Pathway to Japanese Literature

The Nearsighted Geisha and the Labyrinth Case

“You want me to recount some thrilling episode from my detective days?”
“For your novel… I see.”
“Save your breath—there’s no glamour in this work.”
“Just endless sifting through the dregs of warped cases.”
“Everything becomes routine eventually.”
“Nothing but petty, disagreeable memories.”

Those trivial, unpleasant memories are quite something.
Those triumphant tales of celebrated detectives fail to stir the soul.
How terrifyingly persistent they are.

“Well then, how about this kind of story?”
There was one absolute labyrinth case where even the sharpest detectives at the Metropolitan Police Department had to throw in their hats because they couldn’t find a single lead no matter how hard they tried.
What they call a perfect crime.
That case had its clues definitively pinned down exactly one year after the incident, thanks to a certain geisha’s severe nearsightedness.
“How about a story where they caught the culprit right away?”
“Unusual, eh?”
To tell the truth, this was really just a dull tale of failure for us.
To even call it a detective story felt almost embarrassing—it was such an absurdly straightforward case...

How interesting... Sneaky of you. So you're finally making me talk.

It's an old story now.
Since it was Meiji 41, this was after the Russo-Japanese War had ended.
It was before Kōtoku Shūsui's High Treason Incident, wasn't it.
A bit too old? ......Never mind......

It's a very old story now, but this particular case left behind such a bizarre impression that I simply can't forget it. I don't know why, but things like the victim's mangled face, the perpetrator's young pallid smiling face, and that timid nearsighted geisha caught between them remain etched in my eyes with a clarity that defies all reason.

The sequence of events was quite straightforward, but... Unlike other cases, there was something profoundly thought-provoking and somber about this one—it made me reflect in a way I couldn't quite shake.

The incident began as a run-of-the-mill murder case.

In Iidamachi, there was a lumber merchant—I’ve forgotten his surname—named Kinbei who was murdered in his own lumberyard. It must have been the 26th, since it was the day after Tenjin-sama’s festival. It was a fine morning, I think, but when we arrived, he’d been killed in such a brutal way.

He was a portly, bald old man around fifty years old, dressed in the standard merchant attire of striped haori jacket, work apron, and straw sandals. With no hat on his head and hands tucked into his sleeves, he lay collapsed face down on a path of fluffy sawdust heaps—a route leading from his family's lumberyard toward Iidabashi Station. In an instant, an assailant who had leaped out from behind the lumber struck him on the crown of his head.

From his forehead down to between his eyes and nose, it had been split open straight like a pomegranate, with brain matter oozing out. At first glance, I thought the amount of bleeding was remarkably slight, but when we dug through the damp sawdust beneath his face, the lower layers turned increasingly black and clotted.

I estimated the time since death at around ten hours, but he apparently never moved from where he fell. It was unquestionably an instantaneous death. Now, that much had been determined, but absolutely nothing else was understood.

At that time, since sawyers were active in every lumberyard, the crime scene's surroundings were strewn far and wide with fresh sawdust. The perpetrator had clearly targeted this environment for his scheme, leaving us utterly confounded by the complete absence of discernible footprints. Countless impressions littered the ground, yet none held any definitive form. Near the corpse lay two areas of heavily trampled earth—likely the criminal's footprints from the attack—but beyond confirming they weren't made by wooden clogs, this evidence proved worthless for deduction. The victim's pockets contained nothing but two mutual loan association ledgers. Neither frog-mouthed purse nor tobacco pouch could be found. It stood as an impeccably sterile crime scene.

