The Investigation Read Online Free Page A

accompany the singer. It sets the tone of the whole piece. I
would say it’s a duet of a pianist and a singer.’
    ‘It makes me wonder which singer would be able to hold his own.’
    ‘Professor Marui Yasujiro. He’s the foremost tenor in Japan. He teaches at Tokyo Imperial University Music School and has made several records. He’s renowned worldwide,
especially for performing Schubert. To really express the loneliness and gloom of this piece, he sang it as a baritone. His performances are some of the best interpretations of Schubert’s
work.’
    I was sufficiently awed, and it must have shown on my face.
    ‘Professor Marui is planning to give a concert, wishing for peace in Asia, here next February,’ the nurse told me. ‘He decided not to use his usual accompanist for this
concert; he wants someone working here. He thought that was more fitting with the themes of hope and peace. That’s why I’ve been practising so hard.’ She smiled, revealing her
even teeth, which resembled the piano’s white keys. ‘I’m Iwanami Midori,’ she said. Her words rippled like water and pooled in my heart.
    ‘Watanabe – Yuichi . . .’ I stammered, disgusted with myself that I couldn’t utter my own name without stuttering.
    She nodded before walking across the wooden floor.
    ‘Iwanami Midori . . .’ I murmured. Her name sounded like a melody.
    It was snowing outside. The snow fell through the darkness, crackling like thin ice. The night air was heavy with ice and cold and heartlessness and conspiracies and secrets
and other unknowable things. Our barracks formed a makeshift structure on the west side of the central facilities. By the time I returned, the lights were out and the other conscripted guards were
deep in slumber. The coal stove glowed in the middle. I stumbled into my sleeping bag, which smelled of other people. It had been a long day. Sugiyama’s death, searching for clues but
learning nothing, the mysterious poem. I wasn’t Sherlock Holmes or a Special Higher Police detective. I didn’t have the skills to solve a gruesome murder, let alone the means to catch
the perpetrator.
    The wind swept the snow off the galvanized iron roof above my head. The amber light, the warm air, the elegant piano, the girl in white . . . I folded my hands on my chest and felt the piece of
paper that I’d retrieved from Sugiyama’s uniform:
    As a stranger I arrived,
    As a stranger again I leave.
    May was kind to me
    With many bunches of flowers.
    The girl spoke of love,
    Her mother even of marriage,
    Now the world is bleak,
    The path covered by snow.
    That violent guard wrote such poetry? It didn’t match up. Was it a clue, or a sign left by the murderer? Why would a criminal leave a mysterious poem in the victim’s pocket? I was as
puzzled as ever, but grew convinced that the poem contained the key. The song I’d heard Midori playing earlier circled in my head – the song of one man’s despair, of painful love.
Melody embraced poetry, and poetry was laid over melody. The harmony of sounds layered over the verse; the tinkling of the piano sparkled in the golden light of the furnace. Three faces hovered in
my mind – Sugiyama, Hasegawa, Midori. Poetry, melody, piano.
    Before the war tore my life into pieces, my days began in a single-storey house topped with an attic in the outskirts of Kyoto, and proceeded to a small used bookshop run by my
mother. I spent hours among the old wooden bookshelves piled with dust, surrounded by paper. Walls of books protected us from the ominous news of the war. Nothing could filter in through the
hundreds of thousands of pages; not the brawling of merchants or the clomping of marching soldiers or the cold of the winter night. The books protected me from the era’s rebellions and from
my anxiety about the future. I snuggled deeper in my prison-issue sleeping bag, recalling forgotten names, their faces as vivid as a new photograph – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, André Gide,
Lord