Kizu the Reaper
Before there was any
crime, before the horror that befell Japanese university summer dorms
in the summer of 2000, there was just Keiichiro Matsui, the top
student in all of Japan. He had scored #1 on the Japanese national
practice exams for his junior and senior years of high school, and
attended the most prestigious prep-schools in Japan. He was
everything a woman would want, tall, handsome, soft-spoken, polite,
kind, wealthy and supremely intelligent, he dressed in a black suit
and red tie carrying a briefcase around Tokyo University campus and
smiled handsomely to every girl that looked at him, he was an ace
medical student who planned to be a surgeon…therefore, no one knew,
nor could anyone ever know, why Keiichiro, going by the alias “Kizu
no Shinigami,” or “Kizu the Grim-Reaper,” killed more than
900 college-age women over a period of 13 years, from 2000-2013, with
a steak knife, scalpel, fishhooks, fishing line and a Japanese katana
sword. Striking only in the summer, when the girls stayed at
all-girls’ dormitories in the tropical hot-spring country in
southern Japan and when no school was in session, moving with purpose
and intent, much like a great white shark hunting its prey with a
silent, malicious determination, dressed in a topcoat, black boots
with a simple black mask and a black Fedora hat, sneaking into the
dorms like a ghost, wielding fishing line and fishhooks. Kizu would
silently approach a sleeping young woman standing over her bed with
the ocean breeze blowing in, and rudely awaken her by holding a knife
to her throat. Kizu would crucify her to her bed with fishhooks in
her hands, arms, legs and feet, tied with fishing line, and
eviscerate her vagina and uterus with a knife and scalpel to the
strains of Mozart’s Dies Irae, played in the hallowed halls
of Notre Dame Cathedral. Then, he’d decapitate her cleanly with the
katana, jam the phone lines with a signal scrambler in his pocket, so
that no one could call the police, and repeat the ghastly process
until every girl in the dorm was dead. During the day, he was
perfectly sane, and was the last person you’d expect to be
the most horrid serial killer in Japanese history; not since Jack the
Ripper did a killer terrorize a country to such a degree. The schools
that owned the summer dorms closed them down, but Kizu simply stepped
his efforts up after that, breaking into the girls’ homes, and
killing them in the same macabre way, often leaving taunting notes
and lectures to police about the Platonic-Aristotelian dichotomy; the
debate on whether people are naturally good or naturally evil, and
opinions about death and heavy issues such as abortion, atheism,
religion, assisted suicide, and Marxism vs. Capitalism. He also used
bizarre symbols and swastikas, but swastikas drawn in the traditional
Buddhist, Hindu or Shinto Namaste style, curved at the ends
with four dots surrounding it, rather than the Nazi Party’s
Heukenkreuz design. He also carved messages like “WAR”
“PEACE” and “LOVE” into his victims’ bloodied, battered
skin with a scalpel. The attention paid to the case waxed and waned
over the 13-year span, 9-11-01 stole the headlines, but the dreaded
“Grim Reaper Killer” never went away; between the international
hunt for Osama bin Laden and the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
you would see, on Japanese news media, every summer, headlines of
another hot-spring bathhouse dorm slaughtered like squealing hogs,
police never called, the same killer, every year, every time, usually
3 or 4 times a year…it all ended on May 8, 2013…for the first
time in the 21st Century, college girls vacationing in
southern Japan could sleep soundly, and not fear the wrath of Kizu
the Reaper…but his macabre psychological torment involving the
sound of a bicycle horn and repressed memories of abuse he underwent
as a young boy was almost too depraved and psychotic to be believed.
Even today, police still shudder at the very mention of the case...
- Shatterpoint
The summer of
2000 broke open just like any other, the universities in Japan
reached their summer breaks, and the girls of Udan-no-Ura Bathhouse
Dormitory returned for another summer of fun, drinking, partying and
flirting around town, at the various bars and host clubs that catered
to them; these opened up every summer in anticipation of the 6
college girls that lived in Udan-no-Ura between May and August, most
people assumed that, because of how every business treated them as
special guests, they may as well might have run the town. They were
stunning, bossy, and high-maintenance, and extremely intelligent,
they attended Tokyo University, the most prestigious university in
Japan and ranked behind only Harvard and Oxford in the global
rankings. They were treated like princesses every time they came to
town, and expected, no, demanded, nothing less. Some might have
claimed that they were tyrants, and some might have secretly or even
openly resented their arrogance. However, there was no indication
that anyone meant them any harm, as even the naysayers said that they
brought huge amounts of business to the tiny resort town in the
summer, Udan-no-Ura was essentially a college onsen town that catered
to the whims of 6 college girls every summer. They lived like queens,
but every queen has someone that wanted her dead…little did anyone
know what was about to happen one night in June.
“Goodnight,
everyone, we’re all going to sleep, leave the window open, it’s a
beautiful night. Happy summer.” The six girls went to bed as their
guests all filed out of the room, leaving the window in the dorm
house open facing the beach, just to let the breeze circulate through
the house, as they had for the past two years. They had never had so
much as anyone look inside their house through the window, and crime
rates here were very low…they had no reason to be suspicious, as
police bulletins went out whenever there was even a petty crime in
town, but, most crime was not even worth getting into a fuss over.
The only crimes ever to befall Udan-no-Ura were pickpockets and
shoplifters; there had never been a violent crime in the history of
the resort town’s existence. There was no history of violence, no
reason for violence, and no motive. This was not a bad neighborhood.
Therefore, there was no reason to fear violence in an upper-class
resort town full of university students, at least against the
university students, there had been a few fights and brawls that the
police had to break up between drunken young men that the 6 girls
invited over, but that was all part of the usual summer banter at the
police station. Therefore, no one could have foreseen the shadowy
figure walking up to the bathhouse dorm window on the first floor, at
3:00 A.M., he looked just like a shadow, moving slowly and
unpredictably, so that he looked just like a shadow moving along in
the wind with whatever was casting it, in the same way a walking
stick moved to look like a twig blowing in the wind, it was perfect
camouflage, even a security camera would have had trouble detecting
the individual amongst the shadows cast by the streetlights. As the
shadow approached the window, he jumped up and into the low window
and into the living room, darkened by the fact that all the girls
were asleep and everything was turned off, except for the glow on the
digital clocks for the new DVD players, brand-new technology in 2000.
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