A considerable number of people had been dispatched to the scene at that time. It might have been a bit excessive, but that was probably due to work being slow at the time. In addition to the initial four or five officers from Kōjimachi Police Station, there came the First Investigative Unit Chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, the Chief of Criminal Affairs, an assistant inspector, four constables, two or three members from the Forensics Division, two police doctors, a preliminary judge, and a court clerk—practically every sharp-eyed investigator handpicked from police departments nationwide desperately combed every inch of that place, yet not a single clue could be found. However, the subsequent autopsy revealed that the murder weapon embedded in his forehead was a straight, heavy object approximately one-tenth of an inch thick and estimated to be over a foot in length. It was exactly like the back of a hatchet. It had only been revealed that [the weapon] resembled the back of a hatchet, but this very explanation would prove rather unamusing in hindsight. I think this also became what drove the case into a labyrinth. Given it was described as a straight, heavy object over one shaku (approximately 30 cm) in length and about one bu (roughly 3 mm) thick, they all gathered to consider various possibilities, but having previously heard the term "hatchet's back," they couldn't conceive of any other implement no matter how hard they tried. They never imagined such a large paperweight could exist. A straight, heavy, conveniently sized metal plate... a paperweight... In reality, there are hardly any clever bastards who’d immediately connect it to a draftsman. In detective novels, there may be plenty of them. When no direct evidence could be found, they would have to proceed with circumstantial evidence next.

When we split up to question Kinbei's wife, the shop manager, and young workers, we learned Kinbei had declared after dinner that he would settle accounts at the Hongō mutual loan association. He retrieved an old-fashioned ledger entrusted to him and about nine hundred yen from the shop safe, tucking them into his pocket alongside a frog-mouthed purse likely holding salmon roe. With hands tucked in sleeves to prevent dropping anything, he sauntered out the front entrance bareheaded—an exit witnessed by both wife and clerk. He never returned that night, but since monthly loan association days on the 25th typically saw him disappear until morning, everyone retired early as was his custom.

The next morning... that is, on the morning of the 26th, when the shop manager and young apprentices went to inspect the storage area for fir planks scheduled to arrive that day from Fukagawa Sawmill to the docks, they immediately discovered the corpse and caused a great commotion.
He had not a single enemy who would want him dead... such an utterly straightforward account...

Of course we then thoroughly investigated everyone in the household, but there wasn’t a single suspicious individual among them.
The wife—a parsimonious and rigid woman—had been reading novels in the rear second floor until around ten o'clock with her obedient eldest son, her only child who had become an honor student at the First Higher School, but she never once heard any suspicious noises or screams.
Moreover, the young shop manager had bought roasted sweet potatoes on the front second floor of the shop and been engaged in ribald conversation until past ten o'clock, so naturally he hadn’t heard anything either.
They all possessed what we now call solid alibis.
Kinbei appeared to have been quite a stingy master, but even so, he must have been skilled at handling people.
It seemed there wasn’t a single soul who bore any resentment toward him.

The thought that this one might become another labyrinth case as well… hit me right in the middle of those interrogations.

However, given that over nine hundred yen had gone missing, this had to be considered a murder-robbery case—a matter of grave significance. Moreover, it had to be someone who had studied and thoroughly understood Kinbei’s daily habits long beforehand—a man of considerable physical strength and vigor. Even though dusk had fallen, to carry out such a daring deed in this dimly lit place near houses and a tramway required more than mere nerve. Operating on the logic that the perpetrator might potentially be an ex-convict... we thoroughly vetted distant relatives, mutual loan association affiliates, along with ex-convicts and ruffians from the Kudanshita area—but not a single suspicious individual emerged from any of these groups. Among these, the caretakers of the mutual loan association who had gathered at Yushima Tenjin’s precincts on the evening of the 25th—since Kinbei, who was supposed to bring the crucial ledger and money, hadn’t arrived—ended up calling Kinbei’s house in Iidamachi around nine o’clock that night. Upon hearing the wife’s reply that he should be arriving soon, they waited while drinking until past midnight, but he still didn’t come. So they tried calling once more, but this time no one seemed to get up to answer; completely unaware that he had been murdered, they decided to storm over to Kinbei’s place tomorrow and went home muttering complaints before going to bed. Some speculated that Kinbei had diverted the nine hundred yen to other purposes and was perhaps detained somewhere while scrambling to secure funds, but others countered, "No, Mr. Kinbei was extremely meticulous about money matters—that’s why he was entrusted with the ledger." There was absolutely no intention of doing such a thing. There were also those who muttered, "Something’s not right..." Then again... Well, there’s talk that Kinbei had recently taken a mistress somewhere in Tsukiji—who knows if it’s true?—and so someone came out with that theory, and they all noisily debated it before parting ways... Such was the frank chatter among those folks.

