Richard Jerram

Hibiya Hitman

Novel extract

Mitaka, far from home
1 April 2019

A blur of motion. The thud of a body. Squeals from the braking train drowned out the screams of passengers waiting for the 7:46 semi-express to Shinjuku. The front carriage came to a stop half-way along the platform. Too late for the blue-suited man who’d gone under the wheels.

Reflexively, I reached for my camera.

A couple of twenty-something women, fodder for the offices of Tokyo, puked their breakfasts onto the dimpled yellow line that was the boundary between safety and danger. Some passengers rushed to the side of the platform and looked over the edge, perhaps hoping to help, perhaps just out of curiosity. To a man, they turned away. Hands over mouths. Ashen faces. Staring eyes. A couple of those vomited too.

Inside the carriage, faces peered out. For the experienced commuters, a sudden stop on arriving at a station on the suicide-prone Chuo line would mean only one thing. Those in the first coach probably heard the impact.

Over the tannoy the guard on the platform told people to stand well back. He was a bit late.

Trains are heavy things. Human bodies are weak and fragile. The semi-express had been slowing down as it reached the station so the impact might not have been enough to kill the jumper, but I knew he was dead.

Monday morning. Classic timing for a suicide. Some sad salaryman couldn’t face another week of meaningless corporate drudgery right after a weekend of mindless domestic boredom. His quality of life wouldn’t change much.

I couldn’t see the body to judge how much damage it had suffered. It was under the train, mercifully out of sight. But squinting into the gap between carriages and platform, I could see two legs, black shoe still attached to one of them. They were a couple of metres apart, which is always going to be a problem. And not attached to a torso, which is an even bigger problem. Anyway, that’s how I knew about the blue suit, because the fabric of the trousers was surprisingly undamaged. Though blue wouldn’t have been a bad guess anyway, as it applied to most of the men who’d been waiting for the 7:46.

I was no stranger to violent death. Hell, I’d gone as far as making a modest contribution myself a few years earlier. But it was still a fearsome sight so early in the day, even with the brutal image offset by showers of cherry blossom, blown over the tracks by a blustery spring wind.

I stepped back, away from the edge. What a nuisance. That thought must have been said under my breath as the woman standing next to me turned and frowned.

I was going to be late. Again. No way my boss would believe my excuse, as everyone knew I lived in Shinagawa, by the waterfront near the middle of Tokyo. No reason to be affected by a jumper on the Chuo line, way out in the suburbs.

Serves me right for picking up a woman who lived over in Mitaka. What had I been thinking? I knew what I’d been thinking. That I was too broke to date someone more glamorous inside the Yamanote line that looped around the centre of town. Someone who’d expect to be taken out to a fancy bar or restaurant in Ginza. That I still craved the warmth and comfort of another human being. That a thirty-something divorcee was going to be lonely and grateful for the attention. Not wrong on any of those points. She’d told me I was the first mixed-race guy she’d ever slept with and seemed to get a buzz from that – kept calling me an English gentleman. Made her more willing. She’d even cooked. Sukiyaki, which was great and we’d managed to eat most of it before moving on to the main reason I was visiting.

I’d go back for the food, but not the rest.

I pulled my Nikon out of my shoulder bag. Just the workhorse 24-70mm lens I was never without. More than enough for this distance. I couldn’t imagine there was going to be any demand for extreme close-ups. The magazine I worked for was at the dirtier end of the gutter press, but even Hikari would draw the line at publishing the stumps of severed legs. I needed something more subtle.

A thought occurred to me and I went back to the edge of the platform and peered over the side. The man’s other shoe, the one unattached to an unattached leg, was lying on its side a few paces away.

‘Passengers please stand back from the edge of the platform. Stand well back,’ barked the tannoy.

I snapped some pictures of the shoe, sitting in the gap between the train wheels and the wall below the platform. The zoom showed the sole was almost worn through at the ball of the foot, which was great. An indication of financial pressures that might have pushed him over the edge. It’s all about context when it comes to a commonplace scene like this.

A few steps along the platform took me closer to the shoe and I held the camera out for more of a bird’s eye view. A different perspective on the same horror.

‘Passengers please stand back from the edge of the platform. Stand well back.’

Now I was into the flow. Thinking about how the pictures might play on paper. I took some of the legs, even though my magazine wouldn’t be able to use them. Squatting down, playing with the angles, some shots put them closer together than they really were. Others emphasised the distance. I felt protected behind the viewfinder, even though the gore of one of the stumps was in plain view. Not a comfortable sight. I’d seen worse. This was business and I’d trained myself to suppress any automatic emotional response.

The week before I’d beaten the competition to an accident where a truck had jumped the lights and side-swiped a minivan. Obliterated the smaller vehicle, as well as the elderly driver and his passenger. Those photos were great, because they gave the impression that it could have happened to anyone.

