The Aosawa Murders

by Riku Onda

The change of season in this part of the world is never dramatic. It’s more like the gradual erosion of a boundary line every time a rain shower arrives to paint the old season over bit by bit, as the new one takes its time to turn gradually, in a vague, almost apologetic fashion.

Walking around the city, as we are now, is like a synaptic experience – it’s all connected but separate. There’s no centre anywhere, only a series of loosely linked neighbourhoods. You could walk and walk and never feel like there’s any end to it. It’s like moving pieces on a Chinese chequers board.

Fear is a spice that lends credibility. Just the right amount sprinkled in any story makes it plausible.

This is just my opinion, of course, but the concept of singular is a subtle but important factor in much of Japanese culture. It implies taking a step back to admire something that might be slightly deviant, or unsettling in some way. To coolly observe something repellent and unpleasant and appreciate it as a form of beauty for entertainment.

Have you ever heard it said that in extraordinary circumstances the air changes colour? Well, that day the air seemed to separate into two layers. A murky layer that hung over the floor, and another layer closer to the ceiling that sparkled, hard and clear. The air around our feet felt heavy and stagnant, but higher up it was as though the air was being sucked upwards by someone way up high.

After the murders everybody treated the place like a haunted house – nobody went near it. But of course it wasn’t unoccupied. She was still living there. And the people who took care of her.

Of all the people who lived in that house, only she had survived. Hisako Aosawa… She was in her first year of middle school at the time, so she would have been around twelve.

It was dramatic. She was the survivor of a tragedy – a role she was made for. Nobody actually said it, but I think the other children thought so too.

I did wonder more than once if maybe she actually could see. I always had the feeling that she picked up on everything, despite being blind. If you were in a room with her, she immediately perceived changes in people’s facial expressions or what was happening around her. Adults often remarked on it too.

Sometimes she made mysterious comments. Things like I became able to see after I lost my sight. She often said that.

You see, it’s a very simple story. If there are ten people in a house and nine die, who is the culprit? It’s not a whodunnit. The answer’s easy – it’s the survivor, of course.

Every person spoke in the sincere belief that what they said was the absolute truth, but if one thinks about it, it’s difficult to describe an actual event in words exactly as one sees it. More like impossible, in my opinion. Each person has their own idiosyncratic biases, visual impressions and tricks of memory that shape their perception, and when one also takes into consideration the individual knowledge, education and personality that influence each single viewpoint, one can see how infinite the possibilities are.

That’s how I came to believe that it’s impossible to ever really know the truth behind events. Once one accepts this, it follows that everything written in newspapers or textbooks as “history” is actually an amalgam of the greatest common factors from all the information available.

She presented herself completely differently, every time, according to whom she was speaking with. I can’t express it very precisely, but it was as if she became the kind of interviewer that the other person wanted her to be. She’d make the adjustment in an instant, changing her personality just like that.

Perhaps it was my imagination, but when the door opened, she was looking at me. Yes, she looked directly at the spot where I was standing. I realize what I’m saying sounds contradictory. Of course she couldn’t have seen me. But I firmly believe that in that moment, she was clearly aware of me.

“What would you do if you wanted to send a message to one particular person when everybody is looking?”

I can’t help feeling there’s something inexplicable about this crime. I don’t know how to express it precisely, but there’s something incoherent or indefinable about it, something the human mind isn’t equipped to engage with.

That bestselling book would be a way to do it. A message to a specific person… Someone connected with the crime who would be likely to pick up that book… Someone she couldn’t consult in advance or share a code with.

She wanted to see, knew she should see, but at the same time was desperately afraid of seeing.

On the other side of the frosted glass she saw a white shadow.

One day, Beethoven had received a visit from a stranger; a young man dressed in black. They exchanged a few words, and shortly afterwards Beethoven died. The man who had come to him was a messenger of death.

Little did she know then that very soon she was to see a real emissary from the land of the dead,

“Because I can’t hear any of the sounds a woman usually makes when she’s at home. The small rhythmic sounds of somebody at work. Women make them when they move about in their own home, feeling safe and relaxed.”

Although still a teenager and closer in age to their grandchildren, Hisayo was poised enough to hold her own with any adult. She had a mysterious presence that seemed to compel people to treat her with veneration, like a shrine maiden. She in turn received this treatment with the appropriate dignity.

Back home once again, the girl realized at last why the sight of the man had stopped her in her tracks. The Beethoven biography. The man who had paid a visit just before Beethoven’s death. This man, whom she had met on the street, was the very image of the man she had imagined as a messenger of death.

