Edge

Chapter 3: Chain

As Saeko and Hashiba walked towards the subway station after leaving Kitazawa’s office, it seemed only natural that they should have dinner together.

“There’s an Italian place in this neighborhood that has a unique flair. What do you say?” Hashiba suggested.

“Sure. Anything goes,” Saeko replied, her response an approval of the proposed cuisine rather than of the invitation itself.

Hashiba led the way, and they arrived at the seven-story building in only a few minutes. The restaurant was on the top floor. It was the first time Saeko had been here, and yet she had an odd sense of déjà vu. For a moment, she stopped in her tracks and pondered why that was. Whenever she noticed a strange glitch in her perceptions, Saeko had the habit of analyzing the possible causes.

The building was on a one-way street, with a tree planted in front of its vestibule. Something about the tree seemed to be causing the strange sensation. Four low posts were staked around its roots and the ground was littered with its leaves, whose prominent veins reminded Saeko of blood vessels. Pebbles were scattered on top of the carpet of leaves. As she marveled at how small the tree looked under the starry sky, Saeko had the sudden sensation of being watched from above. She looked up. Against the glare of the neon signs on the surrounding buildings, the starry sky seemed lacking in luminosity. Hadn’t they been a bit brighter just moments ago?

In the thickest part of the tree’s canopy, right in the middle, a black shadow loomed, as if a cat had climbed the tree and gotten stuck up there. It was only natural that the night sky and trees would create dark shadows, but the blackness at the center of the tree was a shade deeper and undulated slightly in the treetop, almost like a writhing worm.

Saeko squinted, trying to get a better look, but suddenly her eyes refused to focus as if she’d lost a contact lens. She glanced down and then back up again, and as she did, she shuddered as a feeling of foreboding washed over her. Part of it was the chilly December evening air, but she had also detected a disagreeable stench. It was a smell she was sure she recognized but couldn’t quite place. Her senses seemed to be blocking out the memory.

“What’s wrong?”

When Hashiba’s hand found the small of her back, Saeko quickly pulled her attention back to the present moment. His touch seemed almost to dispel her fears, and Saeko remembered her growling stomach.

“I’m starving,” she replied. They had arrived at Kitazawa’s office at seven o’clock, and in the subsequent two hours had consumed nothing but coffee. “Shall we?” Saeko strode quickly through the vestibule, keeping her gaze straight ahead.

At the table, Saeko and Hashiba sipped glasses of red wine as they waited for their food and reassessed the discoveries they had made at Kitazawa’s office. Still flushed with excitement, Hashiba enthused about having to drop the approach they had taken for the previous installment. He seemed to be reacting to the latest developments not with fear or disappointment but with pure delight, relishing the possibilities they implied for the project. Seldom did the opportunity arise to expose a freakish natural phenomenon in his line of work.

“This is really getting good. The tricky part will be when and how to let Shigeko Torii down gently.”

Hashiba was conspiring to shift the focus of the program away from the occult angle toward a purely scientific perspective. But given that the original project had been approved based on the producer’s interest in featuring the psychic reader Shigeko Torii, it would be something of a tricky undertaking. It was probably best to stay the course for the time being and wait for the right opportunity to change tack. In all honesty, Hashiba would have preferred nothing more than if Shigeko Torii were to step down from the project of her own volition.

The reason Hashiba was so caught up in his plans for the program and didn’t feel the slightest twinge of fear was that he perceived no threat to his person from the discoveries they had made.

During a brief lull in their animated conversation, Saeko glanced around the restaurant and was struck by the festive air of the rest of the clientele, an atmosphere unique to the Christmas season. Something horrific is afoot right now, right under our feet, and nobody knows about it but us, she mused, not without an inkling of superiority. The fact that they now shared a secret made her feel closer to Hashiba, too. The evening was passing by all too quickly, and she didn’t look forward to going home. Would Hashiba say goodnight after their meal, or would he invite her to stop in at a bar for drinks? If he did, Saeko knew she would say yes.

Hashiba seemed to have a strong tolerance for alcohol. Even after finishing a bottle of wine between them, he remained completely unaffected. As they stepped into the elevator his movements were perfectly in control as he helped Saeko with her coat, even though he had drunk about three times as much as she had.

The elevator descended slowly from the seventh floor down to the first and the door slid open. From the elevator to the entrance there was a hallway that was more than ten meters long that fed out into the walkway beyond. The corridor was dimly lit, and the tree planted outside the entrance stood out in vivid contrast. Between the garish lighting of the bar on the building’s first floor and the headlights of passing cars, a halo streamed through the spaces between the tree’s leaves.

The vestibule hallway was empty, but small clusters of people passed by on the sidewalk outside, framed by the square opening of the entrance.

It happened just as Saeko and Hashiba began to walk towards the doors. A dark shadow shot vertically through their line of vision, shaking the tree’s branches and thudding to the ground with a heavy shock. The entrance doors were open, and a gust of air seemed to reach them an instant after the impact.

Startled, Saeko and Hashiba recoiled and froze in their tracks. At first, they weren’t sure what had just happened. It wasn’t an earthquake, nor was it a traffic accident. But the image replayed in Saeko’s mind as if etched into her retinas. The dull thud, and the black shape that cut across the square entrance from top to bottom. The unnatural susurrations of the tree’s branches.

Did some person fall to the ground?

There was no other possible explanation. Saeko and Hashiba both reached the same conclusion. “Did someone just fall out of the sky?” Hashiba asked Saeko, unsure of whether to believe his eyes.

“That’s what it looked like …” Saeko swallowed, letting the thought trail off incomplete. Outside on the sidewalk, several people had begun to scream. They too, it seemed, had taken a moment to process what had happened. Soon, a small crowd had gathered in front of the tree. Cries of “Call an ambulance!” rang through the air.

“Come on,” Hashiba urged, and at his prompting, Saeko began to walk forwards. But just as she did, the sight of another figure falling through the air rooted her to the spot. It was a man, small and thin, wearing a tracksuit. His hair was cropped short and was mostly gray. Even though she was too far away to see his face, somehow Saeko sensed that he was smirking slightly at her. She recognized that wrinkled face — it belonged to Seiji Fujimura.

Saeko found herself drained of the strength to continue walking. She grasped Hashiba’s arm.

“What’s wrong?” Hashiba turned to ask.

Saeko’s face was ashen. “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“You mean you …”

He hadn’t seen it. The realization sank in as Saeko registered Hashiba’s nonplussed expression. Her arm still looped through Hashiba’s, Saeko pressed both hands to her chest and stood quaking. The night air seemed to have grown suddenly chillier.

Just seconds ago, she had seen it as clear as day — whether it had been a ghost or a living soul, she didn’t know. But a man with a face identical to Seiji Fujimura’s had wafted slowly down to the ground as if to retrace the path of the body that had fallen a moment earlier. Or had it been the opposite? Perhaps the apparition had emerged from the body and floated up into the sky?

Had it fallen down to the ground, or risen up into the air? The vision had been so strange that Saeko wasn’t sure. Clearly, the figure she had seen had lacked the ordinary mass of a physical body.

In any case, Saeko felt an urgent need to get away. First, however, they would have to exit the building.

“Let’s go.” Saeko’s voice trembled as she grasped Hashiba’s hand and pulled him along.

Once outside, she turned immediately to the right, staring straight ahead as she tried to get away from the building. Even so, she glimpsed the feet of the fallen man through a gap in the flock of rubberneckers. The legs of the man’s tracksuit left his ankles exposed, and his bare feet were strangely white. He seemed to be lying face down, and his pale legs convulsed repeatedly, causing his toes to flap against the tree’s roots.

Saeko tried to look away, but as she did, she caught sight of the man’s hands. His shoulders seemed dislocated; his arms were bent at the elbows, and both hands lay next to his legs, palms up, at what would have normally been an impossible angle. The man’s hands also trembled with each convulsion, as if they were signaling to Saeko. If she placed her hands on her hips and let them shake with her body, they’d probably execute a similar dance. Bye, they seemed to be saying in a half-mocking tone.

