute to Osaka for a short weekend, and this, too, was traveling. In Osaka he had a wife, Taneko, whom he had married whilst a postgraduate student in the United States. But after they got back to Japan, his wife said that she didn’t want to live in Tokyo, this despite the fact that she had been to college there and even had a small part in a professional drama there once. She said that she was happier staying in the parental home in Osaka, so Ichiro Honda spent his weekdays living in a hotel in Tokyo.

Taneko’s father was still in good health and continued as President of D Corporation, a top-ranking public company. His wealth had accustomed her to having her own way ever since she had been a child. Now she lived with him and a housekeeper in their large mansion in Ashiya, forcing Ichiro to travel to Osaka and back every weekend. However, she had become accustomed to this style of living, and it seemed to her to be the most natural form of existence. For his part, too, he had come to enjoy a double life where he could enjoy the advantages of a single man for much of the time. Whatever his wife got up to whilst he was away was of no concern to him; he was no more concerned, either, in how she endured her lonely life. Just a month ago, his wife had had a small studio built in a corner of the garden where, the housekeeper told him, she would withdraw for two or three days at a time. If this kept her happy, well, so much the better.

Just as he was not jealous of his wife, so Taneko affected no interest in whatever he did to pass the time in Tokyo. He always flew between the two cities, but he seemed to suffer most from emotional strain whilst he was in Osaka. On his return flights to Tokyo he always looked gloomy, which must in some way have been the fault of his wife. His plane would get into Haneda on Sunday evening. The other passengers would have the light step of people returning home, but not he; he looked more like someone walking in a cortege. He displayed duty and hesitation rather than pleasure. He would take a taxi to the hotel and sit slumped in the back without saying a word; Saturday nights were obviously an ordeal for him. As soon as he got back to the hotel he would go straight to bed—the one night of the week when he did so.

By nine sharp on Monday mornings he would be in his office, a private room on the sixth floor of the K Precision Machinery Company in the center of the business district. He occupied a fairly senior post as a computer specialist in this company. Just as gas companies send out staff to supervise the fitting of boilers and so forth, so he was sent out as a consultant to visit large companies, department stores, insurance companies, canning factories, and the like, advising the clients of the most effective way of solving their problems.

So during the eight hours between nine and five, Ichiro Honda led a blameless life, five days a week, plus the time of his visits to Osaka. As far as the world was concerned, he was a devoted husband and a serious worker. But for him, his real life was bounded by the hours of his freedom in Tokyo in the evenings. Ichiro Honda, the computer specialist married to a rich wife, vanished from the face of the earth in the evenings. At first he had drifted, lonely and bored, and had then taken to finding solace in the arms of women.

Every day, he would go back to his hotel straight after work, to wash, perhaps change, and have dinner: on one day meat, on the next fish, but always a bottle of Bordeaux to wash his meal down. Leaving the dining room, he would saunter into the lobby and read the evening papers, both in English and in Japanese. Some evenings he would enjoy a conversation with an Englishman who occasionally stayed in the same hotel. Honda prided himself on his ability to speak the Queen’s English. His favorite topics on these occasions were drama and literature.

At eight o’clock promptly, by which time it was always dark, he would pick up a taxi at the hotel entrance, and his evening would begin. But before getting into the car, he would stand and appreciatively sniff the aroma of Tokyo, which seemed to be compounded of darkness and neon; satisfied that night had indeed once again transformed the city, he would head for the town, for the places where the women awaited him.

His targets were never professional women; rather, they were the lonely and those others who pined for love. To hunt them down, he nightly patrolled music cafés, bars, dance halls, and even cinemas, but all of them away from the business or fashionable entertainment areas. Office girls, sales clerks, typists, beauticians… students, even. They all lay in wait for him along the walls of dance halls or seated in coffee shops and cinemas. They lay in wait, but they were his victims; all he had to do was to find them.

To him, women were no more than tinplate targets at a shooting gallery in a fair. The man pulls the trigger, the woman falls, but after all they are made of tinplate and will rise again. So he could go on shooting to his heart’s content.

Until such time as the target turned out not to be tin, and blood would be shed…

Ichiro Honda had a way with women. He had the faculty of penetrating their psychology at first meeting. Was the woman interested in the arts? Very well, he would be a musician or a painter. In time, he had been sailor, airline pilot, poet, bartender. To hear him in the last role explaining how to mix drinks was enough to make one feel thirsty. And as for his nationality, he had found it effective to represent himself as having come from somewhere outside Japan. His story was that he had been born in England, or Paris, or had spent his boyhood in Chicago. He didn’t have to go into much detail—the story itself was usually enough. As a child, his classmates had mocked his foreign looks, but his clean-cut, chiseled features now stood him in good stead.

He even had a British passport, already expired and abandoned by its owner, which he would flash around. It had taken him three days to change the photo and signature and correct the dates, but it was worth it. He was breaking no law; customs or immigration were never involved, just women. He would leave it, ostentatious in its navy blue cover with the gold coat of arms, on a bedside table or on the counter of a bar. Words were quite unnecessary—the woman only had to see it to believe.

Despite his use of such tactics, he was inside himself convinced that women were naturally his prey because of some innate gift, some supernatural sense, that he had been born with. Often he awoke with a premonition of what woman the day would bring him. He could not explain it—it was just there, a blend of the excitement of his mind and the inner rhythms of his body. These foretastes of the evening would occur to him during purely routine activities such as knotting his tie. Not even his work at the office could drive these thoughts from his mind; they lingered with him all day long, so that he felt as if his soul had left his body and was flying around somewhere over his head awaiting the dusk.

On October 15—a day that would be burned into his mind by the subsequent interrogations of the police, the prosecutor, his lawyer, and the judge—such a premonition came over him as he was tying his tie. He retied it carefully; as he picked up his room key, he broke into a cheerful whistle and ran down the stairs two at a time, eschewing the elevator as being too pedestrian for such a day. He read the papers in the lobby, taking his morning tea at the same time, and then went into the dining room and ordered toast and ham and eggs. He glanced at the local news in the press; traffic accidents, double suicides, and murders—what did these have to do with him? All of these human dramas were for him but arrangements of print on the page; he could not foresee his feelings on reading the papers a few weeks later. Did he but know it, he was no more than an insect in flight over whom the net was about to descend. As far as he was concerned, the world took no account of him and his doings.

As he walked to the subway, the burden of expectation oppressed his chest. He felt like a hunter setting forth for the field, and the whole world seemed to be bathed in sunlight.

On the evening of the fifth of November, Ichiro Honda boarded a bus at Yotsuya Sanchome, arriving at Shinjuku Oiwake. He was clad in a loose-textured tweed coat and hunting cap of the type affected by French film actors in the 1930s. The whole ensemble was brown. He had changed into this outfit at the apartment that he had rented under the assumed name of Shoji Ueda for the last two years. He had gone directly to this apartment, in a building called Meikei-so, immediately after he had left work. The landlord was under the impression that he was a writer who used the apartment to get on with his manuscripts in private.

The flat had two rooms, one about a hundred feet square and the other about seventy-five. Both were in the Japanese style with matted floors, and it served his purpose. For one thing, it was more private than most similar places—the caretaker was not curious, nor were those in the neighboring rooms. Of course, Honda never took anyone else there. The wardrobe was full of suits and coats; there was also a desk and a bed. Here he would always change into whatever costume took his fancy for that night. The decision was not always an easy one between the hunting cap, a trilby, or a French beret; between, say, the sweater with the red lining or a shabby raincoat. Sometimes he would change costumes several times before he was satisfied. Then he would sit down and write his diary.

He called it “The Huntsman’s Log,” and in it he would record all his adventures with women. He had been keeping it for many years, and the fat notebook was almost full. Such was his routine on days like this when the morning premonition came over him; he would go to the flat, change, and read or write up his diary of conquests.

Reading each entry would recapture for him the remembrance of his successes; he could resavor the taste of each woman. He could evoke the feeling of a breast beneath his hand, or the rustling of an underslip as it slid from a body. Visiting these past experiences would prepare him the better for the pleasures that waited him that night.

On this particular evening, the book fell open at an entry made about a year before. Later, he believed that this was no mere accident, that some hand had guided his, but at the time he thought nothing of it. Reading the passage, he recalled the woman clearly; he saw again her face as she sobered up. She had had a muddy complexion, and her face was cratered with acne scars. His eyes ran down the words he had written in his clear, forceful hand:

After summoning up the memory of Keiko’s face, he turned the page and began to read the next entry. The thought of any connection between himself and the girl who had killed herself after sleeping with him once never crossed his mind. The newspaper articles were but more fuel for an entry in his log.

