The Devil's Disciple (3 page)

What I'm about to say isn't easy to talk about. I, the young prodigy, started carousing so much that my friends at university came down on me hard. They told me I was making them all look bad. But what did I care? What value could a warning from my friends have if they didn't understand my suffering? In the spring of my twenty-first year I had to drop out of university.

Thanks to you, up to then everyone thought of me as a brilliant and well-behaved young man. Now my transformation was so extreme that a trusted teacher urged me just to take a break for a while and then come back to university. But I had already made my decision. I threw away that school cap with the two white stripes that was once so precious to me and marched right out of the university gates. It was that time of the year when every tree around the dormitory sent its blossoms scattering like crazy in the spring breeze and everyone was outside enjoying it.

My parents back home were shocked by my rash behaviour. They came to me in tears and begged me to reconsider. But there was no turning back and I had no desire whatsoever to go back to university. Then they got angry and tried to call me back home. But how could someone schooled in your demonic teachings ever set foot in the rustic backwater I came from? I told them they could go to hell and drifted my way through big old Tokyo without any goal in sight.

Over the next few years I tried out all sorts of jobs. Once I got a job at a magazine helping with translations. Once I worked writing film scenarios for the moving pictures. Before long I'd prowled around every last corner of Tokyo.

I had just enough work to eat, but there were two things I could never give up. One was alcohol and the other was sleeping powder. The more I drank the more powder I took. The loss of Sueko made me so self-destructive that I couldn't get to sleep on my own. I was already so far gone that even a double dose wasn't enough.

Eight years have passed since then. You know very well from your own experience how much more of it you have to take after using it for so long. The amount I take now would probably be just right for you since you use it all the time, but it would be enough to kill anyone else.

So to get back to the beginning, I lost Sueko and I dropped out of university. As I started to hear how my classmates were coming up in the world I just sunk deeper into the gutter. About two years ago I started living with a woman. My current wife – who finally got permission to visit me here yesterday. My wife Tsuyuko. Later you'll understand what made that meeting so fateful.

Of course she's not an educated woman. She was working in a real dive of a cafe. Like Sueko, she is two years younger than me and we got to be close when I used to go out drinking. Tsuyuko loved me. I wasn't that into her. She was fiercely loyal. And kind. So two years ago I married her and we started living together. It wasn't a marriage for love (at least on my side). I needed her devotion, her kindness, her body and the little cash she'd saved up. Tsuchida-san, I say this without any shame: I was a little devil. I'm sure you would agree there was no reason not to sacrifice a dame or two so that I could grow up into a bigger devil.

Tsuyuko didn't have any family so I was all she had. Even after we got married she was obedient, faithful and sweet as could be. I could go out drinking and buy as many whores as I wanted and she couldn't say a word. With such a loveable wife I finally felt at peace.

Six relatively peaceful months passed with my new wife, interrupted only by the death of my father. Of course I hurried home as soon as I got the news but he died before I arrived. I was the heir so a little property came my way. Not much but enough for the two of us to get by, so I returned to Tokyo.

I started working at the magazine again doing translations and set myself up with a little income. I was renting a small house in the suburbs at the time and have lived there ever since. Anyone would have thought this young couple had the world on a string. I even thought so myself.

But alas, that was just a daydream. I'd forgotten that I was the disciple of a devil. After that first six months Tsuyuko started to get on my nerves. Of course I didn't marry her for love and I was never crazy about her, but I had never hated her either.

Once we started living together, however, I began to despise her. Of course all young couples start to get on each other's nerves once the honeymoon period is over. But in my case it was different. I told you already that Tsuyuko was obedient, faithful and sweet. Now it was those same qualities – that same obedience, faithfulness and sweetness – that started to grate on me. I hated her for her shyness. Her girlish virtue irritated me. And more than anything that sweet disposition drove me out of my mind.

It was then that I felt the seed you planted inside me start to grow. I was afraid of myself. I felt like I had to do something. But I didn't know how to escape this strange agony.

Tsuchida-san, you have no interest in the opposite sex so you are no doubt still single. You probably cannot imagine the suffering of a husband who hates his wife. But as my mentor you do of course understand what it's like to hate someone who is blameless in the eyes of the world, someone who has nothing but good qualities.

I tried to get rid of Tsuyuko but she wouldn't leave me. She didn't mind if there was another woman. Said she'd work as a maid as long as she could stay by my side. Since there was no talking her into leaving I tried all kinds of ways to make her want to leave on her own. But nothing worked. Physical and psychological abuse had no effect. In fact the more I tried to push her away the more she clung to me and wormed her way further in. I couldn't stand to be near her.

If she'd been a little less of a good girl, a bit more selfish, if she'd just pushed back a little I might not have been so enraged. But she never let up. She was demure and obedient no matter what. I could stay out three or four nights in a row and she wouldn't say a word when I came home. Not a word until bedtime that is, when she would get down on her knees and beg me to love her. The pathetic sight of her was nauseating. I hated her so much I wanted to tear her into shreds and eat her. I would make a point of sending her out on errands on stormy nights but she just kept on smiling. When I couldn't stand it any more I would slap the smile off her face. But Tsuyuko just bawled and begged me to love her more.

I did everything I could think of to turn her body and soul into an instrument for my own pleasure, my toy. I thought surely this would get her to cave in. But she held fast. In the end I tortured her so cruelly that I started to hate myself. I started to feel possessed by her living ghost.

Tsuchida-san, if you'd been in this situation I'm sure you would have used that powerful brain of yours and found a solution. But heaven didn't bless me with a brain like yours and what I came up with was pretty damn prosaic. There was only one way for me. It was death. To die. And according to our philosophy she was the one who had to go. Sometimes late at night she used to say she'd kill herself if I left her. I'd tell her, ‘Go ahead. Knock yourself off for all I care.' But I was only saying it to hurt her. I never thought it might actually happen.

