Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination - Edogawa Rampo [29]
Lieutenant Sunaga was at first quite confused. Although aware of his tragic plight, his gradual return to normal health brought with it feelings of remorse, melancholy, and complete despair.
Whatever Tokiko and her husband said to each other was through the medium of the written word. The first words he wrote were "newspaper" and "decoration." By the first he meant that he wanted to see the clippings of the papers which had carried the story of his glorious record; and by "decoration" he was asking to see the Order of the Golden Kite, Japan's highest military decoration, which he had been awarded. These had been the first things Major General Washio had thrust before his eyes when he had recovered consciousness at the hospital, and he remembered them.
After that the crippled man often wrote the same words and asked for the two items, and each time Tokiko held them before him, he gazed long at them. Tokiko felt rather silly while he read the newspapers over and over, but she did derive some pleasure from the look of deep satisfaction in her husband's eyes. Often she held the clippings and the decoration until her hands became quite numb.
As time passed, Lieutenant Sunaga became bored with the term "honor." After a while he no longer asked for the relics of his war record. Instead, his requests turned more and more frequently toward food, for despite his deformity, his appetite grew ever larger. In fact, he was as greedy for food as a patient recovering from some alimentary disorder. If Tokiko did not immediately comply with his request, he would give vent to his temper by crawling about madly on the mats.
At first Tokiko felt a vague fear of his uncouth manners and disliked them, but in time she grew used to his strange whims. With the two completely shut up in the solitary cottage in the country, if one of them had not compromised, life would have become unbearable. So, like two animals caged in a zoo, they pursued their lonely existence.
Thus, from every viewpoint, it was only natural that Tokiko should come to look upon her husband as a big toy, to be played with as she pleased. Furthermore, her crippled husband's greed had infected her own character to the point where she too had become extremely avaricious.
There seemed to be but one consolation for her miserable "career" as nursemaid to a cripple: the very fact that this poor, strange thing which not only could neither speak nor hear, but could not even move freely by itself, was by no means made of wood or clay, but was alive and real, possessing every human emotion and instinct— this was a source of boundless fascination for her. Still further, those round eyes of his, which comprised his only expressive organ, speaking so sadly sometimes, and sometimes so angrily—these too had a strange charm. The pitiful thing was that he was incapable of wiping away the tears which those eyes could still shed. And of course, when he was angry, he had no power to threaten her other than that of working himself into an abnormal heat of frenzy. These fits of wrath usually came on whenever he was reminded that he would never again be able to succumb, of his own free will, to the one overwhelming temptation which was always lurking within him.
Meanwhile, Tokiko also managed to find a secondary source of pleasure in tormenting this helpless creature whenever she felt like it. Cruel? Yes! But it was fun —great fun!. . .
These happenings of the past three years were vividly reflected inside Tokiko's closed eyelids, as though cast by a magic lantern, the fragmentary memories forming themselves in her mind and fading away one after the other. This was a phenomenon which occurred whenever there was something wrong with her body. On such occasions, especially during her monthly periods of physical indisposition, she would maltreat the poor cripple with real venom. The barbarity of her actions had grown wilder and more intense with the progress of time. She was, of course, fully aware of the criminal. nature of her deeds, but the wild forces rising inside