The Devil's Disciple by Shiro Hamao

innuendo. Such was their life until the incident occurred.
    It was on 16th August of last year, in the afternoon, that two men came to call at the Oda home in ‘K’. They had both known the Odas for two or three years at that point. One was a twenty-five year old student of ‘K’ University called Tomoda Takeshi. The other was Ōtera Ichirō, a student of another university who was twenty-four at the time. Tomoda had attended the same school as Oda Seizō and was himself the scion of an important family. He happened to be renting a villa on the outskirts of ‘K’ at the time. But he felt lonely there by himself and had come to the Odas’ that afternoon in search of company. Ōtera was a student at the university where Michiko’s late father had taught. But this Ōtera lived in circumstances very different from Tomoda. It would only come to light later, but it seems that (Ōtera’s father had benefited from the generosity of Michiko’s father. The former was stubborn by nature and had what might be called a mania for suing people. He was always getting himself involved in legal disputes and soon exhausted what small property he had and died while Ichirō was still in secondary school. His mother died soon thereafter leaving relatives to scramble to help him go to university at least. Eventually they appealed to Michiko’s family and arranged for him to go to Tokyo to study. At the time of the incident he was three years out of secondary school and, with the help of all kinds of people, was studying at a university in Tokyo and living in a boarding house in the suburbs. He was in the middle of his summer vacation on the day in question and, having been acquainted with the Odas for some time, had come to ‘K’ for the day to go swimming. I should mention here that both Tomoda and Ōtera happened to be quite close – perhaps too close it was said-to Michiko.
    On that afternoon Tomoda and Ōtera had gone swimming in the ocean with Michiko but, as I mentioned earlier, the evening brought a violent storm. The sky began to look quite ominous and the two young men quickly heeded Michiko’s warning to get out of the water.
    It seems that Seizō was having one of his rare good days. When the two guests returned from the ocean he said, ‘Since there are four of us why don’t we have a game of mahjong?’ Being regulars at the Oda home in ‘K’, the two guests were enthusiastic mahjong players and needed no persuading.
    The game began after dinner – as all of those who were questioned later confirmed – at five-thirty in the evening and ended after about half an hour. Right after dinner the four gathered around the table and started clacking and banging away at the tiles. Meanwhile the weather was worsening outside into a proper storm.
    I’m not too familiar with mahjong, but people say it takes some time to get through a game even for accomplished players. Apparently they started out agreeing that they would play two matches (comprising eight ‘rounds’) back to back. But when those two matches were over the weather wasn’t letting up and Michiko was winning. Seizō was dead last and uncharacteristically caught up in the game. He hated to lose and proposed another four rounds, which they played, bringing the total to twelve.
    By the time all the rounds were over it was almost midnight. The wind had stopped but the rain was still falling and the husband and wife urged their guests to stay the night. Tomoda had a house in ‘K’ so begged off and went home by car. Ōtera, on the other hand, decided to take them up on their offer of hospitality since the trains had stopped running and the weather was so bad. According to the maids it was just after midnight when the master of the house said he was going to bed and told them to do likewise. So the two girls, whose names were Otane and Oharu, readily retired to