Ring

1

September 5, 1990, 10:49 pm, Yokohama

A row of condominium buildings, each fourteen stories high, ran along the northern edge of the housing development next to the Sankeien garden. Although built only recently, nearly all the units were occupied. Nearly a hundred dwellings were crammed into each building, but most of the inhabitants had never even seen the faces of their neighbors. The only proof that people lived here came at night, when windows lit up.

Off to the south the oily surface of the ocean reflected the glittering lights of a factory. A maze of pipes and conduits crawled along the factory walls like blood vessels on muscle tissue. Countless lights played over the front wall of the factory like insects that glow in the dark; even this grotesque scene had a certain type of beauty. The factory cast a wordless shadow on the black sea beyond.

A few hundred meters closer, in the housing development, a single new two-story home stood among empty lots spaced at precise intervals. Its front door opened directly onto the street, which ran north and south, and beside it was a one-car garage. The home was ordinary, like those found in any new housing development anywhere, but there were no other houses behind or beside it. Perhaps owing to their inconvenience for transport links, few of the lots had been sold, and For Sale signs could be seen here and there all along the street. Compared to the condos, which were completed at about the same time and which were immediately snapped up by buyers, the housing development looked quite lonely.

A beam of fluorescent light fell from an open window on the second floor of the house onto the dark surface of the street below. The light, the only one in the house, came from the room of Tomoko Oishi. Dressed in shorts and a white T-shirt, she was slouched in a chair reading a book for school; her body was twisted into an impossible position, legs stretched out toward an electric fan on the floor. Fanning herself with the hem of her T-shirt to allow the breeze to hit her bare flesh, she muttered about the heat to no one in particular. A senior at a private girls’ high school, she had let her homework pile up over the summer vacation; she had played too much, and she blamed it an the heat. The summer, however, hadn’t really been all that hot. There hadn’t been many clear days, and she hadn’t been able to spend nearly as much time at the beach as she did most summers. And what’s more, as soon as vacation was over, there were five straight days of perfect summer weather. It irritated Tomoko: she resented the clear sky.

How was she supposed to study in this stupid heat?

With the hand she had been running through her hair Tomoko reached over to turn up the volume of the radio. She saw a moth alight on the window screen beside her, then fly away somewhere, blown by the wind from the fan. The screen trembled slightly for a moment after the bug had vanished into the darkness.

She had a test tomorrow, but she was getting nowhere. Tomoko Oishi wasn’t going to be ready for it even if she pulled an all-nighter.

She looked at the clock. Almost eleven. She thought of watching the day’s baseball wrap-up on TV. Maybe she’d catch a glimpse of her parents in the infield seats. But Tomoko, who desperately wanted to get into college, was worried about the test. All she had to do was get into college. It didn’t matter where, as long as it was a college. Even then, what an unfulfilling summer vacation it had been! The foul weather had kept her from having any real fun, while the oppressive humidity had kept her from getting any work done.

It was my last summer in high school. I wanted to go out with a bang and now it’s all over. The end.

Her mind strayed to a meatier target than the weather to vent her bad mood on.

And what’s with Mom and Dad anyway? Leaving their daughter all alone studying like this, covered in sweat, while they go gallivanting out to a ball game. Why don’t they think about my feelings for a change?

Someone at work had unexpectedly given her father a pair of tickets to the Giants game, and so her parents had gone to Tokyo Dome. By now it was almost time for them to be getting home, unless they’d gone out somewhere after the game. For the moment Tomoko was home alone in their brand-new house.

It was strangely humid, considering that it hadn’t rained in several days. In addition to the perspiration that oozed from her body, a dampness seemed to hang in the air. Tomoko unconsciously slapped at her thigh. But when she moved her hand away she could find no trace of the mosquito. An itch began to develop just above her knee, but maybe it was just her imagination. She heard a buzzing sound. Tomoko waved her hands over her head. A fly. It flew suddenly upwards to escape the draft from the fan and disappeared from view. How had a fly got into the room? The door was closed. Tomoko checked the window screens, but nowhere could she find a hole big enough to admit a fly. She suddenly realized she was thirsty. She also needed to pee.

She felt stifled-not exactly like she was suffocating, but like there was a weight pressing down on her chest. For some time Tomoko had been complaining to herself about how unfair life was, but now she was like a different person as she lapsed into silence. As she started down the stairs her heart began to pound for no reason. Headlights from a passing car grazed across the wall at the foot of the stairs and slipped away. As the sound of the car’s engine faded into the distance, the darkness in the house seemed to grow more intense. Tomoko intentionally made a lot of noise going down the stairs and turned on the light in the downstairs hall.