There, with talk of Kinbei’s mistress emerging, the investigation promptly shifted to scrutinizing his conduct—and upon checking the geisha registry offices, that mistress was immediately identified.
There was a geisha from Yoshichō called Aikichi, now twenty-five… Her real name was Tomoguchi Aiko, if I recall correctly. Last year… in late Meiji 40, Kinbei had taken her in, and now she ran a small tobacco shop in a Tsukiji 3-chōme backstreet with her hard-of-hearing foster mother.
The second floor had a closet and a six-tatami room with an alcove; downstairs was a three-tatami shop space, along with a toilet and kitchen—all arranged in a layout as cramped as a cat’s forehead.
Though she was taken in, it was merely a nominal independence—she was still being made to work at the geisha house.
Her earnings were periodically calculated by Kinbei with meticulous precision.
He even inspected the detailed kitchen purchase ledgers.
He was a thoroughly meticulous, solidly composed old man, you see.

Now, this Aiko—formerly called Aikichi—was such a gentle and kind woman, almost to the point of foolishness, that a certain teahouse mistress took pity on her and supposedly arranged for Kinbei to take her in, thinking it would secure her future. But that bastard Kinbei exploited Aiko's good nature—not only taking all her earnings but even making her entertain clients—leaving one utterly appalled.
He was no match for someone with such financial prowess.

Now, the focus of the investigation shifted to looking into Aiko’s background, but since those trivial details are neither interesting nor relevant to the main story, I’ll skip over them.
In any case, Aiko was the illegitimate child of a certain wealthy aristocrat, left with a foster mother—the usual sort who’d taken her in from the countryside—in such a pitiable state that she couldn’t utter a word of complaint no matter how they exploited her.
She was no good at shamisen, dance, or singing; too gentle for a geisha, her figure average and plump, yet despite being twenty-five she retained the shy innocence of a new apprentice pouring sake.
And though I can’t quite explain why, her nearsightedness was inhumanly severe—this being the crucial climax of our story—yet the way she fixedly stared at people’s faces through those blurred eyes became somehow irresistibly endearing.
The person being stared at would feel as if they were somewhat loved... Ahaha.

Don't make light of this.
It's not like I was being conceited.
That’s what everyone thought of me.

But more than that, I want you to sympathize with how our hardship—silently enduring the newspapers’ daily lambasting of the Metropolitan Police Department’s incompetence since the crime occurred while grinding through all these extraneous investigations—was anything but ordinary.
Journalists don’t have an ounce of sympathy for such things.
Since their business is to please readers, they’re practically itching to write pieces like “Exposing the Metropolitan Police Department’s Incompetence” or “The Perpetrator’s Grand Success,” constantly pestering us with “When’s the next scoop? When’s the next scoop?”—it makes you want to scream.
It’s a rotten business.
Honestly...

However, to our chagrin, this case was gradually conforming to the newspapers' demands.
Whether my own brand of intuition—that following this trail would inevitably hit upon something—had been accurate or not, Aiko had never shown signs of keeping a paramour.
As a precaution, we investigated whether any customers had exchanged words hinting at mutual interest.
We pressed her about even minor infatuations, but Aiko just kept blankly shaking her head until we were the ones who ended up backing down.
Stupid people are utterly useless in these situations.
Especially women—so many give this sort of vacant response—it's infuriating.

In truth, there had indeed been a man Aiko fell for.
Though she had come to feel her first love for him, having met him just once that single night, being a timid woman she herself considered it merely a passing fancy—and amidst life's other troubles, ended up forgetting it altogether.
Of course, that man was the perpetrator... but... patience—listen carefully.
This marks the crucial narrative pivot.

