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Kamaitachi no Yoru 3: The Mikazuki Island Incident - The Hidden Truth

It's already been a year since the serial murders on Mikazuki Island that shook the country. Though it feels like the case has been covered exhaustively in the press, this magazine is publishing a special on the mysteries surrounding it, which up until now have been treated as taboo. Once you've read it, we're sure you'll understand that this was more than a simple murder case.

It all started two-and-a-half years ago, at a pension in Shinshu called Spur. That day, there were four staff and seven guests present. Spur was owned by a married couple: Jiro Kobayashi, and his wife, Kyoko. Toshio Kubota and Midori Kubota (née Shinozaki) were part-time employees. The guests were the owner's niece, Mari Kobayashi, and her university classmate Toru Yajima; OLs Kanako Watase and Keiko Kitano; Seiichi Kayama and his wife, Haruko; and Yosuke Mikimoto, a photographer. The fates of these people, brought together by chance, were to become entangled with the Mikazuki Island Incident.

Rather than simply cover the case, we will instead publish a special feature on the hitherto unreported aspects of it. Some mystery fans have been clamouring to know the details of the case, as it's said that the killings in question utilised a trick that would put a mystery novel to shame. Now that more than 18 months have passed since the "Mikazuki Island Incident", we wished to reveal the truth behind it to our readers. If you would like to know more about the case, please refer to the already-published "Kamaitachi no Yoru X3 Complete Official Guide" (Chunsoft).

When discussing the incident, one cannot overlook the PlayStation game Kamaitachi no Yoru, which engrossed not only gamers, but also mystery fans and critics. The game - a "sound novel", in which text is displayed on top of a background image, combined with music and sound effects - received high praise for providing an ambiance that can't be gleaned from reading a book, and proved a massive success. But this ground-breaking game also served as a smoke signal from the revenge-seeking culprit behind the Mikazuki Incident.

Our story starts with Aki Kawamura, the daughter the owner's wife Kyoko put up for adoption, passing away in a car accident near Spur. Guessing that it had been one of the guests at Spur who was responsible for the accident, Kyoko released a game in which the guests from the day of the accident, the pension's staff, and Aki Kawamura featured as characters in order to find out who was responsible.

As mentioned previously, Kyoko was uninterested in whether or not the game was a success - her goal was to use it to smoke out the perpetrator. Allow me to briefly summarise what the game entails.

The game begins with Toru, the protagonist, and Mari arriving at a pension. After they take a breather, Toru and Mari meet a group of three OLs - Kanako, Keiko and Aki - and Seiichi Kayama and his wife Haruko arrive, which prompts them to go and eat dinner. In the dining room, they spot a mysterious man. The man - named Ichiro Tanaka - is oddly dressed, wearing a black coat, sunglasses, and a hat low over his eyes even while indoors. However suspicious he appears, though, dinner passes without incident.

After their meal, there is trouble in the lounge after the three OLs find a piece of paper outside of their room. It reads tonight, at midnight, someone dies. The note, however, is deemed to be a prank. It is at this time that Mikimoto arrives late, carrying a large bag.

Almost all of the characters are in the lounge making friendly conversation when suddenly, they hear the sound of a window shattering. They all go to investigate, and figure out that the noise seems to have come from Tanaka's room. However, as the door is locked, the owner has to unlock it. Inside, they discover a dismembered corpse. This sets the stage for the game.

Next, we'll explain the state of the crime scene when Tanaka's body was found, and what was learned from it.

All of Spur's guest rooms are more or less identical, with the only exits being either the door or the window. Even if we ignore the issue of the door being locked, even if someone had left through the door, it would have been difficult for them to get outside unnoticed due to the reception and lounge being so close to the front entrance. In fact, due to the numerous people inside the lounge at the time, it was deemed impossible for anyone to have left the building under the circumstances. No suspicious persons were discovered during the ensuing search, either, so it appears that the killer must have broken the window and escaped through it.

