OKYO DAILY, MORNING EDITION

Tokyo, April 20, 2000—On April 19 shortly after 6 p.m., the body of a woman was discovered in unit 103 of the Green Villa Apartments, Maruyama-ch, Shibuya Ward. The apartment superintendent who found the body called 911.

The Investigations Bureau of the Metropolitan Police Headquarters, in cooperation with the Shibuya Ward Police Precinct, launched an inquiry and determined that the deceased was Kazue Sat, 39, a resident of the Kita-Toriyama area of Setagaya Ward and an employee with G Architecture and Engineering Corporation.

Judging from the marks on her neck, the Investigations Bureau has cited strangulation as the cause of death and ruled it a homicide. An investigation is now under way.

According to initial reports, the victim was last seen leaving her house on April 8 around 4 p.m., destination unknown.

Her body was discovered in a six-mat room that had been vacant since August of the previous year. The door to the vacant apartment was unlocked and Sat’s body was found faceup on the floor in the center of the room. Her handbag was recovered at the site, and though she was believed to have been carrying approximately ¥40,000, her wallet was empty. She was dressed in the same clothes that she had been seen wearing earlier that day.

Ms. Sat entered G Architecture and Engineering Firm after graduating from Q University in 1984. She was assigned to the General Research Department, where she was assistant manager of the research office. Single, she lived with her mother and a younger sister.

When I read this article in the Tokyo Daily, I knew immediately that it was the same Kazue Sat I had known in school. Of course, a name like Kazue Sat is not uncommon, and conceivably I was mistaken. But I was convinced. There could be no mistake. How could I be so certain? Because almost two years earlier, shortly after Yuriko died, Kazue had called me. It was the last phone call I ever received from her.

“It’s me,” she had said. “Kazue Sat. Hey, I heard Yuriko-chan’s been murdered.”

I’d not heard one word from Kazue since university, yet this was the first thing out of her mouth.

“It’s such a shock!”

I was shocked too, not by Yuriko’s death and not even by the fact that Kazue had called me out of the blue. Rather, I was unsettled by the fact that Kazue was laughing on the other end of the line. Her low, whispery laugh lingered like the buzzing of a bee. Maybe she intended the laugh to seem consoling, but I felt it seep into my hand as I clung to the telephone receiver. I’ve said, haven’t I, that Yuriko’s death didn’t particularly surprise me? But at that moment, and that moment only, I felt a chill shoot down my spine.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Nothing.” Kazue’s response was overly casual. “Well, I suppose you’re sad, aren’t you?”

“Not really.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Kazue’s tone indicated that she had always been perfectly aware of how I felt. “You and Yuriko-chan weren’t particularly close, as I recall. It was as if you two weren’t even related. Others might not have realized you were sisters, but I picked up on it right away.”

“So what are you up to?”

“Guess.”

“I heard you’d gotten a job with an engineering firm after university.”

“Would you be surprised if I told you Yuriko-chan and I were in the same line of work?”

Detecting the note of triumph in her voice, I was at a loss for words. I had a hard time associating Kazue’s present life with words like men, prostitution, and sex. From what I had heard, she worked for a very reputable firm and was making her way as an elite career woman. When I didn’t respond immediately, Kazue offered the following parting shot and then hung up: “Well, I intend to be careful!”

I stood there for some time looking down at the telephone, wondering whether the person I’d just spoken to was really Kazue. Could it have been someone else claiming to be her? The Kazue I knew had not been so cryptic. She always spoke with arrogant conclusiveness—all the while staring nervously into the face of her audience, terrified of being caught in a mistake. She was incredibly haughty when she spoke about an academic subject. But if the conversation shifted to the latest trends in fashions, restaurants, or boyfriends, she clammed up, relinquished her superiority, and sank into the background. That was the Kazue I knew. The discrepancy between her confidence and her insecurity was so great, I had almost felt sorry for her. If Kazue had changed, it meant she’d found a new means of doing battle with the world.

This is what you want me to talk about, isn’t it? Of course, I fully intend to return to Kazue and Yuriko in due course, but I seem to continue getting sidetracked. I’m sorry. All these digressions about myself really have nothing to do with the topic at hand. I imagine I’ve bored you to tears by now, as I am sure you would much rather hear about Yuriko and Kazue.

