For seven days, a shadow of a mother, curled up in her daughter’s arms, has been caressing the embroidered pocket that she holds tight against her chest. A translation headset over her ears, she hides her face behind a curtain of black hair and crushes her tears in an immaculate square of cotton. A mute pain in a foreign country whose language she does not speak. In the unknown town where his daughter disappeared. At the trial of the one who is accused of having murdered her.
Wednesday April 6, Taeko Kurosaki approached the bar of the Assize Court with small steps, the embroidered pouch still tight against her, her handkerchief in her hand. She bowed to the court and the jurors. The male voice of the interpreter translated his first words with an assured tone: “First of all, I would like to express my gratitude and apologies for the inconvenience caused, to all who have taken the trouble to pursue this matter for so long for my beloved daughter. »
A mother, alone in the middle of the courtroom, and three and a half hours of pain.
“For more than five years, I have been psychologically destroyed and I have a great mistrust of humans. I isolate myself, I don’t see anyone, and that’s why I lost the ability to express myself. It may be that my speech is long, interspersed with silences, I ask you to be patient to listen to me.
– We will be, ma’am.” replied the president of the court.
Taeko Kurosaki talks about her eldest, Narumi. Of the little girl who “from kindergarten, read books to those who cannot read”began the piano at age 7, decided on her own to learn English at the end of elementary school and became “the best student in her class at college”. She talks about the teenager who works hard to pass the international high school entrance exam, gets up at 5 a.m., “Open the curtain of your window slightly in the light of dawn to revise without spending electricity”, is selected among other high school students “to dialogue with political leaders”chooses French at the age of 16 as a second foreign language and “has this dream of going to France one day”. She talks about the student who gives up the coveted private university and joins the public one in Tsukuba “to ease the financial burden” of her divorced mother, multiplies the small jobs and deprives herself of dance lessons because behind her, there are the studies of two younger girls to ensure.
“And it is alas! in this context, that she will meet Nicolas Zepeda. It was in the fall of 2014.
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