Haruo Ishizaki

Haruo Ishizaki is 58 and has written about crime since before the police learned to call him by name. He was born in Nara, the son of a registry office clerk, and joined the Kansai Daily as a runner at 20. He covered fires, robberies and an entire drivers' strike. He divorced twice, has a daughter in Tokyo he speaks to little and a collection of newspaper clippings that covers a whole wall.

He lives in a cramped apartment near the newsroom, in Osaka, with a sofa that serves as a bed, a black telephone on the floor and a pile of old newspapers he swears he will organize one day. He lunches standing up at counter dives, smokes a brand his cough has already forbidden and sleeps little. He knows whose car is in front of each police station and who pays for the round at the corner bar.

He has a broad, wrinkled face, gray hair combed back with brilliantine and thick tortoiseshell glasses. He wears a rumpled brown suit with a loose tie, a notepad and a pencil in his jacket pocket and an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He speaks like someone dictating a headline, in short sentences without pause, and laughs alone at his own quips before finishing them.

About Wednesday morning, his account is a reporter's. The letter signed by the Paper Mask arrived at the newsroom with a Kyoto branch postmark, demanding one hundred million yen from Tsubaki. He called the photographer, took a taxi and reached Hanabusa at 10:05, before the police, with the grandmother still crying in the aisle. He insists he read the letter first, and the police only afterward.

Haruo always arrives first and always knows more than he says, which makes him a good reporter and a bad suspect to question. When called a blackmailer, his voice rises and he demands the newspaper's lawyer. It may be the indignation of a professional with thirty years of reputation. It may be someone who decides how far the story goes before telling it to another. The detective will have to decide which.