Let me give a rundown on the facts that came to light in the following days.
Before dawn on August 9, 1998, the efforts of the firefighters who rushed to the scene were for naught, and the Sakitani Memorial Hall was almost entirely destroyed. They found a total of six bodies at the scene.
The confirmed identities and locations are as follows:
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The results of the coroner’s inquest and court-ordered autopsies revealed that not a single one of them had died as a result of the fire.
The caretaker Mr. Numata had been stabbed in the neck by a large number of metal cooking skewers, which had been the cause of his death, and thereafter had been burned in the fire. Of the other five, who were all students, four of them—Maejima, Yonemura, Sugiura, and Nakao—had died from blood loss due to being stabbed and cut in multiple locations by a sharp blade. Akazawa appeared to have died due to snapping her spine in her fall from the second-floor balcony.
With the various circumstances and witness testimony, the fact that Mieko, the wife of Kensaku Numata, who had shared the role of managing the Sakitani Memorial Hall, had brought about the deaths of these six people was found to be conclusive. It was thought that Mieko had also tossed kerosene around the kitchen to set the fire after murdering Mr. Numata. Mr. Chibiki had restrained her, but, before being surrendered to the police, she had died. She had bitten through her tongue in an effort to commit suicide, and had apparently succeeded.
Why had Mieko Numata perpetrated such a string of crimes that night? Regardless of whether she possessed an exceptionally aberrant psychology, the root cause was still unclear.
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Wakui, who’d suffered an asthma attack during dinner on August 8, emerged unscathed due to treatment received at the hospital to which Mr. Chibiki had delivered him. As to why he should have neglected to check how much medicine was in his inhaler, he supposedly admitted that it perplexed him, too.
Kazami, who had met with such unexpected misery due to an outrageous misunderstanding by his childhood friend, had suffered no substantial injury beyond a sprained ankle. Even after testing, no abnormalities were found in his head, which had suffered a not-insignificant loss of blood from the impact of his fall, and he came through without major incident. I haven’t heard yet how he and Teshigawara talked things over after that. But, well—given their personalities, I don’t think it turned into any major conflict.
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The cause of the intense pain that I, Koichi Sakakibara, experienced was, as suspected, due to a spontaneous pneumothorax in my left lung, which then went on to suffer a collapse somewhat more severe than my previous two experiences. I didn’t entirely lose consciousness at the scene, but the pain and shortness of breath that I continued to feel until I was treated at the hospital were not minor…So, to be honest, I have little memory of the events around that time, such as what happened after my lung collapsed or how I was rescued.
In any case…
By the time my symptoms eased to a certain degree and I had calmed enough to be able to think things over, I was in a room in the same ward of that old, familiar municipal hospital in Yumigaoka where I had received treatment only a few months earlier.
My grandmother had come running to my side, and after talks with the head physician, the suggestion was made that I consider simply having surgery at this point. The overall determination was that surgery would be a better option in order to prevent any further recurrences. And so my father in India, ignorant of all that had occurred, was speedily contacted and his permission obtained, and two days later I underwent the surgery.
Unlike before, the trend was now toward thoracoscopic surgery for this sort of lung surgery. They would make a few incisions in my body about one centimeter in length, then insert an endoscope and other instruments through these to complete the necessary procedures from outside my body. The burden on the patient from this method was far smaller than that from open-chest surgery, and the postoperative recovery was faster as well.
The result was a successful surgery with no complications. My recovery was also a quick one, and I was informed that the prognosis was that I could be discharged after only one more week.