Chapter 45: Predicament

“By the way,” Suzuki Koji said, his expression suddenly thoughtful, “have you seen that hit drama series, the one that’s got everyone talking? ‘Sleepwalker’?”

Kishida Masayoshi ran a tired hand through his short, increasingly gray hair. “I think I’ve seen the trailers. Some kind of dark, suspenseful thriller, right?” He let out a weary sigh. “Trying to solve my own real-life cases is giving me enough of a headache. Why on earth would I torture myself by watching a fictionalized version in my free time?” He shook his head. “I swear, I’m getting more gray hairs every day. If this keeps up, my whole head will be white soon. The other day, I was at a crime scene, a simple burglary, and some little girl actually, seriously called me ‘grandpa’.”

“I’ve been telling you for ages, you should just dye it,” Suzuki Koji said, shaking his head with a look of pity. “Looking like a stressed-out old man, what woman is going to be interested in you?” Kishida was still single, with no prospects of marriage on the horizon. And while Suzuki was well aware that their colleague, Matsushita Makoto, had a bit of a hopeless crush on him, from his professional psychological perspective, they weren’t a good match. Makoto’s personality was a little too… chaotic… for a man as perpetually tormented as Kishida.

Kishida sighed again. “It’s just too much trouble, dyeing it all the time.” Besides, he thought, in a strange, grim way, his prematurely gray hair now served as a constant, sobering reminder. Every time he looked in the mirror, it was a warning: when dealing with the lives and deaths of others, he had to be careful. He had to be cautious. And cautious all over again.

“You distracted me. I almost forgot what I was going to say,” Suzuki said, snapping his fingers as the original thread of his thought returned. “Because that ‘Sleepwalker’ drama is such a massive hit, the topic has become a subject of intense public discussion. And because of that, there’s a chance that an old, very cold case might be reopened. I was on the phone with my old professor the other day, and he mentioned that someone from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had recently consulted him about it.”

“A case? What kind of case?” At the mention of the TMPD, Kishida’s professional interest was immediately and intensely piqued. Any case that was still on the radar of the top brass in Tokyo had to be a major one. The Makeup Hunter case, their city’s own personal boogeyman, was also on the TMPD’s books, though it had long since gone cold for lack of any viable leads.

“My professor said it was a case related to… sleepwalking,” Suzuki explained, pouring himself a fresh cup of coffee. “And apparently, it’s also deeply entwined with some strange, local island customs. There were a lot of victims, and the complexity of the case is said to be on par with the Makeup Hunter investigation. It happened twenty-three years ago, back in the year 2000. The location was a remote village on a place called Mie Island.”

“Mie Island?” Kishida Masayoshi searched the dusty archives of his memory, then shook his head. “Is that even a real place in Japan? I can’t say I’ve ever heard of it.”

“Mie Island is quite a significant distance from the main island of Honshu. If you were to take a boat from Tokyo Bay, it would be about a five-hour trip. It’s much closer by plane, though – less than an hour.”

“I had a college classmate whose hometown was on Mie Island,” Suzuki continued, a nostalgic look in his eyes. “One summer vacation, he invited me to visit. I was pretty excited at the time, since I’d never actually been on a proper boat before.”

“Unfortunately, it turned out I get terribly, debilitatingly seasick. The motion sickness pills were utterly useless. I spent hours of the journey emptying the contents of my stomach over the side of the boat. By the time we finally reached Mie Island, I was practically a walking, dehydrated corpse.”

“But,” he continued, a genuine warmth in his voice, “that trip left a deep and lasting impression on me. The unique culture, the strange and wonderful local legends of Mie Island… they were absolutely fascinating. The only regret is that the timing of my visit was poor; I missed their main annual festival.”

“While I was on the island, I did vaguely hear some whispers, some local gossip, about that case from twenty-three years ago. But I wasn’t that curious back then, so I didn’t press for details.”

Kishida gestured for him to get to the point. “And so?”

Suzuki shrugged. “And so? So they’ll have to assemble a new, specialized task force, obviously. An island that small, how many police officers can they possibly have? And it’s highly unlikely that any of them would have any real homicide investigation experience. So, they’ll have to pull experienced investigators from the mainland. If you’re lucky enough to get picked for the team, remember to bring me back some of their famous local souvenirs.”

Hearing that his friend’s ultimate point was about souvenirs, Kishida couldn’t help but roll his eyes. “And here I thought you were going to tell me how bizarre and intriguing the case was!”

“Well, it is said to be very bizarre. But there seems to be very little concrete information about it available online. If you really want to know more, I happen to know that Ōgami Seiji, who lives right here in this city, will be going to Mie Island this summer to assist with the investigation. If you’re interested, you could always pay him a visit.”

