The Devil's Disciple (7 page)

The courageous Jinbei raised his cane and struck Ōtera repeatedly on the right hand. As soon as the ostensible murder weapon fell out of Ōtera's hand Jinbei tackled him. The latter put up no resistance, almost as if he were expecting it, and in no time Jinbei had tied him up with an undersash. Jinbei ordered the frightened maids to call the police immediately. The investigation began from that point on and I suppose most of you know the rest since the newspapers covered it so extensively, but allow me briefly to remind you of a couple of important points.

I learned afterwards that the prosecutor who got wind of the murders immediately requested an arrest warrant from the examining judge who then took care of the autopsies, the inspection of the crime scene and the securing of the weapon. What I am telling you now is based partly on the results of those investigations and part of it was already known to the public at the time. So the order in which I came to know the facts is different from the order in which I am going to relate them to you now. But we won't bother with such matters of legal procedure and I'll just tell you what was going on at the time.

The cause of death of Oda Seizō and his wife Michiko was of course determined to be homicide. The weapon used was an extremely sharp blade. The pool of blood around Seizō was determined to have come from his lungs and the mortal wound to have been a blow to his right breast. He was stabbed through his pyjamas and there was also a bruise on his forehead but this latter was assumed to have been caused when he fell on the table. In other words, Seizō was only wounded in one place.

But Michiko, as I said a moment ago, died a horrible and cruel death. She was wounded in three places: stabbed on each of her breasts and cut across her cheek. The stab wound that killed her was the one on her left breast. The top of her nightgown had been torn off and her hands were tied behind her with her own sash. Her wrists were rubbed raw, presumably from having struggled to untie herself or to keep from being tied up, and the skin on her throat was slightly chafed as well from the cord wrapped around it. It was also established that man and wife had breathed their last within moments of each other.

The culprit was of course Ōtera Ichirō and he was apprehended at the scene of the crime. The object in Ōtera's hand was a jackknife that Oda Seizō kept in his study and it proved to have been the weapon that inflicted the victims' wounds.

Ōtera did not resist arrest but he refused to speak when he was brought to the police. I believe he spent two whole days without uttering a single word.

The prosecutor immediately brought charges against him for the murder of Mr and Mrs Oda.

I was engaged to work on this case by a certain aristocrat who was very close friends with Ōtera. Ōtera, it seems, had a very quiet and prepossessing character. He was also such a beautiful young man that one wished he were a woman. Given his humble circumstances he had a very impressive set of friends, including the aristocrat in question, a great supporter of his who was no doubt quite smitten with his looks and his character. When all of this happened the aristocrat came to me and asked me to do what I could for Ōtera. He said it was inconceivable that Ōtera Ichirō could possibly have committed murder and I resolved to put my services at the young man's disposal.

By the time I took the case on, however, the prosecutor had already filed charges, Ōtera had broken his silence and confessed to the crime, and it was all over the newspapers. I have a copy of one of the newspaper accounts with me here that I would like to read to you.

Suspect Confesses to Murder of Wealthy Couple

A Crime of Passion Reveals the Dark Side of High Society

Ōtera Ichirō (24), who was captured at the scene of the murder of Mr and Mrs Oda Seizō of ‘K', finally broke his silence last night and confessed to the crime under intense questioning by the police. The confession not only confirmed that this gentle and attractive youth is in fact a vile murderer but also exposed the utter depravity of domestic life in today's high society.

It was passion that motivated the grisly murder. Passion in the form of a repugnant and adulterous love affair. It seems that the young and beautiful Oda Michiko had been intimately involved for a year with Ōtera. The two had known each other for two years and Michiko, whose husband felt no love for her and whose illness made him dependent on medication, fell in love with the attractive young man after just a few meetings. At first Ōtera took pity on Michiko for her unhappy home life, but then a few sweet words from her caused him to forget his status as a student and become drunk on the sweet wine of adultery. The two became increasingly close and planned frequent trysts, taking advantage of the husband's disinclination to put any restraints on his wife. Their behaviour was disgraceful. On some occasions Michiko would visit Ōtera's lodgings herself, and sometimes they would meet at Tokyo station for a trip to the suburbs. A search of Ichirō's home after his confession turned up more than one hundred letters written to him from Michiko. But Michiko's heart had recently begun to wander and the wanton woman had fallen in love with Ōtera's friend Tomoda Takeshi (the man who had been at ‘K' earlier on the evening of the murder). This was the motive behind the murder.

On the evening of the 16th the brazen-faced Michiko played mahjong with her two lovers and her husband, toying with the three men under the guise of the game. When Ōtera happened to overhear her setting a date for a rendezvous with Tomoda he became enraged and lay awake later waiting for an opportunity to confront her and ask her true intentions. When Michiko came downstairs to use the toilet,Ōtera embraced her and pleaded with her to continue the illicit relation. But Michiko, whose fickle heart had already moved on, rebuffed him summarily. It was this treatment that resolved Ōtera to murder the young couple. That night he sneeked into their room, delivering a serious blow to Seizō while he abstained from administering mortal blows to the hateful Michiko so that he could torture her to death…

This article is quite tame compared to most of the press coverage at the time, which tended to represent the events of that evening in an even more sensational manner including descriptions of the love affair of Michiko and Ichirō, all the better to fan the flames of the readers' curiosity.

But all of the newspapers saw Michiko's tragic death as just deserts for her shameful conduct and made no bones about expressing sympathy for Seizō, who had lost not only his wife, but his life as well. There were even a couple of newspapers that took the trouble of visiting Michiko's family, the Kawakamis, in order to claim that however reprehensible the daughter's conduct had been, the widowed mother who had sacrificed her daughter for money was no less to blame.

