Free The Devil's Disciple by Shiro Hamao Page A

received as he struggled with Ōtera, while possible, starts to seem rather farfetched.
    It would only be possible if Ōtera were left-handed. The notion that Seizō killed himself after he murdered Michiko seems equally unlikely unless Seizō were also left-handed.
    Seizō, however, appears not to have been left-handed. And neither does Ōtera.
    As a result, my theory that Ōtera was innocent is back on shaky ground.
    All of you have fertile imaginations and I have no doubt that another theory has occurred to you that would explain several of the facts in this case as I have described them thus far. I will not name it here but I imagine that as detective-novel writers you will surely have thought of it.
    If this last remaining possibility were true, however, why did Ōtera admit to the murders? Most problematic of all, moreover, were the words the dead couple uttered right before they died. Seizō clearly said ‘Ōtera’ and Michiko ‘Ichirō’ before they died. If this was indeed confirmed it was not hard to know what it meant. With only one possible exception, it must have been Michiko calling out the name of her lover as she died. But in any case, the biggest problem was the defendant’s confession. There is no more powerful evidence than a confession. And Ōtera Ichirō had made a complete confession.
    I went back and forth over it in my mind, thinking that, whatever happened with the murder charge against Michiko, he might end up being charged with manslaughter in Seizō’s death. As I continued in this confused state I was on tenterhooks waiting for the final decision of the preliminary trial.

V
    The decision for which I had waited so impatiently was finally handed down. As I said earlier, the case was to be moved on to a public trial. In my capacity as the barrister for the defendant Ōtera Ichirō I quickly ordered all of the case records. With what excitement I finally held the documents in my hands! I read through them ravenously from start to finish, as one would read letters from a lover. With eyes sharpened so as almost to penetrate the paper they were written on, I read through them all without missing even a single character.
    And yet what did I find there? Having read them all I felt utterly disappointed. I was disappointed to discover that the newspaper reports had been mostly free of inaccuracies. The defendant Ōtera Ichirō had, both to the prosecutor and in the pretrial hearing, admitted his guilt. He had pleaded guilty to the murder of both husband and wife.
    The few doubts on which I had pinned my hopes were summarily dispatched by the extreme rationality of the confession. At the same time, it was altogether too passionate a confession for it to be fraudulent. It was too earnest not to be true. And what purpose, after all, could possibly be served by the defendant lying to the prosecutor and the preliminary trial judge?
    I have a facsimile here of the record of that interview. Allow me to read it aloud and to show you the exact transcript of the questioning and his responses during the pretrial. (The original is lacking voiced consonant marks and punctuation, but I will try to read it as a normal text to make it easier to understand.)
    Q: Does this mean that the defendant resolved to kill Michiko because she had transferred her affections to another man?
    A: I decided to kill Michiko because, while she had been quite kind to me up until then, she had treated me coldly after her change of heart and had begun to love Tomoda instead.
    Q: Did the defendant know that Michiko was in love with Tomoda?
    A: Until that day I had no conclusive proof of it. That evening I became convinced of it based on the way they were speaking to each other.
    Q: When did the defendant decide to kill Michiko?
    A: It was late at night on that day. Until then I was suffering enormously on the inside but the thought of killing her had never crossed my mind.
    Q: Please