‘Yes, is Mr Sasaoka here? I spoke with him on the phone.’
‘Oh, yes, hello.’ A slightly pudgy man’s face appeared from behind a cabinet.
‘Mr Sasaoka?’
‘Yes! Er …’ The man turned to the desk beside him, opened a drawer, and pulled out his card, which he offered to the detective. ‘Pleasure to meet you!’
They exchanged cards. Kusanagi glanced down at the one he had received, which read:
Kunio Sasaoka
CEO, Kunugi Publishing
Mr Sasaoka beamed. ‘This is my first time ever getting a card from a police officer. This’ll make an excellent keepsake.’ He reversed the card and huffed with surprise. ‘It says, “To Mr Sasaoka”! And you’ve written the date here – I see. This is to prevent inappropriate use, am I right?’
‘Don’t take it personally.’
‘No, no, I completely understand,’ the editor said. ‘So, would you like to talk here, or maybe we should go to a café?’
‘Here is fine.’
He led Kusanagi to a simple meeting area in a corner of the office.
‘Sorry to bother you during business hours.’ Kusanagi sat down on a black Naugahyde sofa.
‘No worries. Things are pretty laid-back here. Not like at the major publishers!’ Sasaoka guffawed loudly.
‘Like I said on the phone, I wanted to ask you a bit about a Ms Junko Tsukui.’
The smile faded from Sasaoka’s amiable face. ‘Yes … I was her editor, in fact. She had real talent. What a loss.’
‘Did you know her for long?’
‘I wouldn’t say long, maybe two years and a bit. She did two books for us …’ Sasaoka stood and retrieved two books from his own desk. ‘Here they are.’
The first was titled The Snowman Tumbles and the other The Adventures of Taro the Temple Dog.
‘She liked writing about characters that already have a certain place in the kid-lit tradition. She even did one about a teruterubozu,’ Sasaoka explained.
‘Actually, I know that one,’ Kusanagi told him, remembering the book that had launched the illustrator’s brief career as a character designer for Yoshitaka’s online anime.
Sasaoka nodded, his eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘Ms Tsukui could take the most familiar characters and make them sparkle. We all miss her.’
‘Do you remember anything about her death?’
‘All too well. She left a letter addressed to me, after all.’
‘Yes … according to her family, she sent a few notes to people she knew.’
Junko Tsukui’s family home had been in Hiroshima. Kusanagi had spoken with her mother over the phone. When the young woman died of a sleeping pill overdose, she had left three letters behind, each addressed to someone she knew professionally.
‘She apologized for abandoning her work,’ Sasaoka said, shaking his head. ‘I had just asked her to start her next book. I guess she was concerned that it was never going to get finished.’
‘Nothing about why she committed suicide?’
‘Nothing. Just an apology. As if I wouldn’t forgive her!’
Tsukui also mailed a letter to her mother just before killing herself. When her mother read it, she immediately phoned her daughter, and when she couldn’t reach her, she told the police. A local squad rushed to the apartment, where they found the body.
Junko hadn’t written about her reasons for committing suicide in her letter to her mother. Instead, she had thanked her mother for giving birth to and raising her, and she apologized for throwing away the life she had received.
‘We still don’t know why,’ the mother had told Kusanagi over the phone, breaking into tears, the pain in her voice still fresh even after two years.
‘Do you have any idea why she might’ve done it?’ Kusa -nagi asked Sasaoka.
The editor frowned. ‘The police asked me that back then, too, but I still don’t know. I saw her about two weeks before she died, and maybe I’m just dense, but I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary at all.’
It wasn’t just you, Kusanagi thought. He had already met with the other two recipients of Junko’s letters, and both of them had said the same thing. No one understood why she had taken her own life.
‘Did you know she was seeing someone?’ he asked, changing the topic.
‘I heard something like that. But I never knew who it was. You have to watch what you say about those things these days, what with the sexual harassment suits and all,’ Sasaoka said with evident sincerity.
‘Boyfriends aside, then, do you know anyone else she might’ve been close to? A female associate or friend?’
Sasaoka crossed his thick arms and shrugged. ‘They asked me that, too, but I couldn’t think of anyone. I think she liked being alone, honestly. She was one of those people who are happy sitting in their room, drawing, not going out of their way to be around other people much. I was kind of surprised when I heard there was a man, to tell you the truth.’
Sounds a lot like Ayane, Kusanagi thought. With the exception of her assistant and one old friend back home, she was basically alone, sitting on the sofa in her big living room, working on her patchwork all day long.
Maybe the ‘lonely woman’ was Yoshitaka’s type? Kusanagi recalled his conversation with Tatsuhiko Ikai. Yoshitaka Mashiba chose women who led lonely lives because it was only their function as childbearers that interested him. If that was how he thought of them, then friends and the obligations of society would be needless accessories for a machine with only one purpose.
‘Detective?’ Sasaoka broke the silence. ‘Can I ask why you’re looking into her suicide now? I know there was no motive, but at the time they said it was a clear-cut case of suicide. There was no investigation back then.’
Kusanagi shook his head. ‘It actually has nothing to do with her suicide itself. Her name came up in the course of a different investigation.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Sasaoka was clearly curious but lacked the temerity to press for more information.
Kusanagi took the opportunity to leave before Sasaoka asked more questions. ‘I should be going,’ he said. ‘Sorry for taking you away from your work.’
‘Are you sure that’s all you need? Gosh, I didn’t even remember to offer you some tea.’
‘It’s okay, I’m fine. Though I was wondering if I could borrow these books for a bit?’ He held up the two picture books in his hand.
‘Those? Please, you can have them.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah. They’re just going to be shredded at some point anyway.’
‘Well, then, all right. Thanks.’ Kusanagi stood and headed for the door with the editor close behind him.
‘I have to say it was a real surprise when I heard she was gone. When I got the word that she’d died, suicide was the last thing I expected. Even when we heard what had actually happened, we debated it for a long time, me and my friends. Some even thought she was killed. I mean, who would have the guts to actually drink that stuff? It had to be painful.’
Kusanagi stopped and fixed his gaze on Sasaoka’s round face. ‘Excuse me? Drink what stuff?’
‘The poison.’
‘Poison? Not sleeping pills?’
The editor’s mouth formed the shape of an O and he waved his hands. ‘No way, I thought you knew! It was arsenic.’
Kusanagi froze. ‘Arsenic?’
‘Yeah, the same stuff they found in that poisoned curry down in Wakayama.’
‘You mean arsenous acid?’
‘Right. Yeah. They did call it that.’
Kusanagi’s heart nearly leapt out of his chest. He quickly excused himself and left the offices. He dashed down the stairs to the street, ringing Kishitani on his mobile phone as soon as he was clear of the building. He instructed the junior detective to call the local Police Station who handled Junko Tsukui’s suicide and get everything they had on it.