Disciple of the Wind (39 page)

“Come on, let’s go inside,” she said. “Let me fix you some tea.”

Once they were in the house, Shoji’s domestic instincts kicked back in. Under her roof, she would be the one to make the tea. She was most insistent, so Mariko wandered into the sitting room.

She loved this room. This was where she’d had her most important conversations with Yamada-sensei. It was where he became a grandfather to her. It even still smelled like him—or rather, it was redolent of old books, a smell she would forever associate with him. Bookshelves lined the walls, and technically every last volume belonged to Mariko. Yamada-sensei had left everything to Shoji in his will, but since none of the books were in Braille, she’d given them all to her old friend’s protégé. Shoji insisted on keeping them here since she knew Mariko’s apartment was far too small to house them all. “I’ll be your library,” she’d said at the time. “That way you’ll be sure to come visit.”

Mariko didn’t visit as often as she’d like. Shoji-san had been a friend to Mariko when no one else was there. They’d met soon after Yamada-sensei’s murder, right in the morgue. She had invited Mariko to tea and Mariko said yes. That had evolved into an invitation to come home with her and catch a nap and a shower. Again Mariko had agreed. It ran totally against Mariko’s nature to leave herself
vulnerable in a strange place, but she’d done it anyway. Somehow it felt as if she and Shoji had known each other for decades.

In fact, there was a sense in which they had—a very weird sense, but then everything was weird when it came to Shoji’s senses. She was a
goze
, a seer, possibly the only one alive. There was a time when Mariko put as much stock in
goze
as she had in space aliens, but as a detective, she had to accept whatever the evidence told her. If little green men beamed down and bowed to her, Mariko would have bowed back, and if a little blind lady foretold her future, then Mariko would listen.

“Shoji-san,” Mariko said, drifting toward the kitchen, “does the name Furukawa Ujio mean anything to you?”

“Hm. That’s not a name I expected to hear from you.”

“So you know him?”

“I used to. He was . . . well, you could say he was my son’s doctor.”

Mariko’s brain did a stutter step. “I didn’t know you had a son.”

“No? I guess not. We don’t talk much about family, do we, dear?”

“No . . .” Mariko trailed off; most of her attention was dedicated to catching up with her own thoughts. Shoji knew Furukawa. Furukawa was—how did she put it? Her son’s doctor. Not
our family doctor
, which would have suggested a general practitioner. A specialist, then. Was he a pediatrician? Or did her son have special medical needs? How rude was it to ask? More to the point, Mariko asked herself, how rude am I willing to be?

Shoji came into the sitting room carrying a platter with a steaming
tetsubin
pot, two matching teacups, two tea bags, and a little plate of sandwich cookies. She walked slowly but surely, without the aid of her cane. Carrying out domestic duties seemed to have bolstered her spirits; she was totally unlike Mariko in that respect. “There,” she said, “let’s sit. Now why should you have run across the name Furukawa Ujio? Is he in trouble?”

That sounded alarm bells in Mariko’s mind. “Why do you ask?”

“Because you’re a police detective. Don’t sound so suspicious. If
you must know, I’ve been quite glad not to hear from Furukawa-san. It’s about time he ran afoul of the law.”

San
, not
sensei
, Mariko thought. Doctors always received the honorific
sensei
, even the ones who deserved to go to prison. Well-mannered women of Shoji’s generation would never make that slip. The only reason she didn’t refer to Yamada as
sensei
was that she thought of him as her old friend Keiji, not the PhD from Todai. So what did that mean about Furukawa? A doctor without a doctorate?

“He’s not dead, is he?”

“What?” Mariko said.

“Furukawa-san. He wasn’t killed in one of those automobile accidents, was he? Or in that horrible business at St. Luke’s?”

“No.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been grateful to be blind, Mariko-san. I was glad not to see the firebombing in ’forty-five, and I’m glad not to see these awful, awful pictures coming out of Terminal 2. It’s bad enough just to hear about it—”

Just like that she was crying again. Mariko hurried out of the room, mostly to give Shoji a moment of privacy but also to fetch a tissue box. When she returned, her old friend had composed herself. “I’m so sorry, dear.”