Thus, since Aiko at the time of the incident had no concrete leads whatsoever, there was simply no way to proceed.
On the other hand, thoroughly scrutinizing every customer Aiko had taken on would be an enormous task; moreover, since we hadn’t established any solid prospects to begin with, we decided to discontinue this line of investigation entirely.

Naturally, then, with the investigation’s approach hitting dead ends on all fronts, the narrative would circle back to where it had begun.
In other words, we had no choice but to discover the murder weapon and pursue leads from it—but being stymied by how this crucial instrument had remained utterly unfindable since the crime’s occurrence was downright exasperating.
It’s only natural we were stymied… The perpetrator had taken that murder weapon—the paperweight—back to his workplace, properly replated it with nickel, and used it daily for drafting work. There’s nothing more absurd than this, yet here we were, cornered without the slightest inkling of such a possibility.
Our only lifeline was this single thread… if only we could find the murder weapon, it’d be ours for the taking… Prepared to comb through every corner of Tokyo, checking each house one by one in a nitpicking search for its origin, we sifted through sawdust from one end to the other of every lumberyard in the Iidamachi area.

It’s no laughing matter.
People may casually call it the Labyrinth Case, but you’d never imagine how much hardship like this had accumulated behind the scenes—I tell you.
In the end, we even conducted a massive search from Kudanshita to the Ōte moat area, but all we found were old buckets, rusted-through kettles, broken geta, tattered shoes, stray dogs or cats, and umbrella ribs.
The newspapers went so far as to print photos of that grand search operation, but all it did was make us feel like laughingstocks.

When we finally heard the announcement three months after the incident that it had become a complete labyrinth case and the search was being called off, the frustration, the bitterness… It absolutely wasn’t just some bureaucratic sense of duty or anything like that. You might call it our comrades’ grit. The case’s logical progression ended up fragmented, and the unpleasantness of it being left unresolved defied description. Even after returning home, for two or three days I found my meals tasteless and did nothing but lose my temper at my wife... Of course, given how big the initial uproar had been, it goes without saying that the Metropolitan Police Department was mercilessly jeered at by the newspapers. But with the facts literally matching “Metropolitan Police Department’s incompetence” and “perpetrator’s grand success,” we couldn’t even muster a peep in response.

Yet in a cruel twist of irony, this thoroughly labyrinthine case—this perfect crime devoid of leads—saw a breakthrough a full year later, all thanks to Aiko’s inhuman nearsightedness.

How strange… yes, quite.
At first hearing, it must sound thoroughly mysterious—even mystical.
Yet in truth, it’s nothing extraordinary.
Just an indescribably pitiful tale entangled in human frailty.

It was exactly one year later—again in mid-April of Meiji 42.
Of course, we were being hounded by one case after another and had all but forgotten about Kinbei’s murder by then...

The rain was drizzling, and with no cases to speak of... So there we were, killing time chatting with colleagues in the Metropolitan Police Department’s common room when an attendant came to announce a visitor.

“Tsukiji’s Tomoguchi Aiko… requests an urgent audience…”

With that, he handed me a small business card.

I jolted upright.
Recalling all at once the hardships from a year prior, I hurriedly stood.
In such situations—when a woman connected to a case requests an audience this abruptly—nine times out of ten she brings some crucial clue.

While enduring my colleagues' teasing, I entered the usual interview room to find Aiko beyond doubt—her hair coiled in a traditional marumage chignon, dressed in dowdy matronly fashion—perched rigidly on a chair.
Her deathly pallor and gauntness betrayed profound anxiety.
Worse still, her expression as she glanced nervously toward me retained none of the endearing charm from her past.