A suicide on the Chuo line was less relatable.

‘Sir, sir. Please move away from the edge.’ It was a station guard, flushed from the stress or excitement of it all. ‘We have to evacuate the platform.’

He held out an arm to guide me away from the scene but I brushed past him, towards where the train had hit the man. Pictures of pools of vomit would be ideal for showing the shock of the bystanders. Sadly, they’d been trampled by people rushing away from the scene.

I’d skipped breakfast in my rush to escape from a different scene, the one of my latest conquest, so I had an empty stomach. Nothing available for me to sick up as a substitute for the trodden vomit. The station guard had looked a bit queasy and I wondered if he might oblige. Perhaps if I could persuade him to take another look at the legs. But he’d already moved away as he shepherded people towards the stairs. The doors of the first carriage had been opened and the train’s passengers were quietly filing out to join those who’d been waiting on the platform.

I made my way to the front of the train and took some pictures of the windscreen. It had cracked where the jumper had hit it and there was something unpleasant smeared just to the left of centre. I realised the driver was still in the cabin, a ghostly figure in the shadows. That could’ve been part of the protocol or maybe he was just too stunned to move.

Poor guy. Bad way to start your week.

I zoomed in and took a few of him.

That would have to do. Not as if a suicide on the Chuo line was unusual enough to be newsworthy, even backed up with good quality pictures. At least the shots would give me an alibi for being late for work. I joined the end of the queue. No one else had been taking pictures, even though the cameras on phones weren’t bad these days. Everyone seemed to have their device out, maybe to recount their early morning adventure or to tell someone they were going to be late.

I thought about phoning Yuka from the night before. Yuki? No point.

Luckily, Mitaka was a decent-sized station so there wasn’t only one line in each direction. We could all have just turned and boarded a train from the tracks on the other side of the original platform; the one the local trains would use when waiting to be overtaken by the express. Still, I understood why the staff needed to have us all out of the way. They didn’t want an audience for when the ambulance crew arrived and sent a volunteer to scrabble under the train to pull out whatever remained of the man in the blue suit.

Sheep-like, we headed up to the footbridge and trudged across towards platform two. By now it was so packed that I couldn’t even make it as far as the stairs down. Understandably, they were managing the flow of commuters so they didn’t end up with someone else under the wheels of the 8:06. Usually, there would be a train every two or three minutes at this time of day and, despite that, the Chuo line was famously packed. The jumper had disrupted the schedule but people were still flooding into the station and, presumably, all of those ahead of Mitaka further up the line. It wasn’t even peak rush hour yet.

I pushed against the flow of bodies until I found myself back in the station forecourt I’d walked through thirty minutes earlier. Buses were disgorging reinforcements, fated to be kept waiting outside the ticket gates until some of the swell inside had been carried off down the line.

Might as well wait in comfort, rather than squashed up with all the commuters on the platform, then enduring an even worse crush for the ride into town.

Probably a couple of hours before things calmed down.

McDonald’s on one side of the road. Doutor on the other.

I needed coffee, but I realised I was hungry as well, so I dipped into the Golden Arches for a morning special. Other people must’ve had the same idea as there was quite a line, but I took my tray and managed to squeeze onto a stool by the counter that ran along the window.

The woman on my left stared blankly out at the street, cup of tea cooling in front of her, the tab of the tea bag flicking in the breeze from the air-conditioning. I couldn’t be sure, but she looked like one of the office workers who’d lost her breakfast on the platform. To my right, a youngish man in an expensive-looking suit and a neatly layered haircut was tapping away at his mini laptop, tray with crumpled wrappers pushed to the side.

I took a few bites and reassessed my level of hunger.

Tried a sip of coffee but it was still way too hot.

Pulling out my camera, I used the electronic viewfinder to page through the pictures I’d just taken. A couple of shots of the shoe were really good. We might be able to use them. The lighting wasn’t great but that made the scene look sinister rather than accidental. I should’ve used my flash to see if it brought out different textures. Too late now.

‘You there too, huh?’

The man to my side had turned away from his screen and was looking at the pictures on the back of my camera.

‘Yeah, stroke of luck. I’m a photojournalist.’

I felt the woman beside me shift and, out the corner of my eye, saw her reach for her tea.

‘Pain in the arse, these jumpers.’

‘Thought it was better since the economy improved,’ I said.

‘Maybe it is. I wasn’t working back then.’

‘Selfish bastard. Going to cost me a couple of hours,’ I said.

‘Tell me about it. It’s why some drivers go so slow even before they reach the station. Happened to them before.’

‘Is that really going to help?’ I asked.