He remembered watching her receding back going down the narrow alleyway at Omori Kaigan, where the air is full of the fresh smell of the sea. Even he was always hurt by partings; he saw it as the price to be paid for love. He shook his head ruefully. But it was no time for such thoughts—he was ready for the hunt, and dismissed them from his mind.

He went to the cupboard and began to dress with meticulous care. It gave him pleasure to don a dark brown herringbone jacket and to select a deep-red bow tie. He chose an overcoat of thick but loose-woven tweed made in Britain. He stood in front of the wardrobe mirror and carefully combed his jet black and slightly wavy hair. After a little reflection, he chose a dark brown hunting cap, and then as an afterthought he deliberately loosened his tie and twisted it slightly off center.

Like most men of his type, he was a narcissist. He examined his face in the mirror, noting with approval his black eyes with their impenetrable depths and their double-folded lids. This was not merely his face; it was a mask for others to see in it what they would. But nonetheless it struck him as a charming face, and he winked at it. The face winked back at him from the mirror.

Outside, the cold winds played at his mufflerless throat, but his feet danced merrily over the pavement. In the lanes not occupied by trams the cars thrust and jostled, so it took some time for him to find a break in the traffic and dart across the road, just in time to catch a crowded bus that arrived at that very moment.

He got off at Shinjuku Oiwake and was immediately attracted by the beauty of a selection of musical instruments arrayed in a brilliantly lit window. It was Kotani, a well-known instrument shop, and he pushed open the door and went in. Within, all was light and gaiety; students, couples, and salaried workers crowded the counters buying audio equipment, records, or musical instruments. His eye quickly picked out a group of office girls gathered around a record stand. Most of them were just over twenty years old, but one woman stood out as being older. Although one of the group, she seemed to detach herself from their gay chatter. They obviously all worked for the same company, and from their conversation he gathered that they were English-language typists. It seemed that someone at their workplace was about to get married, and they were choosing a present.

Watching them, he made up his mind. The old maid would be his target for tonight. He had already sensed in her a mixture of loneliness and irritation. When he heard her decline an offer to go with the younger women to a coffee shop, his mind was made up. He withdrew a little and made himself as unobtrusive as possible whilst watching the group.

Shortly afterward, the woman left the group and made her way to the door. She left the shop alone, and Ichiro followed her.

His victim was smartly dressed in a well-tailored mohair coat of simple design. She looked over thirty, and something in the jut of her chin revealed to him the pride of a woman who lives alone as well as the shadow that overhangs a woman who has lost the chance of marriage. He was ready to begin the night’s hunt.

He followed her, knowing from her conversation that she was headed for Shinjuku Station. There should be plenty of time to overtake her and engage her in conversation. So far, his premonitions had never let him down; everything always went smoothly. So it would be tonight.

He caught up with her at the pedestrian crossing just in front of Isetan Department Store. She stood waiting for the lights to change, unaware of his presence behind her, gazing at the nape of her neck. The thought of this woman, who would be his within a few hours, standing just in front of him gave him mixed feelings of joy and secret sensuality. He identified himself with a hero in a fairy story clad in a mantle of invisibility. The north wind blew in his face, foretelling winter, and old newspapers and fallen leaves whirled in the air. All around, people hurried about their business, their collars turned up against the cold.

At first, it seemed as if the woman was bound for the station, but then she stopped in front of the Meigaza Cinema and gazed at a poster of an old French film that was showing. He stood in the window of the bookshop next door and watched her. The bell signifying the start of the last performance began to ring, and as if this made up her mind for her, the woman went in, just as Ichiro’s sixth sense had told him she would. Despite her telling her companions that she had somewhere else to go, she was just another of his victims starving for love. All he need do would be to set a little snare, and she would be his.

For this aging spinster had undoubtedly been upset by the topic of her colleague’s marriage, drinking the stale blood of her own missed romance. All he would have to do would be to talk to her and to listen to whatever she had to say. That would be all.

After her back vanished into the entrance, he counted five slowly and then followed her up the steps. He paused to let her get far enough ahead for him to overtake her on the staircase. If no one else interfered, it would be easy.

He steadied his breathing and then began to trot up the steep, narrow stairway to the fifth floor, taking the stairs two at a time.

Fusako Aikawa, an English-language typist at the Sato Trading Company, was quite unaware of the fact that Ichiro Honda was pursuing her up the stairs of the Meigaza. She was thinking back to her college days, when she had been a regular frequenter of this cinema. In those days, the five-floor climb had not worried her one little bit. Indeed, it had given her pleasure to climb the stairs in those days, for she had believed that an enchanting world of mystery awaited her at the top; that once there, she would be wafted away to a land of real life. How she had pined for real life in those innocent days, she thought. And when she had got it, what had it turned out to be? What had the last ten years brought her other than going to work and then going home to sleep every evening?

Of course, she had had one or two relationships with men, but what had they signified? They had been no more than boring love affairs—not the real life that she craved, the life of the silver screen. She put them out of her mind. And so she had developed into a trusted, long-service employee who saved half her salary every month, a confirmed old maid who turned up her nose at pleasure. Even she herself did not know at what point she had finally become like that.

What had made her an old maid? Her alarm clock every morning; the crowded trains commuting to work; the monotonous repetitions of the menus at the office cafeteria.

What was more, she was angry with herself for escaping with a spurious excuse from the other girls in the music shop, just running away from the painful topic of her colleague’s wedding. Why had she had to pretend that she had another engagement? Why such an obvious lie? Why not tell them that their sentimental chatter disgusted her?

She stopped halfway up the stairs to catch her breath. The bell stopped; in the cinema, the lights would be going down, and she felt as if she was trapped in a vacuum. And then she heard Ichiro Honda’s footsteps pounding on the staircase. She stepped to one side to let the stranger pass.

That was not Honda’s idea at all, of course, and he cannoned into her, thereby giving himself the chance to talk to her. She slipped and nearly fell, supporting herself against the wall. She turned to glare at him, but was disarmed by the halting Japanese of his apology: “So sorr-eee.” It made her smile. He extended a helping hand.

“No, I’m quite all right, really.” Little did she understand the hunter’s technique. To the contrary, she formed, as she was intended to, a good first impression of this young man with a sporty hat and his tie twisted a little to one side.

“Is cinema more further?” came the deep, attractive voice.

“Yes, a bit.” For some reason, perhaps because she was talking to a foreigner, Fusako also adopted a peculiar accent, but this, in a strange way, relaxed her and made her lower her usual guard against unknown men. Somehow, this collision halfway up the stairs with a stranger who spoke broken Japanese seemed a most natural event. She went on:

“It’s inconvenient not having an elevator, isn’t it?” and set off again up the stairs with him at her side. It never crossed her mind that he was not a foreigner. Even though his features looked rather Japanese, somehow his manner was quite different from that of the men at her workplace. The way he held himself and moved, his special brand of sweet openness, made him clearly a foreigner. She had already stepped into Ichiro’s trap.

“This film my country.”

He pronounced each word with careful slowness, making sure she could grasp his meaning. As if to answer her unspoken question, he said, “Why I want to see.”

“Are you from France?”

“No. Algeria. My name Sobra. I come Japan to study.”

The thought of a student from a developing country made Fusako feel protective.

“Oh. I see. This film is set in Algeria, then. Do you still have the Foreign Legion?” She made conversation as they climbed the steps together, and for some reason her heart began to sing.

When they got to the top, the ticket office was closed. Ichiro shrugged his shoulders, and the sight of this so-foreign gesture melted her heart. A girl on the other side of the room called her over to the place where tickets were now being sold, and so she ended up paying for both of them. He argued a bit, but as the newsreel had just started they hurried into the theater.

During the two hours that the film was being screened, he sat bolt upright, his eyes never straying from the screen. He did nothing menacing or suggestive, such as trying to take her hand. In the presence of this quiet foreign student, she felt more and more at ease, and her feelings toward him became warmer.

The film ended, and they left by the emergency staircase at the back. Borne along by the crowd, they found themselves in a narrow back street where there was a jumble of small bars and dustbins. Just like the Casbah, she thought, her mind still on the film. Was the man walking beside her born in a place like this? The very thought made her feel romantic. On the spur of the moment, she said, “Shall we have a drink?”

He accepted, and they went into a bar. Instead of a sweet cocktail, she ordered a highball. She felt quite capable of holding her drink tonight, and in any case she was determined to see this adventure through to the end.

When they left, the man paid.

“Let me stand you one this time,” she said, and led the way into another bar. She felt rather proud at having a foreigner in tow, quite apart from which such travelers should be treated with hospitality. Also, she wanted to eat something.