As I mentioned earlier I became involved in this matter after the prosecutor had brought the indictment and the case had advanced to the preliminary hearing. As you are all aware at this point, it was not possible to have any contact with the defendant and neither the prosecutor nor the judge was sharing any information with me, so I had no other option but to find what information I could on the outside. For this reason, at this stage, all of my knowledge about the case came solely from the newspapers. Of course I did all that I could on my own. I was able, for example, to meet with Tomoda, but all I could find out from him was that the Odas' daily life was as frosty and strained as the rumours said. As for Michiko, Tomoda categorically denied any special relationship with her. He also claimed that the story about him having had some sort of secret communication with her on the night of the murder was entirely a fabrication of the newspapers. He did tell me that he had received a number of letters from Michiko some of which were quite upsetting. Once she complained of her husband's cruelty and solicited his sympathy upon showing him fresh bruises on both of her arms. He claimed that this was the extent of their interactions and he seemed not to know much about Michiko's relations with (Ōtera. He did say, however, that he believed that Ōtera was very much in love with Michiko.

Of course, the minute they catch a likely suspect the newspapers waste no time in making out that he's the real culprit and their readers have the bad habit of believing them. If he turns out to be innocent, people are just as quick to attack the police and kick up a ruckus about trampling on people's human rights or torture or what have you. The problem starts when people assume that the suspect is the perpetrator. As far as we lawyers are concerned the suspect is not guilty even after the prosecution has indicted him. All the indictment means is that the prosecutor believes the suspect is guilty. Of course the prosecutor needs quite a bit of evidence to make him think so, but we cannot in any circumstances assume guilt until it has been proven in the court of law. Even when the newspapers have pronounced someone guilty there is still plenty of room for doubt and in many instances they have in fact been proven wrong.

As long as the full details of the case had not been released it was of course impossible to know anything for certain, but it did look awfully unlikely that anyone besides Ōtera could possibly have committed the murder.

The only way to find out more information was to wait until the case went to trial. Finally, four months after the murder had taken place the preliminary judge handed the case over to the trial judge. It was at this point that Ōtera Ichirō learned that he was to stand trial for the murder of Oda Seizō and his wife Michiko.

Based on the facts I had heard up until this point was it not time for me to let the matter go? Did it not look as though Ōtera was guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt? I, for one, thought not. Gentlemen as intelligent as you will no doubt also have noticed that even among the facts so far established there were several points that did not add up. It was these doubts that made me decide to undertake the defence of the accused and to do all I could to uncover the truth about this case.

My first doubt had to do with the following.

A reasonable enough motive had been established. Ōtera was angry that Michiko had transferred her affections to Tomoda and when he reproached her with this she brushed him off so cruelly that he conceived the desire to kill her. And yet we know that the knife Ōtera had was not his own but belonged to the victim Oda Seizō.

The intended victim may have been a helpless woman. But her husband was there with her. And however ill he was, he surely would not have watched quietly while his wife was murdered. So anyone who wanted to kill Michiko in that room would have to kill her husband as well. It is also uncertain whether Ōtera knew that there was a jackknife in the room. This would suggest the possibility that Ōtera burst into the room prepared to kill two people with bare hands and empty fists. Under normal circumstance, this would be rather peculiar. Of course Ōtera may not have intended to kill anyone when he came to stay with the Odas. But once he made that decision it is quite likely that he would have taken a towel or something with him, even if he had just five minutes to prepare. At a pinch even an empty cigarette case could work as a murder weapon. Add to this the fact that Ōtera was physically weak and more like a woman than a man and one has to think that, while it may not be impossible, it was certainly highly unlikely that he would have gone into that room unprepared. Clearing this up would make it easier to determine whether there was an intent to kill. And even if it turned out that Ōtera was behind this tragedy it would be to his advantage to have this matter clarified.

My second doubt had to do with the scene of the crime. This was a crucial point.

When someone kills a husband and wife it is typical for them either to kill the man first or to tie him up while they kill or violate the woman. In this case, however, the wife had been stripped from the waist up and her hands were tied behind her back. If what I was told was in fact the case the couple died at almost exactly the same time. So one has to ask what Seizō was doing the whole time while Ōtera was taking his revenge by tying Michiko up, stripping her naked, wounding her on the face and breasts, and finally killing her. And would not Michiko herself have screamed bloody murder? how could it be explained if she hadn't? I wondered what the accused said about all of this, and what sorts of theories the prosecutor and the examining judge had come up with.

There is one more suspicious point I want to mention. This is something that crops up often in the novels you gentlemen write so you might have thought of it already. It's about the fatal wound inflicted on the victim Seizō: a stab wound in the right breast. It's not easy to stab someone in the right breast from head-on unless one is left-handed. This is not a matter just for novels. It is a serious matter in real life as well. It is only possible for a right-handed person to inflict such a wound if the victim is in just the right position so that his chest comes into contact with the assailant's right hand. Now I had not heard that Ōtera was left-handed. So we needed another theory to account for this wound. One might imagine, for example, that the two had been struggling over the knife and Seizō was wounded accidentally (in this case it would be more natural to assume that Seizō, and not Ōtera, was wielding the weapon). This point is very important because leaving aside the question of Michiko, it has a bearing on whether Ōtera could be charged with the murder of Seizō. If Ōtera were not convicted of murdering Seizō, even if he were found guilty of some other charge, it would have a serious impact on the final verdict. The issue here is not just whether he killed one person or two. To put it simply, if Ōtera did not kill Seizō but did kill Michiko, there is a chance he would get the death penalty. But there is also a chance that he would not. If, on the other hand, Ōtera killed Seizō it would be a case of an adulterer killing the husband. And in such a case, even if he did not kill Michiko, he would certainly receive the death penalty.