Word: nizaemon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Nizaemon was in his 50s when Japan's top actor chose him as leading lady. This honor earned him the right at last to use his family's famous stage name. He was at the height of his fame a decade later when he took up with the shapely, silk-skinned movie standin, Toshiko, and made her his mistress. Nizaemon's adoring public could bear up under that. But when the Great Lover married his hussy and began uxoriously washing diapers and doing kitchen chores to please her, his prestige began to wane. Only his relatives...
Last week they came as usual to the paper-windowed bungalow in Tokyo's Harajuku district, but no one answered their knocking. They peeked inside. There, in a blood-soaked pile of quilts and blankets, lay Nizaemon, his wife, his baby, an old housemaid, and an 11-year-old servant girl. Tossed into Nizaemon's garden was an ax, sticky with gore...
Tokyo's police began diligently searching for a suspect. Conspicuously missing with 600 yen of Nizaemon's postal savings was the servant girl's brother, a pale, stringy youth named Iida who served as the actor's make...
Four days later police found Iida. He was calmly reading a newspaper account of the murder in an out-of-the-way country inn. Sure, he admitted, he did the job: Nizaemon had refused to let him use his sister's 15,000-yen inheritance. It had taken him, he said, only one stroke of the ax to kill Nizaemon, but rather more to cut off his wife's head. He never had liked her; she had refused to give him more than his regular ration for supper...
...paper-windowed bungalow in crowded Tokyo, Nizaemon's mourning relatives were already squabbling among themselves. Who was to get the vacant house...