Bit by bit she became a little drunk, and the alcohol made her talkative. She began to tell him everything—about her work, the other people there, the story of her background and childhood, the apartment in Koenji where she lived alone. He asked no questions, but she kept talking. All the things bottled up inside her came out; if he did not fully understand, then so much the better. He just sat and listened, looking at her and smiling, never losing his smile. He was an ideal listener, and so she kept on talking.

She had not realized that the bar was one that stayed open all night, so it was with a sense of shock that she realized that it was already 2 a.m. She had to go home. She stood up unsteadily and nearly fell. As she was recovering, the man paid the bill. Drunk as she now was, she felt loath to part with the foreigner. She clung to his arm; she seemed to be floating, though her heels kept catching on the pavement. She had never been like this before. Half regretfully, she began to coquet him.

“You have nowhere to go tonight, have you?” He shook his head. This childish response reminded her of a stray dog. She stopped a taxi.

“Get in. We’ll go to my apartment. I have never taken anyone there before, but you are an exception.” She tried to whisper, but her voice came out loud and drunken.

When the taxi reached her apartment, the familiar streetlights at the crossing and even the potted palm at the entrance danced before her eyes like ghosts. For a moment, she could not recognize it and thought that she had come to the wrong place.

At last, though ten years too late, the cinematic real life of which she had dreamed when she was twenty was beginning to happen to her. She unsteadily climbed the uneven steps; the paint was peeling off the plaster. The man was supporting her with one arm; she leaned against him and felt his hand on her breast through the thick overcoat.

She unlocked the door and staggered in. He was still holding her. There was no fire, and the apartment was as cold as ice. She switched on a small foot warmer and sat him beside it while she busied herself making a cup of tea. He got up and stood awkwardly; what an inexperienced young man he seemed! She took two mattresses from the cupboard, two bed covers, clean sheets, and pillowcases and made up the beds. She was rationalizing all the while—nothing to be ashamed of in sleeping quietly next to a man, and anyway she would stay up all night. She called him over.

“Bring the foot warmer. It’ll keep you warm; Japan is much colder than your country.” What less could she offer a young man from a faraway land of deserts?

The man stood gazing at her with burning eyes. “If he desires me,” she thought drunkenly, “do I give him everything?” He began to undress slowly, and she went to take his clothes, only to be seized in a tight embrace. How strong his arms were, even though he looked so quiet! Algerians were certainly different. For a moment she felt afraid and struggled, but then he kissed her. They fell onto the bed, and her struggling stopped. She gave herself to him.

The man took a long time, seeming to taste all of her body. Was this the Algerian way? This put her off for a moment, but the aversion faded away, turning to joy as she felt his lips crawl all over her body. She smelled his sweat; it seemed redolent of the deserts of North Africa that she had seen in the film a few hours before. She was carried to a primitive land, became an animal, and submitted.

At about five in the morning, Ichiro Honda turned in the bed and touched the naked woman. She slept on, but he awoke.

For a moment he could not remember where he was, but then he realized that he was in the woman’s apartment and not in his bed in the hotel. He raised his left hand in front of his eyes and looked at his self-winding Omega. The date had changed; tomorrow already, he thought. Being careful not to awaken the sleeping woman at his side, he slipped out from under the coverlet.

The icy air hit his naked body, raising goose pimples. He rubbed his chest and powerful shoulders vigorously and quickly dressed. A small light was still burning by the bed, and he looked around the room. There was a portable typewriter on the desk; he thought for a while and then slipped a piece of paper into it and began to type slowly. He kept looking at the woman to see if the rattle of the keys awoke her, but she slept on. He could just see her face above the coverlet; even in sleep she seemed exhausted. Not even the chatter of the typewriter could awaken her. He left the paper in the typewriter and slipped out of the room and into the hall outside, where he was overcome by the sour smell of the apartment. To him it suggested the melancholy of strange places, evoking a sensation he had had many years before in someone’s flat in Chicago. He stepped into the street and breathed deeply of the fresh morning air, tasting a refreshing sense of release from the adventure of the night before, but this sensation did not last for long. By the time he had reached the broad thoroughfare of Olympic Street after feeling his way along the misty lane, it was gone.

He hailed a cab, took it to the Meikei-so, where he changed his clothes, and arrived back at the hotel at about 6 a.m. The clerk at the front desk suppressed his curiosity and pretended not to look at him as he handed over the key. Honda thanked him curtly and went upstairs.

All day long, as he tried to get on with his work, Honda sensed a postcoital lassitude that lingered in his body like the dregs of a good wine. He felt too exhausted to go out in the evening and stayed in the hotel. After dinner, he sat on a sofa by the wall in the lobby reading a newspaper in a heavy binder. Idly, he cast his eye over the local news section, when suddenly one item leaped out of the page and caught his eye. He read it carefully; at 2 a.m. on the previous night, it said, a cashier at a supermarket who lived alone had been strangled in her apartment at Kinshibori. The name and address seemed familiar. It seemed to be the same as one of his recent victims, a girl whom he had picked up about two months ago at a dance hall in Koto Rakutenchi.

He lay back and gazed up at the ceiling, his brows furrowed in thought. The cheap apartment in a district full of lumber wholesalers came back to his mind. A foreigner passed by close in front of him striding long and heavily, followed at a trot by a page carrying his suitcase. This brought Honda out of his reverie, and he replaced the newspaper in its rack and walked out of the hotel. He made his way to the newsstand at the underground station and bought every evening edition that he could find. In the train, he avidly read every article concerning the murder of the cashier.

The photographs of the girl certainly looked different from the face that he remembered. The girl he had met, if he recollected aright, had a puffiness around her eyes and cheeks that did not show up in the newspaper photos. Perhaps it wasn’t the same girl, but he had to know. He would not relax until he had checked the name and address in his Huntsman’s Log.

Getting off the crowded car at Yotsuya Sanchome Station proved difficult; he had to push his way through the throng, and in doing so he felt the body of a young woman press against his thick overcoat. This unconsummated experience appealed to his sensuality. At last he forced his way out onto the empty platform, where he was overcome by a deep sense of unquiet, for it seemed as if everyone remaining in the train was gazing at him accusingly and might set off in pursuit of him at any moment.

He thrust the papers into his pocket and made his way out of the station. On the way to his flat, he stopped off at a small liquor store, which was just closing, and bought a bottle of whiskey and a jar of olives. As soon as he got in, he opened the lid and gulped down a few of the olives; their oil lined his throat and stomach, and he chased them with a whiskey before opening his diary. The name and address were the same; he began to read the passage that he had written two months ago.

The diary for September 2 ended there, with the sketch map that the girl had drawn attached by tape at the bottom of the page. It was drawn and lettered in a childish hand; he looked absentmindedly at the various landmarks—a tram stop, a moat, a concrete bridge. Gradually the image of the apartment came back to him, and he could clearly remember the bridge, the narrow streets.

The apartment was behind a lumberyard; when he had made his way there, night had drawn its gloomy curtains around him, and he remembered passing by the dark shadows that were bundles of timber.

He thought back to the newspaper reports of the murder. She had been discovered by a middle-school student delivering milk at 5:30 a.m. on that very morning, just when he had been standing on Olympic Street waiting for a taxi. He imagined the boy passing the lumberyard, the milk bottles rattling in the carrier on his bicycle. When he crossed the small garden at the back of her apartment, he had noticed that the window was half-open, and he could see the whole room reflected in the mirror on her dressing table. The woman whom he had seen writhing on the tiles of the bathroom—now the milkboy saw those same limbs writhing, but frozen by death.

Honda remembered that dressing table well. It had been covered with a red square of fine silk, on which were arrayed jars of powder and bottles of cheap creams and lotions. It was now unpleasant to remember that the girl had taken a bottle of milky lotion from that same dressing table and poured it over his body. He threw down the diary in disgust and opened the window, gulping down the cold night air. It was unbelievable that the woman who had innocently pressed her lips all over his body was now dead.

At all events, it was clearly the same woman; the name and address in the diary told him that.

The newspapers reported that on the night of her death a man had visited her room, and that the evidence suggested that he had had sex with her. Kimiko Tsuda must have been something close to a prostitute, he imagined. Although he had no direct evidence as to this—she hadn’t asked him for payment—it seemed likely from her overfriendly manner and also from her obvious sexual expertise. Why, she had had a man with her last night… and that had been the end of her.

The newspapers also reported that she had had many male friends, so in due course every one of them would be investigated. What about him? No need to worry, surely. He had only been to her room once, and she had only known him as Sobra, a buyer from the U.S.A.

He closed the window, and in that instant, inexplicably, he remembered how large the whites of her eyes had been when she had raised her head from his loins…

At the time, there seemed to be no connection between the murder of his former victim and the fact that he had been sleeping with a new girlfriend at the time.

The connection only became clear much later.