No. Perhaps it was the opposite. Perhaps rather than bidding her farewell, Seiji was beckoning to her: Come, come …

The sensation of Seiji Fujimura standing by her bedside at the hospital in Ina, prodding the lump in her breast with his finger, came back to her. At any moment, those trembling hands seemed as if they might reach out towards her neckline again. She quickened her pace, dragging Hashiba away from the scene.

Given that he was a director at a TV station, Hashiba probably would have liked to stay longer at the scene of the incident to investigate. At the very least, he probably wanted to determine whether the fall had been a result of foul play or rather a suicide or accident. It might not yield a major news story, but it was likely to show up on the next day’s talk shows.

But Saeko was in no state to worry about that right now. In a haze of panic, her footsteps rang out loudly as she hurried off as quickly as possible, her gaze averted, pulling Hashiba along by the hand.

She needed something stronger than just beer or wine. Something to calm her nerves.

When she spotted a bar, Saeko shot Hashiba a pleading glance and pushed open the smoked-glass door.

It wasn’t until they were seated at the bar that she suddenly felt a twinge of embarrassment at having dragged him along so forcefully. Sighing deeply, she ordered a dark rum on the rocks to quell the emotional turmoil she was feeling.

“What’s come over you?” Hashiba leaned slightly backwards on his stool, taken aback by Saeko’s sudden transformation.

“Didn’t you see that?”

“See what?”

“The face of the person who fell.”

“Of course not! We were too far away for one thing, and for another he landed face down with his head half hidden in the tree roots.”

Hashiba was right. They had only seen the back of the falling man, and even when exiting the building, they had only glimpsed his form through a thick crowd of people at a distance of several meters. How could they possibly have seen who he was? And yet, Saeko knew. The image of Seiji Fujimura’s face was branded into her mind even if it hadn’t passed through her retinas. No matter how she tried to dismiss it, his visage refused to disappear.

In a single drag, Saeko downed half of her glass of rum.

“It was Seiji Fujimura. I’m absolutely sure of it,” she informed Hashiba.

Hashiba was reaching for his drink but froze with a choked exclamation of surprise. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he managed.

There were two solid reasons for his denial. For one thing, it would have been too bizarre a coincidence for someone Saeko and Hashiba both knew to happen to fall to his death right in front of them. For another, there was no way they could have seen the man’s face from where they had been. How could Saeko possibly know who it was?

But as he watched Saeko tremble with fright, Hashiba didn’t know what to think. Indeed, the man’s tracksuit had seemed familiar. And even from the back, the figure had borne something of a resemblance to Seiji Fujimura.

An ambulance’s siren pierced the silence, far away at first, but growing steadily closer.

“I’ll go have a look,” Hashiba said.

The bar where they were now seated was only a couple of hundred meters from the scene of the fall. If he ran, Hashiba would get there sooner than the ambulance. Perhaps he would be able to confirm the man’s identity.

Saeko wanted to know the truth, too. Moments ago, she had been too distressed to think of anything but getting away from the scene. But now that she’d had a moment to calm down, she wanted to get to the bottom of what she had seen.

Please, let it be just my imagination …

Saeko hoped she had been wrong somehow. She didn’t welcome the idea that the bizarre vision she’d had might actually reflect reality. Especially if that reality involved Seiji Fujimura.

She still remembered vividly how she’d felt in the hospital in Ina when she’d sensed someone crawling up to her bed in the middle of the night, and her terror when she’d realized that it was Seiji Fujimura. When she recalled how his fingers had probed her breast, she was overcome with the image of hundreds of earthworms slithering all over her body. When Seiji had handed her the key to the Fujimuras’ home, it had been warm from his body heat and damp from the sweat of his palm. She still had it in her handbag, wrapped in a tissue.

Saeko shuddered, trying to dispel the repugnant image.

I don’t want to be alone tonight, she realized.

She had no desire to spend another night in that state of terrified isolation she’d experienced in the hospital room. She wanted company — even her ex-husband would do. In her current state, if she tried to sleep alone, she knew she would be unable to distinguish reality from nightmare. She would be Seiji Fujimura’s helpless prey.

Please …

Just as Saeko pictured the face of the man she most wanted to remain by her side that night, it appeared in the doorway of the bar. Less than four minutes had elapsed since he’d shot out the door.

Hashiba wore an expression of deep consternation as he approached the counter and weakly set one hand on his stool.

“You were right,” he told her.

Instinctively, Saeko closed both eyes. Despite her fervent prayers, her bizarre vision had now been confirmed by another witness.

In confused tones, Hashiba recounted what he had just seen. But Saeko wasn’t listening. She didn’t have to. She remembered — the broken legs splayed at an unnatural angle, the two palms that seemed to beckon as they convulsed.

Her eyes still squeezed shut, Saeko’s hands searched the counter for her drink. Finding it, she downed the rest of her rum in a single drought. Only the ice cubes remained in her glass, clinking frigidly.

Hashiba continued. “At the moment, there’s no indication of foul play. He was probably tired of running from his debtors and threw himself off the roof of a building in despair. They didn’t know yet if he’s going to make it, but there’s no question that he’s in serious condition.”

Saeko released her glass and let her hand wander over to Hashiba’s stool to squeeze his hand. Cold and damp from holding her glass, her hand was quickly enveloped in Hashiba’s warmth. He responded by stroking the grooves between her fingers delicately with his fingertips.

I don’t want to let go of this hand tonight.

Saeko interlaced her fingers tightly around Hashiba’s, gripping them with surprising strength for a woman.

That evening, when Saeko took his hand tightly in hers, Hashiba had a hunch that he might wind up spending the night with her. But when she pulled him along, he didn’t realize they were headed for her apartment until she said, “Would you come home with me tonight?” Her speech was oddly rushed, as if to convince him that it was the drink talking.

After they left the bar and got into a taxi, Saeko directed the driver into a quiet residential neighborhood in Minato Ward. During the ride, and even as they emerged onto the sidewalk, Saeko made no move to release Hashiba’s hand. The strength of her grip seemed to convey a fear that he might run away if she didn’t hold on tightly enough.

But Hashiba didn’t have the slightest intention of running away. When he had invited Saeko to have dinner with him, he’d harbored a distant hope for this outcome.

When had Saeko begun to get under his skin? It seemed to Hashiba that she had first sparked his interest at the initial production meeting when she’d expressed herself in such a unique register. Ever since, his interest had escalated rapidly, into romantic desire. Saeko was completely different from any woman he’d ever met. Her manner of speaking — a mixture of worldliness and innocence — seemed fresh and original, and sometimes downright comical. And yet Saeko always seemed perplexed by his amusement, cocking her head to one side quizzically and following up with an even quainter string of expressions.

When Hashiba lay alone in his bed at night, he recalled Saeko’s words and expressions that day and basked in a cozy happiness. Thoughts of her seemed to melt away the stress of his job, and before he knew it he was drifting off into a peaceful slumber.

Hashiba had gotten the sense that Saeko might reciprocate his interest, but loath to give the impression of a director who hit on every woman in his path, he had made an effort to be very careful in how he approached her.

He hadn’t dared to dream that the object of his yearning would grant him such an unexpected boon.

Just a few meters from where the taxi had let them off, Saeko led Hashiba through an opening in the tall hedge that lined the sidewalk. When they turned the corner, a luxury apartment building opened its glass doors in welcome, looking for all the world like a five-star hotel. Enclosed on all sides only by thick plate glass windows, the lobby was completely visible from outside, and its chandeliers and the intricate glass sculptures shimmered like gemstones.

The courtyard between the building and hedge was densely landscaped, creating an oasis of greenery even in the heart of Tokyo. Constructed at the dawn of the bubble era, the building was more than two decades old, but there was no question that the magnificent twelve-story building was still the epitome of haute style.

Without the slightest hesitation, Saeko strode through the vestibule and opened the sealed doors with a card key. Hashiba followed along silently, his mind swirling with questions he was unable to voice.

