Akimitsu Takagi > Quotes

“If you’re exposed to grief long enough, you can become addicted to it, you know. You begin to feel something’s missing when­ever you’re without sadness. And once this happens, sad­ness becomes a kind of queer delight...”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Honeymoon to Nowhere

“You have the mark of a genius. You’re highly intelligent. Also lazy. You don’t make any effort to do work that doesn’t appeal to you. But once something engages your interest, you apply yourself wholeheartedly to solving that problem. The trouble is that you rarely find an objective that seems worthy of your attention. In this postwar mess of a country, I would guess that you’re having a hard time finding a practical application for your genius”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“Anyway, one of the most taboo of all tattoos is the Three Curses.” “The Three Curses?” Kenzo asked, feigning ignorance. “Surely you’ve heard that saying: ‘The snake eats the frog, the frog eats the slug, the slug dissolves the snake.’ At any rate, those creatures are the familiars of the three rival sorcerers. The sorcerer Jiraiya always appears riding on a giant toad, Orochimaru on a snake, and Tsunedahime on a slug. If anyone ever tattooed a snake, a frog, and a slug on one person’s body, the three creatures would fight to the death. That’s why such a tattoo is forbidden. Even if a client begged for that tattoo and offered to pay a fortune for it, the artist would be morally obliged to refuse.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“There’s a thin line between obsession and derangement, and I’m not at all sure the professor hasn’t crossed it.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“As far as he could tell, suicidal people were often in a strangely romantic mood. It was part of the reason why people still flocked to famous suicide spots as Mount Mihara and Kegon Waterfall—the lure of tradition, and the desire to decorate one’s last moments with a bit of beautiful scenery.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“The three men shared a light meal of rice, miso soup with tofu and straw mushrooms, grilled butterfish, and various savory side dishes. (Daiyu’s wife Mariko, as was customary, served them in silence, then ate later by herself in the kitchen.)”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“The world is full of men with strange obsessions who will stop at nothing to get what they want.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“There was a severed head, and two soft white forearms, and two long legs from the knees down, all laid out on the tile floor, with the hideous cuts of the saw clearly visible. The faucet was running, and the water had filled the bathtub and overflowed onto the floor. The long, luxuriant black hair on the bloated head twined and floated in the water like an undulant knot of snakes.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“I don’t mind introducing you, but I have to warn you that she has a tendency to take over people’s lives. Also, she sometimes comes out with bizarre and even paranoid remarks, and the best thing is just to say ‘Yes, yes’ and act sympathetic.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“In Osaka slang, a tattoo is called gaman— you know, “patience” or “perseverance.” There are two things about getting tattooed that seem to impress people, the money it costs, and the pain it causes.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“Anyone who would buy into that load of moronic propaganda they call the Pronouncement from Imperial Headquarters would have to be soft in the head, don’t you think? Let’s just say that participating in the war wasn’t exactly my idea of a delightful experience. Day after day we would sink innumerable enemy aircraft carriers and battleships. I remember counting sixty ships destroyed, each one full of men who probably didn’t want to be fighting any more than we did.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“Daiyu Matsushita was not the sort of policeman who used violence, intimidation, and torture to extract confessions from suspects. He preferred to let reason and systematic detective work do the job. His philosophy reflected the New Constitution of 1946. He tried at all times to show respect for a suspect’s human rights, and he would only send a case to the prosecutor if there was direct evidence to back up the accusations.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“Even after a work-of-art tattoo was located, the problems were just beginning. The next obstacle in the collector’s path was obtaining a contract for posthumous conveyance of the tattoo. The potential difficulty of this cannot be overemphasized, for people tend to be passionately attached to their own skins, even after death.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“Daiyu and his pianist wife, Mariko, had met at the university and married for love. Their standing joke was that someday when they were old and gray they would spend a leisurely day together, and maybe even go out to dinner.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“Tattooing is definitely an art form,” Kenzo said. “I do agree with you about that, and I’ve recently learned to appreciate the beauty of the art tattoo. But tell me, speaking not as a collector but strictly as a physician and a rational man, don’t you think it’s stupid to undergo so much pain and expend so much energy on self-mutilation? I mean, surely no one with an iota of common sense would ever do such a thing.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“You don’t want to get too caught up in this world.” Tsunetaro’s voice was stern, but his facial expression had relaxed perceptibly. “I’ve seen it a hundred times. You may start off as an impartial observer, but tattooing is like narcotics. You become fascinated, then addicted, and the next thing you know you’re ruining your own skin with ink and dyes.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“Kenzo had become a military medic. He had survived the war with limbs and faculties intact, although even after he was repatriated from the Philippines a sort of tropical torpor seemed to linger in his mind.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“They discussed the war, the Occupation, and the future of an economically-shattered Japan ruled by an emperor who had announced that he was not, after all, a god. In the course of the conversation Kyosuke effortlessly quoted Chekhov, Chaucer, and Heine, though not in a pretentious way, and always with perfect relevance.