By Atsushi Hachisu. Commentary to Ryouki Keiji MARUSAI (2007) by Kotaro Ohkoshi.
In 1938, the year before the outbreak of World War II, a mass murder occurred in a poor village in the mountains of Okayama Prefecture, one of the worst in the history of crime. It is commonly known as the Tsuyama Massacre. On the dawn of May 21st, a 22-year-old young man named Mutsuo Toi, decapitated his grandmother with a wood-chopping axe at his home, and then, armed with a shotgun and a Japanese sword, attacked nearby residents one after another. Thirty people were killed and three were seriously injured in the inferno. After the attack, Toi fled into the mountains and committed suicide by shooting himself near the summit.
A few years ago, I visited that site to collect materials for a magazine article. At that time, there was a document that I was dying to to see. It is a book entitled “The Tsuyama Incident Report (the killings and woundings of 33 people in the village of West Kamo, Tomata District, Okayama Prefecture)” published by the Criminal Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Justice. The cover is carefully stamped with “Top Secret”. It is an internal research document prepared by the police after the incident, and naturally it should contain detailed records of the incident that are not disclosed to the public. This kind of material is distributed only to a small number of people involved in the investigation and can’t be found in either the local library or the National Diet Library. One time, I found a copy of the book for sale on the Internet for 18,000 yen, but it turned out to be a trick to attract customers. The editor in charge tried to write to those who had the materials to ask for access to them, but in the end, our hopes were not fulfilled.
When I read this book by Kotaro Ohkoshi, I was struck by its contents, which were “barely fiction”, and at the same time, while having a visceral sensation in my guts, I had a strong feeling that this was a first-class criminal document. You could say that I had a hunch. The bizarre incidents created by Mr. Ohkoshi are splendidly constructed. The wriggling patterns of human relationships feel like the real thing. The perverts are terrible in their vividness. Mr. Ohkoshi freely uses his imagination to provide the greatest momentary pleasures, but at the cost of stripping away the filter of falsehood and exposing the essence of those unrestricted desires.
The scenes of sex and violence in this book are quite intense, but such is the genuine crime material. The aforementioned editor had a chance to see an internal police report for the Kiyoshi Okubo incident (1971), a serial rape and murder case. In the report, there were living photos of the victims and photos of their corpses side by side. This would be unthinkable in today’s public reporting.
However, “Ryouki Keiji MARUSAI” never descends into vulgarity. In the author’s crystal-clear worldview, insanity and grotesque are illuminated like a complex stained glass. It’s a mysterious talent to perfectly balance on the edge between reality and fiction. Just as crystals naturally form geometric patterns, morality quietly and steadily shapes order. The members of the Bizarre Crime Division play the roles of almost succumbing to the desire and barely pulling back just at the right moment. Or, they are like criminals who have transcended the criminal world and can no longer help but live as detectives.
But why do the leaks of top secret material happen anyway? When the Abe Sada case (1936), in which a geisha strangled her lover to death and cut off his penis and testicles, caused a stir in the world, Abe Sada’s testimony was leaked and published by an underground company. The truth of the matter is not clear, but it smells as if it was traded for money, taking advantage of the public’s curiosity. Or perhaps there are cases of force majeure, such as the owner of the materials dying and they being mixed in with the collection of books disposed of by the bereaved family.
And I still wonder at the fact that the “top-secret” crime material, “Ryouki Keiji MARUSAI”, was leaked from the brain of a manga artist named Kotaro Ohkoshi. Isn’t it miraculous for the bizarre fantasies lurking in the human subconscious to have manifested so neatly? This is itself a marvelous “incident”.
