Nocturne of Remembrance (10 page)

A thought came to him. “Is your mommy very strict about etiquette?”

“Etiket?”

“Things like saying good morning and thank you.”

“Oh, she’s normal. I mean, who doesn’t say ‘thank you for the meal’ before eating?”

Maybe this was an effective episode to improve Akiko’s impression. Mikoshiba filed his exchange with Rinko into a drawer of his brain.

There was silence for a while. Other than the occasional truck passing by on the main thoroughfare in front of the office, only the sound of them sipping their noodles was audible in the room.

“Did your mommy and daddy not get along well?”

As soon as he said this, he regretted that it wasn’t how you spoke to a child, but Rinko didn’t seem to mind.

“I didn’t see them quarrel much.”

“I see.”

“Because Daddy never left his room.”

This overlapped with Akiko’s testimony. Prior to the incident, Shingo’s shut-in tendency had grown worse, and he’d almost never left his room. In the end, even showing his face to his family had become a bother, and he’d been taking his meals separately. If they never saw each other, there was no way to quarrel. Rather than them just not getting along well, Rinko’s statement revealed that their relationship had become completely chilled.

Mikoshiba tried to imagine Rinko amidst such a household. The father was, in effect, absent, and the mother came home late from her part-time job. The only person she had to talk to was her sister, Miyuki. A household in name only, it was an empty place just for sleeping and eating.

Perhaps it was like the emptiness that Mikoshiba had once tasted. There had been family members in his house, but they’d been invisible. When he did speak to them, his voice didn’t reach them. Even when they looked at the same thing, everyone saw something else.

The moment he remembered this, that old grainy feeling came back. From back when whatever he saw, or heard, or tasted left his heart feeling dry and chapped.

He looked up to find Rinko sipping her noodles. Five or so questions popped into mind. Asking her might close the distance between them, so he decided against it.

A sudden intruder, a foreign substance that had leapt into a familiar place—although quite small, it had a presence that exceeded its appearance.

“Thank you for the fine meal!” it piped.

“You left half of the soup. I thought you were hungry?”

“It’s not healthy to drink all of the soup, you know.”

Rinko brought her hands together again to express appreciation for the meal, then picked up her cup and headed back to the kitchenette.

“Go to sleep already.”

“Good night,” she said and disappeared into the reception room.

Left behind, Mikoshiba hurriedly finished eating and went back to poring over the court records.

He’d left half of his soup.

The next morning when Yoko came to the office, he was already up and dressed.

“Where is she?” asked Yoko.

Mikoshiba simply pointed towards the kitchenette. Rinko was in the midst of washing her face.

“Thank you for watching her all night. I’ll take her home now.”

“No, it’s okay. I will.”

“What?”

“You mean to leave her with Yozo Tsuda, right? I need to ask him something about his deposition. It’s only convenient.”

“Um, did Rinko have breakfast?”

“I’ll get her bread at some coffee shop nearby.”

“Oh … okay.” Yoko looked puzzled as she gazed at Mikoshiba.

Rinko started whooping as soon as she got into his car.

“Amazing! It’s a foreign car, isn’t it?”

“Is foreign that amazing?”

“Daddy told me once. He said that driving a Mercedes proves that you’re rich. Because he used to have one, too.”

That must have been when Shingo was the director of development at a software company.

“Is that car still at your house?”

“Nope. It disappeared last year.”

“It’s not exactly proof that you’re rich. It only means that you look like you’re rich. There are some idiots who say it’s a mark of being
high-class, a status symbol. But over half of the people who drive them are vain show-offs, or else it’s to avoid paying taxes.”

Mikoshiba, who thought of a car as merely another kind of doorplate, was quite scathing, but Rinko just stared at him blankly.

According to Akiko’s testimony, Shingo had become unemployed prior to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, so he’d held on to his Mercedes for a while. What that signified was the possibility that Shingo had been typically
nouveau riche
.

