Chapter 43: First Diary Analysis (Part 2)
“So what’s the answer? Don’t leave me hanging, Koji!”
Kishida Masayoshi leaned forward, his patience frayed to a single, thin thread. It felt like everyone he spoke to these days—Yomikawa, and now even his oldest friend—was determined to give him only half the story, to leave him dangling on the precipice of understanding.
“The motive for the murder,” Suzuki began slowly, his brow furrowed in deep concentration, “it appears, on the surface, to be a case of simple, accumulated resentment. Hatred, even. And yet, for a clinical psychopath, an individual with a profoundly underdeveloped emotional capacity… even a long-standing grudge, as a normal person would understand it, would be highly unlikely to serve as the direct, primary motivation for an act as extreme as murder.”
Kishida’s eyes widened in confusion, a fresh wave of frustration washing over him. “Eh? What do you mean by that? Are you saying the diary is a lie after all?”
“Think back to Kagehara Tetsuya’s stated motivation for torturing animals,” Suzuki explained, his voice calm, like a professor leading a particularly disturbing lecture. “He didn’t do it because he hated them. He did it because he found the process… interesting. It was a way to alleviate his chronic, soul-crushing boredom. So, the logical progression, for a mind like his, would be to eventually grow bored of torturing animals, and then, in his endless, desperate quest for new, more potent forms of stimulation, to graduate to… murder.”
“The vast majority of clinical psychopaths who become serial killers follow a similar trajectory. Their internal lives are a gray, monotonous landscape, utterly devoid of the color and texture that normal emotional experiences provide. And, critically, negative emotions such as hatred or jealousy rarely, if ever, serve as a primary driving force for their actions. This point is of the utmost importance.”
“The little girl in that old American movie, The Bad Seed… she murders her classmate because he won the penmanship medal instead of her. And then she proceeds to frame her own father for her crimes. This is, of course, a work of fiction, a Hollywood dramatization. Because if that little girl were a true clinical psychopath, she would not have been capable of feeling the intense jealousy required for that to be her motive.”
Kishida Masayoshi frowned, a vague memory surfacing. “But wasn’t that movie, that story, based on a real case?”
Suzuki Koji nodded, then began to recount the chilling, real-life story of Mary Bell, the eleven-year-old killer who had terrorized a community in England in the last century.
“Mary Bell and Kagehara Tetsuya cannot be directly compared, of course,” Suzuki concluded, after finishing the grim tale. “Mary was much younger at the time of her crimes, and her actions lacked a certain… premeditated, almost artistic quality. But from the perspective of their core motivations, I would hypothesize that they share a certain common and deeply disturbing ground. The desire to see others suffer, not out of hatred, but out of a profound boredom. A need for stimulation.”
Kishida Masayoshi’s brow was furrowed in frustration. “So, you’re saying that this part of the diary, the part about his intense, all-consuming hatred for Tanaka Erika, is a lie? But I personally investigated their relationship. Numerous sources told me that they had always seemed to be on good terms, but that, shortly before the incident, there had been some kind of sudden, intense conflict between them. Tanaka Erika’s own parents asked her about it, but she refused to say what it was about.”
This final section of the April 8th diary entry aligned perfectly with the results of his own investigation. To simply dismiss it as a fabrication… it was a difficult and deeply unsatisfying pill to swallow. He was so close, he could feel it.
“I am not saying that this part of the diary is necessarily a lie,” Suzuki clarified, sensing his friend’s frustration. “It is possible that what is written here is… a part of his motive. A single, twisted thread in a much larger, more complex tapestry. But it is not the whole motive. It is not the core of it.”
“For example,” Suzuki continued, his voice taking on a new, more speculative tone, “it is entirely possible that some… triggering event… occurred. Something that made Kagehara Tetsuya finally decide that he needed to… eliminate… this person who was so persistently, so intrusively, a part of his life.”
“But, for reasons of his own, perhaps he did not wish for others to know about this triggering event. Or perhaps, more chillingly, he simply did not wish to commit the true, cold, logical reason for his actions to writing, even in a private diary.”
