Happy Anniversary, Sachie
1951: A confession of murder in Kakaako, maybe
Whoever said time heals all wounds had not lived as long as Hideo Takashima nor suffered as much. His elusive picture bride had entered his life back in 1920, a rare sixteen-year-old prize from Yamaguchi for a thirty-year-old fisherman whose last glimpse of the ken was when his new wife was a snot-nosed child. He had been too busy and too poor to marry before then, only taking the plunge into arranged matrimony when he had scraped up enough to buy his own sampan and a modest house on Ilaniwai Street. The place wasn’t much more than a shack with a crude outdoor furo, but it was all his and he didn’t have to share his bath water with the rest of an entire camp. When she came down the gangway at Pier 14 from the big steamer from Yokohama, the queen of his Kakaako castle had arrived. Sachie. Pale and pretty and delicate like an errant pikake petal drifting slowly earthward on a lazy breeze.
Hideo Takashima had come to turn himself in for her murder.
It’s 1951 and he said he killed her back in ’21. Thirty years ago. He showed up in the morning at the receiving desk with his shabby lauhala hat in his hands, eyes milky with tears of regret and cataracts. The desk sergeant called a couple of flatfoots to escort him to a small room we used for “soft” interrogations and interviews, one with a sunny view of Merchant Street through the venetian blinds and a koa-bladed ceiling fan. It was a friendly little room where we talked to grieving new widows and high-priced haole lawyers, not one of the scarred interior torture chambers where we beat confessions out of hopheads and rapists and hired guns. The flatfoots seated him like he was some kind of honored guest and even went to fetch him a cup of bad coffee.
Then they called me: Detective Sergeant Francis Hideyuki Yoshikawa. Frankie to my friends, The Sheik to my fellow cops. The only homicide dick that spoke Japanese. Lucky me. The rest of the division was finishing reports and eating malasadas. I got to talk to Hideo Takashima, self-confessed perpetrator of a thirty-year-old homicide.
I entered the little bright room and introduced myself in Japanese. I showed him my gold shield with my eyes down and I bowed at the waist and offered him a business card with two hands in my best onegaishimasu fashion. He gave me a sad half-smile and bowed reflexively and said: “Come, sit down.” Like he was the host. He said it in English, to boot.
I thought about the box near my desk being full of grease stains and loose sugar and no malasadas when I got back and how I really didn’t need to be missing out because the man spoke English. I also thought about how I was supposed to talk to a witness way outside of town and that this little talk would make me late for that little talk. I pulled a chair out and fished a pack of Lucky Strikes from my coat pocket. I offered him one and he pinched it out with a calloused thumb and forefinger and nodded thanks. I pulled my own out with my lips and lit us both up. I loosened my tie and shrugged off my jacket; I had a feeling we’d be there for a while. We puffed in silence for a few heartbeats before he said something.
“I killed her, you know,” he said. He looked out of the window at nothing.
“Killed who?” I asked.
“Sachie. My wife.”
“Okay. When?”
“Thirty years ago. 1921. Exactly thirty years today. That’s why I’m here. Anniversary.”
“Congratulations. That’s sweet and sentimental. How’d you kill her?”
“I choked her in her sleep. Then I took her out on the sampan and dumped her body fifteen, sixteen miles out.”
“Efficient,” I said. I blew more smoke in the air and stared at his bald, brown pate. “Now the big question: why?”
Hideo Takashima put his cigarette stub out in the black ashtray next to his coffee cup. I pushed the pack of Luckies across the table to him and he took another out. I lit him up and he told me why.
He spoke in a mild, clipped fashion and punctuated the end of each sentence with a sleepy little smile and a bird-like nod. In this way he told me of Sachie’s highly anticipated arrival from Japan, like she was something shiny and expensive with chrome fixtures out of a Sears and Roebuck catalogue he had ordered months before. The wedding was a small but heartwarming affair in a little teahouse in Kalihi with just a handful of well wishers and some sake she had brought in her steamer chest for the occasion, part of the modest dowry from her parents. He took her betrothal photograph out of his pocket, crisscrossed with little lines and worn around the edges from years of handling. She was an attractive girl with a small round, pale face and a delicately pointed chin. He rambled on a bit about the evening, especially dwelling on the kimono she wore, like a blazing sunset fading to a snow-white field. There was the long silver pin in her hair, with tiny silver blossoms at the end. There was wistfulness and a longing in his voice, though his eyes remained as bleak and lusterless as a civil servant’s career. He never touched her, not even on that wedding night of theirs, though he ached to do so. She was a prize to remain unwrapped and in mint condition, to be polished before being put on display on special occasions then gently repackaged. He was content with possessing her in this way.