In the courtyard, there was a fountain with a pool around it, cleverly designed so that the water extended into the interior of the lobby. Saeko and Hashiba were standing on a floor elevated just above the water’s surface. A water court, Hashiba believed it was called. The entire floor was built of strong glass that covered the shallow pool, so that it felt almost like walking across the surface of a frozen lake. Hashiba couldn’t imagine how much it cost just to maintain such an extravagant contrivance. From the paintings on the walls to the sculptures in the hallway, every aspect of the building gave off an air of dazzling sophistication.

As a director, Hashiba had visited the homes of numerous celebrities, but nothing he had seen before even approached the opulence this building exuded.

“Do you actually live here?” he asked, his face a mask of stupefaction.

Saeko simply nodded, stopping in the elevator hall.

Of the two elevators, the one on the left lacked floor-indicator lamps. Only after they entered it — Saeko inserted a card key to open its doors — did Hashiba realize that the elevator was exclusive to the penthouse apartment and connected it to an underground parking lot as well as the lobby.

Where is she taking me? Hashiba wondered, still completely dazed. His hand had gone limp in Saeko’s grasp.

He had a general idea of Saeko’s background. Her father had vanished when she was seventeen, and after college she had gone to work at a publishing company. She had quit upon marrying, only to divorce later without children. Now she supported herself as a freelance writer.

Those facts added up to an image of a tough divorcée struggling to make it on her own. Hashiba had imagined her living in a one-bedroom apartment at best, a cramped living space that doubled as an office with books and magazines stacked so densely you could hardly walk through it, a stark environment dominated by the smell of ink and paper. If not utter poverty, Hashiba had expected Saeko’s surroundings to reflect a hand-to-mouth existence.

Where is this going?

As he stepped out of the elevator, Hashiba’s feet sank into the deep pile of a lush crimson carpet that led straight down the hallway to a single door. Hashiba felt as if he were floating through water as he traversed this astonishing space to approach a heavy door.

Unable to disguise his amazement, he asked, “How long have you lived here?”

Once more, Saeko scanned her card key to open the sole apartment on the building’s top floor, ushering Hashiba in. “Since my first year of high school …”

Hashiba’s own apartment would probably have fit comfortably in the front entryway of Saeko’s home.

“How on earth …” he stammered.

“It’s hard to explain, so I don’t bring people here very often. Even my editor would be surprised to learn that I live in a place like this.”

“Well, who wouldn’t?”

“Does it, uh, bother you?” Saeko asked, her face completely serious.

“Of course not!”

“Well, good.”

Suddenly, Hashiba felt like he finally understood why Saeko always seemed so enigmatic. Her home was the last place you would imagine as a single thirtysomething woman’s.

“I just feel as if I’ve unraveled one of your mysteries,” Hashiba began, but before he could finish the thought, Saeko’s lips pressed against his mouth, silencing him. With an urgency that contrasted sharply with her usual grace, she wrapped both arms around his body and pulled him to her, pressing her groin against his thigh.

As their bodies cleaved together and their hands explored beneath each other’s jackets, the door automatically locked behind them.

Locked in embrace, Hashiba and Saeko stumbled and fell repeatedly as they crossed the floor of the vast living room, so spacious that Hashiba couldn’t imagine how many tatami mats would fill it. Kissing and clinging to each other as they moved sideways through the space like mating crabs, they laughed out loud with each tumble.

Having flung off each other’s clothes item by item, by the time they reached the bedroom and tumbled onto the bed Saeko was in her panties, stockings, and bra, and Hashiba was wearing just his briefs and socks.

The bewildering events of the day had only intensified their arousal. After the shocking revelations that had come to light in Kitazawa’s office, they had watched Seiji Fujisawa, the sole heir to the Fujisawa estate, plummet to the ground from a tall building before their very eyes. The sense that something extraordinary was afoot pricked at their skin like a needle-sharp arrow, pumping adrenaline into their bloodstreams. Still heady with that tension, their passion for each other seemed to flood the void of their apprehension.

It was a well-documented fact that the reproductive capacity of animals increased when their survival was at risk. Saeko and Hashiba’s lives hadn’t been directly threatened, but they could sense danger looming just ahead. The fact that they alone shared that information stoked their excitement, inflaming them with the passion of co-conspirators.

Hashiba lifted Saeko up and dropped her on the bed. Too frenzied to bother with the fasteners, he pushed her bra up and out of the way to expose her large nipples. They were already hard as he took them into his mouth and rolled them on his tongue. The tip of his nose brushed against her bra. As he inhaled the delicate scent of her skin, Hashiba reached around her back with one hand and unhooked her bra. Returning both hands to her breasts, he caressed them from underneath. One wouldn’t know it from her svelte appearance when she was clothed, but her breasts were unexpectedly round and plump.

Saeko slid her hand over Hashiba’s briefs, feeling his engorged member. With her hand positioned the way a runner in a relay race received a baton, it more than spanned the distance from her fingertips to her wrist, and its already-slippery tip had managed to poke its way out from under his waistband.

Saeko was careful not to stroke it too strongly. It throbbed in her hand as if it might explode at any moment, and Hashiba was already panting heavily. She wanted to make sure his erection lasted long enough to go where it was going. Although she still hadn’t seen it directly, her automatic reaction when she felt the shape of his penis in her hand was a rush of tenderness.

It happened just as Hashiba was stroking Saeko’s breasts from bottom to top. When his fingers reached the back of her left breast, the tips encountered a small lump, just around a centimeter in diameter. The sensation was a familiar one to him. Stunned, his fingers froze in their tracks.

The moment Hashiba’s fingers discovered the lump, Saeko knew. It was the exact spot that had been troubling her for the past several days.

As if the tiny lump in Saeko’s breast were a switch, touching it was like shutting down a machine.

Silently, the relentless flow of energy that had been mounting in Hashiba abruptly waned, and his hand hovered in the air as if to embody his unconscious withdrawal. It was as if the sensation in his fingertips traveled straight to his lower body without even checking in with his brain. As he struggled to catch his breath, Hashiba battled the sudden ebb of energy, but it was too late to reverse the flow as all of the vitality quickly drained out of his lower half.

As Hashiba lay flat on his stomach, Saeko tenderly stroked his head. It occurred to her that watching all of the vigor drain so suddenly from his swollen penis was rather like watching the tide go out at the beach. When the ocean receded, it exposed the sand underneath that was previously hidden by seawater, revealing patterns. The image on the wet sand was … Seiji Fujimura’s face, contorted by the paroxysms of death. The moment Hashiba’s fingers found the lump in her breast, the horrific image flashed into Saeko’s mind. She was assaulted by the memory of a man resembling Seiji fingering her breast in the hospital in Ina. She remembered what he had said as he’d fingered the lump.

“Keep this up, and you’ll be one of us soon enough.”

Yes. Something along those lines.

Hashiba’s mind was elsewhere. The sensation his fingertips had encountered was a familiar one, and the memory caused his enthusiasm to suddenly wane. His erection withered, just as Saeko’s juices also ceased to flow.

Since Hashiba’s transformation was more visible, he had more difficulty accepting what had happened. For a while he refused to give up, but it soon became clear that his efforts were in vain.

“It’s all right.” Saeko took his hand in hers and whispered softly into Hashiba’s ear, encouraging him to relax. Saeko thought she knew why his ferocious erection had wilted so suddenly. When he’d encountered the lump, the thought of breast cancer had dampened his libido. His concern for her health suggested that he cared about her. Viewed in that light, it was a welcome reaction.

Saeko was only half-right, and a long ways away from the depths of Hashiba’s thoughts.

She took Hashiba’s hand in hers and guided it back to the lump. “It’s probably mastitis, I think. I’ve been meaning to have it checked, but I’ve been so busy …” As she spoke, she stroked Hashiba’s head with her other hand.