But what is it about those two that interests you, if I may ask? I know I’ve asked this earlier. It’s just that I can’t quite understand the fascination. Is it because the man accused of the crime—Zhang’s his name, a Chinese national—was in the country illegally? Is it because of the rumors that Zhang was falsely accused?

Are you suggesting that Kazue, Yuriko, and that man as well each had their own different dark infatuations? I myself do not think so. But I am convinced that both Kazue and Yuriko enjoyed what they were doing, and that Zhang did too. No, no, I’m not saying he enjoyed killing. In fact, I don’t even know if he was the murderer—and I don’t particularly want to know, either.

It’s probably true that the man had relations with both Yuriko and Kazue. Didn’t he say he bought their services for an incredibly cheap sum? Just two or three thousand yen, I think he said, less than twenty-five dollars. If that’s the case, he must have had something they wanted. I mean, there had to have been some reason for Yuriko and Kazue to do what they did. That’s why I imagine they enjoyed their relationship with him. Why else would they have agreed to sell themselves for such a low price? Wasn’t this the means they had for waging war on the world? This is what I meant earlier in reference to Kazue. But theirs was a method beyond my abilities.

During the three years I spent with Kazue Sat in high school and the four we had in university, my family was undergoing tremendous changes. A big factor was my mother’s suicide in Switzerland just before the summer vacation of my first year in high school. (I believe I showed you my mother’s last letter, didn’t I? I’ll speak to you more about her in due course as well.)

Kazue encountered a similar experience. Her father died suddenly while she was in university. By that time she and I weren’t seeing a lot of each other, so I’m not certain of the exact circumstances, but it seems he had a cerebral hemorrhage and collapsed in the bathroom. For this reason, Kazue’s family circumstances and standing at school were not unlike my own.

I referred to our standing at school just now, and I think it safe to say that she and I were the only ones at our school who had undergone experiences significantly unlike those of anyone else. So it would seem perfectly natural for the two of us to be drawn to each other.

Kazue and I both passed the entrance exam and entered the Q school system in high school. As I am sure you are aware, Q High School for Young Women is extremely competitive and accepts only those with the highest scores on the board exams. Kazue undoubtedly studied hard for the exams while she was in a municipal junior high school and got in. I don’t know whether it was by fortune or fate, but I made it too. Of course, my motivation for giving everything I had to pass the entrance exam was driven by my desire to get away from Yuriko. It wasn’t that I was particularly fixated on Q High School for Young Women itself. But Kazue was different. Ever since she was in elementary school she had set her sights on Q High School, and as she would tell me later she devoted herself to her studies precisely so she might achieve her goal. Here lies the difference between Kazue and me, and it is a big difference.

The Q school organization extends from elementary school through university, meaning that those who succeed in entering at the ground level as elementary students can, for all intents and purposes, glide all the way up to university level without the hellish pressure of additional entrance exams. This particular kind of school structure is therefore referred to as an “escalator” institution. The elementary school enrolled both boys and girls and only admitted around 80 children. In middle school, the number of students doubled. In high school, students were divided by sex, and once again the class size doubled. Therefore, among the 160 students attending the young women’s division in any given year, half would be those who had only just entered the program at the high school level, while the other half would have been there longer, either from elementary school or junior high.

The university, on the other hand, admits students from across Japan, and the number of famous people who claim Q University as their alma mater is impossible to count. Q University is so famous that my grandfather’s elderly friends would all gasp in admiration at the mere mention of the name. That’s because the university doesn’t admit just anybody. And that is why students enrolled in the Q system—who would be able eventually to glide into the prestigious Q University—felt entitled. The sooner students had entered the system, the more profound their sense of elitism.

It is precisely because of this escalator system that parents with money try so hard to get their children into the school at the elementary level. I’ve heard from others that the intensity with which they approach these initial exams is near hysteria. Of course, I have no child of my own and have no connection to any of this, so I cannot profess to be an authority.

When I create my imaginary children, do I sometimes have them entering Q Elementary School? Is that your question? Absolutely not. Never. My children merely swim in an imaginary sea. The water is a perfect blue, just as those hypothetical illustrations based on Cambrian fossils. There on the sand of the ocean floor, amid rocky crags, everything engages in a survival of the fittest and all living creatures exist just to procreate. It’s a very simple world.

