The Devil's Disciple (2 page)

You do remember me, don't you Mr Prosecutor? My case may have been investigated by another prosecutor and landed on the desk of another judge, but as the accused in the sensational murder of a beautiful woman, no doubt my name has been all over the newspapers. Since you work in the same court in which I am being tried you could hardly have failed to notice my name in connection with this case. You must have heard of it.

If you had agreed to meet me I might have been spared the writing of this letter. If I had remembered earlier that my old friend was serving in the court attached to the very prison in which I am being held, I might not have had to suffer as long as I have. I might have been able much earlier to relate the bizarre experiences that I am about to set down here.

Prosecutor Tsuchida, I am being held here as a murderer. But the truth is that I am probably not that murderer. That's right.
Probably.
It saddens me to have to say this. And I apologise for expressing it in such an odd way. But if you will be so kind as to read this letter through to the end I promise that you will understand.

The horrific things I am about to describe are not entirely without relation to you. In fact it is fair to say that it is you who have made me suffer so. And because of that only you can understand my pain. Part of me hates you for this. I curse you for it. But now I beg you. I bow down before you. In the name of that friendship we once shared, that friendship of unparalleled closeness, I beg of you to believe what I have to say.

Let me address you as Tsuchida-san.

I shouldn't think that would be a problem.

Tsuchida-san, I ask you for a moment to step aside from your imposing profession as a prosecutor and think back to how things were a decade ago. Think back to our student days, when we had just put secondary school behind us and passed the next hurdle to those tearful, torrid days when we lived in the school dormitories.

We were best friends. Actually we were even more than best friends were we not? Was I not always to be seen at your side wherever you were and you at mine, no matter where we went? Were we not known among our dormitory mates as a
Paar?

You are three years older than I am. You were the older brother looking for a younger one. I was young – still a child really – and I was overawed by the strength of your personality. Soon I had become your one-and-only little brother. Surely you cannot have forgotten this.

I thought I had found someone who could understand my loneliness. Even better, you were kind enough to love me. On top of that, you were brilliant. I respected you and came to believe that you could do no wrong.

For two years our friendship burned like a flame. The opposite sex was nothing to us. After those two years you graduated and went on to a top university. And what happened to us?

We split up all of a sudden. All too suddenly. And after that we barely saw each other again. Tsuchida-san, you, of course, were the cause of our break-up. You left me because you fell passionately in love with a beautiful boy one year below me in school.

Did you ever deign to ask yourself how your younger brother felt after you so carelessly tossed him aside out of fickleness?

I thought we loved and understood each other. I thought our friendship would last forever. But you stopped caring and left me all alone. I looked hard at myself from within that loneliness. I saw myself quite clearly there, and the self that I saw had no choice but to revile and curse you.

Self-absorbed as you are, you will no doubt interpret whatever I say to your own advantage.

Your face will contort into that devilish smile of yours as you picture to yourself a woman abandoned by her lover and despising him for his cruelty. But that's not what was going on at all. I had other reasons to hate you.

So yes, we were lovers of a sort. And I was forsaken by my lover. But getting away from you allowed me to take a good look at myself and at you as well, all the way through you.

Tsuchida-san. You are the most dangerous person in this world.

You are a devil. Devouring the flesh of humans is not enough for you. You are a hateful devil who won't stop until you have cast their very souls into hell.

You were a brilliant prodigy. You had an intellect of rare penetration. (And I suspect you still do.) But with that brain and that eloquence what did you do to the young men who gravitated toward you? What did you teach them? Have you, at least in my case, ever given a thought to how you warped their personalities?

You spoke with passion and preached with tears. The most irrational ideas sounded rational on your lips. The most specious rhetoric sounded utterly logical when it came from you. But what was it all in the end? Did it not end by destroying every pure soul that came near you?

When I first met you I was an innocent boy. By the time we parted, alas! I was the disciple of a devil.

You used to say to me, ‘Life is not a rose-strewn path. It is a battle and we must fight.'

But it was not the battle that excited you. It was destruction. The lust for destruction. You loved to destroy things. You weren't happy until you had brought pain and suffering to the boys who loved you, until you had brought them low. But you yourself never fell. That is what made you so frightening, so dangerous.

You love to give alcohol to boys who don't know the taste of liquor and then sit back and watch them suffer. But you don't stop there. You want to watch them as they fall further and further into alcoholism while you yourself never touch a drop.

If you were just a hard-drinking, whore-buying ruffian you may not have posed such a danger. Why? Because you would have been the object of universal contempt. But everyone thought of you as a perfect gentleman (despite the fact that in your case a certain distance from the fair sex was hardly indicative of virtue). This is what made you so dangerous. Those naive and good-hearted boys all trusted you. They became your disciples. And what became of them? Tsuchida-san, I know young men besides myself who were loved by you. And I know how they ended up.

I gained knowledge, but sold my soul. I will have to live with the fact that I sacrificed my body to your strange love, but having sold my soul fills me with regret.

Tsuchida-san, I've allowed myself to voice this bitterness for too long already. There really is no end to this kind of complaint. As I mentioned before, I have not begun this letter in order to criticise you. So let me get to the point.

I am not blaming you, but I want to make one thing clear, and that is how much my personality changed because of you.

When I first met you in the grounds of our school I was a vulnerable young boy who wouldn't hurt a fly. But you remember all the horrifying stories you told me every time we met. Before then I'm sure I was completely uninterested in horror, in the bizarre or the criminal. But you found it fascinating to the extreme and introduced me to literature and scholarly works on all of these subjects. Thinking back to it now I see that what you really liked was forcing your own tastes on me and making me drink that poisoned brew. But I knew nothing of this. I trusted you and believed everything you said.