While thinking "Got her..." yet keeping a straight face as I listened to her story, I learned that after being widowed from Kinbei, Aiko had quit being a geisha and tried running a tobacco shop with her stepmother as their sole livelihood. Then, since neighboring company employees and factory workers began frequently coming to buy from them, she realized they could manage quite well. However, on the other hand, her stepmother had taken up hobbies like theatergoing, religious devotion, and nightly drinking—all while using the legacy of the deceased Kinbei to increasingly siphon off savings—and furthermore rejected every good marriage proposal that came Aiko’s way. Thus driven from dawn till dusk by the shop’s earnings and household drudgeries, Aiko had become utterly haggard by this point… Such was the tale—in short, Aiko was a woman fashioned to be wrung dry from birth until death. …Then, timidly, Aiko produced a single letter and asked us to read it.

Half in disappointment, thinking it might be some threatening letter, I opened it only to find something entirely different.
Written neatly in drafting purple ink across all three sheets of stationery—minute characters filling every inch.
It’s preserved among the reference materials, you understand.

Shall I show you... Hmm... Come over here now.
This was the letter.

“Please excuse the preamble.
I must express my gratitude to you.
You must recall how yesterday, by chance, you and I found ourselves alone there.
At that time, the person sitting next to you was a detective from the Metropolitan Police Department’s Political Crimes Division.
When I realized that, I knew I was already cornered with no way out.
For you must have remembered the face of me who had asked you all those probing questions about your late husband.

Not only that, but seeing you worn down by hardships had made me profoundly aware of my own guilt.
I had wavered, wanting to confess my identity then and there, but in that moment you simply fixed me with those same tender eyes as before and kept up your pretense of ignorance.
How clearly I understood those wordless sentiments you conveyed—that desperate wish for me to escape unscathed.

Alas.
The feelings of that moment.
How can I convey my gratitude to you?

Your late master Kinbei was a demon.
Not only your heartrendingly pure heart but your pristine body and blood—he was a demon determined to wring every last drop from them.
Thus I resolved to chastise that demon, rescue you, and secure travel funds for my journey abroad.
For a month I shadowed Kinbei until seizing the perfect opportunity.
Yet I never went abroad.
Every yen taken from Kinbei went to the party’s movement funds.

From the perspective of your ideology, I am someone who deserves endless condemnation.
I am the sworn enemy of your late master.
I am society's public enemy.
I am the one who brought about your misfortune.
Yet you pretended not to know and kindly overlooked this.

Ah.
You have continued pouring that single night's pure affection upon me until this very day - a full year later.
You have loved me.

Through you, I first understood the preciousness of pure human affection.
My conviction - that I would live a life of unyielding materialism devoid of heart or tears - began crumbling at its very foundation through your influence.

I seem to be going mad.

I will flee to a place where I shall never lay eyes on you again.
To avoid becoming a traitor—to die while offering my fullest gratitude, holding close your pure, aching love as my sole possession—

I cannot bear to become a traitor, marry you, and plunge you into an unfortunate fate of unknowable nature.

Please live happily—truly happily.

From a lonely socialist

Ms. Tomoguchi Aiko

Please burn this letter immediately.
I trust in your kindness.

Upon finishing this letter, I immediately thought—this permits no delay—and started to rise... but... settled back down.
The attitude Aiko showed when bringing this letter was so peculiar... Though it seemed like a move that would send a man who favored her to his death... Since an honest soul like Aiko couldn't possibly do such a cruel thing, I decided to interrogate her again just to be safe.
I also began to suspect this might be some first-rate socialist ploy.

“Hmm.”
“Miss Aiko…”

“Yes…”

“Do you have any idea who wrote this letter?”

Aiko fluttered her eyes in surprise and lightly shook her round chignon from side to side.

"No… I haven't the slightest idea… Because I can't read what's written… The characters are too small…"

I was rendered speechless.

“What…? Haven’t you read it yet?”

Aiko laughed sadly while adjusting her chignon.