With regards to the body itself, the act of dismembering it would require plenty of time and effort, due to the extreme difficulty of cutting through bone. Tanaka had been spotted at dinner, and the guests had left the dining room at around 7:55pm. Considering that the cuckoo clock had just signalled 9pm right before the sound of the window shattering was heard, that leaves only an hour between his last sighting and the crime.

As noted above, however, it's practically impossible to chop up a human body in 30 minutes to an hour. Given the length of time the dismemberment would've required, that would mean that Tanaka would've had to have been killed prior to showing up in the dining room. How, then, did the killer cut up the body and flee through the window?

In hindsight, the answer is simple: the body had been cut up long before the window was broken. First of all, the killer visited Spur whilst in disguise, and gave his name as Tanaka. His outfit - the black coat and sunglasses - served to obscure his build and features. Then, after slipping out of Spur, he visited once again, now in his usual attire, as a guest. This would clear up the issue of the time necessary for the dismemberment, and also provide him with a flawless alibi.

Only one person could possibly have employed such a trick in the killing of Ichiro Tanaka. That is the one person who wasn't present at Spur when Tanaka was in the dining room: Yosuke Mikimoto.

When he arrived at Spur, he had been carrying a large bag. This didn't seem unusual, since he was a photographer. Inside the bag was the already-dismembered body.

This would clear up the mystery surrounding the corpse, but what of the window? When the glass had broken, Mikimoto was in the lounge, and therefore could not have broken the window in Tanaka's room. However, this, too, can be explained using the snow.

First of all, he fastened a rope to the window handle, then tied a flat board to it. Next, he put that board on top of the snow that had fallen on the roof, meaning that when the snow naturally fell, so too would the board, and the rope attached to it would cause it to crash into the window, the resulting impact breaking the glass. In other words, it was possible for him to have broken the window without actually being in the room.

What Mikimoto miscalculated, however, was how early the glass would break. Its timing contradicted that of the time at which the crime occurred.

All of this, though, is an event that occurred within the video game Kamaitachi no Yoru. A psychological locked room, a dismembered corpse, concocting alibis... All of this would put a mystery novel to shame, but none of it is real. I'm sure you'll understand what makes the game so enjoyable if you give it a go, but what does any of this have to do with the real life incident?

What about the real-life Mikazuki Incident, then?

Kyoko, wife of Spur's owner Kobayashi, decided to root out and exact revenge on the person who ran over and killed her daughter, Aki Kawamura. Disguising herself as an old woman named Kiyo Hishida, she attempted to kill Midori Kubota, whom she had smoked out by talking about Aki on Mikazuki Island. However, she mistakenly ended up killing Shintaro Masaoka and Natsumi Kayama - innocent bystanders - instead, and failed to kill Midori herself. Then, later that day, a giant wave struck the island, engulfing the entire mansion. This is the story of last year's incident.

But why did Kyoko choose Mikazuki Island as the place to enact her revenge? The island's mansion was built by the Kishizarus, a notable local family, in the Meiji era, and formerly served as a private prison. Kyoko was a descendent of this family.

As the name implies, the mansion was built in the shape of the mikazuki, or crescent moon. There was a courtyard in its empty middle area, with a tall wave barrier built to wrap around the building. The only windows were in the storeroom and corner room on either side of the mansion's second floor. Due to the existence of such equipment as a boiler, some critics have theorised that it may have been modelled after Abashiri Prison, which requires the same accommodations.

This prison-mansion had a large mechanism concealed within: a water wall. There is a man-made lake next to the mansion, from which water could be drained and fill up the space between the wave barrier and the roof. Kyoko utilised this mechanism to kill Shintaro Masaoka.

Allow us to explain the Mikazuki Incident step by step.