She remained seated on the toilet, lost in thought, for a long time even after she had finished peeing. The violent beating of her heart still had not subsided. She’d never experienced anything like this before. What was going on? She took several deep breaths to steady herself, then stood up and pulled up her shorts and panties together.

Mom and Dad, please get home soon, she said to herself, suddenly sounding very girlish. Eww, gross. Who am I talking to?

It wasn’t like she was addressing her parents, asking them to come home. She was asking someone else…

Hey. Stop scaring me. Please…

Before she knew it she was even asking politely.

She washed her hands at the kitchen sink. Without drying them she took some ice cubes from the freezer, dropped them in a glass, and filled it with coke. She drained the glass in a single gulp and set it on the counter. The ice cubes swirled in the glass for a moment, then settled. Tomoko shivered. She felt cold. Her throat was still dry. She took the big bottle of coke from the refrigerator and refilled her glass. Her hands were shaking now. She had a feeling there was something behind her. Some thing-definitely not a person. The sour stench of rotting flesh melted into the air around her, enveloping her. It couldn’t be anything corporeal.

“Stop it! Please!” she begged, speaking aloud now.

The fifteen-watt fluorescent bulb over the kitchen sink flickered on and off like ragged breathing. It had to be new, but its light seemed pretty unreliable right now. Suddenly Tomoko wished she had hit the switch that turned on all the lights in the kitchen. But she couldn’t walk over to where the switch was. She couldn’t even turn around. She knew what was behind her: a Japanese-style room of eight tatami mats, with the Buddhist altar dedicated to her grandfather’s memory in the alcove. Through the slightly open curtains she’d be able to see the grass in the empty lots and a thin stripe of light from the condos beyond. There shouldn’t be anything else.

By the time she had drunk half the second glass of cola, Tomoko couldn’t move at all. The feeling was too intense, she couldn’t be just imagining the presence. She was sure that something was reaching out even now to touch her on the neck.

What if it’s…? She didn’t want to think the rest. If she did, if she went on like that, she’d remember, and she didn’t think she could stand the terror. It had happened a week ago, so long ago she’d forgotten. It was all Shuichi’s fault- he shouldn’t have said that… Later, none of them could stop. But then they’d come back to the city and those scenes, those vivid images, hadn’t seemed quite as believable. The whole thing had just been someone’s idea of a joke. Tomoko tried to think about something more cheerful. Anything besides that. But if it was… If that had been real… after all, the phone did ring, didn’t it?

… Oh, Mom and Dad, what are you doing?

“Come home!” Tomoko cried aloud.

But even after she spoke, the eerie shadow showed no signs of dissipating. It was behind her, keeping still, watching and waiting. Waiting for its chance to arrive.

At seventeen Tomoko didn’t know what true terror was. But she did know that there were fears that grew in the imagination of their own accord. That must be it. Yeah, that’s all it is. When I turn around there won’t be anything there. Nothing at all.

Tomoko was seized by a desire to turn around. She wanted to confirm that there was nothing there and get herself out of the situation. But was that really all there was to it? An evil chill seemed to rise up around her shoulders, spread to her back, and began to slither down her spine, lower and lower. Her T-shirt was soaked with cold sweat. Her physical responses were too strong for it to be just her imagination.

… Didn’t someone say your body is more honest than your mind?

Yet, another voice spoke too: Turn around, there shouldn’t be anything there. If you don’t finish your coke and get back to your studies there’s no telling how you’ll do on the test tomorrow.

In the glass an ice cube cracked. As if spurred by the sound, without stopping to think, Tomoko spun around.

September 5, 10:54 pm

Tokyo, the intersection in front of Shinagawa Station The light turned yellow right in front of him. He could have darted through, but instead Kimura pulled his cab over to the curb. He was hoping to pick up a fare headed for Roppongi Crossing; a lot of customers he picked up here were bound for Akasaka or Roppongi, and it wasn’t uncommon for people to jump in while he was stopped at a light like this.

A motorcycle nosed up between Kimura’s taxi and the curb and came to a stop just at the edge of the crossing. The rider was a young man dressed in jeans. Kimura got annoyed by motorcycles, the way they wove and darted their way through traffic like this. He especially hated it when he was waiting at a light and a bike came up and stopped right by his door, blocking it. And today, he had been hassled by customers all day long and was in a foul mood. Kimura cast a sour look at the biker. His face was hidden by his helmet visor. One leg rested on the curb of the sidewalk, his knees were spread wide, and he rocked his body back and forth in a thoroughly slovenly manner.