“You should really at least have it checked.” Hashiba flipped over, facing upwards, and held Saeko’s hand as he stared vacantly at the ceiling. The dimmed lights illuminated the bedroom softly. Hashiba’s flaccid penis remained trapped in the elastic band of his briefs, and Saeko’s nipples were now soft as they peeked out from underneath her shifted bra. Suddenly conscious of their awkward state of undress, neither of them moved for several moments.

Once he’d regained his composure, the question that had baffled Hashiba earlier resurfaced in his mind: Why does she live in a place like this?

He asked, “So what did your father do, anyway?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’m interested.”

Saeko twisted her body sideways, peered at Hashiba’s face, and whispered, “Will you stay with me tonight?” Her question seemed to suggest that she wouldn’t mind telling Hashiba about her father but that she didn’t want him to leave when she was done.

Hashiba didn’t answer immediately. He paused, glancing at the clock on the bedside table. “Sure,” he agreed after a moment.

Why had he hesitated? Saeko wondered what the brief pause signified. If he were single, wouldn’t he have answered immediately? If he were married, on the other hand, he was more likely to take a longer time answering while he thought up an excuse to give his wife or a reason to decline the invitation. The implication of a slight pause was harder to glean and Saeko wasn’t sure what to think.

“Are you married?” she ventured, cutting straight to the chase. For all of her apprehension and worry, when the time came, she found it easy enough to ask the question.

She did try to sound as offhanded as possible, but her body language told a different story. She gripped the sheet tightly in both fists, and she gazed fixedly at Hashiba, as if pleading for salvation.

Hashiba met her gaze, but he pulled back ever so slightly. “No. I’m single.”

His tone was resolute, with no hint of falsehood. Saeko had no intention of interrogating him further. The reality of his pronouncement sank in slowly, filling her with a mixture of relief and happiness. Suddenly, she became aware that tears were welling up in the corners of her eyes, and she blotted them furtively against the sheet so that Hashiba wouldn’t notice.

Thank you. She sent a message of gratitude not to Hashiba, but to whatever being had granted her prayers.

Saeko retrieved two pairs of pajamas by the wardrobe next to the bed and handed one to Hashiba. Her relief had left her pleasantly sleepy. After a few more words of conversation, they both drifted off into sleep, their breathing deep and even.

After a while — Saeko had no idea how long — she felt herself briefly awaken. Instinctively she reached out to make sure Hashiba was there. Relieved, she was about to fall back asleep when she heard voices coming from the other room.

They were coming from the television set, that much was clear. There was nobody else on the same floor, after all. She must have left it on in the living room. She had a habit of switching the TV on the moment she got home and entered the living room, so it wasn’t completely out of the ordinary. On the other hand, she had no memory of turning it on that night. Perhaps she had hit the remote control as she had stumbled into the room, locked in Hashiba’s passionate embrace?

The room was quiet now except for Hashiba’s deep, even breathing. The heavy sash windows completely insulated them from the sounds of the city outside, as if they were floating in a gigantic underwater capsule. The faraway sound of the television chatter seemed like bubbles floating up to the surface from the bottom of the ocean.

Each time a bubble burst, Saeko could hear the words. The snatches of conversation were disjointed and hard to comprehend, but as she pieced together more of the fragments she came to understand that the broadcast was about an emergency situation of some sort.

But before an alarm bell could sound in Saeko’s mind she had drifted back to sleep.

There was just one locked door at the penthouse where Saeko lived.

Saeko and Hashiba woke up at the same time, just after seven the next morning. When Hashiba asked Saeko about her father once more, she took a key from the bedside table and led him to the door of the locked room.

She had sealed it off when she had married and her husband had moved in. After their divorce, it hadn’t occurred to her to unlock it. The spacious 500-square-meter flat included the living and dining rooms and six bedrooms. Keeping one of the rooms locked made it easier to keep up with the cleaning.

The quickest way to explain who Saeko’s father had been to Hashiba would be to show him this room. The sleeves of her baggy pajamas were so long that they extended past her fingertips as she held up the keychain with a single key attached and waved it slowly in Hashiba’s view.

“This was my father’s study.”

“You keep it locked?”

“My ex-husband wanted it that way.”

“Why?”

“It bothered him, I guess — having my father’s presence intrude on our lives. So he wanted me to keep it locked. That’s what he said, anyway.” Saeko twirled the key around her finger like a gunman spinning a revolver.

Perhaps her marriage would have lasted longer if they’d moved to a new place. Her husband had proposed it a number of times. He’d often complained that the apartment possessed a creepy atmosphere that was hard to describe. But Saeko couldn’t leave behind the home where she had lived with her father. It would have required her to admit that he wasn’t coming back.

“That’s weird. There’s something abnormal about you two.” You two, he’d said, pointing at Saeko. He was referring to Saeko and her father, of course. As far as Saeko was concerned, her ex-husband had been the strange one. But looking back on it now, perhaps she and her father really had been abnormal.

More than anything, she didn’t want Hashiba to feel that way about her.

“I guess I can understand that,” Hashiba mumbled, half lost in thought.

Saeko was in the midst of unlocking the door when he spoke. She froze and turned to look at him, mistaking his comments as an expression of sympathy for her ex-husband. “Why is that?” she demanded.

“Well, sometimes our sense of a person is even more striking in their absence. It sort of relates to the disappearances we’ve been investigating,” he answered.

And with that, he began to recount an experience he’d had in elementary school. Saeko leaned against the door as she listened to his story.

“I was born in Mishima, Shizuoka, but we moved to Mitaka, Tokyo when I was just a baby. We moved back to Mishima when I was in fourth grade. I started school there in September, right as it was starting back up after summer vacation. On my first day, they had me stand at the front of the classroom and introduce myself. At recess time, a boy with delicate features and pale skin came up and put his arm around me like we were old friends. He seemed fascinated by the idea that I was from Tokyo, and he kept asking me about life in the big city. I gave him the best answers I could come up with, and before I knew it he was inviting me to come over to his house to hang out. He seemed a bit strange to me, but I was new and I didn’t have any friends, so that day after school I took him up on his invitation.

“His house was in a quiet residential neighborhood behind the Mishima Taisha shrine. The main house was a newish western-style two-story building. But in front of the house, on the same lot, there stood an old-fashioned, one-story shack. It was surrounded by trees, and the area around it was dark and shadowy. It looked like an old woodcutter’s shack from a storybook, and it caught my eye, the way it contrasted so sharply with the fancy modern western house on the same property.

“That day, all we did was play chess and watch TV, but we got along well and from that day on, we hung out pretty frequently. Whenever I went over to his house, I wondered about the shack, and eventually I asked him what it was for.

“Right away, his face clouded over. He lowered his voice. ‘Don’t ever, ever go in there!’ he warned me.

“Naturally, I wanted to know why.

“He acted like that was the dumbest question in the world. ‘Why?’ he repeated, sounding exasperated. ‘You mean I never told you? My crazy old grandfather lives alone in there. He’s a total psycho. Don’t ever go near there unless you want him to break your neck.’

“He told me various stories to illustrate his point. The old man used chopsticks to pick the dead flies off of flypaper and collect them in a glass pot. He hated animals, and whenever a stray wandered too close, he put on wooden sandals and kicked it as hard as he could. The old man had killed two stray cats and a dog that way, my friend said. The old man also kept an air rifle by his porch and used it to shoot down crows when the mood struck him. The only thing he ate was rice with canned enoki mushrooms. He muttered to himself constantly. My friend’s mother left his meals for him on a tray in his front entryway, and the old man devoured them in minutes. It didn’t take him long, since all he ate was white rice and canned mushrooms, and he always returned his dirty dishes on the tray right where he had found them. For months, nobody in my friend’s family had seen the old man’s face. Even my friend’s mother had only heard his muffled mumblings when she left him his meals …

“As I listened to my friend’s story, a vivid image of the old man began to form in my mind. How he lived in that dark, dirty shack, rarely bathing, the hems of his garments grimy with dirt. A foul-smelling, unpredictable eccentric who should be avoided at all costs. A dangerous maniac.

