At that moment, she turned her head toward her lawyer and Honda caught a glimpse of her profile, her eyes wide and clear and a few stray hairs brushing her cheek.
The spectators stared at this small woman in fascination, as if she might perhaps have the translucent body of a silkworm that had somehow excreted a thread of inconceivable complexity and evil. Her slightest movement made them imagine the sweatmarks on the armpits of her uniform, her nipples tight with fear, the line of her buttocks, rather too full, dull, and a little cold. This body had spun threads without number until they were finally wrapping her in a sinister cocoon. For the spectators, there had to be a peculiarly intimate correspondence between her body and her crime. They would be dissatisfied with anything less. For the average man, driven as he is by lurid fantasies, there is almost nothing more deliciously titillating than the contemplation, from a safe distance, of evil laid out in its cause and effect. Had the woman been thin, her very thinness would have embodied this for them. But since she was plump, her plumpness served just as well. And so, satisfied that she was nothing less than evil incarnate, they eagerly exercised their harmless powers of imagination, fastening with delight on every detail down to the very beads of sweat that they were sure covered her breasts.
Honda’s scruples would not let him follow the thoughts of the crowd, although these were quite clear to him, despite his youth; he focused his entire attention on the testimony of the defendant as she answered the judge’s questions. Her account was now getting to the matter at issue.
Her way of telling things was tedious and confused, but it was clear enough that the chain of events leading up to this crime of passion had unfolded relentlessly in a manner that must lead inevitably to tragedy.
“When did you start living with Matsukichi Hijikata?”
“I . . . it was last year, Your Honor. I remember it very well. June the fifth.”
Her retentive memory made the spectators laugh, but the guards quieted them at once.
Tomi Masuda was a waitress who had become enamored of a cook named Matsukichi Hijikata, who worked at the same restaurant. The man was a widower who had only recently lost his wife. Spurred by affection, she had begun to take care of him, and the previous year they had started to live together. Hijikata, however, gave no sign that he wanted to make the arrangement official, and in fact after they had set up housekeeping, he became more and more energetic in his pursuit of other women. Then toward the end of the previous year, he had taken up with a maid who worked at an inn called Kishimoto in the same Hama district. Though Hidé, the maid, was only twenty, there was little she did not know about men. As a result, Hijikata’s nights away from home became more and more frequent. Finally, this spring, Tomi had gone to confront Hidé and plead with her to leave her man alone. Hidé had treated her with contempt, and Tomi unable to control her rage, had killed her.
It was, in brief, a triangle that ended in violence, a common affair of the streets with no particularly distinguishing feature. Yet under the close scrutiny of the court hearing, many undoubtedly authentic and totally unpredictable elements came to light.
The woman had found herself with a fatherless child, now eight years old, who had been left in the care of relatives in her home village, but she had asked them to send him to Tokyo so that he would have the benefit of a better school system. But although she had hoped to use the boy as an inducement to Hijikata to settle down, Tomi, even as a mother, had already embarked on the course that would force her to become a murderess.
And now her testimony came to the events of that night.
“No, Your Honor. If only Hidé had not been there that night, everything would have been all right. I know that this whole thing just wouldn’t have happened. If only she had had a cold or something that night and had been in bed when I went to the Kishimoto to see her, everything would have been all right too.
“The knife I used was the one Matsukichi uses to cut sashimi. He’s a man who takes real pride in his work and he has all kinds of good knives. ‘To me these are like a samurai’s sword,’ he keeps saying, and he never lets any of the women at work touch them but always sharpens them carefully himself. But about the time I started to get jealous of Hidé, he hid them all away somewhere, thinking it was dangerous.
“When I realized the way his mind was working, it made me angry. After that I used to make jokes about it, pretending to threaten him. I’d say: ‘I don’t need any of your knives. There’re plenty of others around I can lay my hands on, you know.’ Then one day after Matsukichi hadn’t been home for a long time, I was cleaning out a closet, and all of a sudden I came across a package with all his knives in it in a place you’d never expect. And what surprised me most, Your Honor, was that almost all of them were covered with rust. When I saw that rust, I just knew how much he’d got himself involved with Hidé, and I started to shake with one of the knives right there in my hand. But just then my boy came home from school, and I gradually calmed down. Then I thought to myself that maybe if I took his favorite knife, the one he uses to cut sashimi, to be sharpened, Matsukichi would appreciate it—trying to make myself think I was a real wife. I wrapped it up in a cloth, and then when I was going out, my boy asked me where I was off to and I told him I had a little errand to run and I’d be right back and he should be a good boy and watch the house. And then he said: ‘I don’t care if you never come back. Then I can go back to my school back home.’ This gave me such a shock and when I stopped to ask him what he meant, I found out the children in the neighborhood were making fun of him and saying: ‘Your old man couldn’t stand your mother’s nagging, and he ran out on her.’ This is something the children probably picked up from hearing their parents gossiping about us. And so now here was my boy wanting to get away from a mother who’s been turned into a laughing stock and go back to his foster parents in the country. Suddenly I got so angry and before I knew it, I’d hit him across the face. As I rushed out of the house, I could hear him crying behind me.”
According to the testimony that followed, Tomi was not thinking about Hidé at this moment, but was hurrying through the streets with one thing only on her mind: to get the knife sharpened so that she would feel better. The knife sharpener had a great deal of other work to do, but she would not be turned away. After she had waited for over an hour, he finally sharpened it for her. When she left his shop, she had not felt at all like going back home, and finally had turned almost involuntarily in the direction of the Kishimoto Inn.
Shortly beforehand, Hidé had returned to the Kishimoto after enjoying a wild night with Matsukichi and had been lectured by the innkeeper’s wife for leaving work. She had gone to the woman and apologized tearfully, just as Matsukichi had instructed. It was only a few minutes after this was over that Tomi arrived at the inn and asked to speak to Hidé for a moment outside. Hidé came out to see her and was surprisingly cordial. She had just changed into a stylish working kimono, and as she walked along the street with Tomi, her loose clogs scraped languidly along the ground in the manner affected by affluent prostitutes.
“I made a promise to the boss just now. From now on I’m going to have nothing more to do with men, I told her,” she said.
Tomi felt a rush of happiness when she heard this, but next moment Hidé, smiling brightly, robbed her words of all significance with a further remark: “But I don’t know if I can hold out even for three days.”
Making a great effort at self-control, Tomi then offered to treat her to a drink at a nearby sushi shop on the bank of the Sumida River. Once they had begun to drink, Tomi did her best to talk to her as though she were addressing her elder sister, but Hidé refused to be drawn; her only reaction was an ironic smile. And finally, when she was probably driven to melodramatic extremes by the saké, Tomi lowered her head in supplication, but the younger woman turned away in brusque contempt. They had been there for over an hour by this time, and it was dark outside. Hidé got up to go, saying that the manager would be angry at her again unless sh
e returned immediately.
After they left the sushi shop, Tomi claimed that she did not know why they wandered into a badly lit vacant lot in Hama that lay by the river. She said that perhaps when she tugged at Hidé’s kimono, trying to get her to stay and talk, Hidé had happened to begin walking in this direction as she pulled herself free. At any rate, Tomi denied any intention of having led her that way in order to kill her.
After walking for a short time, Tomi began to argue again, but Hidé only laughed. As she did so, her even teeth flashed white, although there was no more than a glint of light on the surface of the Sumida to relieve the darkness that engulfed the two of them.
“It’s no use you keeping on like this,” Hidé replied at last. “No wonder Matsukichi got so fed up with you.”
This, according to Tomi, was the decisive moment, as she went on to describe her reactions.
“When I heard that, the blood rushed to my head. I don’t know how to describe it exactly . . . right then I felt like a baby crying desperately in the dark, waving its arms and legs because it had no words to say it wanted something—or because it was hurting somewhere. And then I started to swing my own arms about, and somehow they loosened the cloth, got hold of the knife, and while they were still waving it around, Hidé’s body bumped into it in the dark—that’s the only way I can say it.”
Her words had been so intense that the crowd in the courtroom, and Honda with them, could clearly see the phantom baby miserably waving its arms and legs.
After she had finished, Tomi Masuda covered her face with her hands and sobbed. Her shoulders under the prison uniform seemed the more pathetic for being plump. The mood of the spectators now seemed to be shifting gradually from undisguised curiosity to something else.
The rain was still falling outside the windows and veiled the courtroom in a bleak light which seemed to focus on Tomi Masuda. She stood there as though she were the sole representative of all the complex passions of man, living, breathing, grieving, and crying out in pain. She alone was endowed with the privilege of emotion. Until a few moments before, the spectators had seen nothing but a plump, perspiring thirty-one-year-old woman. But now with bated breath and staring eyes, they were looking at a human being wracked by her feelings, writhing like a fish carved up alive for the dinner table.
She had absolutely no protection from their gaze. The crime that she had once committed in darkness had now taken possession of her to reveal itself before the eyes of them all. For it was the vivid character of the crime itself, rather than any consideration of good intentions or moral scruples, that she had impressed with such cogent force upon the spectators. Tomi Masuda’s self-revelation far surpassed the possible accomplishment of even the most skilled of actresses, who, after all, would have revealed no more than she had intended. It amounted to facing the whole world and turning it into one giant audience. Her lawyer, who stood beside her, seemed too shabby to have any capacity to help. She stood there, a short, plump figure, with nothing to mitigate her drabness—no combs in her hair, no jewelry, no fine kimono to catch a man’s eye—but the fact of being a criminal was enough to make them see her as a woman.
“If we had the jury system here in Japan, this is the kind of case where they might let her get away with it,” said the law student, whispering in Shigekuni’s ear again. “What can you do with a glib woman like that?”
Shigekuni sat thinking. Once passion was set in motion according to its own laws, then it was irresistible. This was a theory that would never be accepted by modern law, which took it as self-evident that conscience and reason ruled man.
Then his thoughts turned to more personal things. Although he had come to watch this trial as a thoroughly disinterested spectator, he was now fascinated. At the same time, however, it had made him realize something else: he would never plunge into the kind of molten red-hot passion that had come gushing out of Tomi Masuda.
Outside, the overcast sky had brightened further and the rain had slackened into brief, scattered showers. The raindrops coating the window shone eerily in the sunshine.
He hoped that his reason would always be like that sunlight. But a part of him was drawn irresistibly to the darkness of human passion. This blackness was a fascination, no more. And Kiyoaki, too, was a fascination that seemed to come surging up to shake the very fabric of life, but that instead of being life-giving, carried the seeds of a fateful end.
It was in this mood, then, that Honda decided not to interfere with Kiyoaki for the time being.
30
AS THE SUMMER VACATION grew closer, something happened that disturbed the atmosphere at Peers. Prince Pattanadid lost his emerald ring. The affair became very serious when it became generally known that Prince Kridsada had protested in anger that the ring had been stolen. More than anything else, Prince Pattanadid wanted the matter to be settled as quietly as possible, and he rebuked his cousin for his rudeness. Nevertheless, it was evident that in his heart, he, too, believed it to have been stolen.
Prince Kridsada’s angry charge provoked a predictable response from the school administration. They said that such a thing as theft was unthinkable at Peers. The ensuing turmoil was eventually to reach such proportions that the princes, more and more homesick, were finally to decide that they wanted to return to Siam. The chain of events that was to put them on a collision course with the school began when the dormitory prefect, trying to be as helpful as possible, asked them to give him an account of the events immediately preceding the disappearance of the ring.
As he continued to question them, their stories began to differ. They both agreed that they had gone for a walk on campus in the early evening, returned to the dormitory for dinner, and then discovered the loss of the ring when they went back to their room afterwards. Prince Kridsada claimed that his cousin had worn the ring during the walk and then left it in the room before dinner, contending, therefore, that it must have been stolen during dinner. But Prince Pattandid himself was not so sure on this point, as was evident from the vagueness of his testimony. He was sure that had worn the ring when he went out for the walk but confessed that he could not remember whether or not he had left it in his room during the meal.
This, of course, was crucial to deciding whether the ring had been stolen or lost. Then, when the prefect asked about where they had been on their walk, he discovered that the two princes, drawn by the pleasant evening, had gone through the fence surrounding the Reviewing Mound and had lain down for a while on the grass at the top, an act forbidden by school rules. It was not until the next day, a muggy afternoon with intermittent showers, that the prefect heard their account of what had happened. Nevertheless, he decided that there was only one thing to be done, and he asked the princes to come with him at once so that all three of them could make a thorough search of the top of the mound.
The Reviewing Mound was in a corner of the drill field. Though it was small and undistinguished, the Emperor Meiji had once deigned to review a student parade from its flat, grassy top. And so it had afterwards been made into a memorial of the event, with several of the sakaki trees sacred to Shintoism planted at the top, one of them by the Emperor himself. It was considered the most venerable place at Peers, second only to the sanctuary where Emperor Meiji had planted a sakaki.
Accompanied by the prefect, the two princes passed through the fence again, this time in broad daylight, and climbed to the top of the mound. The grass had been soaked by the drizzle, and the task they faced of searching roughly two hundred square yards of the mound’s surface was obviously not going to be an easy one. Since it did not seem adequate to search merely the spot where they had lain down, the prefect decided that they should divide the area into three, with each of them scouring a section. And so with the rain, now increasing somewhat, falling on their backs, they picked through the grass, blade by blade.
Prince Kridsada made little effort to hide his reluctance, and carried out his task with a certain amount of grumbling. Prince Pattanadid, however,
being good-natured, began his search more willingly, recognizing that it did, after all, concern his own ring. He started at the bottom of the slope in his section and worked his way upwards with great precision.
He had never taken so close a look at each blade of grass. For nothing less than the most painstaking care would do, because despite the ring’s gold setting, its large emerald would be next to invisible in the grass. The drizzle became raindrops on the back of his neck, finally slid under his tight collar and rolled down his back, a sensation that aroused a yearning for the warm monsoons of Siam. The light green at the roots of the grass gave the illusion that a ray of sunshine had broken through, but the sky remained overcast. Here and there, there were small white wildflowers in the grass, their heads drooping under the weight of the rain, but the powdery whiteness of their petals remained as bright as ever. Once Prince Pattanadid’s eye was caught by a bright glittering spot under a sawtooth leaf of a tall weed. Sure that his ring could not have lodged there, he nevertheless turned the leaf over to find a small, brilliantly colored beetle clinging to the underside to escape the rain.
Peering at the grass at such close range made it loom up under his nose, immense and green, reminding him of the jungles of his homeland in the rainy season. With his eyes thus fixed on the grass, he could imagine the gathering cumulus clouds shining with such white intensity, the sky a deep azure blue in one quarter but dark and threatening in another, and he could even hear the violent rumble of thunder.
It was not really the ring that made him willing to expend such painful effort. He wore himself out searching through the grass that defied his exertions for the sake of recovering the image of Princess Chan, however slight the hope of success. He was near to tears.