At the time not that many books on horror and crime had been translated into Japanese, so we had no choice but to read them in the original. Somewhere you got your hands on books by authors I had never heard of, such as Poe, Doyle, Freeman and Krafft-Ebing. You gave them to me under the pretence of language study, didn't you? You lectured me on Carpenter, talked of Whitman and introduced me to Montaigne. Run through by every conceivable weapon and forced by you to build up a demonic philosophy, I found myself stimulated by the criminal and the bizarre. And all the while I was your plaything. Tsuchida-san, I was one of your victims. And because I lacked your brilliance, your zeal, your circumspection and, in some cases, your astounding self-possession, I walked straight into the trap life had set me.

You should be happy with yourself. Not only did you mercilessly transform me into your plaything, but now I languish here in prison, while you, who taught me everything, have used your talents and intelligence to go through life without a single misstep. I respect and admire you from the bottom of my heart. But at the same time I cannot help being appalled at the frailty of the laws of this nation that are powerless to do anything to stop someone as dangerous as you. You are the prosecutor and I am the criminal. What perfect roles for us! But neither you nor I will ever free ourselves from crime, not as long as we live.

By now I'm sure that all of these tedious accusations have given you a sense of why I wanted to tell my story to you in particular. If I hadn't met you that time when I was a boy I would never have ended up in this place. You didn't teach me crime. But you did give me the personality of a criminal. This is what I wanted to tell you above all else.

And there's something else I want you to remember. Surely you do remember it; that autumn evening when we talked of our passionate friendship? If my memory serves, the school year started in September at that time. I had just enrolled, my head was still spinning from the stress of studying for entrance exams, and I was suffering from what seemed a slight bout of neurasthenia.

Life in the dorms was especially unfamiliar to me and each night I found myself almost entirely unable to sleep. This made attending my daily classes an excruciating affair.

It was the 10th October. And once again I had trouble sleeping and went down into the school grounds. Among the dark autumn grasses I caught a fleeting glance of a shadow. That shadow was you.

Until then you and I had never spoken a word to each other. But there is nothing strange in two dormitory mates having a conversation when they find themselves at two in the morning standing in a playground overgrown with autumn grasses. The first thing I said to you was that my nights had been made miserable for the previous month by lack of sleep. You were deeply moved and told me that you yourself had suffered from insomnia for two years already. Under the dark skies our conversation drifted towards those sleepless nights and as we spoke a warm intimacy grew between us. By dawn we were bound together in a beautiful friendship.

But unfortunately I came to resemble you even in your painful sickness. I complained of my suffering each time we met. It was then that I first learned the names of Bromal, Adalin, and Veronal and began to use them regularly. Of course this was also under your guidance. Not surprisingly, this education gave birth to something truly accursed (as I will explain presently). But unlike with your other teachings, you were as much a victim of this one as I was. Recently I heard from a friend that you are now unable to sleep without ingesting enormous quantities of powerful sleeping medication. It is that pain. That pain that I want you in particular to understand.

Tsuchida-san, you, of course, know why I am going on about drugs in this way. To the best of my knowledge I am now in jail for having employed a large dose of powerful medication (of sleeping powder, to be exact) to kill my lover Ishihara Sueko.

I have now committed to paper just those circumstances of which I wanted you to be aware in advance. From this point forward I will write of the crime I did commit and the one I did not. You should know that I do not tell lies. I implore you once more in the name of that friendship we once shared. Please, please believe me.

To order my story properly I should start with the time you and I split up. As I noted earlier, that hot friendship of ours broke off suddenly with your enrolment at university. I would have been twenty at the time. And you were twenty-two.

When you left me for a pretty younger boy I found myself for a time completely bereft. At the same time, as I said earlier, I discovered that you had already breathed your soul into me.

It was in the autumn of that year as well when I met a beautiful woman called Ishihara Sueko.

Tsuchida-san, I had become your disciple in every way, but your particular brand of sensuality seems not to have penetrated me completely. I felt an intense physical desire for Sueko.

It's tedious to have to listen to other people's love stories. Tales of broken hearts must be particularly odious to you since you have not the slightest interest in the opposite sex and abhor sentimentalism. So I'll try to stick to the story line as closely as possible.

Sueko was eighteen at the time, two years younger than I was. She was a student at the XX School for Girls. The first time I saw her it was at the auditorium of a music conservatory in Ueno. You remember don't you? Those concerts that were held every Saturday in Ueno. They were about the only legitimate musical events Tokyo had to offer. There was one other concert series that was sponsored by the family of a famous former daimyo. But you always hated aristocrats so you never took me. Not even once.

Sueko and I were both regulars at those Saturday concerts. The audience were all working people. I won't bore you with the details of how we got together. Let's just say that from that autumn the little forest in Ueno where you and I used to pledge our love to each other became the spot for Sueko and I to do the same. I had just learned how to love the opposite sex. I loved her so much I would have given her everything I had. She seemed quite well disposed towards me as well. If this love affair had a happy ending I might have been able to suck out that awful snake venom you pumped into my veins. I know what you'll never know; how beautiful women are, how precious. Sueko would have been the goddess who saved me.

But the chips didn't fall that way. Our romance came to a nasty end. And the end came much faster than I thought. By the end of that same year a future husband had been found for Sueko.

Whether it was her intention or not – she claimed at the time that she was sacrificing herself to her parents' wishes – made no difference to me. All that mattered was that she had chosen a man other than me to be her husband. I was furious. I was sad. And I cursed women. Tsuchida-san, that's when everything you used to say started to work on me again. I cursed all women.