THE SECOND VICTIM (DECEMBER 19)

At 8 p.m. on the nineteenth of December, Ichiro Honda was high above Tokyo on the observation platform of Tokyo Tower. He was accompanied by a girl, a student at an art school, whom he had met about a week before.

He was wearing a trilby, tipped back slightly, and the buttons of his overcoat were undone. Throughout the proceedings, he kept his hands thrust deeply into his pockets. He was posing as a correspondent of The Times of London. This was his third meeting with the girl, Mitsuko Kosugi, for he reckoned she would be a tough nut to crack and was taking his time over her. However, he had to be back in Osaka by Christmas Eve, and so tonight it was now or never; he must shoot at all costs. He therefore kept looking at her out of the corner of his eye, working out how best to proceed.

Mitsuko was looking out over the nighttime city, which seemed to be hung with jewels. Her eyes were sparkling; she wore no makeup and her face was blemished in places. Her face was thus somewhat unrefined, but by contrast her body was marvelously mature; there was a green, hard unripeness about her that appealed greatly to Honda. She was only nineteen; it was some time since he had enjoyed a woman so young, and he was determined not to let her escape.

He had met her at the Western Art Museum at Ueno, where she was sketching a muscular male statue. It was Ichiro’s custom to visit museums two or three times a month, as he found them fruitful hunting grounds. He admired her work and then introduced himself to her as a foreign correspondent. They went to the museum tearoom together, where he drank his tea and ate his cake in a clumsy foreign manner, and he discovered that she was on a long vacation and so was able to persuade her to show him around Tokyo. She agreed, and on the next day she had taken him, not to the famous historical sites or scenic areas, but to the Kabuki theater and on a bus tour around cabarets in Yoshiwara and Akasaka. Tonight they had eaten mudfish and were now visiting Tokyo Tower.

He listened raptly to her explanations, but at the same time could not help staring at the pretty conductress when they went on the bus tour. She had a full bosom and pert buttocks; he didn’t mind at all that the conductress was conscious of his gaze. At the Kabuki theater, he tested Mitsuko’s reaction by resting his hand on her knee. She ignored the action, fixing her attention on the stage. Was this her way? he wondered. To pretend that nothing was happening, however much a man took advantage of her body? The thought tantalized him.

And then, suddenly, he had tensed and muttered “Disgraceful!” in English.

“What is it?” she asked, gazing anxiously into his face.

“Oh, nothing,” he replied in genuine embarrassment. The reality was that the memory came back to him suddenly of a theater in America where he had lusted for a white woman in black tights. Why did this memory suddenly strike him in the Kabuki theater? And what had come over him to yearn for that white woman—too ascetic a life during his studies, perhaps? But wasn’t it, after all, natural to entertain such desires at that age? Of course it was, he thought, and calmed down. Why remember a thing like that now? He smiled reassuringly at her.

“Nothing,” he repeated.

A little later, he got his hand on her knee again. He had slid his hand a little way up her thigh, relishing the sensation of unfulfillable lust…

And now here they were on Tokyo Tower, and the group of schoolgirls over there had finished with the telescope and they could use it. The girls walked off, speaking in some provincial accent, and he led Mitsuko to the telescope. There was nobody else around.

“Care to have a look?” he asked, putting his hand in his pocket and taking out a coin.

“Oh, yes! I wonder what we’ll see!” She ran to the telescope, and Ichiro followed her and slipped in a coin. He put his hand on her shoulder and brought his face close to hers as if to share the viewing with her. Her faint shudder as she became aware of his hand on her body gave him a thrill. Three minutes passed, and with a click the lens was closed. He placed his lips on her cheek, and she did not move. He twisted his head, trying to find her lips with his, and she neither resisted nor collaborated. And then, suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he detected a movement. Was someone watching them?

He froze his posture and watched. It seemed that the movement had come from behind an illuminated tank full of tropical fish. But if someone was watching, they must have realized that he had seen them and withdrawn into the stairway behind, for all he could see now were the fish swimming under their mercury light.

He kissed the girl, still keeping careful surveillance on the fish tank, but there was now no sign of anyone there. Perhaps it had been some high school boy. He felt embarrassed and withdrew, leaving Mitsuko gulping air, the saliva showing in her mouth. He kissed her again, and his attention wandered from the fish tank and concentrated on the sensations at the tip of his exploring tongue. There was another movement, but it was just another couple like them looking for somewhere to be private together. He clasped Mitsuko more firmly and kissed her again.

On the way down, the lift was full of country people. Just as the doors closed, he once again had the sensation of being watched, but he could see no one.

They hailed a taxi at the entrance. He sat close to her and put his arm around her and kissed her furtively, but was interrupted by a taxi, which came up close behind them and stayed there, its lights flooding the back of his cab, forcing him to desist lest they be noticed.

They went to a bar, and then to a beer hall. In the noisy beer hall, several drunks peered at them curiously, and they moved on. They went to Shinjuku, to another bar, and then to a sushi shop, by which time he had forgotten all about his feeling of being shadowed at Tokyo Tower—indeed, he was already three parts drunk, and she was beginning to show signs of the alcohol. She did not usually drink much, but tonight he pressed drinks on her, and she proved to have a stronger head than he had. It was already 1 a.m., and he felt unsteady on his feet.

“Let’s go to a hotel,” he said.

But, to his surprise, she resisted his invitation firmly. So he called a taxi and told it to take them to Asagaya, the area of Mitsuko’s apartment. At that, she seemed to relax, and snuggled up to him in the back of the car. Perhaps, after all, he would get a shot at her; perhaps she would invite him back to her apartment.

And so it turned out. When the taxi dropped them, she asked, “Like to come in for a bit?”

He followed her down the narrow alleyway, with stepping-stones set in the dirt. Her flat was in a two-story building second from the entrance to the alley.

“Sorry—you have to take off your shoes. It’s a Japanese house,” she said to the Times journalist.

There was a large shoe cupboard in the entrance hall, with separate compartments for each of the occupants—some thirty in all, it seemed. She opened the compartment marked “Kosugi” and gave him a pair of slippers.

“This is how my name is written. This character means ‘small,’ and this one ‘cedar.’ Interesting, isn’t it, our way of writing.”

Ichiro Honda nodded and gazed in a fascinated manner at all the names, playing the role of a foreigner fascinated by the Japanese characters. The names were written in a variety of ways, some on grubby slips of paper, one with a large inkblot half obscuring the name. He ran his finger down the row as she explained the meaning of each name to him. His finger came to rest on the newest nametag of all.

“Obana. ‘Little tail.’ Funny name, isn’t it? She’s new here. Room 209—now, whose place did she take, I wonder?”

There was something familiar about this to Honda, and he thought hard as he went up the stairs but couldn’t bring it to mind. He completely forgot, in his fuddled state, that this was the name of the key-punch operator who had committed suicide.

The staircase, the hall downstairs, and the landing upstairs were all very spacious, as befitted a building that had formerly been a hospital. Where the reception counter had been, just under the staircase, there was a public telephone.

Mitsuko’s room was in the far corner of the ground floor. It was just over one hundred feet square and had a small sink and a gas ring. There was an unfinished painting on an easel and several finished ones stacked against the wall. These he proceeded to examine as Mitsuko boiled the kettle and made instant coffee. They drank the coffee; he was at a loss what to do next, and fiddled with books and a paperknife on the table, and picked up a plaster figure and examined it, pretending he didn’t know what to do with his hands, awaiting his chance. Looking at her, he detected increasing anxiety in her eyes.

This was the chance he had been waiting for. She seemed to sense his feeling, for she opened her mouth to speak.

“You are…” She broke off, perhaps feeling that he would not understand her meaning. He reached out and touched her knee; she pushed him away, but this only served to inflame his desire and he pounced on her, pushing her down onto the floor, and thrust toward her with his hands and his lips. She resisted him fiercely and did not give in.

After thirty minutes of struggle, he gave up. He could not think that this was happening to him… why? He separated from her and gazed at her face.

“I am sorry. I am just not in the mood today,” she said. She pulled down her skirt, which had ridden up in the struggle. There were tears in her eyes.

Ichiro made up his mind to go. He stood up and went to the door. On the way out, he turned and asked her, “Have you got another boyfriend?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Really I haven’t.”

He smiled wordlessly, went back into the room and kissed her proffered mouth with his dry lips. It was no less than his duty to do so. This woman had become a different creature from the one who had yielded to his kisses, her whole body trembling, at the Tokyo Tower a few hours before. Now he saw her for what she was: dull, a woman lost in daydreams about true love, egoistical, ignorant, nothing.

“Your telephone number, please,” he commanded, and she wrote it down in large letters, telling him to call before 10 p.m. and, when the receptionist answered, to give her room number. She rose to see him off, but he pushed her down and made his way out on his own.

