The caged parrot

The red house with its pointed eaves lay hidden in a peaceful neighborhood, across from a park filled with the constant laughter of children.

The police broke down the door. Five minutes later, three young men were rescued from that sunless red house, wrapped protectively in bedsheets.

Three young men, three ages, three distinct features.

The twenty-year-old had black hair that curled slightly outward.

The nineteen-year-old had a pair of vacant green eyes.

The thirty-year-old had an old scar at the corner of his eye and a fresh wound at the corner of his mouth, swollen red and still bleeding.

When the three sat side by side on the ambulance stretcher and looked at me together, I had the uncanny feeling that I had glimpsed a future branching timeline.

In that timeline, perhaps they would be cut apart and pieced together to become a "person" codenamed Toji Fushiguro.

(1)

"Little girl, how did you know the exact location?"

I sat on a waiting chair in the police station lobby. Out of humanitarian concern, the young officer dispensed with many tedious procedures and took my verbal statement in the gentlest, least intimidating way possible.

I brushed the officer off with a simple story about being a victim. After he left, I carefully searched my memories. In one tiny fragment, I discovered that I had seen Fushiguro Tomomi before, only her surname had not been Fushiguro then, and she had not been in Kyoto. She had been in Tokyo, at the Racecourse.

I reconstructed a story in my mind, then expanded it, profiled it, and pieced it back together into the truth I wanted to uncover.

It was a complicated story.

A woman working at a horse-racing track in Tokyo fell in love with a gambler. Each day, her happiness came from waiting for him to appear. She must have greeted him before, but unfortunately, the gambler had eyes only for the races, not her.

But the woman was not discouraged, because she understood a gambler's nature all too well.

The gambler came countless times, and over those countless days and nights, the woman's love grew ever deeper.

The love she could no longer hide began to crave an answer. One evening, she decided to confess to the gambler when he came the next day.

She prepared everything: perfume, styled hair, heavy makeup, blood-red nails. Like a freshly baked cake, she put herself in the display window and waited for the gambler to buy her.

But she did not know that the gambler had a family, a lover, and a daughter. Most tragically, it had never occurred to her that, for his lover's sake, the gambler might give up gambling altogether and move to the countryside.

That day, the cake sat in the display window, slowly deteriorating, spoiling, until it was finally thrown into the trash.

Unrequited love was commonplace, but it was not enough on its own to turn someone into a lunatic.

While the officer was distracted, I walked over to his desk.

The rookie officer had exams coming up, and a thick reference book lay on his desk. I moved it aside and found Fushiguro Tomomi's file.

Fushiguro Tomomi, formerly known as Wagatsuma Tomomi.

The surname seemed familiar. Thinking back, I remembered a television program reviewing violent crimes that had aired five years ago. One of the victims named on it seemed to have had the surname Wagatsuma.

Interestingly, one of Japan's notorious murderers also had that surname. Her name was Yuno Gasai, and she had been executed over a decade ago.

Could there be a connection between the executed Yuno Gasai and this Wagatsuma Tomomi?

I flipped through the file, found nothing important, and took the opportunity to hack into the officer's computer.

I had an incredible natural advantage when it came to computers. Numbers, code, and data were as simple as one plus one to me.

I pulled up Wagatsuma Tomomi's records and found Yuno Gasai's name under family members.

They were sisters, though not by blood. Both had been adopted by the Wagatsumas.

After checking the Wagatsuma family's former address, I left the police station.

(2)

I had just hung up a call from the police station when Megumi called.

The boy sounded subdued as he asked where I was.

Looking at the iron cage before me, I told him I was still at the police station and would be home soon.

After hanging up, I put on gloves and stowed the Wagatsumas' iron cage in the void.

The story in my mind took on an entirely new dimension.

The cake had not spoiled in the display window. It had been rotten from the very beginning.

The woman was an orphan who had grown up without any sense of security. Nothing she had belonged to her.

The room she slept in today would become someone else's temporary lodging tomorrow. Her clothes were other people's discarded hand-me-downs.

Children in such an environment desperately craved something of their own.

One day, she was adopted. She thought she finally had parents of her own. But she had never imagined she would not be the only one.

Love she had to share, and a sister who had appeared out of nowhere.

Those things only made her more obsessive, more neurotic.

What truly pushed her over the edge was her abnormal parents.

I arrived at Fushiguro Tomomi's home, a rented apartment near the Racecourse.

I picked the lock with a hairpin. The moment I pushed the door open, I dodged a fruit knife coming straight at me.

Fushiguro Tomomi, who should have been in jail, had actually been released on bail on grounds of mental illness, aided by the victims speaking in her defense.

During that first call I had hung up, the officer had apologized to me in a voice full of helplessness.

He really had no need to apologize. The moment I saw those three men, I knew this would be the outcome. After all, this was not my first encounter with Stockholm Syndrome.

I jabbed her with a powerful anesthetic, then grabbed her by the lower leg and dragged her into the apartment.

To my surprise, my first meeting with Megumi Fushiguro's sister happened under such awful circumstances.

A little girl shorter than me sat slumped on the floor. Trembling, she tried to reach for the phone, but I stopped her.

She was a resilient girl. Terrified as she was, she still tried to protect her mother.

"P-please. Please don't kill my mom. Please..."

"Sure, all right."

The girl froze, her tears stopping at once. "D-do you mean that?"