“Whenever I went over to my friend’s house, I had to pass by the old man’s shack. I avoided it as best I could, but whenever I thought I heard a noise from inside, I bolted at top speed.

“My friend was good at his studies, slightly mischievous, and enjoyed teasing people. He was brilliant at coming up with ideas for new games. He was a lot of fun to hang out with, and he taught me lots of new things, so I spent a lot of time at his house, even though I was afraid of the old man in the shack.

“For two-and-a-half years, up until the time when my friend was accepted to a private junior high school in Tokyo, I spent a lot of time at his house. As far as I knew, his grandfather continued to live in the shack, though I never actually saw him. But when the wind riffled through the leaves of the trees, I could almost hear the old man gnashing his teeth. My heart pounded with terror when I imagined the old man bursting out of his house, shouting at the top of his lungs, his hair wild and messy, his tattered garments fluttering.

“Just once, I saw the old man for myself before my friend left for his private school in Tokyo.

“That day, the sky was just beginning to grow dusky as we played catch out on the lawn in the yard. My friend threw the ball and I missed it, allowing it to roll right into the half-open doorway of the shack. I remember freezing in my tracks, terrified. I looked at my friend and gulped with apprehension.

“My friend seemed amused by my fear of his grandfather. He made no move to retrieve the ball and instead shot me a challenging look as if to say, ‘You missed the ball — you go get it.’ He had a faint smirk on his face, and he stood watching me patronizingly with his arms crossed as though he were a grown-up and I was just a kid.

“You know how boys are. We’d do anything to avoid being called a coward or a sissy. I was supposed to go over to the shack like it was no big deal, slip inside, and get the ball. So I summoned all my courage and set out towards the shack, but I was so terrified I could barely walk. Still, I was determined not to let on to my friend how scared I was. Resolving to just get it over with as quickly as possible, I crept through the door into the front entryway and looked for the ball. Inside, the smell of earth was stronger than in the yard. The air was dank and chilly. My heart was pounding.

“The ball had stopped just at the threshold where the flooring began. It was right next to a pair of carefully placed wooden sandals, their toes stubby with wear. Those are the sandals the old man must have worn when he killed the strays, I thought. Just then, right as I was reaching for the ball, a grimy pair of feet stepped into the sandals. Their toes and their tops were pasty white, and the toenail of the little toe on each side was a gnarled lump. Two ankles peeked out from underneath a disheveled kimono, revealing a gigantic mole right on the bony protuberance of one ankle bone. I looked up, too terrified even to speak.

“There he stood, exactly as I had imagined him. In the dim light of the entryway, he wore a dingy kimono and his face was bleary and lifeless. With a vacant stare, his jaw pumped up and down, as if he were trying to speak, and food dribbled out of it. For the first and last time in my life, my legs completely gave out. I crumpled to the floor, landing on my rear and supporting myself with my hands behind me. My throat seized up and I couldn’t find my voice to call out to my friend.

“The old man raised one foot and kicked the ball towards me. It rolled straight towards my hand. Somehow, I managed to pick it up and crawl back out of the house. Then I ran, stumbling, out into the yard where my friend was waiting. At this point, I was way past the point of worrying about looking cool. I didn’t care who called me a wimp. I dropped to all fours in the grass, panting like an animal.

“My friend knelt down next to me. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. His smirk was gone, as was the arrogant stance. In fact, he seemed vaguely frightened as he placed a hand on my shoulder.

“ ‘I … I saw your grandfather,’ I finally managed to say.

“My friend looked up towards the old hut and was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘You couldn’t have.’

“ ‘He rolled the ball back to me with the toe of his sandal!’ I insisted, tossing the ball over as proof.

“My friend twisted sideways, dodging the throw.

“ ‘He couldn’t have!’ he said again, this time more forcefully.

“I didn’t get it. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

“ ‘He doesn’t exist. It was just a story.’

“ ‘What are you talking about?’

“ ‘My grandfather died long before I was born. We just use that shed for storage. Nobody lives in there,’ he told me.

“My friend apologized for lying to me and explained the circumstances. In kindergarten, he’d often had friends over to play. They always thought the shed was a great playhouse, and they were always messing things up inside. But there were valuable ceramic pots and such stored in the shed, and my friend’s father had told him, ‘You’re welcome to have your friends over to play, but I don’t want you kids messing around in that shed. If any of those ceramic pieces ever gets broken, you’re going to have to pay for them.’

“Desperate, my friend came up with the idea of pretending that his grandfather lived there. He figured it was the best way to keep his friends from going near it. At first it was just a simple lie, but over time he started to flesh it out, adding details about his grandfather’s idiosyncrasies. Those quirks became more and more exaggerated, and the old man developed into a creepy character. Before long, he had fabricated the perfect scarecrow to ward off mischievous playmates from exploring the shed.

“When he had finished explaining, my friend and I slowly approached the hut. We had to make sure that there really was no old man in there, of course. At this point, I think my friend was actually more frightened than I was. I guess I was already starting to understand what I’d experienced.

“There was nobody inside. My friend and I peeked in through the front door and listened, but we didn’t hear anything. And there were no wooden sandals there, either. It was slightly comical, seeing my friend so afraid of the phantom he’d invented …”

Hashiba had been leaning against the wall, but as he finished his story, he straightened up and placed one hand on the wall just next to Saeko’s head.

“Do you know what I think it was? For two-and-a-half years, I completely believed the story about the grandfather in the shed. Based on the information my friend had given me, I’d developed a complete mental picture of the old man. He didn’t exist, and of course I never saw him. But that made him all the more real to me. My imagination gave birth to and fed this being, fleshing him out, filling in the image of his terrifying face.

“And then when I went after the ball, in a panic, I actually came face to face with this figment of my imagination. It was a bit of a hallucination, I suppose. No wonder the phantom old man looked exactly the way I’d imagined him.

“Now, suppose things had gone differently. Suppose I had never learned the truth. My friend would have gone away to his junior high school in Tokyo. The grandfather would no longer have a reason to exist, and my friend would have tried to expunge him. ‘One day, my grandfather up and took off,’ he would have told us. ‘Nobody knows what happened to him.’

“Then we would have investigated the shed and found nobody there. As far as we were concerned, his grandfather would now be a missing person. The person who had lived in the hut all that time had disappeared. It would never have occurred to us that he hadn’t existed in the first place.

“Since we’ve been investigating these missing persons cases, every now and then, I wonder: did the Fujimura family really live in that house in Takato to begin with? I know it sounds crazy. But maybe we won’t be able to solve this mystery unless we question the assumptions we take for granted.”

Saeko was reminded of the debate between Einstein and Bohr.

“So the Moon exists when we’re observing it and doesn’t when we aren’t?”

With that extreme formulation of the Copenhagen Interpretation, Einstein had denied the possibility that things only existed if there was someone there to observe them. On a quantum level, it sometimes appeared that the mind of the observer influenced the state of the object. It was the interplay that mattered; Saeko herself had considered the possibility that the world was built through its interaction with a cognizing subject.

“I wonder if the ability to cause a wave function to collapse merely by observing it is an ability unique to human beings,” she pondered aloud.

“A wave function?” Hashiba echoed. He didn’t seem to be familiar with the term.

“It’s the role of psi in Shroedinger’s equation. A quantum wave is just an elusive probability until the moment we observe it, at which point it collapses and makes its whereabouts known.”

A slightly distant look came into Hashiba’s eyes.

Oh, great. Now I’ve done it, Saeko realized immediately.

“What are you, some kind of physics whiz?” he asked.

“I’m no whiz. But I guess I was more familiar with physics growing up than most kids,” Saeko replied.

“I don’t understand relativity or quantum dynamics, but that’s never been a problem for me,” Hashiba noted. Saeko picked up on a note of irony and resentment in his tone.

Most people acted surprised when they learned that Saeko had a strong grasp of physics. Growing up in an environment where math and physics were discussed every day, Saeko didn’t realize how unique her education had been until she started to encounter men who acted stunned and alienated by her knowledge.