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“He opened his mouth and out came a rainbow, he thought, recalling the proverb about a person who talks a bigger game than he can deliver.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“Japan had always had a thriving sex trade, but this was different. Before the war there had been a few streetwalkers in the seamier parts of town, but most of the prostitution was carried on in designated brothels, behind closed doors, with a certain decadent élan. Now, though, there were hordes of women standing around all the major train stations hoping to rent their bodies to some stranger for an hour or two, simply because they could find no other way to support themselves.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“one thing I know for certain is that there’s a big difference between good versus evil, and beauty versus ugliness. For example, you people tend to despise tattoos, as if they were an affront to your puritanical eyes. You seem to see anyone who happens to have a tattoo as a thief or a murderer or some sort of lowlife scum, and that simply isn’t the case at all. In the so-called civilized countries of the West, even among royalty, aristocracy, and members of the upper classes, getting tattooed was a widespread fashion at the turn of the century. And all those people agreed that the Japanese tattoo was the absolute zenith of the art form, on a par with our famous ukiyo-e woodblock prints. If you people in the police department could just learn to look at tattoos with a slightly more artistic eye, I think you might be surprised to discover the strange beauty there. I don’t mean to climb on my soapbox, but I really think Japan should use our defeat in that stupid war as a time for national rebirth. We need to repeal the senseless ban on tattoos, once and for all.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“Near the entrance to the famous Specimen Room at Tokyo University, there was a lavishly gilded casket that housed an ancient Egyptian mummy, said by some to have been the favorite concubine of King Tut himself. Elsewhere in the room, the disembodied brains of such celebrated novelists as Natsume Soseki and Kanzo Uchimura were on display, floating dreamily in formaldehyde. Then there was the distinguished married couple, both professors of medicine, who had willed their bodies to science in the 1920s. Now their perfect ivory skeletons stood at attention by the entrance, like a pair of sentries. Interesting though these objects were, the most riveting thing in the room was the collection of vividly colored, intricately-tattooed skins hanging on the walls and suspended from the ceiling. They looked to Kenzo like an eerie parade of souls in limbo, and he gazed at them in awe and fascination.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“Kenzo felt one of his sudden mood-swings coming on. He had first experienced this disturbing phenomenon while stranded in the depths of the mountains of the Philippines, resigned to imminent death. It had been diagnosed as a post-traumatic nervous disorder, and in certain situations it would flare up suddenly, without warning.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“This country’s in the grips of total pandemonium. All over Japan, it’s as if eighty million people had simultaneously gone out of their minds. Staple foods are either rationed or else completely unavailable, and the distribution always seems to be running behind schedule. On top of that, the authorities have cracked down on hoarding, and anyone caught laying in supplies is ruthlessly punished.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“Doppelgänger—double-walker. The word had originally had mildly supernatural connotations—“a wraith of one alive,” said Kenzo’s German-Japanese dictionary—but it had come to mean simply a double, or an uncanny look-alike.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“When the negotiations were concluded and the papers signed, the next step was to wait for the owner of the tattoo to die. There was no way of knowing whether this would happen in ten years, or twenty, or thirty. However, it is a medical fact that all-over tattooing decreases life span because heavily tattooed skin doesn’t breathe properly. No matter how frustrated and impatient the collector might become during this long wait, he couldn’t very well slip the tattooed person a dose of poison to hasten the process. All he could do during those long years was to pray that the tattoo would remain safe, for there are so many potential disasters that can befall a wonderfully decorated body. Natural calamities, war damage, domestic accidents, automobile wrecks, violent crime, to name a few. Then there’s the possibility that the tattooed person will decide to disappear, absconding with his own skin to avoid the imagined horror of being flayed after death.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“With a living canvas such as human skin, whether or not a tattoo artist could produce a work of art that satisfied him depended in great measure upon the subject. The ideal, of course, was pale, velvety, fine-grained skin without a single birthmark, scar, or blemish.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“If you look at it from a psychoanalytic point of view, a tattoo is a form of perpetual suicide. It’s as if the person has some subconscious awareness of having sinned, and their way of atoning for a guilty conscience is to inflict pain on their own body. Not just criminals, but martyrs and celibates too; what they all have in common is deep feelings of guilt. So the collector’s request to remove their skin after death and preserve it for posterity is actually the fulfillment of their deepest desires.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“Kenzo had no grudge against the American victors, and he thought of saying, “Their appalling tattoos didn’t keep them from winning the war.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case

“When she saw the severed head she fainted dead away. What can I say, she’s a woman.” “I don’t know what it has to do with being a woman,” Daiyu responded in a serious tone of voice. “I think anyone might faint at such a ghoulish sight. I mean, if this weren’t our job, a few of us might be under a doctor’s care right about now.” The investigator looked properly chastened,”
― Akimitsu Takagi, Tattoo Murder Case