Leaving the building, he looked back, but there was not a light to be seen. It seemed that no one else was up at this late hour. He reached the highway and began to walk in the direction of Shinjuku, turning up his coat collar and thrusting his hands into his great-coat pockets. Inside, he was raging at his rejection. Suddenly, in a maudlin way, he thought of his wife, patiently enduring her loneliness in Osaka, hundreds of kilometers away. Perhaps it was self-pity, but he thought of his fruitless endeavors to bridge this gap. It is only because of that—that’s why I waste my time hunting women, he thought for a few seconds, but then he rejected the thought, at which moment a taxi arrived. He got in, and at first told the driver to take him to his apartment in Yotsuya Sanchome, but then suddenly changed his mind and decided to visit Fusako Aikawa, the typist he had met at the cinema. Her apartment was only one stop away on the subway from Mitsuko Kosugi’s. He got out of the taxi near her apartment and walked the last few yards. He had no particular pressing desire for a woman now, but needed something to distract his mind from the emptiness he had sensed when walking in the road.

He had difficulty in finding the building, but eventually reached it, arriving in the front yard, which was muddied by an overflow of sewage. In the dim light he saw some underwear on the clothesline, which someone had forgotten to take in. The garments floated like white ghosts in the dark.

Inside, the staircase awaited him, its vast maw ready to swallow him as he climbed.

Hesitantly, he knocked gently on Fusako Aikawa’s door, but there was no reply. Last time he had left her sleeping with the hem of her satin negligee riding up over her breasts; the lascivious image floated back into his mind. How bewitching she had looked! He pressed his ear close to the door and listened. Within, all was silent.

So far, he had visited this apartment three times; on the first occasion, Fusako had taken him there, but subsequently he had visited her without any warning, and she had always been glad to see him, even as late as 1 a.m. “Come whenever it suits you,” she had said to the young Algerian student, and he felt in her something protective, which was different from the emotions displayed toward him by his other victims. This gave him a strange sense of security.

He looked at his watch; it was already ten to three. Not wishing to disturb or attract the attention of the neighbors, he knocked again gently, but there was still no reply. It was late; perhaps she was sleeping heavily, he reasoned. He decided to go home, but the same instinct that makes one try the door of an empty house took hold of him and he turned the knob. The door was unlocked, and he stepped into the room.

There was a strange, sweet smell inside, something stagnant, reminiscent of Formalin in a hospital, both sweet and sour at the same time. He turned on the light, and saw Fusako spread-eagled on the bed, stark naked, her legs slightly apart, her hands resting at her sides. Her head was turned to one side. Could she be sleeping naked in this cold weather?

He moved over and stood by her. Her face was swollen and tinged with a purplish hue, and there was a red line about her throat, about as thick as a belt. It looked as if she had been strangled. He moved his hand toward her fat underbelly, so pink, and for a moment he imagined that she was breathing. Could she really be dead? But there was no doubt that she was.

He stepped back sharply, but at the same time as he felt terror he also felt drawn toward her by carnal desire. He hurried out of the room, switching off the light and obliterating the sight of that naked body. Creeping down the staircase, he realized that he had had a momentary desire to rape Fusako’s corpse, and knew that he could have been capable of such a cold-blooded act.

But still, he thought, who on earth could have forced Fusako Aikawa into such a posture? What other man had she let into her room? He felt as if the dead woman had betrayed him somehow. But he had no idea that Fusako’s death was another step on the path to his own misfortune.

He walked away from the apartment rapidly and met no one for several minutes. Then he came to a well-lit intersection and found a policeman standing there. They exchanged glances, but Ichiro said nothing, and the policeman merely tapped his left palm twice with the flashlight he was carrying in his right hand and then moved on without a word. Honda had no intention of reporting the murder that he had discovered.

He caught a taxi on Olympic Street and, his deep voice full of depression, told it to take him to Yotsuya Sanchome. Sitting in the back of the speeding cab, it suddenly occurred to him that the murder of Fusako Aikawa bore a similarity to the killing of the supermarket cashier about two months before. She, too, had been strangled at night, although in her case they had found the string of her Japanese nightgown around her neck. And the coincidence went further; on the night that Kimiko Tsuda was murdered in Kinshicho, had he not had sex with Fusako for the first time? And tonight, had he not expected to enjoy Mitsuko Kosugi—this very night upon which Fusako had been murdered? He felt an awful sense of premonition, but kept it at bay by muttering “No! No!” to himself several times. After all, his visit to Fusako’s room had been but a sudden whim. If he had not tried the door, then he would have left totally unaware of what had happened. So therefore the death of Fusako had nothing to do with him, he reasoned. But in the back of his mind, he heard a voice whispering doubts: “Do you really believe that? Did Fusako Aikawa’s death really have nothing to do with you?” And the voice would not be stilled.

The taxi stopped outside his secret flat, and Honda absent-mindedly handed the driver a five-hundred-yen bill and told him to keep the change. The driver, a good-natured-looking old man, took off his cap and bowed his profuse thanks. As he did so, he memorized the face of this unusual customer who had tipped him twice the fare. Another witness had unwittingly been created to Honda’s future disadvantage.

He entered the Meikei-so and lay down on the bed without taking off his clothes; putting his hands behind his neck, he stared at the ceiling, a vacant look in his black-ringed eyes. How could such a thing happen to him? So far, his secret life of fishing for women had gone without a hitch. But surely it was nothing—merely a coincidence? He strove to drive the doubts from his mind, but without success. A new, dark thought began to obsess him—both of the women were his victims, were they not? Both had had sexual relations with him. And as he moved on to each fresh victim, a murder was committed. Was this some epidemic—was there a carrier stalking the town? He loosened his tie, undid his shirt buttons and massaged his chest. Was he a leper, his body gradually rotting away? But the feel of his muscular, hairy chest reassured him.

But then: What if all the women I touch are murdered? Surely this was impossible. What had happened so far was mere chance. It was arbitrary that two women with whom he had slept were now dead—there could be no possible connection. It was all chance.

Sluggishly, he pulled himself up off the bed and changed his suit and prepared to go back to the hotel. In his mind rang that one word, his breastplate: “Chance.”

All day long Ichiro Honda waited with mounting impatience for the evening papers to come out, expecting to read of the discovery of Fusako Aikawa’s dead body. In his office on the sixth floor, he listened to the 3 p.m. news, but there was nothing on it. Whereas at the time of the last murder he had stayed fairly calm, this time he couldn’t—perhaps because he had seen the corpse with his own eyes.

He switched off the radio, got up, and went to the window. On the road far below, cars were moving like toys and pedestrians like ants; it was impossible to tell the difference between men and women from this height. He thought of how, amongst the billions of people on earth, only two knew that, in a flat with the plaster peeling in Koenji, a woman’s body was beginning to decay: only two people—himself and the murderer who had strangled her with a nylon stocking. He felt a weird sense of affinity for the murderer, as if they were partners in crime. There was some poem like that, wasn’t there? He couldn’t remember. He went out to buy the early editions of the evening papers.

In the corridor, he met an acquaintance from the General Affairs Department. He wore rimless spectacles and spoke with an effeminate voice.

“When are you next off to Osaka, then?”

“The day after tomorrow. I always at least spend Christmas with my wife.”

“Do give your father-in-law my best regards.”

During this exchange, he beamed and looked at ease, but as soon as the other man was gone his face resumed its look of gravity and exhaustion.

He bought several evening papers, but there was no news in any of them of the death of Fusako Aikawa.

When work was over, he walked down Ginza, occupying himself by staring at displays of women’s shoes or else by standing behind a girl who was trying on scarves. Reaching Shinbashi, he went into a large pachinko hall, which had previously been a cabaret. The staircase and the ceiling were all too gorgeous for a pinball parlor, he thought. He looked around; the players, each riveted to his machine, seemed to lose themselves in the oppressive clamor. Perhaps he could, too; he bought a hundred yen worth of balls and sat down at the nearest vacant machine. As he played, he noticed a girl of about fifteen peering around the machine at him. She had single-lidded eyes heavily painted with mascara and seemed to display an interest in him. For his part, he was getting bored with the monotony of the game; his saucer was full of balls and emitted an oily smell. He noticed a man of his own age standing behind him.

“Care to try?” he said.

The man, despite his cheap suit, had his pride. He flushed at what he took to be an insult. Honda ignored him and walked out, leaving the balls behind him.

The murder was not reported on that day, nor indeed the next day, finally appearing in the evening papers of the third day. Now that it at last came out, it was a shock to him. He bought all the evening papers and took the underground to his hideout in Yotsuya Sanchome. He was tightly squeezed between other passengers and closed his eyes, listening to the rattle of the wheels over the points. The headline he had read kept appearing in front of him.

