Strange buildings, p.3
Strange Buildings, page 3
The victims were the boy’s mother, grandmother and younger brother. His father was out at work at the time. A neighbour heard the mother’s screams and called the police, but the three were already dead by the time officers arrived on the scene. The boy did not resist when the police took him away.
The murders had been committed using a single kitchen knife. There was a half-chopped pile of vegetables in the kitchen, so police believe the boy must have taken the knife from his mother while she was cooking and used it to attack his family.
The three bodies were found as follows:
mother: Discovered in the kitchen with a single stab wound to the chest. Clothing showed signs of a struggle.
grandmother: Discovered lying in her own bed with eyes closed. Stabbed multiple times through the blanket covering her. She was generally confined to bed because of difficulty walking, and it is believed that she died without a struggle.
younger brother: Found in the doorway between the kitchen and the hallway. The knife was still in his abdomen.
The alleged perpetrator suffered multiple cuts to his upper body. He was arrested after receiving treatment at the hospital.
He made several statements to the police, with explanations including, ‘I was feeling irritated,’ ‘I had no hope for the future’ and ‘Mother and grandmother never got along. It was hard to be in the house.’
Alongside the usual opinion pieces in the media about ‘The epidemic of hopelessness afflicting Gen Z’ and ‘A breakdown of communication in the family home’, there was some speculation that there might have been something wrong with the layout of the Tsuhara house.
This speculation never got much traction and soon faded from public discourse, but it caught my attention. I was in the middle of writing Strange Houses, and of course I had floor plans on my mind.
I did a bit of research of my own, but, try as I might, I didn’t manage to turn anything up. In fact, I never even found a copy of the Tsuhara house floor plan.
When I was about ready to give up, I had a thought.
When police investigations finish, houses that were murder scenes are subject to forensic clean-up. So, maybe people involved in that clean-up would know how the house was laid out.
And that is why I had come to interview Iimura.
IIMURA: There were ten of us on that job. Usually, forensic clean-up teams have eight members at most, but that one was different. Things being as they were and all.
AUTHOR: Was it a difficult job?
IIMURA: It was. The stretch from the kitchen to the old woman’s room especially. It was just a lake of blood. We had to replace the floorboards there. That was rough. Course, it’s always rough physically, but that one… It was hard on the heart. You know one of the victims was a kid?
AUTHOR: Yes. The killer’s younger brother, right?
IIMURA: There was this small puddle of blood at the entrance to the kitchen. Kid-sized. It was hard even to look at it. I’ve got a boy of my own, with the ex.
AUTHOR: How terrible…
IIMURA: Sorry, didn’t mean to put a damper on things. Oh, right, you said you wanted a floor plan for the Tsuhara house, didn’t you? I brought a copy. I suppose that’s worth the price of some edamame.
Iimura pulled a folded-up piece of paper from his pocket. He spread it out to reveal a floor plan.
IIMURA: This is the Tsuhara house.
AUTHOR: Really? How did you get this?
IIMURA: There are copies all over the web. I just picked one and printed it out.
That was odd.
I’d searched all over the internet and never found a copy of the Tsuhara house floor plan. But if Iimura was so sure, after having actually been inside that house, I didn’t doubt it. I must have just been looking in the wrong places.
IIMURA: It really is a terrible house. You live in a house like that too long, it’ll drive you nuts. It was unfit to live in, that place.
AUTHOR: Unfit to live in? What do you mean?
IIMURA: Just look at this layout. Isn’t it obvious?
AUTHOR: I’m sorry, it just looks like any other house to me.
IIMURA: Well, just you try imagining living here. Take the ground floor. You’re having your dinner in the living and dining room. But there’s always this foul stink in your nose, killing your appetite. You know why?
The kitchen, bath, and all the other stuff we call ‘wet areas’ are concentrated on the north. The north side never gets enough sunlight, so it never really dries out even in the dry season, and in summer it gets stuffy and mouldy.
On top of that you got your usual toilet smells mixing in and wafting down the hallway to the living room. And there’s no door there, so no way to keep the smell out.
AUTHOR: Why do you think there’s no door to the living room?
IIMURA: I imagine the builders were cutting corners. There are all kinds of nasty little tricks to keep construction costs down.
AUTHOR: I see.
IIMURA: And there are other problems with not having a door to the living room.
You know how some folks come and ring the bell around dinner time, collecting money for the newspaper or trying to spread the good word or what have you. Imagine it here. You open the front door, and your dinner and your family are all right there for the world to see. Not a hint of privacy.
At the very least they should have put the entrance to the living room on the kitchen side, but the stairs take up all that space, so they couldn’t, I suppose.
You get poor layouts like this when you try to build a house on too small a plot. Which just means it’s easy to end up with a bad design like this here in Japan. Lots of small plots.
Of course, you get some really good architects who do it right, but whoever drew up these plans is a joke.
Look here how the entrances to the kitchen, dressing room, and toilet, are all clustered together.
I bet that caused a lot of trouble, a lot of fights. People always bumping into each other.