Then somebody spoiled her.
Takashima woke one night, a year into their new marriage to animal grunts and squeals as large, obscene lumps writhed under her futon in the middle of his modest parlor where she slept. Sachie was with a man, an interloper who sullied the delicate prize awarded to him for years of hard labor at sea, a prize he dared not touch himself. Burning with shame and rage, he stole back into his room and waited until the intruder was gone. Then he smothered her under the futon until she stopped breathing and bundled her up and loaded her into the bed of the truck he had been borrowing from the neighboring camp to haul fencing lumber. He spirited the blanked-wrapped body to his sampan and cast off in the dead of night from Kewalo Basin. He sailed until the lights of Honolulu were like tiny candles in paper lanterns cast adrift on a sable stream. Then he tied a couple of ballast stones to the futon bundle and dropped it over the starboard side and watched it descend into the cold, black depths of hell. The last he saw of her was the moonlight catching the silver hairpin as it drifted down with the rest of Sachie.
I sat in the chair across from him and burned three cigarettes, as he waxed nostalgic about his fresh new shiny bride, her defilement and her disposal.
“Thirty years is a long time not to get caught,” I said. “Didn’t anybody miss her? Didn’t anybody ask any questions?”
“We kept to ourselves. Nobody knew. Nobody cared,” Takashima said. He smiled and nodded his bird-nod.
“Why come forward now—I mean other than the anniversary thing?”
“She haunted me. All this time. I see her sweep the floor, wash rice in the basin, sit with her hands in her lap on the zabuton in the parlor. She talks to me, too.”
“What does she say?”
“What she said to me that first day. She’ll care for me forever. Itsumademo.”
“Do you drink?” I asked. I thought to myself that I certainly did, and that I could use one right then. I could feel my day slipping away into an early grave covered with futility. There were fresher corpses out there made by harder, meaner people than Hideo Takashima that required my attention.
“Once in a while,” he said.
“But you see her every day?”
“Every day. And I’ll see her every day, always.”
“Always?”
“Itsumademo.” Another smile. Another nod.
My cigarette was almost out and I was determined not to ruin another in his presence. I thanked him for his time and told him that I intended to release him pending further investigation because I knew where to find him and did not consider him to be a flight risk. I didn’t tell him that my decision was based on the fact that I thought he was certifiably nuts. He insisted that I take him into custody because he couldn’t bear another moment in his little house with the ghost of Sachie. After arguing with him for a bit about procedure and having nothing but his confession and the impracticality of holding him indefinitely while I verified his statement and getting only a “please” and smiles and birdy nods in response, I decided I’d humor him and advised him that we’d put him on a “24-hour hold”. This really meant we’d throw him into the drunk tank and release him the next morning. He told me he was grateful and I felt more than saw the smile and nod as I walked out of the room and summoned the flatfoots to “book” him.
I spent the rest of the day out in a plantation village past Wahiawa Town interviewing a witness to a knifing at a cockfight. It was a lot of “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” and not a lot of anything useful. At least he hung around despite the fact that I had been delayed by an hour. On the way back to town I grabbed an early dinner of something dead covered in brown gravy at a coffee shop and doused the fire it made in my stomach with the contents of my hip flask. I had a couple of Lucky Strikes for dessert and headed home to my sweatbox apartment in Kaimuki. I took a lukewarm shower, had a couple more drinks from a glass like a civilized man and went to bed.
When homicide dicks dream we dream the worst dreams of all. We don’t dream of the tortured souls of victims crying out for justice or their broken corpses suddenly animating like they do in the pulps. When we dream we dream of reports with carbons in the typewriter and overflowing ashtrays and green desk blotters ringed with coffee cup stains. It’s the same dream night in and night out. Paperwork. There is no escape. The unfinished report abides in waking and in slumber.
When I got to the station in the morning I was summoned into the office of my boss, Detective Lieutenant Gideon Hanohano. Gid wore his 300 pounds like they were only 250 but he still made his desk look like dollhouse furniture when he sat behind it. He was usually in the habit of limping out to see me if he wanted to talk, so an invitation to his office usually meant bad news. I entered with the all the gleeful anticipation of a convict crossing the threshold into the gas chamber. I was all caught up with reports past due, so I couldn’t imagine what it was he was going to tell me. That always makes it worse. Gid was reading the morning paper when I knocked on the doorjamb.
“They got free lei making classes at Kawaiahao Church on Saturday mornings. Not just the limp plumeria kind. The fancy ones the pau riders wear in the parades,” he said without looking up. Gid always read the paper cover-to-cover and every last column inch of it. It was his daily ritual in getting the “lay of the land.” He told me every good investigator should do it.
“That’s nice,” I said. “Maybe you can make a few strands to lay on my early grave.”
