Nadeshiko Uguisu. My sister.
Nadeshiko was two years younger than me, but you never would’ve thought we were related. She was as bright as I was plain. Whatever she did had a halo about it, as though she were trying to share the light she was imbued with.
She was popular wherever she went, always at the center of attention. Our family was not an exception to this. I often felt like Nadeshiko had the leading role and I was nothing more than a lucky actor who happened to have the same agent and got tossed into the same production.
That is, until my second year of high school, when Nadeshiko was murdered.
Her beautifully expressive face, which had flashed like a kaleidoscope, was cut off, and her porcelain white left hand was cut off by the wrist. Nadeshiko as a corpse was, surprisingly, just a dead person—it was still so strange to me. She wasn’t a leading actor in another world. The world didn’t end because of her death.
Only one family was destroyed.
Nadeshiko Uguisu’s murder was Masquerade’s first crime. Her case was rehashed in the media over and over and eventually kneaded into a caricature.
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A photo of her was broadcast over and over on TV. In it, she had a sheepish grin and wore no makeup. She seemed to be asking the photographer to stop taking her picture. The photo was shared online and showed no sign of disappearing. There were some people who wanted to blame the victim for her own murder, so the baseless slander of my sister was endless.
Because the killer was so famous, we, her relatives, weren’t even able to forget the painful incident. Whenever we turned on the TV, whenever we got online, we often found ourselves ambushed by her death as it was shoved in our faces. We were left injured, emotionally wounded, like bystanders killed by a samurai randomly testing a new blade.
When I decided to become a policewoman, everyone around me tried to persuade me against it. They argued things like:
“Best just forget about it.”
“You should stay on your own path.”
“Revenge isn’t the solution.”
I understood what they were trying to say. I knew that they meant well. I might have even given similar advice to someone else in my shoes.
But it had happened to me.
Don’t pretend that you understand.
I’d been robbed of any path other than the one I’d taken.
However—and others may not get what I’m saying here—it wasn’t like my world became a fiery landscape fueled only by my passion for revenge just because I became an officer. I lived my life as usual. I enjoyed what I could of the world each day.
I just couldn’t forget about what happened to Nadeshiko. I was constantly praying. Praying for a future in which Masquerade was caught and exposed as the stale, diminutive, cowardly criminal he was so that the world would lose interest and we could, finally, quietly bury my sister’s death.