AUTHOR: Now you point it out, it does look like an unpleasant place to live.
IIMURA: Right? And the first floor is even worse.
This floor space is good for three, maybe four rooms. But they crammed five in there. Which means they didn’t have space for a hallway.
Without a hallway, if you want to get to the room at the back of the house, you have to pass through the rooms at the front. So, those bedrooms also served as a corridor. And look, no doors here, either. Not a hint of privacy.
AUTHOR: That would be really uncomfortable.
IIMURA: It also bothers me that the balcony doesn’t face south. You want to hang your laundry out to dry on the balcony, you need it to face south. Nothing dries laundry like decent southern exposure.
I could feel my own interest in the house fading bit by bit. Iimura’s explanation was certainly convincing. He had been a housebuilder himself, so I trusted his ability to judge the design of a house from just looking at the plans. And perhaps he was right—maybe this had been a bad house to live in.
Still, it felt like a stretch to go from ‘a bad house to live in’ to ‘a house that would drive someone to murder’. Perhaps sensing my scepticism, Iimura cleared his throat and went on, his tone slightly muted.
IIMURA: Of course, spending a day or two in this house wouldn’t cause any problems, I reckon. But you live here for five or ten years, and those little stresses pile up day after day. Eventually it drives you crazy. It might sound like I’m making it up, but that’s the kind of power houses have.
AUTHOR: You think so?
IIMURA: I do. But still…
His voice dropped to a near whisper.
IIMURA: All that just now, that was just me guessing. The real issue is what actually happened after the Tsuhara family started living here. You got kids, by the way?
AUTHOR: No, I don’t.
IIMURA: Well, try to imagine. So, when you’ve got a kid of two or three playing at home, what do you think is the most important thing to do as a parent?
AUTHOR: Hmm… I suppose making sure there’s nothing dangerous around?
IIMURA: Well, that too, but there’s something else that’s just as important. Maybe even more so. The answer I’m thinking of is ‘keeping them in sight’.
When kids reach a certain age, around two or three, they start to want some independence, to play on their own. But at that age, you can’t leave them completely on their own. So, they usually play in the living room.
The kitchen and living room in most houses in Japan are connected. Parents can keep an eye on their kid, and the kid has the feeling of playing alone, along with the reassurance that Mum and Dad are still close by.
But in this house, you can’t see into the living room from the kitchen. In fact, there’s no good play space you can keep an eye on from the kitchen.
That Tsuhara boy must have grown up feeling anxious all the time, don’t you think?
AUTHOR: Hold on… There’s this tatami room next to the kitchen. Isn’t that perfect for a playroom?
IIMURA: It would be, maybe, but that was the grandmother’s room.
Granny’s room… Something about that flicked a switch in my brain.
mother: Discovered in the kitchen with a single stab wound to the chest. Clothing showed signs of a struggle.
grandmother: Discovered lying in her own bed with eyes closed. Stabbed multiple times through the blanket covering her.
younger brother: Found in the doorway between the kitchen and the hallway. The knife was still in his abdomen.
The grandmother was killed in her room. The mother and younger brother were killed in the kitchen.
The murders happened in two adjoining rooms. I couldn’t help imagining the scene.
IIMURA: The old woman was Mr Tsuhara’s mother, I understand.
From his wife’s perspective, every time she stepped into the kitchen, the old woman would be right there. That would be grating even with a blood relative, but with her mother-in-law it must have been absolute misery.
And the old woman’s legs were bad, so she was practically bedridden. Mrs Tsuhara would have been forever breaking off from her own work to help her mother-in-law to the toilet. She must have felt plenty stressed and irritated with it all.
Children pick up on things, especially their parents’ moods. I just can’t imagine those kids playing happily while their parents were always on edge. They wouldn’t have felt relaxed around their mum while she was so wound up, but if they played in the living room, then they would have felt alone and anxious…
I doubt there was anywhere in this house where the Tsuhara boy could feel at ease when he was a child.
The boy had even told the police that his mother and grandmother didn’t get along.
IIMURA: Then, when kids get older, they want their own rooms. And that was another problem. The Tsuhara boy’s room was right here.
Iimura pointed to the storage space on the first floor.
IIMURA: I got a look inside when we were cleaning. There was a desk and a lamp, with a futon on the floor. The boy must have liked football, because he had J League posters on the wall.
AUTHOR: But why was he staying in the storage space?
IIMURA: Process of elimination, I expect. Like I said, none of the rooms on the first floor offered any privacy. Which would have been just about hell for a boy in his teens.
The only ‘room’ with a door was this storage space. I doubt the boy liked it in there. A cramped, dark room with no windows like that. It’d be enough to depress anyone. But where else could he go?
A childhood full of anxiety and loneliness. An adolescence spent in cramped darkness. And a house entirely lacking in comfort.
Could all these have combined to slowly warp the young Tsuhara into a murderer?
IIMURA: Of course, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that anyone who lived in this house would end up a murderer. I suspect the boy had something in him from the start. The house just brought it out. Nurtured the darkness in his heart, I guess you could say.