Income polarization was old news by now, but things were a bit more complicated in reality. There was a class of people with high incomes whose qualitative assets were almost nil. Despite their high salaries, they had little in savings and still shouldered big loans. Yet they thought of themselves as affluent and continued to spend above their stature, so their wealth never increased.

These illusions of grandeur disintegrated with a simple layoff or drastic cut in bonuses. The new level of income fell short of the costs of maintaining a regal vehicle and a big mortgage. Even at that point, these people couldn’t throw away their pride and didn’t get rid of their fancy cars and expensive homes. But without financial assets, no respectable bank would lend them money, and they ended up borrowing money from less-than-reputable sources. Thus they spiraled into debt, and before they knew it they were buried in it. The picture of Shingo Tsuda that arose from the testimony fit this pattern perfectly.

Yozo Tsuda’s home was located less than half a mile from Shingo’s. It was a one-story house, uncommon these days, and amidst the surrounding elegant residential district, it alone seemed to sit in the shade.

When Mikoshiba pushed the doorbell and announced his visit, Yozo appeared immediately.

“Sensei, I am very sorry to have troubled you. I have asked you not only to defend Akiko but also to babysit Rinko …”

According to the documents he should have been seventy, but the Yozo that stood in front of Mikoshiba did not look it. He had silver
hair, but it had luster, and his face was wrinkled but had a healthy complexion. Even from above his shirt, he looked muscular for his advanced age.

“About that, I would like to talk to you about my defense strategy today. Would that be fine?”

Rinko went right in like it was her own home, and Mikoshiba followed her.

The parlor looked even older and more tired than the house’s exterior. The certificates on the wall were faded in color and gave more of an impression of decline than of glory.

“I live with Takahiro, my younger son, but he and his wife both work. They have their own child, but all three of them will be out until evening. Please make yourself comfortable.”

“First, I would like to confirm something. May I understand that there is no change in your desire to have Akiko’s sentence shortened?”

“Yes.”

“Even though she is the person who killed your son?”

“She is the mother of my grandchildren. Since their father is dead, she must be allowed to return to them as soon as possible.”

“Then let me speak frankly. In order to succeed at getting her sentence shortened, to show that there were extenuating circumstances, we need material to win sympathy for Akiko. Conversely, we have to treat Shingo as the bad guy.”

“You mean airing his wrongs that didn’t come up in the first trial … going so far as to lash the dead, in order to get Akiko’s sentence reduced?”

“That’s the defense’s job.”

“Even if it’s unethical?”

“Ordinary ethics and a defense attorney’s professional ethics are actually miles apart.”

Yozo stared head-on at Mikoshiba as though assessing his worth. “You and Mr. Horai are both lawyers, but you seem quite different.”

“Lawyers are like small store owners. Some are white and some are
black.”

“Was it Deng Xiaoping? ‘A cat that catches mice, be it white or black, is a good cat’ … Oh, excuse me, sensei. I wasn’t trying to compare you to a cat.”

“I am not offended.” Mikoshiba thought the old saying that a cat forgets three years of favors in three days would be quite relevant, but kept it to himself.

“You actually dropped by, too. Lately, Mr. Horai, it seems, has been too busy even to call.”

“That’s because the fees we seek are different.”

“What kind of fee are you expecting?”

“In a word, publicity. Is that acceptable to you?”

Yozo looked at Mikoshiba for a while, but finally his expression warmed up. “Mikoshiba-sensei. You are quite a character. Generally, people with fine titles try to adorn themselves. And adorning means of course that they are hiding something else below the surface. Most people instinctively know that, so they seldom show their true intentions at first meetings. But when you act openly like this on our first meeting, I simply have to trust you.”

“Why, thanks.”

“Okay, then. I will tell you everything, including what I didn’t tell the police, what I didn’t want to. About Shingo’s everyday words and deeds.”

“Other than what you said in your deposition, if possible.”