As he visualized this, he could almost smell the newsprint.

When he got to his apartment, he started to devour the newspapers eagerly. Perhaps because he had seen the corpse, he felt a far deeper interest than he had in the case of the cashier. Again and again it came up: “Sobra an important witness.”

However, only one paper, and that a second-rate one, saw any connection between the two crimes. He got out the two-month-old papers that had reported the last murder and, blowing the dust off them, sat down and began to compare the two cases.

There were four similarities.

Firstly, both women had been strangled.

Secondly, the victims were single women living alone.

Thirdly, both seemed to have intimate male friends.

These were the obvious points in common. In both cases, the papers had suggested a degree of intimacy between the killer and his victim as there were no signs of resistance, but otherwise there was nothing of interest.

And there was a fourth similarity that only he knew about. Both of the victims featured in his hunting log. This fact, unknown to everyone else, was the only thing that bound him to the cases. And what could he do about it? Nothing.

Events had to develop as they would. He was due to fly back to Osaka by the night plane; for a few days, at least, his hunting would cease.

And with this comforting thought, he dozed off.

THE THIRD VICTIM (JANUARY 15)

Ichiro Honda flew back to Osaka on Christmas Eve. He had taken leave over the whole Christmas and New Year season. At the airport, he got a splinter in his hand from a temporary plywood partition that had been put up alongside the walkway, and it drew blood. He mopped the blood with his handkerchief but did not bother to ask the stewardess for iodine.

He looked down at the lights of Tokyo. Oh marvelous living city, that seemed to breathe as he watched it! What did it matter to him that human beings were dying there, people being murdered, all the time?

At Itami Airport, his wife met him. “Welcome home,” she said smilingly. “Have a good flight?” They agreed to go for a walk down the bustling streets of Shinsaibashi before dining there. They then visited a bar where Taneko was known, and it was midnight before they sat down to dinner. They had reserved a table for two, and as it was now Christmas Day they followed their custom and ordered turkey and opened a bottle of champagne.

“Do you remember,” he said, toasting her, “Christmas Eve in New York?”

“Of course,” she replied. “We went to Très Bon.”

“That’s right,” he said. Then, changing the subject, “Let’s dance.”

She was wearing a black, low-necked dress with an orchid pinned to it. She danced closely in his arms, not caring if the flower was crushed or not. They went back to their table.

“Ah, Très Bon,” she said wistfully. “We were so green that we didn’t know anywhere else. So we went there on New Year’s Eve, too.”

“So we did.”

“And at midnight, when the church bells rang, everyone started kissing each other, even total strangers.”

“Yes—very American, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but so lovely. I wish we were back in those times again.” She nuzzled close to him, and he felt her soft hair brush his face, but felt a repugnance beyond his control and turned away quickly. As an excuse he slipped his forefinger down the front of his collar and twisted it around vigorously. “The hotel laundry just doesn’t know how to starch a shirt properly,” he explained apologetically. His wife withdrew and fell silent. Once again, they were up against the solid, opaque film that always seemed to separate them.

“It can’t be helped,” he muttered, as he always did on these occasions. His wife remained silent, her eyes showing either reproach or pity, he could not tell which.

After dinner, they went bar-crawling again and had a superficially good time calling strolling musicians, singing songs, and drinking heavily. Before they noticed, it was 3 a.m.; the alcohol seemed to have washed away some of the latent hostility between them.

They decided it would not be safe to drive, so Taneko left her Mercedes Benz in a garage and they walked arm in arm until they caught a taxi and drove back to Ashiya. As they passed through the stone gate, the light in the entrance hall came on, and the old housekeeper appeared like a phantom before them.

“Welcome home, young mistress,” she said in her old-fashioned way. She was over seventy and a faithful retainer of the old school; her rheumy eyes were unblinking as she gazed at them attentively. Ichiro found this old woman, who had played a mother’s role to Taneko and still seemed to do so, difficult to handle. She had used exactly the same stilted greeting when they came back from America as she did tonight.

“You shouldn’t have waited up for us!” protested Taneko. But the housekeeper ignored her, concentrating on locking the door.

They looked into the dining room to make sure that Taneko’s father wasn’t still up and then made their way upstairs to their bedroom.

Ichiro took a shower and came out to find his wife removing her makeup. She looked at him and said in a matter-of-fact way, “Darling, you kept repeating Hamlet’s line in the bar. You know, ‘To be or not to be.’ What did you mean by that?”

Ichiro looked at her in the mirror; by now, she was combing her long, black hair.

“Nothing in particular,” he replied. “I just think of death from time to time nowadays, that’s all.” His wet hair hung down his forehead, contrasting blackly with his face as pale as a corpse, but there was a strange beauty about his face nevertheless.

She went on combing her hair; after a little while, she questioned him again in the same expressionless manner. “Why so morbid, all of a sudden?”

“Well, I don’t know…” He went to turn down the central heating in the bedroom while his wife went into the bathroom. During her absence he lay on his back with his eyes open. She came back, wearing a beige dressing gown.

“Well, after all, we didn’t get divorced, did we?” she remarked, taking off the dressing gown and standing naked for a moment before getting into bed. Her body was silhouetted against the bedside lamp and cast a shadow on the ceiling.

Without turning toward her, he replied, “Maybe it’s because we’re Christians.” His voice was so soft that she could hardly hear him.

She turned on her side and examined her husband’s profile.

“You know, you are still very important to me. I feel that you are a half of my body,” she said.

They fell silent; not even their breathing could be heard in the quiet room. Ichiro suddenly got out of bed, standing on the cold floor, and looked down at his wife, who had closed her eyes. She lay motionless, and he imagined that he could see shadows under her eyelashes. He moved toward her and peeled back the bedclothes, exposing her white body, but still she did not move. He buried his face in her pudenda and lay there gripping her breasts; still she did not move. After a while, he looked up, the expression in his eyes hollow. He placed his hands on her stomach; the skin was soft, but not as soft as the skin of his victims.

He thought of the infant, born obscenely deformed, the birth of which had come between him and his wife. He threw himself down on her, kissing her frantically—her breasts, her narrow waist, her armpits. She moved spasmodically, but her eyes remained closed.

After a while he desisted and began to sob—but was it tears, or was it hysterical laughter brought on by despair? Once again he was impotent in the presence of his wife, as he had been a week ago… a fortnight ago… a year ago… two years ago…

Taneko opened her eyes and gazed at him silently; her look was one to kill any emotion.

He went back to his side of the bed, his hands hanging by his side in the dejection of a defeated fighter.

On the fifth of January, he took the noon plane back to Tokyo. Contrary to his normal custom, he had a window seat. The skies were clear and cloudless, and he could see the pure white cone of Mount Fuji from a great distance. Looking at the unsullied mountain against the blue sky, he found it hard to believe that two women had been killed in Tokyo at the end of the last year. The memory of Fusako Aikawa lying naked and dead in the dark, damp room in Koenji had all but vanished from his mind. How foolish he had been to fear that he would be accused of the crime! He had been afraid of the scandal and didn’t want to get involved, that was all.

However, he had better stop using the name Sobra from now on. He could change the name on the passport to something a bit more British, something with a grave and serious ring about it. Hume, perhaps, or Wigland; those were good names. Just as other salarymen applied themselves, during their leisure, to do-it-yourself, he would apply himself to modifying the passport.

Well, it was time for a change, and he could alter his life so simply; the obsessive fear of being hunted himself vanished from his mind. He accepted a cup of tea from the stewardess. Next to him, a fat foreigner was engaged in the crossword of an English-language newspaper. He felt cocooned and safe in this environment—the fat foreigner, the smiling stewardess, the passengers all around him. He had nothing to do with the deaths of the two women; it was purely coincidence that they had both been his victims. He really began to believe that he was safe. All he had to do was to abandon the name Sobra, and Ichiro Honda’s connection with the murders would be severed. He touched the window and wrote the name “Sobra” on it with his fingertip and then rubbed it out.

There is a game called capping or tailing—he had heard it called both. One takes the last syllable of a word and starts the next word with the same syllable. Although it is a game for two, he played it with himself to pass the time. He began with the name Sobra and carried on from there. Playing this game of linking suddenly brought another linkage clearly before his mind. Of course he could not be proved guilty; he always had an alibi. The alibis linked onto each other, just as in his game.

For example, whilst the cashier was being murdered in her room at Kinshicho on the fifth of November, he had been with Fusako Aikawa in her flat at Koenji on the other side of Tokyo. Even if he was suspected, apart from the scandal of sleeping with someone not his wife, he was safe; he had an alibi.