Thinking of Megumi Fushiguro, I decided not to leave his sister with any unpleasant trauma. "Yes. Besides, children don't kill people, do they?"

"Then you..."

"I'm here to treat her."

The girl blinked, and her voice stopped trembling. "Treat her?"

I said with certainty, "Does she lose her temper for no reason, often smile strangely at herself in the mirror, and scream hysterically at you at home?"

"Y-yes."

"See? She's ill." I dragged Fushiguro Tomomi into the bedroom. Before closing the door, I told the little girl in the living room, "I'm going to treat her now. Any shouting you hear is a normal part of the treatment. You'd hear similar screaming if you went to a psychiatric hospital."

The girl asked cautiously, "E-excuse me, can I stay with my mom?"

"No." I refused outright. Was she kidding? If she watched, she would definitely be traumatized for life.

"Why?"

The girl was quite persistent, so I decided to feed her a less elaborate lie.

"Because you don't have a license, and I have a medical license. Only licensed people can administer treatment or observe it."

I was not joking. I really did have one, though it was a counseling license I had earned several lifetimes ago.

After fooling the child, I locked the door and took out the iron cage.

I put Wagatsuma Tomomi back inside the nightmare that had once haunted her, to give her a thorough treatment.

(3)

There was a story that gave me much to think about.

Once upon a time, there was a wealthy couple. Because they disliked children, they wanted a substitute that could serve as something like a child.

They wanted this substitute to be flesh and blood, because the wife disliked dolls. So they went to a butcher's shop, bought two pieces of pork, and put them in their home.

After some time, the wife grew tired of them. The pork was lifeless. It could not look after itself or respond to her, and it would even rot.

The husband thought it over and took her to buy two little birds.

The birds were beautiful, one pink and one chestnut. They would chirp at the wife, snuggle up to her, and eat on their own.

But before long, the wife grew tired of them too, because the birds could fly. She disliked things that could fly away.

Yet she could not bear to clip their wings. So she bought a cage to lock them inside.

When the birds were small, the cage could hold them both. But once they grew up, it could hold only one.

Neither bird wanted to be caged.

The pink younger sister depended on her chestnut older sister. So she never knew that the chestnut bird had schemed and racked her brains solely to make the innocent pink bird suffer and be cruelly locked away.

As time passed, the pink bird inside the cage became an eagle, while the chestnut bird outside became a human.

Becoming an eagle meant becoming a pure hunter, with predation an instinct for survival. Becoming human meant acquiring human nature, whose love, hatred, anger, and obsession could turn good and evil upside down.

How would the chestnut-haired human see the pink eagle inside the cage? And how would the pink eagle ultimately treat that chestnut-haired human?

In the end, human malice prevailed.

The pink eagle spared the chestnut-haired human, but the chestnut-haired human fell in love with caging eagles and replicating that couple's personalities.

The truth I was reconstructing in my mind suddenly gained more substance.

The woman at the racetrack loved the gambler obsessively. So she had to find him.

She quit her job and first searched all over Tokyo. She searched and searched, but found he was not there. Then, with what little savings she had left, she began searching the surrounding areas.

By the time she reached Kyoto, she had passed through four or five cities and was penniless.

But she received some good news. She learned the man's surname and found out about his circumstances. She also learned that he was married.

The collapse of her convictions broke her. It also drove her further into madness.

She could not find out what the man's wife looked like, but she knew he had a daughter.

The woman fantasized about having a family with the man. She would have a daughter too, a daughter who resembled him.

Among the sea of people, she found a man surnamed Fushiguro. He had green eyes and chestnut hair. Like that man, he was a gambler.

That was enough. The woman thought it was enough. She married him in a rush, became pregnant, and truly did give birth to a daughter.

Unfortunately, this gambler was not a good man. After she gave birth, he left her.

The bird she had not yet managed to cage flew away.

She refused to accept it. She began searching for people who resembled the man in her heart. Then, in the name of love, she played a game of caging eagles with them.

She could have kept deceiving herself, but one day, the real man appeared.

He truly, genuinely appeared.

She had to seize this opportunity, lock him away, and make him hers alone.

She observed him, then discovered his weakness.

I pressed the stun gun against Wagatsuma Tomomi's temple.

"You actually dared to use me to trick Toji." I finished speaking slowly, then pulled the trigger.

"The woman used her daughter as a topic of conversation to keep the man there.

She told him that little girls needed friends. Without friends, his daughter would only drift away from her father. She said she had a daughter around the same age as his and suggested they bring their children together to meet and become friends.

The woman had it all planned out. She would trick the man into her home, kill his daughter, then kill her own daughter, and lock him in the cage. Then she would have a child with him, a child belonging to them, something of her very own."

Wagatsuma Tomomi was becoming delirious.

I had no intention of curing her. Nor could I cure a complete and utter lunatic.

I opened the iron cage and hauled her out. Looking down at the convulsing woman, I had no need to profile her future.

She had already forgotten Toji's name and face, but she could never forget the pleasure of caging an eagle.

I put away the iron cage and went outside. Before leaving the apartment, I gave the little girl a business card and told her that if Wagatsuma Tomomi had another episode, she should call the police first, then contact the person on the card.

The person on the card was licensed and absolutely professional.

Yet at the time, I had no idea that this act would change Tsumiki Fushiguro's fate in the original timeline.