A young lady with nice legs walked by on the sidewalk. The biker turned his head to watch her go by. But his gaze didn’t follow her the whole way. His head had swiveled about 90 degrees when he seemed to fix his gaze on the show window behind her. The woman walked on out of his field of vision. The biker was left behind, staring intently at something. The “walk” light began to flash and then went out. Pedestrians caught in the middle of the street began to hurry, crossing right in front of the taxi. Nobody raised a hand or headed for his cab. Kimura revved the engine and waited for the light to turn green.

Just then the biker seemed to be seized by a great spasm, raising both arms and collapsing against Kimura’s taxi. He fell against the door of the cab with a loud thump and disappeared from view.

You asshole.

The kid must’ve lost his balance and fallen over, thought Kimura as he turned on his blinkers and got out of the car. If the door was damaged, he intended to make the kid pay for repairs. The light turned green and the cars behind Kimura’s began to pass by into the intersection. The biker was lying face up on the street, thrashing his legs and struggling with both hands to remove his helmet. Before checking out the kid, though, Kimura first looked at his meal ticket. Just as he had expected, there was a long, angling crease in the door panel.

“Shit!” Kimura clicked his tongue in disgust as he approached the fallen man. Despite the fact that the strap was still securely fastened under his chin, the guy was desperately trying to remove his helmet-he seemed ready to rip his own head off in the process.

Does it hurt that bad?

Kimura realized now that something was seriously wrong with the rider. He finally squatted down next to him and asked, “You all right?”

Because of the tinted visor he couldn’t makeout the man’s expression. The biker clutched at Kimura’s hand and seemed to be begging for something. He was almost clinging to Kimura. He said nothing. He didn’t try to raise the visor. Kimura jumped to action.

“Hold on, I’ll call an ambulance.”

Running to a public telephone, Kimura puzzled over how a simple fall from a standing position could have turned into this. He must have hit his head just right.

But don’t be stupid. The idiot was wearing a helmet, right? He doesn’t look like he broke an arm or a leg. I hope this doesn’t turn into a pain in the ass… It wouldn’t be too good for me if he hurt himself running into my car.

Kimura had a bad feeling about this.

So if he really is hurt, does it come out of my insurance? That means an accident report, which means the cops. …

When he hung up and went back, the man was lying unmoving with his hands clutching his throat. Several passers-by had stopped and were looking on with concerned expressions. Kimura pushed his way through the people, making sure everybody knew it had been he who had called the ambulance.

“Hey! Hey! Hang in there. The ambulance is on its way.” Kimura unfastened the chin strap of the helmet. It came right off: Kimura couldn’t believe how the guy had been struggling with it earlier. The man’s face was amazingly distorted. The only word that could describe his expression was astonishment. Both eyes were wide open and staring and his bright-red tongue was stuck in the back of his throat, blocking it, while saliva drooled from the corner of his mouth. The ambulance would be arriving too late. When his hands had touched the kid’s throat in removing his helmet, he hadn’t felt a pulse. Kimura shuddered. The scene was losing reality.

One wheel of the fallen motorcycle still spun slowly and oil leaked from the engine, pooling in the street and running into the sewer. There was no breeze. The night sky was clear, while directly over their heads the stoplight turned red again. Kimura rose shakily to his feet, clutching at the guardrail that ran along the sidewalk. From there he looked once more at the man lying in the street. The man’s head, pillowed on his helmet, was bent at nearly a right angle. An unnatural posture no matter how you looked at it.

Did I put it there? Did I put his head on his helmet like that? Like a pillow? For what?

He couldn’t recall the past several seconds. Those wide-open eyes were looking at him. A sinister chill swept over him. Lukewarm air seemed to pass right over his shoulders. It was a tropical evening, but Kimura found himself shivering uncontrollably.

2

The early morning light of autumn reflected off the green surface of the inner moat of the Imperial Palace. September’s stifling heat was finally fading. Kazuyuki Asakawa was halfway down to the subway platform, but suddenly had a change of heart: he wanted a closer look at the water he’d been looking at from the ninth floor. It felt like the filthy air of the editorial offices had filtered down here to the basement levels like dregs settling to the bottom of a bottle: he wanted to breathe outside air. He climbed the stairs to the street. With the green of the palace grounds in front of him, the exhaust fumes generated from the confluence of the No. 5 Expressway and the Ring Road didn’t seem so noxious. The brightening sky shone in the cool of the morning.