And—linking again—while Fusako Aikawa was being murdered, he was with the art student. Admittedly, the two apartments had been much closer than in the previous case, but nonetheless he had certainly been in Asagaya with Mitsuko at the time. So he had a watertight alibi in each case.

Watertight? But wasn’t there a fatal flaw?

Fusako Aikawa, his alibi in the cashier’s murder, was dead. His alibi in that case was illusory. He looked out of the window, but these ominous feelings destroyed the beauty of the countryside.

If asked where he had been on the night of the cashier’s murder, there was no one to support his evidence. Why had he not realized this before? He cursed himself for his foolish complacency.

Viewed in this light, the two murders began to seem closely interwoven. Rather than two separate incidents, he was looking at a sequence of events.

Had Fusako Aikawa been murdered for no other reason than to destroy his alibi? In the back of his head, he heard the mocking voice of the killer. What was the motive? Was he reading too much into it? Who stood to lose most from the death of Kimiko Tsuda?

Someone was trying to frame him.

The circle of his logic complete, he was now convinced that his theory was correct. The two murders had been committed in order to entrap him. He stirred in his seat and groaned; the foreigner looked up from his crossword for a moment, studying him dubiously before returning to his pastime.

And if that was true…

Then the murderer would strike again. To destroy his other alibi. By killing Mitsuko Kosugi. She was the last link in the chain.

The in-flight announcement crackled over the loudspeakers, instructing the passengers to fasten their seat belts. Below, he could see the approaches to Haneda Airport. And he still could not understand why someone was trying to trap him.

As soon as he was outside the terminal, he telephoned Mitsuko’s apartment at Asagaya. The hoarse voice of the receptionist told him that Mitsuko had gone home to her family for the holiday and would not be back before the fifteenth. He replaced the receiver and stood lost in thought for a while before taking a taxi back to the Toyo Hotel.

The narrow lane leading to Mitsuko Kosugi’s apartment was unlit and was bordered by fences weatherproofed with black tar. It was pitch dark, and visibility was not helped by a misty drizzle. Ichiro Honda pulled down his waterproof hat, turned up the collar of his coat, and made his way down the alley. The stepping-stones were slightly raised above the black silt, and he had to tread carefully to avoid tripping.

At the entrance, he peered over the fence. He could see a faint light glowing behind the curtains of Mitsuko’s room; she was in.

Relieved, he opened the front door and went in. He opened the shoe compartment marked “Kosugi” and slipped in his low-heeled Guccis. There was a pair of lady’s brown pumps in there already.

He went into the hall. The reception desk was dark and empty, just as Mitsuko had told him it would be at this hour. He turned and made his way down the broad corridor leading to her room.

The corridor turned sharply to the left just before her door, forming a right angle like a carpenter’s square. So once he stood in front of her door, he was invisible from the rest of the passage. So nobody would see him or question him.

From some nearby room, he could hear the muffled sounds of a television program. It was 11:30; someone was watching the midnight show. Upstairs, he could hear footsteps, but apart from these two sounds, the building was silent. He made his way stealthily down the passage.

He reached her door and knocked, at first softly and then louder. There was no reply. He leaned on the door of the broom cupboard opposite her room and thought. Later, he remembered the sign “Broom Cupboard” lettered on the door.

He tried her door, and just as in the case of his visit to the apartment in Koenji, it opened to his touch.

He stepped in and shut the door behind him. Ahead of him was a small sink, and to the left a curtain strung on a wire shut off the main room.

“Are you in?” he called, making his voice falter on purpose. But there was no reply. He began to feel a brooding sense of oppression. His chest felt tight; try as he might, he could not rid himself of the recollection of Fusako Aikawa’s death. Would he find Mitsuko Kosugi in there, naked… and dead?

He put his hand on the curtain and paused to collect himself. He had a premonition that he was going to find a death within. He pulled the curtain aside forcefully.

There was no one in the room.

But there were signs that someone had been there until a few minutes ago.

He went over and sat down in a swivel chair in front of the desk. He looked around the room. He had phoned her three hours earlier, as soon as she had returned from her holiday, and had suggested that he would meet her at 11:30. He had suggested meeting somewhere outside, but she was plainly overjoyed to receive his phone call and insisted that he come to her room.

“I’ll toast—er—special New Year cakes for you.” She seemed unsure about making him understand the word mochi in English. He could hear her voice now as he observed the rice cakes wrapped in newspaper on the dining table. She must have slipped out to borrow some seasonings, he decided. He lit a cigarette and waited.

Blowing smoke out into that small room, he examined his surroundings. Clearly an art student’s room, with its volumes of painters on the bookshelves, the canvases stacked against the wall. The closet was ajar, and he could see a red silk quilt stowed away inside. He had not slept with a woman for a month. Seeing the bedding, he felt his desire surging up within him. He yawned and rotated the chair around to face the other wall. The chair creaked noisily in the silent room.

He was facing a walnut-veneered wardrobe with a mirror on the door. Unconsciously he gazed into the mirror. It reflected back, showing him a face with disordered hair; his complexion seemed stagnant in that dim light. It was not a healthy face.

And then he saw a small length of maroon-colored silk caught in the wardrobe door and hanging down. Without thinking, he fingered his silk tie, which was not his maroon-colored favorite. Was there not something familiar about the color of that two-inch-long piece of silk? It looked exactly like his favorite tie.

Leadenly, he pushed himself out of the chair and walked over to the wardrobe. He was in the presence of a mystery that he must solve. What was his tie doing in Mitsuko Kosugi’s room? He reached for the door handle, but his hand was unsteady and on the first pass he missed.

He was hesitant about prying into someone else’s wardrobe without her permission. But, after all, he told himself, he was only checking—nothing wrong with that.

Perhaps the wardrobe was new; he had difficulty in opening the door until he applied his weight. He pulled hard; the hinge grated, the door opened, and…

The dead body of Mitsuko Kosugi rolled out, leaning on his body.

By reflex action, he warded her off, pushing her back, feeling the warmth that was still in her flesh. He could smell the scent of her hair, but more pervasive still was the same scent, half sweet, half sour, that he had smelled in Fusako Aikawa’s room.

Turning his head aside in horror, he pushed the body back into the wardrobe and shut the door upon it. His hands were trembling, his body suffused with a deathly chill; he could hardly breathe. His body seemed to have solidified where he stood.

“Oh monstrous! Monstrous!” he groaned. He could still feel the touch of the woman’s inelastic skin under his fingertips. He rubbed his hand on his trousers as if to wipe the sensation away.

The corpse was in a kneeling position, the better to fit into the wardrobe, its hands hanging loosely by its sides. And around its throat was his tie! He wanted to scream, but his voice was frozen in his mouth.

He went back to the chair and sat down. His whole body shuddered with fear and anger admixed. What was he to do? He lit a cigarette and reached for the ashtray, the Pavlovian actions of a man deep in thought.

Should he call the police? Or the manager of the apartment? To be involved in such a case would mean social ruin. But if he just ran away, what about the tie of his, knotted about her neck? Whatever else he did he must recover that tie first.

It was hanging in my wardrobe in Yotsuya. Who brought it here? Who tied it around her throat? he thought, anger welling up within him. And then: It’s deliberate. It’s another trap. How could he escape the jaws of this trap?

He did not stop to think that, the more he tried to escape it, the tighter it would grip him.

He went back to the wardrobe and opened the door. This time, Mitsuko Kosugi’s body did not roll out. Her head hung loosely on her neck. Her hands were limp by her side. Her hair was in disarray. It was exactly as it had been when he had pushed her back inside the wardrobe.

Fighting back his nausea, he reached down and loosened the tie, which was biting into her throat. It had been knotted very tightly; as he removed it, he could clearly see the livid marks of strangulation. He folded the tie, put it in his pocket, and shut the wardrobe door on the corpse.

He went over to the door. Before passing through the curtain, he looked back to see that he had forgotten nothing, stepped out, and his hand on the doorknob, looked back again. He could see nothing; he touched his hand to his head, verifying that he was wearing his hat, and, satisfied, turned to open the door.

It wouldn’t open!

The blood rushed to his head, and he nearly fainted. But of course it would open; he had walked through that selfsame door a few minutes earlier, had he not? It must be stiff. He gripped the handle firmly, twisted it and pushed against the door with all his might. Apart from the creak of a budging screw, there was no reaction.

The door was locked.

He stooped and peered through the keyhole. The naked bulb outside shone on the wall and the door opposite—nothing else. Nobody. He gave up and went back into the room.

“Why is it locked? Why is it locked?” he kept asking himself. He crouched on the floor like a trapped animal overcome by the exhaustion of its struggles. He looked up and saw the window.

That was his route of escape.

