Wanted: 1 cave to retreat from modern society in

Shockwaves first reverberated through Ise on April 23.

Written in thick, black marker on a guardrail on the road leading to the Ise Shrine was a shocking piece of graffiti that read: "I'm going to rape Kyoko Sonobe."

And she was a tiny young girl not even into her teens who had just graduated from elementary school less than one month earlier.

Similar obscene graffiti targeting young Kyoko was found in numerous other places near her Ise home.

"An identical scrawling was on the bonnet of the family car, which also had half its tires punctured," a friend of the Sonobe family tells Shukan Shincho. "The same graffiti was found on vending machines, a bus stop and on the wall of the Sonobe home. It was written all over the place."

Kyoko's secret enemy had written messages that slurred her in about 50 prominent places, including near the junior high school she started attending in April. Some messages were wiped away only to return later.

Then, suddenly, the cops looking into the case got a break. On the night of May 22, they caught a middle-aged man walking around town with a huge, black marker identical to the one in which the graffiti had been written.

He was promptly arrested, but crimefighters were shocked to learn the man in their custody who had been writing the heinous graffiti was Shigefumi Murai, Kyoko's sixth-grade teacher until she completed elementary school in March.