Used to love him
Here’s hoping you all had a better New Year than one Sumio Sugita of Kita-Kyushu:
A 77-year-old woman was arrested Saturday for fatally attacking her 89-year-old husband with sauce bottles, police said.
Kiyoko Sugita was arrested for the murder of her husband, Sumio, after allegedly bashing him over the head several times with sauce bottles.
She admits to the allegations.
“He did nothing around the home except complain and beat me up,” the old woman told the police.
I can see how that, especially the second part, could get to you by the time you’re 77. Normally, I don’t post entries whose only significance is to show what weird and wacky things happen in Japan; other blogs have that covered ably and amply. (I’m not looking down on them, either; I read them myself.) What struck me about this story was the way the words “sauce bottles” were repeated over and over and over, to the point that you start getting distracted wondering what kind of sauce. If it’d been soy sauce, the report probably would have said so. Maybe ponzu, then? If so, konbu (kelp) or yuzu (a hard, sour citrus fruit) flavor? You’d think yuzu would sting more…you know, with that astringent lemoniness. Well, assuming there was sauce clinging to the inside, since the report says “sauce bottles” and not “bottles of sauce.”
Added after searching for original Japanese story with Atsushi: The type of bottle isn’t specified in the Japanese report, but a poignant clause about the woman’s years of suffering appears to have been dropped for the English version:
Mrs. Sugita is reported to have said, “Not only did he constantly complain at me about my cooking and housekeeping, but I had to sit through endless yakking about his bonsai plants.”
That’s a more rational reason for murder than some we’ve heard this year.