In a sense

"It started out in all innocence!"
Is this the opening and conscience clearing phrase that begins a reluctant confession? I don't think I've ever believed in innocence past three or four years of age, there are only varying degrees of responsibility.
After coming home in a happy frame of mind and apologizing for the lateness of the hour, she had seen the photographs that I had laid out on the table. One deep breath and her shoulders sagged visibly. She turned and she walked over to the mini-bar in the corner of the room, poured herself a drink with shaking hands and sat on the stool and nursed her vodka and lime, then came the tears. I sat in a chair across from her and waited. I watched the tears fall with pain, with guilt and with the undeniable acceptance of her crime. I got up and went over to the bar, my eyes boring in to her vulnerable and deflated person. I took a can of Sapporo Pilsner from the small fridge behind the bar, pulled the ring that depressed the tab into the can top and took a huge gulp. I looked at her sobbing again and then returned to my seat. She cried for seven minutes, I know because I counted each and every one of them. Each passing minutes seemed to last three or four minutes, time enough for her mind to start inventing excuses and formulating lies but it was all too late for any of that because the evidence was laid out for her to see across the table. Photographs of the innocent flirting and then photographs of secret rendezvous and finally the few painstakingly obtained intimate photographs showing without doubt her adulterous behavior. Photographs that would not look out of place on a cheap porn site! The crying finally stopped and I was halfway through my pilsner and as she finally looked up at me mouthing the silent word 'sorry' I just started at her dried mascara streaked cheeks showing how much she was all cried out. The tension in her voice was evident when she finally managed to say aloud in a broken voice how sorry she was and how she realizes now that it shouldn't have happened.
But it did! You can't turn back the clock.

The accidental touch, the fun and the smiles, the flirting and the tactile demand from the depths of your very being to reach out and hold her and the loneliness that she felt deprived her of all reason and she not only accepted the gift of human warmth but began to anticipate the promise of affection.
I was angry, I was incensed and I turned my head away from her so she wouldn't see my tear. I stood up and walked to the kitchen where with such feelings of violent rage within me, I threw the beer can into the kitchen sink. It bounced out of the sink and onto the drainer where it smashed a couple of  plates that had been left to dry.
I ignored the broken crockery and wiped my eyes and then I returned to the mini-bar fridge and took a second can.
"Tell me about it." I managed to say calmly as I sat in the chair facing her once more.
She drank the vodka and lime in one mouthful and made herself another.
"I never meant for any of this to happen, I'm so sorry. We were just playful, always smiling and flirting a little as we worked together and yes it's true, I felt desire for her. It was only ever going to be that way I thought. Then last week came the night of the photo-exhibition at the Hilton Plaza in Osaka it all went wrong. It was a great success where model and photographer were interviewed by the press. The drinks flowed freely and the hours passed until staying over seemed a better option than catching the night bus home. The inhibitions of the drink and the close togetherness in our single room were all that was needed to start the headlong fall into disaster. Unbridled passions, desires and frustrations had us seeking refuge and consolation and fulfillment within each other's arms.
We were awake until the first fingers of dawn crept over the horizon and finally the exhaustion overtook us and we fell asleep. When we woke we both knew that we'd done wrong and after talking it over it was already too late to back down or step away from what we'd both felt and both done and the choices that we'd made even if we tried to blame it on the alcohol in our veins."
I listened to her and the anger inside refused to dissipate.
Had it been two characters in a story I would have nodded my understanding at the escalation of it and I would have felt sad that these two characters in the play were experiencing such turmoil and then I'd be relieved that such a thing could never happen to me. My love and I were too secure.
But it was happening to me and I could not find reason or understanding or forgiveness.
I shook my head and stood up.
"I'm so sorry, please forgive me, it won't happen again I swear it." she begged.
I did not want to see her. I did not want to even confront my own raging emotions and if I could escape from me as well as her, I would have done so; instead I left the apartment slamming the door behind me.