AUTHOR: I wonder if this tragedy would have happened if he’d lived somewhere else.
IIMURA: I wonder… Anyway, the Tsuhara boy isn’t the only one in the world with darkness in his heart, and this house isn’t the only one of its kind.
AUTHOR: What do you mean by that?
IIMURA: Exactly what I said. There are over a hundred houses like this across Japan.
AUTHOR: Really?
IIMURA: Yes. You’ve never heard of Hikura Homes? It’s a construction company running out of central Japan, the Chubu region. All of us in the business know it’s crooked as a dog’s hind leg. This is what they do.
First, they draw up a floor plan. They design it for, say, a hundred-square-metre plot. Then, they go all over the area, buying up as many hundred-square-metre plots as they can, then build the same house on each one, like stamping them out of a machine.
Using the same design for hundreds of houses means they can cut costs by ordering materials in bulk, and they can sell these mass-produced houses at low prices. They’re commodities, in other words.
Which in itself isn’t an issue. Other companies build to set plans, sure. The problem is, Hikura’s basic design is bad. So, they’re mass-producing bad houses just like this one.
AUTHOR: So, the Tsuhara house is just one of these mass-produced Hikura Homes properties?
IIMURA: It is. I’ve lived in the Chubu region for years now. I can’t tell you how many of their flyers I’ve seen. They all have the floor plan and some lines like:
‘New-Build Detached Houses—Two Storeys, Six Bedrooms with Living/Dining and Kitchen—15 Million Yen’. That’s enough to get your attention.
Your typical single-family home starts around thirty million yen. That means they’re selling at around half the market price. And with six bedrooms? Most folks would call it a real bargain. But this is what they get.
Tiny rooms, crammed into the plan just so the numbers in the ad look impressive. Doors sacrificed to cut costs. Not a thought given to comfortable living.
Flashy ads, high pressure sales, no hint of service or care after the sale’s done. That’s the kind of company they are. I can just picture the Tsuharas, with two young kids, their heads full of dreams, falling for the story the salespeople spun.
I finally understood what Iimura had meant by ‘There are copies all over the web’ when he gave me the floor plan.
He must have just downloaded it from a property website. There were probably houses like this up for sale all over the country.
And some day, another person like the Tsuhara boy might end up living in one. The thought gave me a chill.
· · ·
After Iimura finished his second beer, he ordered a vanilla ice cream for dessert.
IIMURA: Sorry, I seem to have talked up an appetite.
AUTHOR: Not at all. You’ve given me some really valuable information.
I have to say, though, I’m surprised that Hikura Homes has stayed in business, what with that reputation for poor quality you mentioned.
IIMURA: They’re good at playing the media game. And their PR budget is huge. So long as they keep up a good image in the media, customers will keep taking the bait—hook, line and sinker.
AUTHOR: I see…
IIMURA: It wasn’t always like that, though. Hikura only started focusing on the media after a big scandal.
AUTHOR: What scandal was that?
IIMURA: Let’s see… I think it was when I was still an apprentice… So, maybe the late 1980s?
There were some dark rumours going around about the Hikura president. That he’d abused some little girl when he was young. They turned out to be unfounded, in the end, but the TV and tabloids were all over it for a while, so everybody heard about it. These days I guess you’d say it ‘went viral’ or whatnot.
And rumour being so powerful, it even hit Hikura’s market share. There, I have to admit, I feel a little bad for them.
Then along came Housemaker Misaki, their biggest local rival, to take advantage of it all and expand their share of the market. It took Hikura over ten years to regain all that lost ground. And I guess the lesson they took from that was, the truth is powerless against the media.
· · ·
When I got home, I looked up Hikura Homes on the internet.
The search bar suggestions included phrases like ‘Hikura Homes terrible’, ‘Hikura Homes scam’ and ‘Hikura Homes religious’. I followed a few of those and a quick read confirmed Iimura’s claims. Hikura really did seem to have a reputation for selling low-quality homes, and their customer ratings were terrible.
Then I checked the company’s own website.
Under the header ‘Great homes, better prices’ were pictures of famous influencers throwing parties in elegant living rooms.
There was a video lower down on the page. I hit play and was greeted by a well-known movie actor murmuring, ‘Hikura Homes can make your dreams come true,’ in her most seductive voice, with a chart-topping pop song playing in the background.
I could only think of Iimura’s comment—‘the truth is powerless against the media’.
Having suffered at the hands of the media, Hikura Homes decided to use those same media to paper over its own poor reputation.
At the edge of the site, I spotted a link that read ‘A Message from Our Leadership’. I clicked through, and the new page had two photos at the top. One was of the company chairman. He was an older man with an aquiline nose and glasses. A caption gave his name as Masahiko Hikura. The other picture showed a middle-aged man with short, cropped hair. This was the president, Akinaga Hikura.
I didn’t need the names to see they were father and son. Akinaga had his father’s face, especially the nose.