First of all, Kyoko activated the mechanism to drain the water from the man-made lake and fill the mansion's courtyard. Then, she murdered Shintaro Masaoka in the corner room, locked the door from the inside, and escaped through the window. As the courtyard was full of water, she swam over to the storeroom on the edge of the eastern side of the building, and climbed inside through the window there. Finally, she drained the water from the courtyard and returned to the caretaker's room. This allowed her to make it appear as if Masaoka had been killed inside a locked room. Furthermore, to prevent anyone else from becoming aware of the mechanism, she mixed sleeping pills into their dinner and put the others to sleep. As Kyoko was playing the role of Kiyo Hishida, who prepared the food, this was a simple thing to accomplish.

Why was Masaoka killed? In fact, his killing was the result of a miscalculation on Kyoko's part. According to the initial room assignments she had come up with, Midori Kubota was supposed to have been staying in the corner room on the eastern end of the building. However, Masaoka, who was claustrophobic, switched rooms with Midori without Kyoko's knowledge. As a result, Masaoka ended up being killed in Midori's place.

What about the next murder, that of Natsumi Kayama, though? Natsumi had been a habitual thief ever since her hostess days, and frequently stole people's belongings. Her negative habit reared its head again on that day, and she went rummaging around the room of Kyoko, disguised as Kiyo Hishida. There, she found and stole a bottle of green nail polish. Since the polish seemed so unfitting for an old woman, she became suspicious of Kiyo Hishida (in other words, Kyoko). In response, Kyoko strangled her to death with her own scarf.

But this brought up a new problem when Natsumi's body went stiff, still gripping the bottle of nail polish in her hand. Kyoko attempted to cut the hand off, but was unable to do so, and was instead forced to flee. Fortunately for her, however, it was discovered after the murder that Midori owned the same polish, turning suspicion on her instead.

Coincidental though it was, Kyoko became aware that the second murder matched up with a children's song. The first verse mentioned a Shintaro - the same name as Shintaro Masaoka - and Kyoko had slit his throat, which also matched the lyrics. By chance, a crab had made its way inside after being swept along in the water drained from the lake, which also matched.

The "jorogumo" referenced in the second verse matched with Natsumi's past as a hostess. Her fox scarf also tied her to the fox mentioned within. Her wrists being gouged at in order to retrieve the nail polish were decided as being related to the "plucked off my limbs" lyrics.

However, Kyoko made another mistake. Yajima, one of the people involved, noticed a hanging mummy. When he used a ladder to scale the wall and examine the body, someone pushed him off of it. He had been pushed by Kyoko, who was inside the building at the time, but luckily managed to survive the fall.

Kyoko was panicked by Yajima's survival. She had to kill Midori before he revealed the truth. Kyoko summoned Midori to a shed near the man-made lake and knocked her out by drugging her. Then, she placed Midori inside a cask she had readied, then packed it with ice in order to kill her and make it resemble the fourth verse of the song. (It's said that Kyoko did this to put her through the same thing Aki went through when she died in the snow, but it's unclear whether or not this is true.) However, Yajima, who had already figured out all of the mysteries, rescued Midori and exposed the truth of Kyoko's crimes.

As we mentioned earlier, Kyoko miscalculated multiple times in carrying out her crimes. The first was mistakenly killing Masaoka. Then, there was Natsumi becoming suspicious of her, the fact that the killings matched with the children's song, and the fact that Yajima solved the mystery behind it all.

Furthermore, you could also say that it was a miscalculation on Kyoko's part that Midori was the person she wanted to take revenge on. The staff of Spur - the owner, Kobayashi, and the two part-time workers, Toshio and Midori - hadn't been invited to the island. Perhaps because Kyoko trusted them all, she doesn't seem to have anticipated that Midori would become caught in her trap to ensnare the killer - in other words, it was a total coincidence that they ended up going to the island in the first place. With the case being so full of coincidences and miscalculations, perhaps Kyoko's plan was destined to fail. Since she didn't try to run when the giant tsunami hit the island, maybe she sensed this.