“Ōgami Seiji?” Kishida was taken aback. That was a name he was very familiar with. “You mean the Ōgami Seiji? The one with the profound, almost legendary expertise in folklore studies?”

“The very same.”

......

June 25th. Monday.

Yomikawa Tsuko stood before the full-length mirror, her expression a mask of profound, and to her, deeply unsettling hesitation.

The girl reflected back at her was, by any objective measure, beautiful. Her figure was slender and elegant. The crisp white shirt of her summer uniform stretched taut over the graceful, maturing curve of her chest. Her straight, slender legs were encased in pristine black over-the-knee socks, and in the small, calculated space between the hem of her plaid skirt and the top of her socks, a sliver of pale, smooth skin was inexplicably, almost shockingly conspicuous.

For a Japanese high school girl, it was a perfectly normal, even fashionable outfit. The only real variation from one girl to another was the precise length of the uniform skirt, a subtle, unspoken signifier of personal habit and social standing.

For the past week, she had worn this same uniform to school every single day. She had walked these same streets, endured these same gazes, without a second thought, without a flicker of internal turmoil.

But this morning, as she put on this uniform once again, a strange, ineffable emotion began to bloom in her heart, a suffocating, creeping dread that she could neither name nor rationalize.

It felt… shameful. To be dressed like this. To be seen like this.

The feeling was similar to the one she’d had when she’d mentally compared herself to Kishida Masayoshi, and had found herself, to her immense disgust, wanting.

I don’t want to wear this. I don’t want to go out like this. I don’t want to be seen.

Shame.

She was suddenly, and with a horrifying clarity, beginning to understand so many things that she had never understood before. Like those men who secretly, furtively, dressed in women’s clothing, taking illicit photos to post on social media for the admiration and discussion of a hidden community of others, but who would never, ever, under any circumstances, reveal their true names, their real identities.

“If my true identity is ever revealed, I’ll jump off a building.”

She seemed to recall reading such a quote somewhere, a statement of existential despair.

“So-called shame,” she reasoned, her mind a chaotic whirl of cold, analytical observation, “it mostly stems from a cocktail of negative psychological states: anxiety, insecurity, a sense of vulnerability, and an excessive, almost pathological concern for the opinions and judgments of others. But… I am not, I have never been, a person who cares about the opinions of others. This… this is very, very strange.”

The minutes ticked by, each one a small eternity. Yomikawa Tsuko couldn’t understand it. But she had no other choice. To maintain her current appearance, to act as naturally as possible, that was her only viable option.

“If I take another sick day, I will have missed far too many days this month. It would draw unwanted attention.”

Grabbing her school bag, she changed into her black leather loafers at the entryway, and stepped out of the silent, empty villa, beginning her daily, and now suddenly fraught, walk to school.

For some reason, the streets seemed more crowded, more… intense… than usual today. As she walked among the throngs of chattering people, she couldn’t shake the persistent, deeply unsettling, and entirely paranoid feeling that they were all secretly, surreptitiously, talking about her.

Is there something strange about my appearance?

Am I acting in some way that is subtly, yet jarringly different from a normal girl?

Have I, without realizing it, had some kind of… wardrobe malfunction?

Impossible. All of it.

She knew, on a rational, intellectual level, that this was just her own mind, her new, unfamiliar mind, playing tricks on her. And yes, many people, both men and women, did indeed glance at her as she passed. But that was not because she looked strange. It was for another reason entirely.

She repeated to herself, over and over, a silent, desperate mantra: Be calm. Be rational. Analyze. Control. But even so, she couldn’t shake the strange, suffocating feeling in her heart. She turned her head, her gaze falling upon her own reflection in the large, polished plate-glass window of a street-side department store. And in that moment, she had a sudden, jarring, and deeply unpleasant revelation.

A commodity. A product on display.

“It’s like being a product in a shop,” she thought, her mind now suddenly illuminated. “In the shop, it is not only the customers – the men – who select, who judge, the products. The products themselves are also in a constant and often brutal state of competition, of comparison. Just as that psychologist, David Buss, wrote in human society, men enjoy looking at women, and women, in turn, pay even closer, more critical attention to other women.”

“The reason for this phenomenon, according to his theories, is that when a woman observes another woman, she is, on a deep, subconscious, primal level, assessing her own relative sexual value. It is a constant, and often merciless comparison of products.”

And this predicament, this new, unwelcome state of being a product, an object on display to be judged and evaluated, not just by potential mates, but by her own gender… it filled her with a profound and utterly inescapable sense of shame.