Asakawa was physically fatigued from having worked all night, but he wasn’t especially sleepy.

The fact that he’d completed his article stimulated him and kept his brain cells active. He hadn’t taken a day off for two weeks, and planned to spend today and tomorrow at home, resting up. He was just going to take it easy-on orders from the editor-in-chief.

He saw an empty taxi coming from the direction of Kudanshita, and he instinctively raised his hand. Two days ago his subway commuter pass from Takebashi to Shinbaba had expired, and he hadn’t bought a new one yet. It cost four hundred yen to get to his condominium in Kita Shinagawa from here by subway, while it cost nearly two thousand yen to go by cab. He hated to waste over fifteen hundred yen, but when he thought of the three transfers he’d have to make on the subway, and the fact that he’d just gotten paid, he decided he could splurge just this once.

Asakawa’s decision to take a taxi on this day and at this spot was nothing more than a whim, the outcome of a series of innocuous impulses. He hadn’t emerged from the subway with the intention of hailing a cab. He’d been seduced by the outside air at the very moment that a taxi had approached with its red “vacant” lamp lit, and in that instant the thought of buying a ticket and transferring through three separate stations seemed like more effort than he could stand. If he had taken the subway home, however, a cer-tain pair of incidents would almost certainly never have been connected. Of course, a story always begins with such a coincidence.

The taxi pulled to a hesitant stop in front of the Palaceside Building. The driver was a small man of about forty, and it looked like he too had been up all night, his eyes were so red. There was a color mug shot on the dashboard with the driver’s name, Mikio Kimura, written beside it.

“Kita Shinagawa, please.”

Hearing the destination, Kimura felt like doing a little dance. Kita Shinagawa was just past his company’s garage in Higashi Gotanda, and since it was the end of his shift, he was planning to go in that direction anyway. Moments like this, when he guessed right and things went his way, reminded him that he liked driving a cab. Suddenly he felt like talking.

“You covering a story?”

His eyes bloodshot with fatigue, Asakawa was looking out the window and letting his mind drift when the driver asked this.

“Eh?” he replied, suddenly alert, wondering how the cabby knew his profession.

“You’re a reporter, right? For a newspaper.”

“Yeah. Their weekly magazine, actually. But how did you know?”

Kimura had been driving a taxi for nearly twenty years and he could pretty much guess a fare’s occupation depending on where he picked him up, what he was wearing, and how he talked. If the person had a glamorous job and was proud of it, he was always ready to talk about it.

“It must be hard having to be at work this early in the morning.”

“No, just the opposite. I’m on my way home to sleep.”

“Well, you’re just like me then.”

Asakawa usually didn’t feel much pride in his work. But this morning he was feeling the same satisfaction he’d felt the first time he’d seen an article of his appear in print. He’d finally finished a series he’d been working on, and it had drawn quite a reaction.

“Is your work interesting?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Asakawa, noncommit-tally. Sometimes it was interesting and sometimes it wasn’t, but right now he couldn’t be bothered to go into it in detail. He still hadn’t forgotten his disastrous failure of two years ago. He could clearly remember the title of the article he’d been working on:

“The New Gods of Modernity.”

In his mind’s eye he could still picture the wretched figure he had cut as he’d stood quaking before the editor-in-chief to tell him he couldn’t go on as a reporter.

For a while there was silence in the taxi. They took the curve just left of Tokyo Tower at a considerable speed. “Excuse me,” said Kimura, “should I take the canal road or the No. 1 Keihin?” One route or the other would be more convenient depending on where they were going in Kita Shinagawa.

“Take the expressway. Let me out just before Shinbaba.”

A taxi driver can relax a bit once he knows precisely where his fare is going. Kimura turned right at Fuda-no-tsuji.

They were approaching it now, the intersection Kimura had been unable to put out of his mind for the past month. Unlike Asakawa, who was haunted by his failure, Kimura was able to look back at the accident fairly objectively. After all, he hadn’t been responsible for the accident, so he hadn’t had to do any soul-searching because of it. It was entirely the other guy’s fault, and no amount of caution on Kimura’s part could have warded it off. He’d completely overcome the terror he had felt. A month… was that a long time? Asakawa was still in thrall to the terror he’d known two years ago.