Her co-conspirator, Murakami, also remained on the island, a fact which would give rise to the following incident.

For a time, the case was thought to be closed - but another crime was about to be committed. Several months after the incident on Mikazuki Island, Kayama suddenly purchased the island and set out to rebuild Mikazuki Manor. One of his subordinates told us that it was around this time that he began to develop an interest in the occult. According to one person involved in the incident, Kayama had started having dreams of his late wife, Natsumi, and decided that he had to stage a memorial service for her spirit. Using photographs borrowed from Mikimoto, a photographer, he began efforts to rebuild Mikazuki Manor.

The 15th of August, a year to the day since the incident. Those who were involved in it assembled on Mikazuki Island once more, after Kayama asked them to gather in order to conduct a memorial service for the dead.

This time, Kayama's ex-wife Haruko, a long-time friend of Kyoko's, went along at Kayama's request to help out and cook. Haruko felt a debt of gratitude towards Kyoko, and had hired an investigator to find her brother, Murakami, to repay her. In other words, it was Haruko who introduced Kyoko and Murakami to each other.

After staying on Mikazuki Island with Kyoko and her husband one year ago, Tsutomu Murakami was believed to have been killed by the tsunami. In actual fact, he was still alive.

Whilst Haruko had brought Kyoko and her brother together, she had actually attempted to do it two-and-a-half years earlier, too. Haruko called Kyoko's daughter, Aki Kawamura, to Spur, planning to make her happy. However, when she learned the truth through the Mikazuki Incident, she must have felt a considerable amount of guilt.

When Murakami learned that Kayama had called on Haruko to help him out, he saw it as a chance to get his hands on the Kishizarus' treasures, which lay somewhere on the island, and asked her to assist him. The reason why Murakami had stayed on the island in the first place was so that he could try to locate the treasure after the others had left. Though he hadn't found anything at the time, Murakami thought something might change if they were all present once more. Haruko, meanwhile, believed that she had to aid him following what had happened to Kyoko.

This was the beginning of the last incident that was to occur on Mikazuki Island.

How did Murakami and Haruko carry out their crime?

First of all, in order to make it easier to search the mansion, Murakami arrived on the island earlier than the others and switched the master key with the key to Room #3, where Haruko was to stay. He thought that as long as he put the tag back, no one would be suspicious.

Then, having learned that the fireplace in the dining room was connected to the second floor storeroom by a secret shortcut, he decided to spend most of his time hidden away inside the storeroom. As long as no one discovered the secret route, there was little chance of him being discovered. Finally, all he had to do was lie in wait for the others and keep watch.

After their arrival, during dinner, Murakami found out an important piece of information: Yajima had found a key at Spur. Kayama and the others guessed that the key was linked to the hidden treasure. Wanting to steal the key for himself, Murakami hurriedly attacked Kayama whilst he was in the caretaker's room, and thus obtained the key to the basement.

But an issue had already sprung up before the attack on Kayama: Keiko lost her key, and, at Kayama's suggestion, borrowed the master key. As noted above, the real master key had been switched out, and was on Murakami's person. Murakami flew into a panic, but surprisingly, Haruko had come up with a plan.

At this point, the key bearing the "master" tag was the key to Room #3, Haruko's room. Keiko was staying in Room #2. Haruko took the bold step of moving both of their rooms down one space in order to avoid the contradiction of the key - that is, to prevent Keiko from finding out that the key didn't open her door. Despite entailing a considerable degree of risk, thanks to the hallway being curved and it being hard to see further along due to the building's construction, her plan worked.

As expected, Keiko made use of her room without noticing that it had been switched. Murakami was relieved that his plan was going without a hitch. However...

Keiko was suspected in the attack on Kayama, as she had the master key in her possession, and the others decided to examine the key. Keiko handed it over to Haruko, who opened the door using the master key given to her by Murakami whilst displaying the tag on Keiko's key to the others. That should have been enough for her to worm her way out of the situation.