“Yes. Letters like this often come from gentlemen, so each time I have my mother read them, but she says she can’t make sense of this letter’s wording… Even when she reads parts here and there, it makes no sense… But since Mr. Kinbei’s name is written in places and it says something about a socialist dying, I got scared… Mother said it would be dangerous to have anyone else read it, so I rushed to have you read it…”

I involuntarily let out a good ten-foot sigh, I tell you.
It was strange that I didn't feel even a shred of comical feeling.
For some time, I found myself staring blankly at Aiko's unknowing, timidly anxious nearsighted eyes—eyes whose myopia had manifested such a dreadful effect.

“Hmm.”
“According to this letter, about a month before Mr. Kinbei died, you had a quiet rendezvous with a young customer at some teahouse, didn’t you?”

Aiko's complexion turned deathly pale before my eyes.
She seemed to have recalled—somehow—the previous interrogation.
Then again, in an instant, her face flushed red up to the base of her ears, but while looking at my face, she nodded timidly.

“Right? There must’ve been one. You remembered now, didn’t you?”

Aiko turned completely crimson and bowed her head.
With my heart pounding, I began employing secret interrogation techniques on her, but she was effortlessly drawn in and started speaking haltingly.

“Yes.”
“I finally remembered.”
“That was a man around twenty-seven or twenty-eight who carried himself like a young gentleman.”
“At the teahouse they called him Mr. Oo, but was his name Mr. Ohibuki…? He was a man who was neat in everything from his attire to his spending—no…”
“His hands—both of them—were not like a laborer’s; they were white and clean.”
“When the alcohol had slightly taken effect, he kindly asked about various aspects of my circumstances, so I told him everything truthfully.”
“I even told him all about Mr. Kinbei... Since the mutual loan association meeting in Hongo is on the twenty-fifth of every month, he takes the ledger and money there.”
“On his way back, I even told him that he would visit my place by streetcar.”
“That young man was apparently the adopted son of a certain wealthy family in Shinshu who came to Tokyo and entered the Higher Technical School, but when his adoptive family went bankrupt, he could no longer attend.”
“Then after working various jobs with great hardship, while attending a bookkeeping night school in Tsukiji, when the remaining assets of his adoptive family finally became his after six months, he started visiting me—specifically naming me whom he'd been thinking of every time he bought tobacco—”
“He said he’d visit occasionally from now on… and mentioned… that your residence was in Shiba Kanasugi… Such… such kindness…”

“Hmm…”
“So you two became quite close, then.”

Aiko turned red up to her ears again.
A single tear rolled down and fell onto her lap.

“Mhm. I know. So that’s why you didn’t tell me about that customer back then either, did you?”

Aiko shook her round chignon slightly from side to side. She began to sob quietly with hitching breaths.

“I see, I see. So at that time, you didn’t remember that he was the only man you ever cared for.”

Aiko bowed her head while trembling slightly. She was probably trying to apologize. I leaned forward on one knee.

“So then.”
“Changing tack—yesterday were you ever left alone with two others somewhere? On a streetcar maybe?”
“The other two were supposed to be men though...”

Aiko looked up as if startled.

"How did you know…"

“Ha ha. It’s written right here in this letter, isn’t it? Where’s that…”

“Yesterday, I went to Fukagawa for my uncle’s memorial service.”

“Ah!”
“You took the Tsukishima ferry, didn’t you?”
“I see, I see.”
“Do you remember what the two men who were riding with you at that time looked like?”

Aiko shrunk back in terror.
She must have thought I was investigating socialists or something like that.
Her dark eyes blinked rapidly as her lips quivered.

“Since my eyes are poor, I can only faintly discern the appearance of someone three feet away...”

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t know—just go by Arakata’s appearance.”
“Were both of them gentlemanly types?”

“No.”
“One was a worker wearing blue clothes, and the other was someone like a shop manager in a black kimono.”

“What about that worker-like man’s face…”

She shrank even more fearfully into the chair.

“Well…the bird-catcher hat…the brown bird-catcher hat was pulled down deeply over his eyebrows, so I couldn’t see well…but the other one kept clearing his throat twice each time—ahem ahem—and spat over and over again.”