Time stopped for Mum the day of those murders. She was still a prisoner of the past when she left us.

I know the pain’s still there, stuck inside me like a splinter.

But I never felt comfortable in that house, not like Mum and my sister. I suppose because it was too different. Not real, somehow. Like a house in a play. For one thing, visitors were always coming and going.

But it always smelled. Every time the back door opened that smell hit me. It was like a… how can I describe it… a cold, tart kind of smell. Made me feel like I wasn’t wanted in there.

They were slim, with fair skin and beautiful features. They’d have stood out anywhere. It wasn’t so much that they stood out but that you couldn’t help looking at them, your eyes just seemed to go in their direction. They looked like something from a fairy tale. Almost too perfect. Every time I saw them I used to think, Those two aren’t from the same world I live in. They were a mystery pair, all right.

Oh, that’s right, I remember the name of the crane that looks like it’s reflected in water – it’s the only one I remember. Dream Path it’s called, apparently. Pretty name, isn’t it?

“No, no, it wasn’t like that, I wasn’t supposed to survive,” she cried.

I was scared of Hisako. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it in words.

Because for one moment, I had a vision… just a tiny peep… of the same world she was seeing from that swing. Pure white, it was. White in all directions, a pure white world of nothingness. And the only thing moving in that pure white world without end was the swing. It was like a revelation, I tell you, a real eye-opener. I felt like… in that moment, I understood.

You see why this story bothers me a lot? What if someone in that house knew what was going to happen?

But my feeling is that somebody knew the drinks were poisoned and tried to stop it happening. One toy car on its own can’t do much, but put it on the wooden floorboards of the passage, where someone wearing slippers might tread on it, and it could be downright slippery and dangerous.

I hurry. Then I happen to look down and see a reflection of myself walking on the surface of the lake. Me upside down… walking along underneath. I look at my face. But when I look closer, I see it’s not me after all. It’s Hisako.

Oh yes, the day of the joint memorial service for the victims. They held it after the murderer’s suicide brought the case to a close. Anyway, I was coming back home around dusk when I saw her sitting on the swing, with a great big smile on her face.

wherever he went, he still experienced the same sense of unease. If he had tried to express it in words he might have said it was the insincerity he sensed in that environment, the treachery he sensed in the cosmetic atmosphere of an office, which seemed superficial in comparison to his experience of life and the world.

Who am I? Would I kill someone in an extreme situation if I were cornered? Are all humans the same? Is reason ultimately no kind of restraint?

He realized that once he had fathomed a set pattern it was all a question of application, but if he became fixated on the pattern it was impossible to do anything new. In some ways this resembled his work. He had come to learn that people’s actions were to a certain degree fixed patterns, a template for reading the train of their emotions, but he could not allow a pattern to solidify into assumption or prejudice, as that would prevent him from seeing anything else.

Outside the raging wind roared, but inside the house was heavy with the silence of death. It was literally deathly silent.

Glancing down, his eyes lighted on a small red toy car lying at his feet. It gave him a jolt: so there were children in this house. Reaching the doorway to a room, he peered inside. The sight that met his eyes struck him physically, like a blow to the face. He stood rooted to the spot.

Something in him broke as he felt overwhelmed by an intense, ominous sense of cold reality, the like of which he had never experienced before. The room seemed filled with ants crawling over ice cream mingled with the vomit scattered over the carpet. Chills coursed through his body and the ants crawled over his skin. He felt a suffocating, cold, otherworldly evil.

Abruptly, a jarring sense of something out of place prompted him to turn and look behind him. He recoiled. Yet all that met his eyes was an empty rattan chair: a light-brown, comfortable, single-seat rattan chair with an indigo dyed cushion on it. What was so strange about that? Feeling a shade more composed, he turned this over in his mind and soon realized what had triggered his reaction. While all the other furniture in the room had been knocked out of place by the agonized death throes of the occupants, that seat alone was in the right position.

Amid the chaos which had engulfed the room, only that seat remained untouched. Did this mean that the person who had been sitting in that chair was unharmed?

“But I doubt we’ll get any testimony from her.” Taromaru looked glum. “Why not?” he asked, puzzled. “She was there the whole time – she must have witnessed it.” Taromaru shook his head. “Ah, but you see, Hisako Aosawa is blind.”

“Come to think of it, those people’s birthdays became their date of death too,” the colleague said.

That’s right. It was like there was something in there beyond the realm of human understanding.

When someone devotes all that time to you for their own pleasure, all it does is make you wary.