The corpse of a young nurse was sent by parcel post across Japan in a box that was labeled to contain a doll, police revealed on Sunday.
The case was being investigated by murder detectives on Monday, Agence France-Presse reported.
The nurse has been reported to be missing since late March.
Found in a storage lock-up in Tokyo, the body of Rika Okada was located in a 2-metre (6ft 6in) box which had been transported from the southern city of Osaka, reports said.
"The delivery service that ferried the package -- marked with the Japanese word for 'doll' -- 400 kilometers (230 miles) to the capital had been paid in Okada's own name," according to AFP. "The bill for the lock-up's short term rental had been settled using her credit card."
"The delivery service that ferried the package -- marked with the Japanese word for 'doll' -- 400 kilometers (230 miles) to the capital had been paid in Okada's own name," according to AFP. "The bill for the lock-up's short term rental had been settled using her credit card."
Although more than a dozen stab wounds were found on the 29-year-old's body, no defensive injuries on her hands or arms could be found, local media reports stated.
A woman, who had been at elementary school with Okada, has used the dead woman's passport to fly out of Tokyo earlier this month, reports said. However, police in Osaka refused to confirm details.
The schoolmate, who was not named, is believed to have lived just a few hundred yards from the lock-up with a Chinese woman of about the same age, according to AFP.
Both women flew from Tokyo's Haneda airport on the same flight, bound for Shanghai.
Just before she went missing, Okada wrote on her Facebook page that she was going to meet up with an old friend whom she had not seen for a decade.