I couldn't stop the tears now. Everything was spoiled. I made my way to my car parked outside and sat in silence for a long while. At some time after being alone with my confusing thoughts I noticed that she was looking out at me from the window of our apartment. I started the car and drove away. Everything we'd worked for was gone, the trust, the confidence and assuredness of all that we were had simply evaporated and even hope had nothing to latch onto inside such an abhorrent vacuum.
'I drove all night' played on the car radio as I drove past a thousand streetlights upon almost empty expressways. I could not tell if I'd had some subconscious impulse or driven on auto-pilot to arrive here but I found myself turning off the expressway at Ueno and down into Asakusa.
I parked in the first car park I came across and paid the auto ticket dispenser 2000yen for my all day ticket and made my way to the well-lit 24 hour coffee shop. I'd often been here with my Uncle Tamaru as a small girl. He wasn't my real uncle of course; he was a business colleague of my Fathers. On evenings that they'd celebrate some deal or other success, my Mother and I would have accompanied Father to Uncle Tararu's home here in Asakusa.
Perhaps the number of interviews with the police that they'd both had would give rise to an assumption that not all of their business dealings were legal. Public knowledge of membership of the Inagawa-kai for both of them would come several years later when finally it was revealed by the police at a press conference shortly after a very successful police undercover operation had exposed some of the group activities. There were many arrests of lower echelon members, members that were paid to take the heat and admit to crimes that would give them jail sentences.
Five coffees and five hours passed before I decided what I was going to do.
From the pay phone in the street by the car park I called Uncle Tamaru.
He was very surprised to receive my call since we had not spoken for almost ten years. It was at my wedding when he had last held me, wished me well and gave me a wonderful and very generous wedding gift in a thick white envelope.
After the usual niceties and family inquiries had been made I came straight to the point, "Uncle, I need a gun."
There was a long silence before he told me not to be stupid and I was to come to his office at once. He gave me the address. I was already in shock and emotionally numb as I wrote down 4-19-8 Asakusa. Was this a good time to decide upon a course of action I wondered?
I went back to the coffee shop for breakfast and allow two hours more to pass.
A long two hours passed before I found myself in my Uncles office. It was not a wonderfully modern office that that I had imagined, instead it was an upstairs room that he rented in an old man's house not far from Senzoku elementary school. It served his purposes, sometimes he moved locations especially when he thought that 'they' may have him under observation.

