On this one occasion, he didn’t call his brother-in-law. He knew that Motohashi would be as devastated — no, perhaps even more devastated — than he was.
He wondered if Motohashi was thinking of taking justice into his own hands when the courts failed. If he was, then he wanted to help. He hoped that Motohashi would contact him. He waited and waited — but the call never came. There was nothing on the news about Motohashi having taken revenge on Hasunuma. On reflection, that only made sense. After all, the man was the director of a company; many people depended on him.
Masumura realized that if anyone was going to act as the instrument of divine justice, it would have to be him. From that point on, revenge became the whole purpose of his life. He would find Kanichi Hasunuma and he would kill him. If he ended up in prison for his pains, then so be it.
Accomplishing that plan proved remarkably difficult. After the two trials, Hasunuma vanished. Masumura, who didn’t have a wide circle of friends in the first place, had no way of tracking down someone who had deliberately dropped off the map.
Long years passed during which he achieved nothing. He needed to work to make a living, but, as an ex-con, finding a steady job was always a challenge. He seemed to spend too much of his time in a desperate search for work. While the intensity of his hatred for Hasunuma remained the same, he had half given up on his plan. He felt the same about life in generaclass="underline" It meant nothing to him anymore.
That was brought to an end by someone’s chance remark.
The someone was a man he had met on a building site where he was working as a day laborer. When Masumura explained how being an ex-con made finding work difficult, his friend said that he knew the perfect company for him in Kikuno, a Tokyo suburb.
“The boss is a real character. He has this policy of hiring ex-cons. His theory is that they work harder than regular people, if you give them a second chance.”
The company specialized in junk removal and recycling, he continued, and he’d been working there himself until recently.
“There’s this one amazing guy there. Not an ex-con, but he was arrested for murder and managed to secure a not-guilty verdict by keeping his mouth zipped shut throughout his trial.”
Masumura’s ears pricked up when he heard the words murder and not guilty. What was the man’s name? he asked. “Hasunuma,” came the answer.
The blood rushed to Masumura’s head and he began to tremble all over. “Tell me more,” he demanded. Puzzled by Masumura’s sudden display of excitement, his friend explained that what he knew about Hasunuma was from listening to his coworkers’ gossip; he’d never spoken to the man himself.
Masumura found the recycling company online. One phrase on the page for recruitment caught his eye: We welcome applications from seniors, it said.
Masumura didn’t waste any time. He phoned the HR department. When they asked him why he was interested in a job, he explained that he’d been in prison. The HR guy seemed happy with that.
The next day, Masumura went to the company office, armed with his résumé, for a one-on-one meeting with the boss. He spoke candidly about the episode that had led to his manslaughter conviction. “You caught a bad break,” the boss commented, before offering him a job on the spot.
Did he have a place to live? the boss then inquired. When Masumura said that he was going to start looking right away, the boss countered that he happened to have the perfect place.
It was the office part of an old warehouse that was barely used anymore. It had a sink and a toilet, if not a bath. The boss arranged for someone to show him the place. Since it wasn’t too decrepit or dirty, Masumura was happy to take it.
He had hardly almost no stuff of his own, so moving was easy. Masumura started his new job the following week.
A wide range of people worked at the company: Some of them smelled like trouble while others seemed quite good-natured.
It was his third day there that he found the man he was looking for. A group of men were smoking in the designated smoking area; one of them wore a nameplate saying HASUNUMA.
Masumura had never seen Hasunuma before. His deep-set eyes, thin lips, and pointed chin all radiated coldness. He was smoking at a slight remove from the rest of the group. Perhaps he liked to keep his distance from people.
That’s the man who murdered Yuna and drove Yumiko to suicide!
Masumura was tempted to grab a knife and go for him right there — but he fought down the impulse.
Simply killing him isn’t enough, he thought. Before I do that, I want to hear the truth from his lips.
To do that, he would have to become friends with Hasunuma, though it was the last thing he wanted to do. He needed to find an opportunity to get close to the man.
The opportunity came knocking in an unexpected form a few days later. Masumura was enjoying a cigarette in the smoking area, when Hasunuma came up and asked him for a light.
“Heard you’re an ex-con?” said Hasunuma, blowing out smoke.
“Yeah, well. It’s something that happened a long time ago.” Masumura was surprised at how calm he sounded.
“What were you in for? Robbery?”
“Not even close.”
Masumura told Hasunuma about the manslaughter incident, keeping nothing back. Telling him the unadorned truth, he believed, was the best way to win Hasunuma’s trust.
After hearing his account, Hasunuma shrugged his shoulders. “All I can say is, you were pretty darn stupid.”
“It was all over in a second. I was out of my mind. I thought the guy was going to kill me.”
Hasunuma shook his head.
“I wasn’t talking about you stabbing the guy. I’m saying, why’d you go and spill your guts to the police like that?”
Not quite understanding what the other man was getting at, Masumura said nothing.
Hasunuma went on: “You should have said that you didn’t remember stabbing the guy; that he reached for the knife before you, that you tried to take it off him and he was down on the floor bleeding out before you even knew what was going on — something like that.”
Masumura shook his head. “I couldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?”
“The police can tell if you’re lying. They ask you a ton of questions at the crime scene reenactment. Say even one thing that doesn’t tally and your whole explanation is shot.”
“You’re too honest for your own good. You’ve got to brazen it out with ‘I don’t remember anything’ and ‘I’m not sure about that.’ Your story doesn’t have to hang together. That doesn’t matter. It’s not your responsibility. Maybe you were the person who ended up with the knife, but they can’t definitively say that the other guy didn’t have it before you. Your fingerprints could have got on top of his and erased them. Believe me, if you’d made a statement like that, you’d probably have been found not guilty.”
Masumura looked on dumbfounded as Hasunuma expounded with absolute self-assurance.
Maybe Hasunuma was right. Maybe his trial would have ended in a different verdict if he had made a statement like that after his arrest, taking a complete what-the-fuck-do-I-know-or-care attitude to any inconsistencies in his story.
In reality, that had been beyond his powers. Stared down by hard-faced detectives and pressured to tell the truth in the interview room, he wouldn’t have been able to come up with any off-the-cuff lies or equivocations. Even if he had, the detectives would probably have seen through him, forcing a confession out of him anyway.
But this man — this Hasunuma — he was different. He’d only needed to hear the bare outlines of Masumura’s story to come up with a strategy for evading punishment. He seemed to be uniquely quick-witted when it came to acts of criminality. And he had nerves of steel. He was quite comfortable defying the authorities and refusing to answer any questions he couldn’t answer.