Outside, the horn of an automobile sounded, jarring on his nerves. The squeal of brakes, the footsteps upstairs, the drone of the television set, the faint sound of music—all of these seemed to grate upon his nerves. Remote as these sounds were, they seemed to be coming closer. The walls and floor of the room seemed to be closing in on him, and everything all of a sudden became colorless. He must escape!

He moved over to the window and touched the curtain before he realized that he might be seen. He went back and switched off the light, noticing irrelevantly the dust upon its shade. Creeping through the darkness, he opened the window.

There was nobody outside.

He climbed out in his stocking feet and carefully closed the window, taking care to make no noise. He felt the damp and slippery ground chilling the soles of his feet.

He went around to the entrance, peeped inside and opened the door stealthily. He made sure that he was unobserved and then opened the shoe box marked “Kosugi.” He reached inside.

His shoes were gone!

He was absolutely certain that he had put them in that box. What on earth could have happened? He fumbled inside; the pumps were still there, but not his shoes. Fear ran up and down his spine as he feverishly opened the boxes above and below and on either side. But his shoes were nowhere to be found.

He heard a door open suddenly somewhere on the ground floor and leaped backward. The duckboard slid under his feet, emitting a scratching sound. He forgot about his shoes and ran out into the alleyway, stubbing his toe hard on a stepping-stone as he ran. The pain was agonizing, but he hobbled on as fast as he could, got to the main road and stopped a taxi. Fortunately the driver did not seem to notice that he was shoeless.

He told the man to drive to Yotsuya Sanchome and lay in the back, pressing his forehead against the cool glass of the window. He was overcome with despair. Somewhere in the dark he heard a siren; had they discovered the body already? Had the police been called?

He felt as if he was being pursued and slumped down in the seat. The driver slowed down; the siren came closer and closer, overtaking them with a burst of headlights into the taxi.

“Fire somewhere,” said the driver, and Honda looked up and was relieved to see a fire engine and not a police car.

He got off some distance before the Meikei-so. It would not do to have the driver remember his destination; he was becoming cautious.

As a result, he had to walk the hundred yards or so of asphalt road to his apartment in his socks, which became soaking wet. Also, his big toe was throbbing, and the pain made it hard to walk. When he got into his room, he took off the muddy socks, one of them bloodstained, and discovered that he had broken the nail of his toe halfway down. He wrapped his foot in a handkerchief and massaged his toe.

He had to check his tie in the wardrobe. He pulled the tie out of his pocket, looked at it, and hurled it to the ground as if it had turned into a poisonous snake. For there were initials sewn into it, and they were his.

Hoping for the one-in-a-million chance that would prove him wrong, he went to the wardrobe and opened it. Perhaps his tie was there and this one belonged to someone else with the same initials… He felt a searing pain in his left cheek and sprang back. It felt as if a red-hot skewer had struck him. For a moment he had a blackout, and then he touched his cheek; it was covered with blood. He looked down on the ground; at his feet was a thin blade attached to a length of bamboo. The wardrobe had been booby-trapped.

Ten or so ties swung mockingly on the rail inside the door, but his maroon tie was not amongst them. His eyes filled with tears; the pain and the torment had made a crybaby out of Don Juan. Pressing his hand to his cheek, he staggered over to the desk. His hunter’s diary, which he always kept under a paperweight on the top, was gone!

He lay face down on the bed. When, after a few minutes, he rolled over, for an awful instant he could not see.

Early in the morning of January 25, ten days after he had fled Mitsuko Kosugi’s room, Ichiro Honda was arrested for murder. The police came to room 305 in the Toyo Hotel and took him away.

The police had been able to trace the man calling himself Sobra through the handmade Italian shoes that had been left at the scene of the crime. They had been a special order, so tracing their owner was a simple matter. This had never occurred to him, nor had he thought in the meantime of going to the police and explaining what had happened.

Since the murder, he had taken no initiative but had just waited to see what would happen. He was like an insect that has lost its wings. About the only thing he did was visit the Meikei-so three days after the murder. He was worried that the taxi driver might have remembered the Meikei-so, but this turned out to be the least of his worries. For when he entered his room, he noticed that someone had taken away the bamboo with the blade in it, which he had put in the corner. This not unnaturally stunned him. But he carried on as he had intended; he packed all his belongings into a bag and informed the manager that he was moving out and wished to settle the balance of the rent.

He roped up the bag, addressed it to his father’s house in Kagoshima, and sent it by rail.

Each day on his way to work, he would follow the case in the papers. The police were hunting for Sobra; well and good—they could never identify him as being Sobra. His main fear was that he might somehow come to be embroiled in the case; he feared the resulting scandal. However, he reassured himself that this could not possibly happen.

In the evenings he hardly ever went out anymore. He killed time lying on his bed in his room, waiting for things to blow over. But when he slept, he had nightmares; he dreamed that he was being crushed by heavy weights and woke up shouting and in a cold sweat.

He followed the progress of the investigation as well as he could by buying all the papers and listening to the radio whenever he got the chance. The newspapers reported that the same criminal had been responsible for all of the murders. On about the twenty-third he watched a TV program featuring the officer in charge of the case, a man with thinning hair and a distrustful look in his eyes. Little did he think that within a few days he would be facing this man across the interrogation table. The policeman said that the criminal had left a vital clue on the scene and that his arrest was only a matter of time. Maybe not tomorrow, but the day after, or else the day after that. Tomorrow never comes, thought Honda scornfully.

However, the day came when he was awakened by knocking at his bedroom door and opened it to admit three men, one of them holding a warrant for his arrest. They seized him and handcuffed him like an animal and bundled him into a car.

Seated in the car as it sped toward police headquarters, a policeman on either side gripping him tightly by the arms, he looked back with nostalgia to the morning of the fifth of November when he had been awakened by somebody in slippers walking down the corridor outside. That was the day of the first murder, when his luck had begun to run out. What had become of the beautiful freedom that he had once so enjoyed?

The policemen on either side of him reeked of tinned salmon or of bean-paste soup with spring onions. These homely smells bespoke domestic peace and quiet.

The examination at the police headquarters went on for twenty days, and all he could do was deny that he was guilty. He began to wonder if he was going mad. They refused to allow him to see anyone, even a lawyer. The line that the police took was not the customary one of urging him to confess. Instead, they thrust more and more irrefutable evidence before him and asked him how he could possibly deny his guilt. It was like a psychological torture for him; his only alibis were worthless, or rather uncallable.

They asked him where he had left his Italian shoes, and when he said that they had vanished from the shoe box by the entrance, they laughed and told him that they had turned up wrapped in newspaper in Mitsuko Kosugi’s closet, and that the only fingerprints on them were his—and hers.

They produced the herringbone jacket, which they had recovered from his father’s house. Out of the pockets came the maroon tie—and a nylon stocking and a key. He remembered the tie, but was not conscious of having had the stocking used in the murder of Fusako Aikawa or Mitsuko Kosugi’s room key.

He began to think that perhaps, after all, he was guilty, that he had committed the murders without being conscious of it.

Furthermore, they told him, although he claimed only to have been in the rooms of the two murdered women for a very short time, they had found semen of his blood group in the bodies of the women. This was evidence suggesting that he had spent at least long enough there to have had sexual intercourse with his victims.

A rare blood group, and one that was found in a bloodstain at one of the scenes of his crimes: AB Rh-negative. Only one person in two thousand had it—and he was one of them. He was at a loss for words.

And so he relapsed into silence, saying nothing no matter what they showed him or told him. After he was committed for trial, he sat staring blankly at the prison walls, asking himself again and again, “Who did it? Who did it?”

But then he ceased to ask himself this question, because in his heart of hearts he knew that there was no way to find out the answer to it.

INTERVAL

Ichiro Honda, engineer, aged 29, sentenced to death on June 30 at Tokyo District court on charges of sex-related murders. The defendant denied the charges.

On a charge of murdering Kimiko Tsuda on November the 5th, he was found not guilty on grounds of insufficient evidence.

On a charge of murdering Fusako Aikawa on December the 19th, and on another charge of murdering Mitsuko Kosugi on January the 15th, he was found guilty.

There were no extenuating circumstances in either case.

The verdict was handed down a hundred and fifty-six days after the arrest of the accused at the Toyo Hotel.

The defendant immediately filed notice of appeal to the Tokyo court of appeals, claiming that the verdict was wrong.

Important items of evidence upon which expert witnesses testified:

Transcript of evidence given on the third day of the trial.

Examination of expert medical witness by the Public Prosecutor:

Questions put by the judge to the defendant:

Question put by the judge to the arresting police officer:

Summation of points arising from the foregoing evidence made by the judge:

Evidence presented by the prosecution was based upon thirty-five man-days of research. Amongst the witnesses called were: