Evil and the Mask (5 page)

One day, however, Kaori didn’t come. I thought this was strange and went to her room. She was asleep and I didn’t want to wake her, so I returned to my own bed. The next day, too, she was sleeping. On the third day I couldn’t stand it anymore and I roused her with a whisper. I kissed her, feeling that I shouldn’t but unable to resist. At first she responded, but soon she suggested quietly that we’d better not do it that day. She was trembling slightly, and I got the impression that it was because of me. Dumbfounded, I had no idea what to do. I apologized over and over, and then left, wondering if I’d
done something wrong. When I finally got into bed my head was churning, reviewing my recent behavior for faults. Even though I was still bewildered, I found myself growing hard. I dealt with it, imagining Kaori’s body, and then lay there vacantly. Whatever the reason, I thought, I had to know, and once again made my way hesitantly to her room. She wasn’t there.

I waited, but she was away too long just to be in the bathroom. Perhaps she’d gone into the garden. I went into the hall and headed towards the back, careful not to wake the servants. Recently several cats had made their home in our yard, and Kaori often fed them from the kitchen door. For some reason I paused outside my father’s room. He had come home about two weeks ago. Heart pounding, I quietly opened the door. The yellow light from the desk lamp was shining on Kaori, standing there stark naked, while my father lay fully clothed on the bed some distance away, staring at her.

I nearly cried out, thought I actually did cry out, but somehow no sound came out. Kaori stood shaking in front of my revolting father. When he told her to open her legs, she sat down where she was and did so, face averted. On the table beside the bed was a bottle of whiskey. He ordered her to look at him and she obeyed with a shudder.

I couldn’t move. This was the fear I had forgotten. My pulse grew painful, my arms and temples went numb, my legs became horribly weak. But I had to overcome this terror and kill my father. I didn’t know how, but I had to kill my father right now. With a sudden feeling of hatred that I’d never experienced before, I opened the door. No, I thought I did, but in reality my arms didn’t move. Just as I was wondering why it
was still only open a crack, even though I was sure I’d pushed it, Father told Kaori that was it for tonight, and she started getting dressed. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I stood rooted to the spot.

She finished putting her clothes on and I came to my senses and fled, leaving the door ajar. I intended to go back to my own room, but plucked up my courage and waited in Kaori’s instead. When she saw my face she climbed into bed without a word and hid under the covers.

“I saw,” I said, but there was no answer. “I couldn’t believe it. What’s going on?”

It was like I was talking to myself.

“What is Father …?”

Underneath the bedclothes Kaori was weeping.

“What is he …?”

“I don’t know,” she said in a small, tearful voice.

“He calls you to his room, makes you strip?”

“Mm.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, and started sobbing violently. “Now it’s just taking my clothes off, but I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I think he’s going to …”

“But so far you just strip and he watches you?”

“Mm.”

“Mmmm.”

Wrapped in the futon, Kaori’s body looked tiny.

“His face, that blank face, suddenly it fills with lust, and I get even more scared, but I can’t move, and your father’s face gets uglier and uglier, and all the time, he’s staring at me.”

I could hardly breathe.

“Do you remember? What Father said the day you arrived? He said he was going to show me hell.”

Kaori raised herself a fraction in the bed and shook her head, still crying.

“When I turn fourteen. Six months from now.”

My heart was beating so fast it hurt.

“Then my father said that you would play an important part. An important part in showing me hell. So that’s it, that’s what he meant. I knew it, he’s mad, crazy, completely insane.”

Apart from the desk, bed and closet, Kaori’s room was completely bare. She had never asked for dolls or trinkets or anything.

“He’s planning to do even worse things to you. He’s already old, so maybe he’ll hire someone, maybe even a whole lot of people. And he’s going to make me watch?”

Kaori was looking at me, tears streaming down her face.

“But I won’t let that happen.”

I looked directly into her eyes.

“Even if I have to kill him.”

THE PROBLEM OF how to murder someone without getting caught has puzzled many people throughout the course of history. Now I was contemplating it too. I’d fantasized about killing my father for ages, but when I was eleven my ideas were just childish. Even though I was still young, in my first year of junior high, now I had to come up with a detailed, viable plan.

What else could I have done? In the face of the old man’s madness, what could a child like me have done? Even after it was all over I kept on thinking about this. Maybe I could have gone to the police and told them that half a year from now Father was going to show me hell? If I’d done that, I’d have
been taken into custody as an emotionally disturbed minor. Or maybe I should have got a video camera and taped him watching Kaori. Then I could have sent it to the police or the orphanage where she was raised and asked them to take her back into their care. That might have worked. But those were all just “what ifs.”

The orphanage’s main benefactor was a company in the Kuki Group—my father, in other words. I remembered two cases where firms related to the family had been accused of minor irregularities, and the local police had hushed them up. Even so, it still might work in this case. Perhaps Kaori could go back to the institution, beyond Father’s reach. But even if she could, would he give up? There was no way that this affair on its own would be enough to send him to prison. No matter how much I wanted to believe it might, the likelihood was far greater that it would not work out. And even if she did go back to the orphanage, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he would hire some people and come up with an ingenious plan to get her back—basically to abduct her. For him it was no longer just the enjoyment of taking me to hell. He’d also started to develop an obsession with Kaori herself. I was only given a tiny allowance, much smaller than you’d expect in a rich household like ours, so if Kaori and I ran away together he could easily track down a couple of penniless teenagers. And if my various schemes failed, things could turn really bad. If he discovered my treachery he might speed up his plans. In his usual detached manner, he might set things in motion immediately. The safest thing for us would be if my first act of
rebellion could put an end to it—that is, if he disappeared. As long as he was alive, Kaori and I were always in danger.

Was it always wrong to kill someone? Was it a crime to kill someone who was absolutely determined to harm you and the person closest to you? Was this just our selfishness? Weren’t we being forced to break the rules to protect ourselves from this powerful madman? Perhaps society would tell me no. You shouldn’t kill your father. First of all you should tell people about his wickedness, even if that’s unlikely to succeed, you should appeal for help to the police and the child welfare service. That you’ll both be taken straight to hell if you fail, that’s just your imagination. Perhaps your father will take your rebellion to heart and be reformed. You’re too quick to make judgments, to dismiss other possibilities. That’s what society would probably tell me. Maybe they’d say that I was the evil one. But I didn’t care.

The most valuable thing in my life wasn’t virtue or society or God, but Kaori. I didn’t care if it was wrong to protect the most precious part of my world. Maybe I was misguided, but I believed that the things of greatest value must transcend ethics and morality. If your new-born baby was about to be killed, would you just watch and do nothing? If you could kill the person who was threatening your child, wouldn’t that be okay? Even if you could get away without killing them, wouldn’t it still be acceptable if it made the baby safer? Even if it was wrong? At least that’s what I thought at the time. If my father died unexpectedly it could cause chaos in the Kuki Group and spread ripples through the wider community, but of course that didn’t bother me at all. I proceeded with my plan.

My first idea was poison. It was hard to get hold of, but among the many mushrooms on the hill out the back was a deadly variety called East Asian brown death caps. When I was eleven I’d looked them up in an illustrated book of plants, thinking I could use them if I needed to get rid of Father. But it would be tricky getting him to eat them, and even if I put them in his drink to make it look like suicide, there was no guarantee that the dose would be lethal. If he received immediate treatment, he would very likely survive. If he didn’t die and if the police discovered that the substance came from poisonous fungi, eventually they would find out that those mushrooms were growing nearby. Then it would be obvious that the perpetrator was someone in the household.

In Father’s study was a hunting rifle. I considered using that to shoot him. Of course if I chose such an extravagant method everyone would know straight away, but perhaps that wouldn’t matter. Brazenly shoot my father with his own gun in his own room, like it went off of its own accord. If I shot him from an unusual angle, maybe it would look like I shot him by mistake when he was showing me how to use it. The only person in the house who knew of my murderous intent was Kaori, and no one would think I’d done it on purpose. Even if they were suspicious, they couldn’t arrest me unless I confessed. The only proof would be hidden inside my head. What’s more, by law they couldn’t prosecute a child of fourteen. Even if the whole story came out I wouldn’t go to jail. The worst that could happen was that I’d end up in juvenile detention. In this country anything a minor does is not a crime, and they can’t be punished for it. In the eyes of society, guilt is exonerated by
youth. That fact gave me courage. If I couldn’t think of any other method, I decided to use the rifle.

In the end I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t kill him, but rather leave him to die. How about locking him up in that secret underground room? By moving some heavy furniture on top of the hatch when he was inside, for example, or tampering with the door so that it couldn’t be opened from the inside. I turned over many possibilities in my mind. Then I could throw in a handful of death caps. When he got hungry enough he’d eat them, even knowing they were poisonous, either out of a will to live or to take his own life to avoid starvation. Down there he couldn’t get quick treatment. If it happened like that, if he was ever found it would look like Father had gone to the hidden basement room and killed himself. If I estimated when he would be dead and repaired the door and removed the furniture from the hatch, no one would know that he’d been imprisoned there. And even if he didn’t eat the mushrooms, since he couldn’t get out he would eventually starve to death. If his body was discovered later, surely it would be treated as a bizarre, mysterious death? At least there would be no evidence pointing to me.

This method had other advantages as well. Father often left the estate without telling the servants or anyone else where he was going. Sometimes he stayed away for up to a month. The staff was scared of him and would welcome his absence. No one would worry about him, assuming that he was up to his usual tricks, and it would be at least a couple of months before anyone started asking questions. By that time he would already be dead, either through lack of food
or by his own hand. As long as I cleared away all traces of my handiwork, I’d be home free. And on top of that, there was high turnover among the servants, so not one of them knew there was another room beneath the vast cellar. Ever since one of the maids stole some old jewelry from a cupboard in the basement many years ago, they had been forbidden to set foot down there. The housekeeper Tanabe might have known about it, but something had happened and she’d left and found another job.

Lately Father had got into the habit of visiting the underground room about once a month. He went alone in the middle of the night, without a servant to accompany him. What he did there I didn’t know, but he had told Kaori that next month he would take her somewhere. Probably he meant this room, I thought.

One problem was what I’d do if, for example, he had an appointment with someone from his company two days after he died. When he didn’t show up they’d contact the house. Then they’d learn that he had vanished and the police would be called. They’d search the house and garden in case he’d collapsed somewhere. If they decided to check the basement as well, I’d be in trouble. I decided to take extra steps to make doubly sure.

After he was safely confined, I would leave the window in his room on the ground floor closed but unlocked. Then I’d go out the back door wearing adult-sized shoes, leave footprints from the end of the gravel path and climb in the window. I’d leave a little bit of dirt behind on the carpet, not too much, and go out the window again. Next I’d put on a different pair
of shoes and repeat the process, sometimes retracing my steps. Hopefully they’d think that several men had been in the room. I’d also leave all the drawers of Father’s desk shut, but empty one of them, so it would look out of place. Basically, my plan was to plant some subtle clues, things that wouldn’t be too obvious but would be noticed once they started to look closely.