“That, too, is a distinct possibility, is it not?”
After this explanation, Suzuki Koji spread his hands in a gesture of academic uncertainty. “My specialty is not criminal psychology, Masayoshi. I can only analyze this from the perspective of Kagehara Tetsuya’s personality profile. I had a brief and deeply unsettling interaction with him at the juvenile detention center. On the surface, he is impeccably polite, a master of social camouflage. His true thoughts and feelings are a complete black box. But internally, he is, I am quite certain, pathologically and unimaginably arrogant. This is reflected in the diary entries as well. He clearly and consistently distinguishes himself from other people, and there is a subtle, but persistent undercurrent of him viewing himself as a superior form of life.”
The mention of superiority struck a raw nerve with Kishida. “I agree with that assessment one hundred percent. In my few interactions with him, I felt the same thing. I could sense that, despite my age, despite my position as a police officer, he had absolutely no respect for me. He likely viewed me as… a fool. An amusing, but ultimately contemptible insect.”
At this, a sudden, unwelcome thought struck him. Yomikawa Tsuko. In that cold, regal sense of innate superiority, she and Kagehara Tetsuya were remarkably, unnervingly similar. No wonder they had become friends. No wonder Kagehara had been willing to entrust his diary, his darkest secrets, to her. Birds of a feather, as they say. Predators recognizing one another.
“So,” Kishida pressed, bringing himself back to the matter at hand, “you’re saying Kagehara Tetsuya’s true motive for the murder is likely connected to this part of the text?”
“Could it be because of this?” Kishida suddenly pointed to a specific line on the screen, reading it aloud. “There you go again. It’s Friday, so Kagehara-kun is in that room, doing strange things. I don’t like it when you do those things.”
“If it were a normal teenage boy, the ‘strange things’ he was doing in his room would likely involve nothing more sinister than pornographic magazines or the like,” Kishida reasoned, a new theory beginning to form in his mind. “But this is Kagehara Tetsuya. And considering Tanaka Erika’s almost preternatural perceptiveness…”
“Tanaka Erika… she probably knew about the animal torture all along. Perhaps she was finally threatening to expose him. And Kagehara, to protect his secret, to silence her permanently, chose to kill her.”
“The sudden conflict between them… it was likely about this. Tanaka telling him to stop, Kagehara viewing her as a meddling nuisance. And then, Tanaka threatening to tell his father, Kagehara Kenta, everything.”
Suzuki Koji considered this for a moment, first nodding, then slowly shaking his head. “As a working theory, it’s plausible. But the subsequent events, as we know them, contradict it, don’t they? Kagehara Tetsuya clearly didn’t care if his animal torture activities were exposed. Otherwise, he would have deleted the incriminating videos he’d made as soon as he realized he was a suspect. And at the juvenile detention center, he showed no remorse whatsoever, nor did he get into any significant conflicts with others over the matter.”
“And more importantly, Tanaka Erika had likely known about his… hobby… for a long time. If he was going to kill her to silence her, it stands to reason he would have done so much sooner.”
At this point, Suzuki Koji leaned closer to the glowing screen, his expression intense. “Look at this final section again, Masayoshi. Read Tanaka Erika’s words, her quoted dialogue. Consider her attitude, her tone. What do you feel when you read them?”
Kishida Masayoshi frowned, re-reading the last few paragraphs. “She was certainly intelligent, and very, very sharp. And from Kagehara’s perspective, yes, probably quite annoying. Intrusive. But beyond that…”
Suzuki looked at him, a strange, almost pitying expression on his face. “You don’t see it, do you? Masayoshi, Tanaka Erika’s words… they are not the words of a mere friend, or a nosy neighbor. They are the words of someone who has a clear and profound, affection for Kagehara Tetsuya. One could even go so far as to say she was in love with him. And Kagehara Tetsuya, in his pathological emotional blindness, was completely oblivious to this fact. He couldn’t even recognize the most basic of human emotions when it was directed at him. And he was, at that very moment, meticulously planning to murder her.”
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