“From his childhood, he never had any gumption,” Yozo began his discourse in a resigned tone. “To speak badly of the dead is normally something to refrain from, but then I was his father. From the time he was little, he did well in his studies, but that was all. He had neither leadership qualities nor much ambition. I think he assumed that because I was an educator, as long as his grades were good and he didn’t do anything bad, he wouldn’t be scolded. He had few friends because he was unsociable, and when he played, it was just video games, but fortunately he never encountered any bullying and graduated from
college without ado. His fondness for video games landed him at a software company, which was growing quickly then, and Shingo, too, was steadily promoted. Even in the eyes of his father, though, he wasn’t fit to manage people. Working steadily at developing software, which he liked to do, suited him much better.”

It seemed cruel for a father to talk thus about his son, but only someone who knew Shingo well could say all this about him.

People who could be objective about the facts made few mistakes. Mikoshiba believed that he could expect credible testimony from Yozo.

“By the way, Mikoshiba-sensei. What do you think of luxury?”

“I don’t know. It’s like a man’s stomach.”

“Stomach?”

“The amount you can consume depends on the person. If you eat too much, you’ll get a stomachache.”

“You make a good metaphor. Yes, that is exactly it. Men of olden times called it one’s lot. If it didn’t match your stature, then it didn’t suit you. Shingo erred on this point. He merely rode the current but mistook it for his own talent, and to borrow your words, ate more than his fill. He was gluttonous, when his frame dictated a frugal diet. And he got a huge case of diarrhea. Believing even then that his stomach ought to be bigger than that, he repeatedly made a glutton out of himself.”

In other words, it was just as Mikoshiba had imagined.

“I was a civil servant, so I know all too well exactly how many people within an organization will overestimate their capabilities. They mistakenly think that if other people pay respect to the title on their business card it is because of their own capabilities. Shingo was a good example of that. So when he was told that he was being laid off, he huffed and decided that he’d become a star entrepreneur and show them. But someone without outstanding capabilities who could be laid off in a restructuring isn’t likely to succeed on his own. His dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur crashed and burned no sooner than he went to the banks with a business plan, but he had too much
pride to begin anew as a company employee. People with no prospects for the future turn to gambling. Shingo did just that.”

“You mean his becoming a day trader.”

“Shingo tried to tell me it was state-of-the-art asset management, but it’s just trying to buy low and sell high, over and over again. It’s gambling. And no amateur continues to win at gambling. So, naturally, he loses big. But he doesn’t think his losses are due to his incompetence. Or rather, he doesn’t want to. So he takes it out on the people around him, his family. But venting his anger doesn’t make him feel good. Being a coward by nature, he starts feeling even more anxious and drifts away from his family even further. Of course you can’t win at gambling in such a mental state, and he loses more. A vicious cycle.”

“If you could see that much, why didn’t you try to stop him?”

“Of course I tried to stop him. But men close to forty don’t just sweetly listen to their folks. He hung his head in front of me, having received the down payment for a loan, but after that he took his frustration out on his family. If I said something, it would only result in more scars on Akiko and my granddaughters. Naturally, I began to think twice about it.”

Mikoshiba didn’t miss the bit about more scars. “DV … Domestic violence became a common occurrence, then?”

“Weak people taking their frustration out on weaker people is the way of the world. At first he just yelled at them, but one day he began to raise his hand against them. He was particularly violent towards Akiko, and the cause was her decision to work part-time to make ends meet. The fact that he needed to put her to work must have hurt his pride. But if she didn’t work, they could not live. So he hit her. When I’d go there to see how things were, usually she had bruise marks. It was by chance that she didn’t have any when she was arrested.”

“Didn’t you think of calling the police?”

“I am embarrassed to say so, but I just did not think of it. Right now, I have utterly censured my son, but back then I probably wanted to try to protect him. Telling myself that it was a family matter, I
balked at having the police come running in. And Akiko, herself, did not want it, either.”

“Did the police ask you for any detailed testimony on the DV?”

“No. The canvassing, is it called? It was very straight-forward and they didn’t delve.”

The reason for that was clear. They had proof of the crime and had obtained a confession. No investigator would go out of his way to explore the background of such a case.