When I first started living with my grandfather, I would dream about what my life would be like as a student at the coveted Q High School for Young Women. My imagination ran rampant, one scene unfolding after another. It gave me a great deal of pleasure, as I have already said, to indulge in these fantasies. I would join clubs, make friends, and live an ordinary life like any other ordinary person. But reality tore these dreams to shreds. Basically, cliques were my undoing. You couldn’t make friends with just anyone, you see. Even the club activities were ranked and ordered into hierarchies of their own, very clearly delineated between the coveted and the peripheral. The basis for all the ranking was of course this sense of elitism.

Reflecting back on those days from my present age and perspective, it’s obvious to me now. Sometimes at night while I’m lying awake in bed, I’ll be reminded of Kazue for some reason and I’ll suddenly be struck with a eureka-like insight, while remembering the things she once did. It may seem a bit of a distraction, but I feel I should tell you more about my experiences in high school.

Let’s start with the matriculation ceremonies. I can still remember the mute amazement I felt at seeing all the new students standing petrified in the lecture hall where the ceremony was to be held. The high school freshmen were divided into two distinct groups: those who were continuing on from within the Q school system and those who had entered that year. At a glance it was easy to discern which group was which. The length of our school uniform skirts set us apart.

Those of us who were entering for the first time—each and every one of us—having successfully passed the entrance exams, had skirts that fell just to the center of our knees, in exact accordance with official school regulations. However, the half who had been in the system since elementary or middle school had skirts that rode up high on their thighs. Now, I’m not talking about the kind of skirts that the girls wear today, skirts that are so skimpy they’re hardly there at all. No, these skirts were just the right length to provide a perfect balance with the girls’ high-quality navy-blue knee socks. Their legs were long and slender, their hair the color of chestnuts. Delicate gold pierced earrings glistened in their ears. Their hair accessories, and their bags and scarves, were very tasteful, and they all had expensive brand-name items that I’d never before actually seen up close. Their elegant sophistication overwhelmed the newly arrived students.

The difference was not something that would softly fade away with the passage of time. There is no other way to explain it but to say that we new girls lacked what the others girls possessed seemingly by birth: beauty and affluence. We new girls were betrayed by our long skirts and our cropped, lusterless, jet-black hair. Many of us wore thick, unflattering glasses. In a word, the incoming students were uncool.

No matter how a girl might excel in her studies or sports, there was nothing she could do to redeem herself once she was labeled uncool. For a student like myself, the question of being cool or uncool was irrelevant from the beginning. But there were others for whom the term provoked considerable anxiety. I’d say over half the students who entered the program as high school students found themselves teetering dangerously close to the border of being uncool. And so each and every one of them worked as hard as she could to avoid the label and tried to blend in with the continuing students.

The matriculation ceremony began. We outsiders paid serious attention to all that was said. But in comparison, the students who had come up from the elementary levels only pretended to listen. They chewed gum, whispered among themselves, and acted as though they weren’t even remotely concerned with what was going on. Far from being serious, they behaved like frisky kittens, impossibly precious. And they never once so much as glanced in our direction.

In contrast, the newcomers, watching the way the insiders behaved, felt all the more anxious. They began to think of the difficult life that stretched ahead of them. Faces froze and expressions grew darker and darker. Confused, they began to suspect that the rules they had followed up to the present were no longer valid. They would have to learn a whole new set.

Perhaps you believe I am exaggerating. If so, then you are mistaken. For a girl, appearance can be a powerful form of oppression. No matter how intelligent a girl may be, no matter her many talents, these attributes are not easily discerned. Brains and talent will never stand up against a girl who is clearly physically attractive.

I knew I was by far more intelligent than Yuriko, and it irked me no end that I could never impress anyone with my brains. Yuriko, who had nothing going for her but her hauntingly beautiful face, nevertheless made a terrific impression on everyone who came in contact with her. Thanks to Yuriko, I too had been blessed with a certain talent. My talent was the uncompromising ability to feel spite. And whereas my talent far exceeded those of others, it was a talent that impressed no one but myself. I fawned over my talent. I polished it diligently every day. And because I lived with my grandfather and had the opportunity to help him on occasion with his handyman jobs, I was decidedly unlike all the other students who commuted to high school from perfectly normal families. Precisely for this reason, I was able to enjoy myself as a spectator on the sidelines, even amid the cruelty of my high school classmates.