Rather than trying to explain her background to Hashiba, Saeko figured the quickest thing would be to show him her father’s study. She rapped on the door with her knuckles.

“For now, allow me to show you the old shed at my house,” she suggested, turning the key in the lock and pushing open the door.

How long had it been since she’d last entered this room? Four years, five? Saeko no longer remembered exactly when she’d sealed it off. Was it when she and her husband had married? Or when they’d first started living together? In any case, at this point, the room had been locked for longer than her marriage had lasted.

As the door opened, a green eddy of scents flooded their nostrils. Saeko could identify her father’s smell in the mix. He wasn’t a phantom. He had definitely existed. And this room had been his sanctuary.

Floor-to-ceiling bookcases took up two-thirds of the room. The aluminum shelves stood in five rows, extending from the wall near the door all the way to the windows. They were packed tightly with double rows of books, and their comb-like formation made even the vast room feel claustrophobic. The entire place was packed with a suffocating quantity of books.

The morning sun poured in through the green plastic slats of the blinds hung over the windows, giving the interior a dark green tinge.

Hashiba stepped inside. “Was your father an author?”

“Well, not exactly …” Saeko weaved through the bookshelves to the windows, raised the blinds, and opened the sashes. Immediately, cold air and sunlight streamed in. As the air in the room changed, the stopped hands on the clock of time once again began to move.

The opposite end of the L-shaped room was her father’s workspace, and his desk wasn’t visible from the door. At the very far end was a sofa bed he’d used for naps. At any moment, Saeko felt as if her father’s leather chair might creak and spin towards them, his legs appearing around the edge of the wall.

Whenever Saeko entered the room, her father leaned way back in his chair to peer towards the entrance. When he spotted Saeko, he would spin his chair around and rise to his feet. No matter how absorbed he was in his work, he always welcomed his daughter’s presence. With that in mind, Saeko was careful not to come knocking without a good reason. She didn’t want to interrupt her father’s work unless it was absolutely necessary.

Leaving Saeko to her memories, Hashiba walked up and down the length of the room several times, trying to get a sense of its former occupant.

“What did your father do?” he asked again.

Hashiba’s voice sounded far away. Whenever Saeko spoke to someone about her father, her voice didn’t feel like her own. It was like the ringing you heard in your ears when you yawned — as if there were a shutter door closing off her inner ear and opening up a narrow passageway into a different space. If her father were dead, she would probably have felt differently. But the possibility that he might still be alive somewhere made her feel the need to maintain this narrow passage to wherever he was.

When she talked to Hashiba about her father, Saeko felt as though someone else were doing the talking. When she thought about it, nobody knew who her father truly was. Saeko’s image of him was the polar opposite of the way his employees saw him. From her point of view, her father was a gentle, loving, pleasant person. But as far as his subordinates were concerned, he was a barbarian, quick to fly into a rage over the smallest mistake. Both were accurate descriptions of different sides of his character. Saeko could only explain her father to Hashiba as she had known him.

Saeko’s father, Shinichiro Kuriyama, had been a rare phenomenon in that he had possessed the attributes of both scholar and businessman, characteristics often considered to be in opposition. Rather than systematically mastering a specific field, he’d taken an interest in everything under the sun, from mathematics, physics, philosophy and astronomy to evolution, biology, sociology, religion, astrology, history, archaeology, and psychology. Well versed in all of these fields, he was probably best characterized as a natural historian.

As an undergraduate he’d majored in mathematics but had switched to philosophy in graduate school. On a scholarship awarded by a newspaper publisher, he had studied abroad in Europe. That was where he’d encountered the book that would change his life.

The summer Shinichiro was twenty-four years old, he came across it by chance in the Oxford book store in the U.K. It was called The Plumed Serpent.

As it happened, Shinichiro wound up purchasing the book quite by accident. Based on the title, Shinichiro had taken it to be the novel by D. H. Lawrence and brought the book up to the register without even leafing through it. It wasn’t until he’d returned to his boarding house that he realized his mistake; he’d purchased a different book by the same title. The author’s name was printed in tiny letters beneath the title: O. H. Wolles — a not entirely dissimilar name. According to the author bio, Wolles was a professor of archaeology at the University of London. Despite his encyclopedic knowledge, Shinichiro wasn’t familiar with the professor’s work. But when he delved into the book, he found himself completely captivated. It dealt with mysteries of ancient history, a topic that fascinated him and captured his imagination. Far from a bestseller, however, the book was barely known even in the U.K.

I want to translate this book into Japanese, Shinichiro realized. He wasn’t confident the book would sell well in Japan. Nonetheless, he felt that somehow, translating the book into Japanese was his mission.

After completing his two-year course of study overseas, Shinichiro returned to Japan and approached all of the major publishers with his translated manuscript. During his time abroad, he had met directly with the author and received permission to publish the translation. All he had to do now was find a publisher who wanted to print it. He tried cold calls and he tried using connections, but the response was always lukewarm. It was unclear whether the editors had actually even read the manuscript, as they all responded noncommittally that they didn’t see much of a market for it. On the other hand, they never turned it down outright. The general implication of their attitude was that they weren’t interested in publishing the book but also didn’t want another publisher to put it out and wind up with a bestseller.

If only they would give him a clear yes or no, Shinichiro would have been able to consider his next move. But when they simply kept him on hold for months on end, he felt that his time was simply being wasted. Frustrated, he made up his mind to drop out of graduate school, launch his own publishing house, and put out the book himself.

He borrowed money from his mother to launch the business and recruited a young editor who had been fascinated by the manuscript but whose boss had forced him to reject it. Soon Shinichiro had established an incorporated company and set about acquiring a publisher’s code.

The following year, just as Shinichiro, deeply in debt, was poised to publish his translation, the gods bestowed upon him a completely unforeseen blessing. Back in the U.K., scientific evidence for a theory proposed by Wolles’ had emerged, and the news spread quickly around the world.

Ruins of an ancient civilization had been unearthed at a particular location in South America, precisely where Wolles had predicted them to be in The Plumed Serpent. His hypothesis had been right on the mark.

In the nineteenth century, the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann had theorized that the epics of Homer were based on historical fact. He had postulated that the legendary ancient city of Troy had been located in Hissarlik, in northern Turkey, resulting in the excavation of a treasure trove of relics from the early Bronze Age. Now, the media descended on Wolles, heralding him as a modern-day Schliemann, lauding his achievement. The book wherein he had penned his theories—The Plumed Serpent—soon began to fly off the shelves in Europe.

When Shinichiro’s translation hit the bookshelves in Japan, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The press were all over him. Suddenly Shinichiro was the man of the hour, the twenty-six-year-old grad-school dropout with the astonishing foresight to discover a brilliant treatise, translate it, and publish it himself. His impressive initiative was widely supported and admired by the younger generation.

Bolstered by all of the free publicity, sales of the book drove reprint after reprint. Before long, the book had sold over a million copies. Meanwhile, Shinichiro developed a personal friendship with Wolles beyond that of author and translator, and Wolles granted him the exclusive right to publish all of his works. Wolles explained his devotion to Shinichiro thus: “Even with little prospect that the book would sell, he recognized its value and invested his energies in its translation. Intuition of that caliber is rare.”

With a staff of just three people, the publishing house was off to a strong start from the beginning. They quickly released Wolles’ next book, then followed up with the rapid release of a succession of nonfiction works dedicated to mysteries of the natural world. Each book achieved bestseller status, and the company grew rapidly with the help of Shinichiro’s stellar managerial skills.

The company’s profit margin was high given that the president himself performed the translations. Soon Shinichiro had paid off his debts, and the company never again saw a drop of red ink. To that end, Shinichiro personally took on Herculean feats. He slept only two or three hours per night, managing his company during the day and holing up in his office at night to fashion new manuscripts. Everyone around him was astounded by the superhuman amount of work he accomplished.

