"Can you imagine how it feels for an innocent man to be kept in prison for years?" demanded Govinda Prasad Mainali during a Japan Times interview in November 2003.
He'd been in prison six years then. He's still there. Perhaps not for much longer.
No one now living — with the possible but highly problematic exception of Mainali himself — knows what occurred in the seedy vacant apartment in Tokyo's Shibuya district where a woman we will call "Y" (to protect her family's privacy) was strangled to death and robbed one night in March 1997. Back then she, not he, was the main story, and a tantalizing story she was: "elite OL" (office lady) by day, backstreet prostitute by night. What drove her? No one knew and no one knows. Stress? Unhappiness? Why unhappy, with all her gifts and advantages?
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