fortune-telling cards that his little sister had given him and dealt himself a hand. The cards told him that if he went to his family, he’d be safe. On a sweltering day at the height of the summer of 1946, he boarded a train for Tokyo.
His timing couldn’t have been worse. The winter’s push to find Watanabe had yielded no clues, and the police were again doubling their efforts. A newly discovered photograph of Watanabe had been copied and distributed, along with a report that described him as a man “known to have perversions” who might be found “wherever there are loose women.” Since Japanese citizens were required to register changes of address, police were ordered to pore over registries in search of men traveling alone. They were instructed to monitor transactions at ration boards and prowl post offices, train and bus stations, taxi stands, ferry landings, mines, black market outlets, dive hotels and lodging houses, and any businesses that might attract a man fluent in French. Probably inspired by the clue that Watanabe might have committed suicide, police moved to investigate all unnatural and unusual deaths since November 1945, especially those in which the deceased person was unidentified. As a homesick Watanabe journeyed out of hiding and into Tokyo, he was walking into the manhunt.
Shizuka Watanabe was sitting in Michiko’s house with two of her other children when the front door swung open and in walked Mutsuhiro. The room fell silent as the startled family members looked at Mutsuhiro and then at one another. Mutsuhiro, emotionally overwhelmed and dizzy from the midday heat, wavered, afraid he would faint. Michiko came in and saw her brother. The family broke into celebration.
For two hours, Mutsuhiro sat with his family, sipping drinks and listening to them tell of being arrested, questioned, followed, and searched. He said nothing of where he’d been, believing that his family would fare better if they didn’t know. As time passed, the family members grew anxious, afraid that the detectives would catch them. They’d been there just two days previously. At two o’clock, Shizuka warned Mutsuhiro that it was the time of day when the detectives usually came to search. Mutsuhiro reassured them that the playing cards had told him that all would be well.
There was shuffling outside. The detectives had arrived. The Watanabes sprang up. Someone tossed Mutsuhiro’s belongings into a closet. Someone else snatched up the cups and dumped them in the sink. Mutsuhiro raced into a tearoom and shut the door. Behind him, he heard footfalls as a group of detectives entered the room that he had just left. He heard them questioning his mother and sister, telling them that if they caught Mutsuhiro, he’d be treated well.
The detectives were just feet away, on the other side of the door. His heart racing, Mutsuhiro tried to decide whether to run or to conceal himself here. The room was tiny, scattered with pillows, but there was a closet. Ever so slowly, he inched open the closet’s sliding door and squeezed inside. He decided not to close the door, fearing that it would make noise. He stood there, a hand clasped over his mouth to smother the sound of his breathing.
The door opened. A detective looked in. “You have plenty of room,” he said to the family. There was a pause as he looked about. If the detective turned his eyes toward the closet, he’d see Mutsuhiro. “It is tidy,” the detective said. The door closed. The detectives left.
Mutsuhiro had wished to stay overnight, but the close call changed his mind. He told his mother that he’d try to see her again in two years. Then he left, walking back, he wrote, “into the lonesome world.”
——
Watanabe returned to the village. The farmer’s son, unable to make a go of his leather strap sales, opened a coffee shop in the village. Watanabe became his waiter.
The farmer approached Watanabe with a proposition. Arranged marriage was still common in Japan, and the farmer had found a match for him. Watanabe was tempted; he was lonely and unhappy, and liked the idea of marrying. But marriage while in his predicament seemed impossible. He said no.
The young woman eventually came to him. When the farmer’s son fell ill, she paid him a visit, and Watanabe, curious, went into the sickroom to see her. He raised the subject of the novel that the farmer’s son was reading, thinking that, he wrote, “if she liked books, she must understand the mind and hardship of human life.” In his notes about the meeting, he didn’t say if she possessed that understanding, but he did seem to like her and thought she would be “a good house-keeper.” Part of him seemed to want to fall for her, and he believed that love “could save my daily life.”
The woman was taken with the attractive waiter, and began lingering in the coffee shop to be near him. He kept his identity secret from her. She began telling her parents about him in hopes of winning their blessing for a wedding. After brooding on her, Watanabe decided that he had to end the relationship. All he told her was that he had “a burden which would make her unhappy.”
With that, he broke with the tenuous existence that he had created in the village. He quit his job and left. He wandered onto a stretch of the Nagano grassland along the Chikuma River and took a job as a cowherd. His inability to control the willful animals exasperated him. He was despondent. At sunset, he lifted his eyes to the majestic Asama volcano, watching a ribbon of smoke unspooling from her upper reaches, the cattle grazing below.
——
In Japan’s Okuchichibu Mountains stands the holy peak of Mitsumine, its sides fleeced in forest, its summit ornamented with an ancient shrine. In the fall of 1946, two bodies were found amid the hollows and spines of the mountain, a pistol lying with them. One was a man, the other a woman. No one knew who they were.
The police went to Shizuka Watanabe and asked her and her family to accompany them to the mountain. The Watanabes were driven up to Mitsumine and, with the help of guides, taken to the bodies. Shizuka looked down at the lifeless form of the young man.
Japanese newspapers ran the sensational story: Mutsuhiro Watanabe, one of Japan’s most wanted men, was dead. He and a woman, probably a lover, had killed themselves.
*
Some death sentences were later commuted; 920 men were eventually executed.
Twisted Ropes
LOUIE KNEW NOTHING OF THE DEATH OF THE BIRD. WHEN the bodies were found on Mount Mitsumine, he was in Hollywood, falling to pieces. He was drinking heavily, slipping in and out of flashbacks, screaming and clawing through nightmares, lashing out in fury at random moments. Murdering the Bird had become his secret, fevered obsession, and he had given his life over to it. In a gym near his apartment, he spent hours slamming his hatred into a punching bag, preparing his body for the confrontation that he believed would save him. He walked around every day with murder in his head.
Throughout 1947 and 1948, Louie jumped headlong into scheme after scheme to raise the money to get back to