‘Course not. Might discourage some, but you saw that guy. Maybe the impact killed him, maybe it didn’t. But if you go under the wheels of something that big and heavy, and you’re separated from your legs into the bargain, there’s not much hope.’

The woman next to me stood up and I turned to catch her glare.

She snapped the white, plastic cover onto the top of her drink, hooked her handbag over her shoulder and walked away. I could see her head swivelling from side to side as she looked for another seat, but the place was even busier now.

From my stool by the window, I watched as she hit the pavement and headed back towards the station.

‘Not happy,’ I observed.

‘Hey, it’s sad. I get that. But, please. Slit your wrists in your bathtub. Hang yourself in Aokigahara Forest with the rest of them. Don’t waste my time.’

I liked this guy.

‘Stupid too,’ I said. ‘The fine’s going to eat up a chunk of the insurance.’

A few years earlier the railway companies had started to charge families for the cost of disruption in an attempt to discourage suicides.

‘Maybe he hated his family.’

‘Certainly hated himself,’ I said.

‘I blame the Bank of Japan, you know.’

I turned to face him, not sure I’d heard him right.

‘Stands to reason,’ he said. ‘They screwed things up with years and years of their stupid policies. Destroyed house values, ruined the economy, cratered job prospects. Suicides went through the roof. Should be in prison.’

I shrugged. It was an interesting view, but I didn’t know how to reply.

‘Changed when the new governor took over and flooded the system with money. Proper attack on deflation; shock treatment for people’s mindset and things turned around. Should’ve done it years ago.’

‘Right, right,’ I said, wondering why I’d not paid enough attention to this.

Just as I was reaching for my coffee, the man turned towards me and grabbed my right forearm. ‘Say, do you really think he jumped? I heard there’s some shadowy network, goes around pushing people under trains. Makes it look like an accident. Contract killers.’

Here we go.

You start talking to some reasonable-looking guy in a bar or coffee shop and before you know it, it turns out he’s a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. The Crown Prince was Yukio Mishima’s love child. Aliens had abducted those schoolchildren, not North Korea. They let Fukushima meltdown on purpose after the tsunami to discredit the government and get the LDP back into power.

‘Nah, I saw him make the jump. Wasn’t pushed,’ I said.

‘Sure about that?’

He fixed his clear brown eyes on me and it felt like I was in the witness box, facing a prosecutor.

Was I sure? How sure can you be, reading emails on your phone on a crowded platform, still sluggish after too little sleep, catching a blurred movement out of the corner of your eye.

‘Fairly sure, yes.’

‘Fairly sure,’ he repeated. ‘Not “sure” sure then. But okay, let’s say this one did. Maybe. You’d be surprised, though.’ The man nodded vigorously.

‘Why the hell do they do it?’ I said, shaking my head. ‘You wonder what goes through their minds.’ 

‘The windscreen.’

An old joke, but delivered with such perfect timing and so wholly inappropriate, I couldn’t choke back a laugh. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. He joined in and I could feel the eyes of the room on us.

‘I’m Kato,’ I said, offering my hand.

‘Tanaka,’ he replied, shaking.

I gave a half bow. ‘What do you do, Tanaka-san?’ I asked, reaching into my bag for a business card.

‘Oh, I’m a consultant,’ he said casually, magicking a meishi of his own from inside his jacket.

He held it out to me, manicured forefinger and thumb on each side. Hideki Tanaka, it said. Consultant. No logo or company name. No phone number. Nicely embossed on expensive paper. Just an email address underneath – hideki.tanaka@proton.me. Hmm. Hideki Tanaka – that was about as generic it could be, though he looked a bit young to be a Hideki. A slight smirk and raised right eyebrow suggested I might need to be careful. Especially as a recent feature in Hikari had already told me that Proton was one of the biggest domains on the dark web for encrypted email.

He studied my business card for more time than seemed necessary. ‘Press photographer for Hikari? You must see some fascinating things,’ he said.

‘Better than a Monday morning jumper on the Chuo line.’

He looked back at my meishi, though he’d already taken the time to read everything it contained. ‘Go to all sorts of places. No questions asked?’ Tanaka spoke slowly and precisely.

‘Not quite that easy, but we get around.’

I thought about seeing if he remembered the Makoto Murderer episode from a few years before, but I could never predict how people would react when I told them I’d been the one taking the pictures. More than that, in fact, though the gory details never became public.

‘Very interesting, Kato-san. Very interesting.’ He closed his laptop and slid it into his bag in one smooth movement. ‘Perhaps we’ll see each other again one day.’Then he melted away, across the room and out the door. Apart from his piercing brown eyes I had no recollection of what Hideki Tanaka looked like. I’d be unable to pick him out in an identity parade and if I hadn’t still been holding his meishiI’d have struggled to believe we’d ever met.