Without a word Tamaru reached over and opened a drawer of the cabinet by his desk, taking out a black plastic bag. From the bag he took a faded blue bath towel, and when he spread the towel open, a lustrous black object emerged—a small automatic pistol. Saying nothing, he handed it to me. I also remained silent as I took it. I tested the weight of it in my hand. It was much lighter than it appeared to be. Such a small, light object could deliver death to a human being.
"You just made two major mistakes. Do you know what they were?" Tamaru asked. I thought over the actions that I'd just taken but could not think of a mistake. All I had done was to take the gun that was handed to me.
"I don’t know," I said.
"First, when you took the gun, you didn’t check to see if it was loaded or not and, if it was loaded, whether the safety was on. The second was that, after you took the gun, you pointed it—even if only for one split second—at me. You broke two absolute rules. Also, you should never put your finger inside the trigger guard if you have no intention of firing the gun."
"I see. I’ll be careful from now on."
"Emergency situations aside, you should never handle or hand over or carry a gun that has even one bullet in it. And whenever you see a gun, you should treat it as loaded until you know for sure otherwise. Guns are made to kill people. You can never be too careful with them. Some people might laugh at me for being too cautious, but stupid accidents happen all the time, and the ones who get killed or badly wounded are usually the ones who were laughing." Tamaru drew a plastic bag from his jacket pocket. Inside were seven new bullets. He set them on his desk.
"As you can see, the bullets are not in the gun. The magazine is in place, but it’s empty. The chamber is empty, too." I nodded.
"This is a personal gift from me."
"Of course," I said my voice dry. "But it must have cost you something."
"Don’t let that worry you," Tamaru said. "You have other things to worry about. Let’s talk about those. Have you ever fired a gun?" I shook my head, "Never."
"Revolvers tend to be easier to use than automatics, especially for amateurs. Their mechanism is simpler, and it’s easier to learn how to operate them, and you’re less likely to make mistakes with them. But a good revolver can be bulky and inconvenient to carry around. So I figured an automatic would be better for you. This is a Heckler & Koch HK4. A German make. It weighs 480 grams without bullets. It’s small and light, but its 9mm Short cartridges pack a punch, and it has a small recoil. It’s not very accurate for long distances, but it’s perfect for what you have in mind. Heckler & Koch started up after the war, but this HK4 is based on the Mauser HSc, a well-respected model from before the war. They’ve been making it since 1968, and it’s still widely used. So it’s dependable. This is not a new one, but it’s been well taken care of by somebody who obviously knew what he was doing. Guns are like cars: you can trust a good used one better than one that’s brand-new." Tamaru took the gun back from me and showed me how to handle it—how to lock and unlock the safety, how to remove and replace the magazine. "Make sure the safety is on when you take the magazine out. After you open the catch and pull the magazine out, you pull the slide back and the bullet pops out of the chamber—not now, of course, since the gun isn’t loaded. After that, the slide stays open, so then you pull the trigger like this and the slide closes but the hammer stays cocked. You pull the trigger again and the hammer falls. Then you put in a new magazine." Tamaru went through the sequence of motions with practiced speed. Then he repeated the same sequence slowly, demonstrating each separate operation. I watched intently. "Now you try it." I carefully extracted the magazine, pulled the slide back, emptied the chamber, lowered the hammer, and reinserted the magazine. "That’s fine," Tamaru said. Then he took the gun from me, pulled out the magazine, carefully loaded it with seven bullets, and shoved it back into the gun with a loud click. Pulling back the slide, he sent a bullet into the chamber. Then he pushed down a lever on the left side of the gun to set the safety. "Now do the same thing you did before. Only, this time it’s loaded with real bullets. There’s one in the chamber, too. The safety is on, but you still shouldn’t point the muzzle of the gun toward anyone," Tamaru said. Taking the loaded gun, I found it noticeably heavier than before. Now it had the unmistakable feel of death. This was a precision tool designed to kill people. I could feel my armpits sweating. Checking once more to make sure the safety was on, I opened the catch, pulled out the magazine, and set it on the table. Pulling back the slide, I ejected the bullet from the chamber. It fell on the wooden floor with a dry thump. I pulled the trigger to close the slide, and pulled the trigger one more time, lowering the hammer. Then, with a trembling hand, I picked up the bullet from where it lay by my feet. My throat was dry, and each breath I took was accompanied by a painful burning sensation. "Not bad for your first time," Tamaru said, pressing the fallen 9mm bullet back into the magazine. "But you need a lot more practice. Your hands are shaking. You should practice the movements for ejecting and reinserting the magazine several times a day until your hands learn the feel of the gun. You should be able to do it as quickly and automatically as I did in the dark. In your case, you shouldn’t have to change magazines in mid-use, but the movements themselves are the most basic of the basic for people who handle pistols. You have to memorize them."
Tamaru took the bullets out of the magazine and gun and put them in a plastic bag. Then he handed me both the gun and the bullets separately. "Now it’s not loaded." I took them with a nod. "Trust me, the smart thing is to think about surviving. It’s the most practical thing, too. That’s my advice to you."
"I see,”" I said dryly. Then I wrapped a scarf around the Heckler & Koch HK4, which was like a crude machine too, and thrust it to the bottom of my shoulder bag. This made the bag a pound or so heavier, but it didn’t change its shape. The HK4 was a small pistol. "It’s not a gun for amateurs." Tamaru said.

I'd taken a small hotel room because I couldn't face her. My life was over and at one point whilst I'd sat at the small table in my hotel room practicing with the gun, I raised it fully loaded and placed it into my mouth. The cold metal had a sharp tangy taste and I heard my heart beat loudly knowing that if I applied a little pressure to the trigger as my finger rested on it, there would be no more pain.

It was two nights later that I was stood in a shadowed archway of the car park. I waited by her car for two hours nearly, always hiding from people who exited from the elevator door from the offices above, got into their cars and drove away. Finally she arrived. She exited the elevator doors and headed towards her car and towards me as I waited in the shadows. She opened her purse and fumbled inside looking for her car keys. I stepped out and she froze and then a sudden relief crossed her features as she saw it was me rather than some would be attacker wanting to mug her.
"You frightened me for a moment," she said smiling.
I pulled the gun from my leather jacket pocket and aimed it at her heart.
She looked at it and then back to me in total disbelief. There was no time for questions or even shock to register on her face.
I squeezed the trigger and I was surprised at how the acoustics of the car park amplified the blast of the gun firing its deadly payload. As my Uncle had promised me, the recoil was small like a short sharp tug up and to the right. I had expected her to fall down dead like perhaps they do in movies but the impact of the bullet sent her sprawling out onto the roadway. It had lifted her off the ground and deposited her unceremoniously into an untidy heap.
I thought once more to taste the barrel of the gun and I looked down to see a few faint wisps of smoke leave the barrel. The smell was like the charcoaled remains of a wood fire.
"It started out in all innocence." I said aloud to myself.
My empty words seemed to echo across the silent and deserted car park.

 I thank Nia for the use of her photographs and for her laughing at my silly story.