But Yajima, who was present, saw through her trick. Ever since they had discovered that Keiko's master key couldn't open the door to the caretaker's room, he had harboured suspicions. Why would there be a door that a master key couldn't open? By flipping his way of thinking, he surmised that it was not the key that had been switched, but her room. But this would cause a major contradiction with Haruko's actions.

It was Toshio Kubota who solved this contradiction. Having witnessed a mysterious shadow multiple times since arriving on the island, Toshio guessed that there was an accomplice involved. Furthermore, from the fact that he had seen the shadow vanish near the dining room, he managed to find the hidden passage and pin it on Murakami, who knew the mansion's construction well.

It was here that the case ended, and Murakami's plan went up in smoke - or so it seemed.

The driving factor in the failure of Murakami's plot was Keiko losing her key. This is what allowed Yajima to point out the contradiction involving the key when Haruko checked whether or not it unlocked her door.

But did Keiko truly not notice the trickery with the key? Considering where everyone was standing during the inspection, it should have been easy for Keiko to spot what was going on - and since she was under suspicion at the time, she must have been paying close attention to the key. We asked Keiko about it afterwards, and she responded that she had had no idea. It seems that she truly was simply unaware.

Doubts also remained as to whether the mysterious man witnessed by Toshio really was Murakami. The man was said to have been wearing a coat with the collar turned up, a hat, sunglasses, and a mask. In theory, if it were a woman in disguise, no one would be any the wiser...

We made inquiries with people involved, but were unable to find out the truth, and were left with no further leads to pursue.

Whilst the incident is described as a murder case, the first victim, Kayama, was in fact only temporarily dead, and came back to life once the case was solved, after which no one else was killed. This means that though murders occurred on their first trip to Mikazuki Island a year ago, nobody lost their lives on their second visit.

Once Kayama was able to move, he appeared to the rest of the group and began telling them about the treasure and Iemon's curse. He had originally travelled to the island in order to hold a memorial for his wife, Natsumi, and built an impressive altar to pray to. At the time, talismans bearing pentagrams had been stuck over the doors of the vacant rooms.

During his temporary death, Kayama met up with Natsumi, from whom he learned that Iemon had made the mansion into his tomb, and that everyone involved in its building had been made into human sacrifices. Kayama faced off with Iemon, and was almost killed by him due to Haruko and Murakami having peeled off the talismans, but was able to vanquish him using Jiro and Kyoko Kobayashi and the other spirits' combined power... or so it's said.

Those present seemingly believed that Kayama was confused, but just as he had said, they found a hidden room beneath the fountain, where the treasure was located. Curse aside, the treasure at least was real. Afterwards, the treasure was converted into money that was used to fund the demolition of the mansion.

It was also discovered that Kiyo Hishida, the old woman the mastermind Kyoko had disguised herself as on the first trip to Mikazuki Island, was in fact a real person. Her body was found in the basement of the mansion. Police believe that she was killed using the mechanism which drew in water from the man-made lake. An investigation is currently underway to determine the perpetrator.

The reason why the particulars of this series of incidents weren't publicised appears to be due to the police's strong desire to prevent rubbernecking or follow-up crimes. However, the mansion on Mikazuki Island has already been pulled down by Kayama, and the case is closed. Unable to bear the idea of such a huge case being hushed up and lost to shadow, we decided to write up a special feature on it.

Looking back on the series of events, it could be said that, beginning with Aki Kawamura's accident, all of this - the crimes of Kyoko Kobayashi and Tsutomu Murakami - was caused by members of the Kishizaru family. Perhaps it was the Kishizaru curse in action.

Keiko ended by saying the following: "Once the case was solved, right before we left the island, I felt sort of like the atmosphere in the mansion changed a little bit. I felt like I'd woken up from a bad dream."

We would like to extend our gratitude to all of those who assisted us with our research. May the dead rest in peace.