Meanwhile, in his private life, Shinichiro got married, had a daughter, and lost his wife, all in the same year.

When he married his college sweetheart three years after establishing the company, she was already pregnant. During childbirth, however, an accident claimed the young bride’s life, and Saeko lost her mother the day she was born.

The singular tragedy rocked Shinichiro’s success-filled world. Overcome by grief, for several months he was unable to muster the will to put down a single word. Meanwhile, he found himself utterly smitten by the baby daughter who had come into the world just as his wife had left it. As a single parent, with the help of various babysitters, he managed to bring her up healthy and strong. Saeko’s existence gave him new vitality and sparked an interest in developing educational materials, a field he had never before even considered.

From around the time Saeko began elementary school, Shinichiro explained the principles of natural and social science to her in easy-to-understand terms. Whenever he could, he took her with him on his information-gathering trips, visiting historical relics, temples, and famous sites around the world and teaching her everything he could. Whether or not she understood was not the crucial point. Teaching Saeko became Shinichiro’s greatest pleasure. His company indeed began to publish educational materials for young learners.

By its tenth year, Shinichiro supervised more than fifty employees and had realized his dream of acquiring a dedicated building for his business. He had translated seventeen volumes and penned six original texts of his own.

Thanks to his books and translations, Shinichiro’s personal income had grown to a tremendous level, and he now ranked among the richest men in his business.

The year Shinichiro vanished was his company’s twentieth year in operation. At that point, it employed 150 people and boasted sales of 50 billion yen per year. It had grown into a well-established mid-sized publishing house.

But, the board of executives included, every last employee was well aware that Shinichiro Kuriyama was the person that made the company what it was. When they lost their powerhouse president, the board made a decision to shut the business down before its operations went downhill and they wound up in the red. They put the company’s accounts in order, and the employees all found posts at other publishing houses.

A trusted lawyer managed Shinchiro’s personal assets. The accounts were held at a trust bank, and even Saeko wasn’t sure of their total worth. She certainly had no need to work, but she didn’t write to pay the bills. It satisfied her curiosity and gave her a reason to live and a way to fill her days with something meaningful. There was nothing she loved more than finding a topic that fascinated her, learning it, and expressing it in her own words.

As he listened to Saeko’s account, Hashiba realized he had a vague memory of Shinichiro Kuriyama’s name and face. “I remember now. I had no idea he was your father! I think I was in my second year of high school, near the end of summer vacation. For days on end, the talk shows went on and on about the mysterious disappearance of the golden boy of the publishing world! That was your father, huh? I didn’t realize.” Hashiba spoke excitedly, punching one fist into the opposite palm.

Then suddenly, he seemed to remember where he was and quickly assumed a more somber expression. Shinichiro’s disappearance was a tragic event in Saeko’s life. The fact that her father was famous and that Hashiba had heard of him was no reason for levity.

Hashiba turned his gaze to the bookshelves. Immediately, he noticed a book that Shinichiro Kuriyama had authored. He pulled it off the shelf and read the title: The Landscape of Evolution. It was, in fact, a volume he’d read long ago. As he thumbed through the pages and skimmed the table of contents, Hashiba began to remember its content.

Since the dawn of life on earth, organisms had gone through many landmark events. Bacteria and other prokaryotes had given rise to the more complex and advanced eukaryotes. Photosynthesis had developed, increasing the oxygen content in the atmosphere. Life on earth had experienced an explosion of diversification during the Cambrian Period. The first land animals had emerged from the sea. The dinosaurs had gone extinct. All of it led up to the rise of modern humankind, with our capacity for language and sophisticated cognitive abilities.

Shinichiro highlighted these landmark events of the evolutionary process, describing the prehistoric world so vividly that it almost seemed as if he had traveled through time and witnessed it with his own eyes. The sales copy for the book characterized it as “a scientific primer for young people.”

“I read this when I was in high school,” Hashiba said, his gaze nostalgic.

“He had me read it too, of course. Probably around the same time,” Saeko replied. She couldn’t help feeling somehow pleased that Hashiba had been a fan of her father’s work.

“Wow, it’s so great that you got to read books by your own father. Wait, don’t tell me you were the very first reader?”

“No. That honor was always reserved for his editor. My father never liked me to read the galley proofs — by the time I was in high school, I never saw them.”

“How come?”

“It really bothered him if I said anything negative about the manuscript. For some reason, he really took everything I said to heart. He said that if I expressed so much as the slightest criticism, it made him want to change everything around.”

Despite his cantankerous, despotic attitude toward his subordinates, Shinichiro had been so sensitive to his daughter’s opinions that he would slave away and rewrite his manuscripts. The memory of that childlike, endearing tendency brought a smile to Saeko’s lips.

“Does that mean you never saw the manuscript he was working on when he vanished?”

“Right. I never read it.”

“That’s too bad.”

After her father’s disappearance, Saeko had searched for his final manuscript. Portable word processors were the norm in that day, and Shinichiro had just recently adopted their use. But Saeko could locate no hard copy version of his latest nor a floppy disk containing the file.

“But now and then, he would discuss bits and pieces of what he was working on. He said that discussing his ideas with me helped him organize his thoughts and figure things out. Whenever he got an idea, he always pulled out his day planner and jotted it down …” Saeko trailed off.

“What is it?”

“His day planner! It might give us an idea of what he was working on.” Saeko clapped, remembering the agenda book she had found at the Fujimura residence. It was still in her handbag. Her father had carried his planner at all times, but his handwriting was so terrible that it would require a great deal of time and patience to decode. Nonetheless, if they were looking for specific information, it was quite possible they might be able to find it.

Saeko returned to the bedroom, located the planner in her handbag, and brought it back to the study.

“Mind if I have a look?” Hashiba asked.

“Please.” Saeko handed it to him.

Immediately, Hashiba was surprised by its weight. It was a size larger than the average agenda book and bound with a real leather cover. The year 1994 was stamped in gold lettering on its front, and overall it gave off a stately air.

Peeking inside, Hashiba saw that the pages were covered in writing all the way until late August. After that, the entries were spotty. In addition to using it to keep track of his schedule, it seemed Shinichiro had used it to jot down notes and ideas.

As he leafed through the pages, Hashiba immediately noticed something strange. When the book was open to the middle pages, he felt something unnatural about the way the pages fell open. He closed and reopened the book several times, trying to figure out what it was.

That was when he first noticed the strange ridges under the book’s cover.

“Oh!” he exclaimed and removed the cover. Something slipped out and tumbled to the floor, landing soundlessly on the carpet.

Hashiba retrieved the fallen object and held it up at eye level. It was a 3.5-inch floppy disk. Like the day planner, its label read “1994.” There was no need to double-check: the handwriting clearly matched Shinichiro’s.

For a few moments, Hashiba and Saeko stood staring at the floppy, turning it this way and that without speaking.

“Could this be …” Hashiba began.

“… my father’s last manuscript?” Saeko finished the thought.

Shinichiro had purchased several portable word processors to use at his office, vacation home, and so forth. When he traveled for work he brought one with him so that he could write wherever he was. Of course he had kept a floppy with him at all times.

No wonder Saeko had never been able to find it. The disk had been tucked into the cover of Shinichiro’s day planner, and the day planner had been at the Fujimuras’ home in Takato.

“I don’t suppose we could open the file on a computer,” Hashiba mused. Nowadays, there weren’t a lot of word processors around anymore. But if they wanted to read the manuscript, they would need to open it on an old word processor and print it out.

Saeko approached a shelf near the window and drew open a lace curtain. Behind it sat a stately black word processor, a relic from another era. “First things first. Let’s open the file,” she proposed.

Saeko found the cord of the long-defunct machine and plugged it into an electrical outlet. When she pressed the power button, the machine emitted a faint beep as it whirred to life, words streaming onto its long, narrow monitor.

Perched on a stool, Saeko worked carefully. It was the first time she’d ever touched her father’s word processor, and the ancient machine was tricky to operate.