Mariko didn’t know what to say. Handling emotional stuff came about as naturally to her as handling snakes.

Shoji folded the tissue into a neat triangle and raised her sunglasses just enough to dab at her eyes. “I have a guess,” she said. “Furukawa-san is not dead, and neither is he in trouble with the law. Does that mean he made contact with you?”

“Wow, Shoji-san, you must be psychic.”

“Don’t mock what you don’t understand, dear.”

“Sorry.” Mariko gave a little bow, as was customary with an apology. As soon as she did it, it occurred to her that with someone who couldn’t see, the bow was probably moot. “Um, yes, he called me. We talked.”

“About my son?”

“No. I told you, I didn’t know you had a son.”

“About Keiji-san, then.”

“Yes.”

“And he told you some things you didn’t want to hear.”

“Yes. How do you—?”

“My son is a schizophrenic,” Shoji said.

Mariko didn’t see how that was relevant, but she didn’t want to interrupt. Shoji took a deep breath before she went on—to steel her nerves, by the sound of it, so now she even had Mariko bracing herself for what was to come. “It is a terrifying disease. Terrifyingly powerful. Visions, voices, delusions, these were my son’s bullies in childhood. They toyed with him, Mariko-san. Without medication, he had no chance for a normal life.”

Shoji’s every word dripped with humiliation. Mariko had a good guess as to why. Most people in her culture saw mental illness as a cause for shame. Mariko was more sympathetic—Saori’s meth addiction had opened her eyes to a few things—but people of Shoji’s generation would be much less so. “That must have been awful,” Mariko said. “This was, what, the sixties?”

“Yes.”

“So when it came to treating something like schizophrenia, pretty much everyone had their heads up their asses.”

Shoji tsked her. “Language, Mariko-san.”

“Sorry.”

“The truth was worse than you imagine. It’s easy for young people to forget, but as a country we were a very long time convalescing from the war. We rebuilt ourselves on manufacturing—Honda, Toyota, Sony, all the worldwide names. But who did we have developing new medicines? We were decades behind. I would hear outlandish stories in the news—first a heart transplant, then the artificial heart, and none of it happening
here
. Even the Germans made medical advances we would not see for years. And the British? The Americans? They were like sorcerers. Every day I wished one of them would whisk me
away. I know I’m not supposed to think that way, but what else was I to do? I had a very sick boy; I needed help.”

Mariko nodded sympathetically, and realized belatedly that Shoji couldn’t see her. “Of course you did,” she said. “But Shoji-san, there’s no need to be ashamed. Any mother wants what’s best for her child.”

“Yes, but I . . . I made compromises. I talked to Furukawa Ujio. He told me of an organization that . . . well, there was no place they could not reach.”

A cold wave washed over Mariko’s skin, raising goose bumps up and down her arms. “You? No. You couldn’t have.”

“My son was sick. He needed better medicine. Furukawa’s was state-of-the-art.”

Mariko’s heart sank. “But he didn’t give it away for free, did he? And he didn’t help just any schizophrenic kid, either. How did he know you were a
goze
?”

Shoji sniffed and dabbed the tissue to her eye. “I don’t know. But what was I to do? The best antipsychotic drugs in the world, and all I had to do was tell him what I saw. I was going to see it anyway. All I had to do was tell him. . . .”

She broke down crying again. “I never knew,” she said. “I swear to you, I never knew what would happen.”

“Shoji-san, I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I had a vision. When Furukawa-san came into our lives, when I accepted his help, I saw the future. The day would come when I had to make a choice: save my child or save all the others. I had no idea what it meant. But any mother would choose her child, wouldn’t she?”

Mariko took her by her soft little hand. “I’m sorry, Shoji-san, I still don’t understand.”

“My child or the others. That was what I saw. But I thought it meant the medicine. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. Maybe Furukawa stole his drugs from a laboratory. Maybe one more experiment there would have helped more children. But you must understand, my son was hurting himself. It happens with schizophrenics. He climbed out a window once, trying to escape whatever
he was hallucinating. When he fell—can you imagine, Mariko-san? Seeing your son lying there unconscious, his leg broken in five places, and being
thankful
? We lived on the third floor. It could have been so much worse. . . .”