“Sit down, Sheik,” he told me. He folded the paper neatly, following the creases and artfully returning it to its original bundle form before laying it on his blotter. His hands were graceful for something the size of boxing gloves. I pulled out the uncomfortable steel framed chair with the forest green faux leather cushion and parked my ass on it.
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant? I’m guessing you didn’t have me come in so we can talk about lei making or a sale on SPAM or anything else in a little sidebar under the headline.”
“Hideo Takashima,” he said.
“Who?”
“Your interview yesterday.”
I thought back to the lunatic fisherman and his wild story about smothering his wife thirty years ago and how he had made me late in getting out to Wahiawa.
“Did they release him?” I asked. I remembered the plan to let him go in the morning.
“Yeah,” said Gid.
“So? Did he go back home to his haunted house in Kakaako?”
“No,” said Gid. “He’s at the morgue.”
“What?”
“He’s dead, Sheik.”
Shit. There went my morning. What the hell happened? Gid told me: just prior to talking to me, he swallowed enough sleeping pills to put down a bull elephant. He took them with the coffee the flatfoots brought him before I entered the room. He curled up on the cot in the drunk tank and dozed and nobody thought about it until they opened the cell to release him and he wouldn’t wake up.
The next thing I knew, I was headed for Kakaako for some answers. Takashima had been so adamant about not returning there. Why not? He could have just as easily taken his pills there. Maybe there was something uniquely Japanese about coming to turn himself in before doing himself in. My dad used to talk about shit like that: giri, honor, saving face. One last necessary thing to do before ending it all, before leaving the world behind after all the shit you did to turn it upside down to turn it right side up again. Or maybe he really was crazy. Maybe he really thought the ghost of his poor dead wife really did putter around the house and talk to him and it drove him nuts. Itsumademo. Well, so much for that. All it took was some pills put an end to forever.
Ilaniwai Street was crowded and hot and full of stray animals and children darting in and out of ramshackle camp buildings. Hung laundry moved lethargically in the faint breeze and delivery trucks kicked up yellow-brown clouds of dust that lingered over the street in a thin miasma giving everything the appearance of a sepia daguerreotype. Finding a place to park was a near impossibility, so though I hate to be the kind of jerk cop who uses his badge for accommodation, I pulled into the corrugated tin garage of a tofu maker and told him it was official business and I’d be out as soon as I possibly could. He bowed and gave me a smile that was a thin veneer over his surrender and disgust. I crossed the dirty street and narrowly avoided being flattened by an old Packard and a manapua cart.
Takashima’s house was almost ridiculously tiny for even one person; imagining two people coexisting in the glorified shipping crate without sitting in each other’s lap was nearly impossible. Still, it was whitewashed and only marginally grubby and the little lawn was well manicured with concrete paving stones in a walkway from the pine gate leading up to a lanai the size of a postage stamp. Toward the back, behind a couple of hibiscus bushes were a toilet shed and a furo house of tin.
I undid the rusty hook on the gate and entered the little yard. Apparently Hideo Takashima had been something of a gardener as well as a fisherman. There were several flowering shrubs of all kinds and red torch ginger up against the pine fence that ran around the perimeter of the tiny lot as well as cucumber and squash vines, eggplant, kumquat and taller mulberry which served to shield the house somewhat from view from the street. The lot’s neighbors were a Japanese camp tenement and a small electrical supply warehouse. Across the street were the tofu maker and more tenements. The little garden was quiet for the neighborhood it was in, probably owing to the tall mulberry. Takashima had created his own private little world in the middle of bustling Kakaako.
I took the two little steps up to the lanai, feeling the boards creak under my weight as I stepped toward the front door. I looked in through the screen as my hand moved to try the knob when what I saw within the little parlor made me freeze with a thrill of terror. There, in the middle of the parlor on a dark zabuton before a small, low table was a woman in a kimono. The kimono was a deep tangerine at the neck and shoulders, slowly melting into a pale peach to pink and finally to white. It was adorned with cranes in flight and snow covered black pine with fantastically twisted trunks. She suddenly became aware of my presence at the screen door and raised her head to look at me. It was the same pale, round face with the little pointed chin from the old black-and-white photograph. I staggered, missing the little step with my heel and pitched backward. My head struck what was probably one of the concrete paving stones and I plunged into a deep blackness mixed in with cool green and hot red at its periphery. I dove a long way down into the dark until I became aware of a faint but persistent buzzing and something cool against the skin of my face.
This is an excerpt from my short story “Itsumademo” which appeared in Bamboo Ridge, Journal of Hawai‘i Literature and Arts, Issue 113
love this, Scott. thank you for writing and sharing.