Saeko offered up a little prayer as she gingerly opened the documents and scrolled through them. The floppy contained fourteen files, each roughly ten pages long. Each page was approximately 800 characters long — handwritten, it would amount to roughly 300 pages of writing. It wasn’t long enough to comprise an entire volume. Shinichiro’s manuscripts had always been between 500 and 800 pages. Clearly, this manuscript was unfinished. The content on the disk was probably less than half of what Shinichiro had planned to write.

The word processor’s screen only displayed half a page at a time, and the resolution was terrible. They would definitely need a hard copy if they wanted to read the text.

Saeko entered the print command. She checked that the ink ribbon was in place and inserted the first blank page. When she pressed the Enter key, the machine languidly began printing the text, line by line, at an appallingly slow tempo by modern standards. It was so slow it was almost ridiculous, and yet there was no other option.

By the time a few pages had finished printing, Saeko figured Hashiba had grasped the process. “Can you take it from here?” she asked.

“Sure. No sweat.”

“Would you mind standing in, then? I’ll prepare us some coffee and a simple breakfast.”

“Leave it to me.”

Saeko stood up, and Hashiba took her place on the stool as the word processor slowly churned out the fourth page.

As Saeko closed the door to her father’s study behind her, the sound of the word processor printing grew muffled. Its high-pitched chirp reminded her of an insect’s song, growing ever fainter as she walked down the hallway.

The clock on the wall read eight-fifty. Since they’d risen just after seven, that meant Saeko and Hashiba had spent over an hour in her father’s study.

Saeko knew Hashiba hadn’t planned on staying over here last night. She wondered if he needed to be at the station soon. What time did he normally wake up and go to work? She was well aware that many media men didn’t begin operations early in the morning, but she also didn’t want Hashiba to be late to work on her account.

As Saeko crossed through the living room on her way to the dining room, she stopped suddenly in her tracks. The 50-inch liquid crystal television set against the wall was on. The volume was low, and the channel was tuned to a morning talk show.

Suddenly, Saeko remembered hearing the television last night. Its sounds had reached her just as she was drifting off to sleep, even though she had no recollection of turning it on. She had fallen asleep wondering why it was on but hadn’t given it another thought since. Now, however, looking at the screen, Saeko began to recall the snatches of sound she’d heard last night. She had imagined the voices rising up from the bottom of the ocean in little bubbles, bursting at the surface to deliver fragments of information. She hadn’t succeeded in piecing it together into a cohesive narrative, but the little she had heard had filled her with a sense of foreboding.

As she remembered the wariness she’d felt the night before, Saeko forgot about making coffee and stood stock still in front of the television. Ever since her father’s disappearance, she’d taken to picking up the remote and clicking the TV on the moment she entered the apartment. She felt uneasy all alone in the penthouse apartment, and before she knew it, turning the TV on had become an unconscious habit.

Her ex-husband had admonished her about it on numerous occasions, scolding, “Don’t leave the TV on if you aren’t even going to watch it!”

Saeko agreed with him on a theoretical level. But despite herself, she couldn’t seem to break the habit.

“Hey! You’ve got me for company, don’t you?” Exasperated by the implication that his presence did little to mitigate Saeko’s loneliness, her husband had actually flung the remote at her once.

So it was entirely within the realm of possibility that Saeko had once again clicked the TV on last night without even realizing it. But she was sure about one thing: the circumstances last night had been unusual. She and Hashiba had embraced the moment they’d stepped through the front door and had remained entangled in each other’s arms as they’d staggered through the living room before collapsing onto the bed. Was she really so pitiful that she had switched on the TV even as she and Hashiba had passionately explored each other’s bodies, feverishly focused on the act? That would be painful evidence of how badly Saeko’s father’s disappearance had scarred her even after all this time.

Saeko gazed despondently at the screen, focused more on her own thoughts than on the images being displayed. But after a few moments, her mind began to zero in on the topic of the television program. Something about it had caught her eye.

A female reporter stood in front of the ocean, talking in an urgent tone. “Yesterday, in this herb garden by the sea, an extraordinary incident took place.” A white station wagon passed slowly behind the reporter, followed by several other cars. They all traveled at a sluggish pace — evidently the road was crowded, even though it was a weekday.

In the background, the ocean was placid, but on the left side of the screen, a steep, rocky cliff plunged into the sea at a dramatic angle, and the water was slightly frothy where the waves lapped against its base. The microphone picked up the whir of helicopter blades — they weren’t visible on screen, but from the sound of it several choppers were circling overhead.

Saeko recognized the landscape behind the reporter instantly. It was just a few kilometers south of Atami on Route 135. Having visited her paternal grandparents’ home in Atami frequently as a child, Saeko knew the area well.

What happened in Atami?

Saeko picked up the remote and turned up the volume.

As the word processor languidly spat out each page, Hashiba had plenty of time to read the manuscript. When the seventeenth page finished printing, he fed the next clean page into the machine and stood up with the sheaf of pages he’d finished reading.

Saeko still hadn’t returned to the study after leaving to make coffee. If breakfast was ready, perhaps he should just come out into the dining room to eat. But more importantly, he was in a hurry to let Saeko know what the manuscript was about. Shinichiro had been writing a book about mysterious group disappearances.

There had been many such unsolved disappearances in history. In the seventh century, a group of Mayans living in present-day Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras had vanished without explanation. The number of people who disappeared was not known. In 1590, one hundred and twenty English colonists vanished without a trace from Roanoke Island, south of Norfolk in North America. In 1711, during the War of the Spanish Succession, every last member of a four thousand-man expedition into the Pyrénées went missing, despite the troops’ familiarity with the area. In 1923, the 605 residents of the Joya Verde settlement on the Amazon River disappeared in a single day. In 1980, four thousand indigenous inhabitants had vanished from their villages in Central Africa. Their disappearance was also accompanied by an inexplicable decline in wildlife populations in the area.

Other examples included the Marie Celeste ghost ship mystery, and the sudden disappearances of airplanes and ships in the area between Miami, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda — otherwise known as the Bermuda Triangle.

Thus, various group disappearances had taken place all over the world, affecting anywhere from several dozen to several thousand people at once. In each of these cases, not a single body was ever found, nor were there any signs of conflict or violence.

The manuscript seemed to be an exploration of these historical incidents, and an attempt to offer a personal interpretation of the mysteries. In other words, Shinichiro had been working on a book about unsolved group disappearances when he himself mysteriously vanished. Could it be a simple coincidence?

Hashiba headed for the dining room. He had to tell Saeko.

He found her in front of the television.

“I found out what your father was writing about,” Hashiba announced, waving the sheaf of papers at Saeko, who stood listlessly in front of the screen.

Saeko didn’t respond. She stared absently at the television, looking completely stunned. Hashiba turned towards the screen as well, following Saeko’s gaze.

A female reporter spoke shrilly, her microphone clenched in one hand. “Yesterday afternoon at two o’clock, at an herb garden three kilometers south of Atami, nearly all of the visitors were reported missing. Presently, the exact number of visitors is not known but is estimated to be roughly one hundred.”

The pitch of the whirring helicopters elevated a notch, perhaps due to an increase in altitude. The reporter hunched her shoulders against the cold while a group of boys standing behind her excitedly flashed peace signs at the camera.

The reporter’s expression was tense, but she wasn’t fully cognizant of the weight of the situation. It was clear from her face that she was intentionally trying to dramatize the bizarre situation to stir up interest. She didn’t really believe that a hundred people had just vanished off the face of the earth. There had to be some mistake. Perhaps some religious cult had staged the incident to create a stir. Before long, someone would get to the bottom of the mystery …

But Hashiba and Saeko knew better. They both experienced the same flash of intuition: the group disappearance in Atami was the latest and greatest in a string of mysterious cases.

After all, they had seen the relief map in Kitazawa’s office the night before. They had taken in the geographical details of the American West Coast and Japan on the full-color maps. And they both knew: Atami was located right on top of the giant subterranean rift at the intersection of the Eurasian and Philippine Sea Plates.