An ice-cold dread settled in Mariko’s stomach, malignant as a tumor. “Shoji-san, what’s your son’s name?”

Shoji gave her a sweet, sad smile. “Makoto. Makoto-kun. It means ‘truth.’”

Shoji Makoto. But the kanji for
sho
could also be read
ko
. Koji Makoto. Shoji’s son was Joko Daishi.

As soon as the thought struck her, Mariko knew it was true. The weight of it crushed the breath out of her. There was a saying in English, one that had always stuck with Mariko because it seemed so Japanese:
the child is the father of the man
. In Joko Daishi’s case, the child with a badly broken leg became the man with a rolling limp. The child suffering from schizophrenia became the delusional man with a god complex. The
goze
’s child became the man who claimed to foresee the future—a man who was utterly fearless because he believed he’d already seen the hour of his death.

Mariko was a little ashamed that she hadn’t seen the connection between Shoji and Joko Daishi before—though if she was honest with herself, there was no reason she should have caught it. Shoji and Koji were both common surnames. Since they shared the same kanji, on a police report they’d look identical. It was unusual for a son to change his surname, but perfectly ordinary among Japanese religions for a person to take a new name when taking on the cloth. Japan’s most famous monks and nuns were all known by their Buddhist names, not their given names. The
daishi
of Joko Daishi was clearly meant to evoke this tradition; it meant Great Teacher, just as in Kobo Daishi, one of the greatest figures in Japanese Buddhism. Perhaps Koji Makoto would have changed his name more dramatically, but his mother had already given him the perfect name for a religious leader: read literally, the kanji for Koji Makoto meant Short Path to the Truth.

Why change from Shoji to Koji? Maybe to save his mother from a
shameful association, once his name finally became public? Even if he saw himself as bringing enlightenment to the masses, he had to know everyone else would see him as a monster. In his warped mind, changing his name was probably an act of compassion.

Mariko remembered the one time she talked with him. It was hard to forget; she’d never encountered anyone who spoke of mass murder with such childlike delight.
My mother is the future and my father is the past.
Gibberish at the time, but now Mariko understood at least the first half: his mother, a
goze
, could see the future. So who was his father? Shoji made no mention of any husband. In fact, the conspicuous absence of a husband in her story suggested that she had raised her son alone. What a scandal that must have been, to be a single mother in the sixties. Compound that with being blind in an era when there was no social tolerance for disability, then add schizophrenia to the picture. Was it any wonder she turned to someone for help? Even if it came from the Wind?

Little wonder, too, that the Wind would be interested in a seer. They were an intelligence agency first and foremost; all the political scheming was founded on having more information than anyone else. And Shoji had the ear of the Imperial house. She was the Emperor’s personal seer. Not that heads of state used fortune-tellers and soothsayers anymore, but Furukawa would find surely some use for a woman who could get herself an invitation to tea at the Imperial palace.

Shoji was crying again, and now it made sense. Her son’s name was all over the news.
Goze
or not, Shoji had probably been telling herself what any mother would tell herself: it wasn’t him; it can’t be him; my son has his troubles, but he’d never do something like that. That was what you told yourself if your son murdered somebody. You didn’t automatically believe the worst of him; you gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Until he was the leading news story in the country. Denial had its limits. That was especially true in Shoji’s case, for she was burdened by the power of prophecy.
Your child or all the others.
That’s what she
saw in her vision. From the beginning, she’d said the meaning wasn’t clear. Now it was coming into focus.

“Shoji-san,” Mariko said, “you can’t blame yourself.”

“Oh yes, I can. I turned to criminals to find medicine for my son. What if I hadn’t? What if he’d spent his childhood in a psychiatric ward, with no help from me or Furukawa-san? This awful Divine Wind would never exist. A hundred and thirty-nine people, Mariko-san. He’s killed a hundred and thirty-nine so far. All of them had mothers. I chose my child over theirs—”

“No, Shoji-san.
He
did this. You did everything a mother is supposed to do: you took care of your sick child. But I hold adults responsible for their own actions. He’s not dangerous because he’s ill. He’s dangerous because he’s willing to murder innocent people to prove a point.”