But as the days wore on the idea started to grow on me. I imagined what it would be like to have Tsuyuko dead. I still had trouble sleeping but I comforted myself by picturing her dying by illness, by suicide or by murder. I don't know how many nights I indulged in these devilish fantasies with the hateful sound of Tsuyuko's breathing next to me. Tsuyuko's face as she slept filled me with satisfaction and I smiled as I gazed upon it.

What do you think, Tsuchida-san? Had I not become the perfect inheritor of your soul?

At that time I was still just fantasising about murdering my wife. I had no intention of actually carrying it out. But then something happened that made everything change. Ishihara Sueko and I met again.

I imagine a woman-hater like you will laugh at the thought of someone who hates his first love but still can't stop thinking of her. But it can't be helped This is the difference between your personality and mine. I lost her when I was twenty but I always, always remembered her.

As I drifted around the country I was careful to follow what news I could find about the famous, rich man she had married. So I knew that he had been killed during the Great Kanto Earthquake, crushed mercilessly beneath a building along with virtually every other member of her family and the neighbourhood they lived in.

But my masculine pride kept me from going to see her. And even if I wanted to see her I couldn't have since I didn't know where she lived. And then, towards the end of last summer, I bumped into her in a section of Yamanote. She told me that she had been living there alone with only a maid to keep her company since the earthquake had taken her husband. Bereft of everything, from the family she had married into, to the town they lived in, she had lost all hope.

We talked about the way things used to be. We went back to the days we had spent together. I truly loved her and she loved me. Sometime between the autumn and winter of last year our passionate love came back in full force.

Of course I told my wife Tsuyuko all about it. I figured this would be more than enough to get her to leave me. Wrong again. She didn't budge from what she'd said before. I could fall as much in love with other women as I wanted, just as long as I didn't leave her.

I figured things could be worse and stayed away from home for most of the final months of last year, shacked up with Sueko the whole time. Luckily Sueko didn't have any children. She didn't know for sure if I was married or not. And anyway I promised to marry her eventually. You're probably wondering why I didn't just dump Tsuyuko. Perfectly understandable. Tsuyuko was alive but she haunted me like a ghost. As long as she was alive there was no escaping her. No matter how long I stayed away from home she'd be waiting there when I came back with that same pathetic and yet accursed look on her face.

By February of this year I had resolved to kill her. In January she had started to feel sick and February brought no improvement. Turns out she was pregnant. She was carrying my seed.

What awful luck. Your typical husband – no, anyone human – would be thrilled to have made his wife pregnant. But not me. I found it revolting and terrifying. The wife I hated and despised was pregnant with my seed. I knew myself too well not to realise it was the devil's seed that was growing inside her. It was bad enough that the bitch was pregnant. But this was the spawn of a devil. I had to kill her and I had to do it fast. I had to get out of this nightmare.

I wanted to kill her partly to rid myself of her living ghost. I knew she would keep haunting me wherever I ran. But now that she was pregnant it was even worse. I was done for as long as she was alive. I could try to hide from her but she'd hold on until the kid was born. But the thought of her giving birth to this cursed child sent shivers down my spine. This second me born from Tsuyuko would pursue me for the rest of my life. I had to stop her from having this child. I had to bury her and the child inside her.

I have to admit I found the thought of killing her thrilling. I'd made up my mind. She had to be killed. And now all was left was to figure out how and when.

Once I'd made up my mind I used every moment not spent enjoying myself with Sueko thinking up methods of murder. I hunted down every book I could find for ideas on how to kill people. I went back and reread all the books you recommended when we were in secondary school. I researched all the cleverest ways of committing murder.

The first thing I learned was that you can't even get started until you have got rid of your conscience. The annals of crime teach us that it's the conscience that catches murderers. They might be brave and bold when they do the deed, but they become cowards afterwards. Case after case shows us that the murderer would never have been caught if he had kept his cool after the act.

At least on this point I was very optimistic. I was the devil's disciple. I ought to have lost whatever I had of a conscience. But since I couldn't be sure until I'd actually committed the murder, I decided there was no use worrying about it now. I commanded myself to be bold and to stay strong once the deed was done.

Then there was the question of the method. This was crucial.

Certain murderers and criminals you read about in detective novels put a great deal of effort into disposing of the body. This is a waste of effort as far I'm concerned. If you can't lay your hands on the chemicals Dorian Gray used to destroy that painter's corpse there's no point racking your brains over the method of disposal. Just leave the body lying there like it is. As long as nobody knows it's a murder it won't make a bit of difference. Of course you don't want to try too hard to make it look like a suicide. This is an instance where gilding the lily can be fatal. It's enough just to keep people from suspecting foul play.

Next I had to choose the best method to knock her off. My research told me that the best place to do it was at home. It would be too dangerous to take her off somewhere else to kill her. The best is to do it right there in the comfortable surroundings of home.

Finally, the ideal method would be one where the victim doesn't notice even if you fail the first time around. If you screw up the first time you can just put on a poker face and wait for your next chance. And if that doesn't work you aim for another opportunity. You can try as many times as it takes and eventually you'll succeed.

But was there such a method? You're a veritable genius in this sort of thing so I'm sure, had you been in my place, you would have seen that the perfect method was staring me in the face and would have wasted no time putting it into action.

But I didn't see it.

Before long, February was over and it was the middle of March.

During this time I went back to Tsuyuko's once every ten days or so but otherwise I was living with Sueko. Before long I had stocked Sueko's house with all the things I needed on a daily basis.