“Ha ha.”
“I see, I see. So he was a dark-skinned man wearing a brown derby hat—a tall one, I suppose.”
“He wore gold-rimmed glasses…”

Aiko looked up, startled.

“How... how did you know...”

I immediately pressed the call bell and summoned the attendant.

“Hey. Attendant, have Mr. Ishimuro from the waiting room come here for a moment.”

“Understood.”

Detective Ishimuro came immediately.

“What’s this… Hmm, this woman?”
“I rode that ferry with her at Tsukishima yesterday.”
“What’s wrong with you… Huh?”
“The worker who was with us? Yeah, I know him.”
“He’s a draftsman at Fukagawa’s Murasaki-zuka Shipyard named Taizo Ohibuki.”
“They investigated him once on socialist suspicions.”
“They say he went through Higher Technical School—gives him that privileged young master air.”
“Yesterday she must’ve failed to recognize my face.”
“Though she was putting on an act of not knowing me.”

To tell the truth, there had never been a moment when I was more flustered than this. It was around this time that we had come to understand that socialists, despite their appearance, were sensitive creatures and alarmingly quick to flee.

“Right, let’s go immediately.”
“He’s a prime suspect.”
“You come along too.”
“I’ll explain the details later.”

Ah!... This is no good.

“Miss Aiko! Miss Aiko!”

Aiko rolled off the chair onto the floor with a thud, still unconscious.
It was a cruel tale, but I found myself smiling then.
Her faint had corroborated every word of her story.

While the police doctor was tending to Aiko, we stormed into the Murasaki-zuka Shipyard and apprehended Taizo Ohibuki—right as he was clearing out his desk drawers—without giving him a chance to protest.
Ohibuki was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist of those nascent days and an admirer of Kotoku Shusui.
For him, the ends justified the means—to secure travel funds for Russia, he had targeted Kinbei, Aiko's patron, through rumors among draftsman colleagues. After gleaning information through Aiko's own words, he zealously tailed him with a nickel-plated square iron rod from his work tools. Amidst a lumberyard arranged like folding screens, he seized a perfect opportunity to decisively commit what he believed to be an absolutely foolproof crime.

However, since Ohibuki had only become acquainted with her once, he hadn’t noticed Aiko’s nearsightedness, and Aiko herself had never disclosed such a thing. So when he found himself fixed under that characteristic moist, adoring gaze of hers, he completely misread the situation. At his core an ideology-intoxicated greenhorn rather than a true villain, he ultimately destroyed himself through nothing more than a fleeting moment of vanity.

When we showed him the letter after putting on the handcuffs, Ohibuki turned pale and nodded.

“What a fool... showing this letter to others... Though I was the far greater fool... Ahahaha...”

and let out a hollow, booming laugh, I recall.
It was a display of remarkably composed nerve, but we who were listening couldn’t bring ourselves to laugh.

Of course, since it rankled us, we didn’t inform the newspapers of Ohibuki’s arrest.
He was executed quietly without fanfare, but the truly pitiful one was Aiko—after that, she apparently made occasional care packages for Ohibuki.
And then, on the evening his execution was reported in the newspaper, she hanged herself in the kitchen of her home.

There was no suicide note or anything, so the cause remains unknown, but having realized that through her own words she had killed both Kinbei and Ohibuki, I think she must have fallen into utter despair and resolved herself to die.

"What... you’ve realized...?"

Aiko had never even realized herself that she’d initially felt her first love toward Ohibuki.
Those feelings blazed up with scorching intensity when she saw that letter.
And with Ohibuki’s execution, the world plunged into darkness.

Hmm.
What a terrifyingly drawn-out way to fall in love, isn't it?
She ended up getting two people killed before realizing she was in love, you know.

Hmm.
What makes this story so remarkable is that it's about a truly pure, timid woman being such a thing... You might say it's novel material.

Ahaha…
So that’s how it was…