Still, Kimura couldn’t explain why, every time he passed this place, he felt compelled to tell people about what had happened. If Kimura glanced in his rearview mirror and saw that his fare was sleeping then he would give up, but if not, then he’d tell every passenger without exception everything that had occurred. It was a compulsion. Every time he’d go through that intersection he was overcome by a compulsion to talk about it.

“The damnedest thing happened right here about a month ago…”

As though it had been waiting for Kimura to begin his story, the light in the intersection changed from yellow to red.

“You know, a lot of strange things happen in this world.”

Kimura tried to catch his passenger’s interest by hinting in this way at the nature of his story. Asakawa had been half-asleep, but now he lifted his head suddenly and looked around him frantically. He had been startled awake by the sound of Kimura’s voice and was now trying to figure out where they were.

“Is sudden death on the increase these days? Among young people, I mean.”

“Eh?” The phrase resonated in Asakawa’s ears. Sudden death… Kimura continued.

“Well, it’s just that… I guess it was about a month ago. I’m right over there, sitting in my cab, waiting for the light to change, and suddenly this motorbike just falls over on me. It wasn’t like he was moving and took a spill-he was standing still, and suddenly, wham! And what do you think happened next? Oh, the driver, he was a prep school kid, 19 years old. He died, the idiot. Surprised the hell out of me, I can tell you that. So there’s an ambulance, and the cops, and then my cab-he’d banged into it, see. Quite a scene, I tell ya.”

Asakawa was listening silently, but as a ten-year veteran reporter he’d developed an intuition about things like this. Instinctively, he made note of the driver’s name and the name of the cab company.

“The way he died was a little weird, too. He was desperately trying to pull off his helmet. I mean, just trying to rip it off. Lying on his back and thrashing around. I went to call the ambulance and by the time I got back, he was stiff.”

“Where did you say this happened?” Asakawa was fully awake now.

“Right over there. See?” Kimura pointed to the crossing in front of the station. Shinagawa Station was located in the Takanawa area of Minato Ward. Asakawa burned this fact into his memory. An accident there would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the Takanawa precinct. In his mind he quickly worked out which of his contacts could give him access to the Takanawa police station. This was when it was nice to work for a major newspaper: they had connections everywhere, and sometimes their ability to gather information was better than the police bureau’s.

“So they called it sudden death?” He wasn’t sure if that was a proper medical term. He asked in a hurry now, not even realizing why this accident was striking such a chord with him…

“It’s ridiculous, right? My cab was totally stopped. He just went and fell on it. It was all him. But I had to file an accident report, and I came this close to having it show up on my insurance record. I tell ya, it was a total disaster, out of the blue.”

“Do you remember exactly what day and time this all happened?”

“Heh, heh, you smell a story? September, lemme see, fourth or fifth must’ve been. Time was just around eleven at night, I think.”

As soon as he said this, Kimura had a flashback. The muggy air, the pitch-black oil leaking from the fallen bike. The oil looked like a living thing as it crept toward the sewer. Headlamps reflected off its surface as it formed viscous droplets and soundlessly oozed into the street drain. That moment when it had seemed like his sensory apparatus had failed him. And then the shocked face of the dead man, head pillowed on his helmet. What had been so astonishing, anyway?

The light turned green. Kimura stepped on the gas. From the back seat came the sound of a ballpoint pen on paper. Asakawa was making notes. Kimura felt nauseated. Why was he recalling it so vividly? He swallowed the bitter bile that had welled up and fought off the nausea.

“Now what did you say the cause of death was?” asked Asakawa.

“Heart attack.”

Heart attack? Was that really the coroner’s diagnosis? He didn’t think they used that term anymore.

“I’ll have to verify that, along with the date and time/’ murmured Asakawa as he continued to make notes. “In other words, there were absolutely no external injuries?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely none. It was just the shock. I mean… I’m the one who oughta be shocked, right?”

“Eh?”

“Well, I mean… The stiff, he had this look of complete shock on his face.”

Asakawa felt something click in his mind; at the same time a voice in him denied any connection between the two incidents. Just a coincidence, that’s all.

Shinbaba Station on the Keihin Kyuko light-rail line loomed up in front of them.

“At the next light turn left and stop there, please.”

The taxi stopped and the door opened. Asakawa handed over two thousand-yen notes along with one of his business cards. “My name’s Asakawa. I’m with the Daily News. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to hear about this in more detail later.”

“Okay by me,” said Kimura, sounding pleased. For some reason, he felt like that was his mission.

“I’ll call you tomorrow or the day after.”

“Do you want my number?”

“Never mind. I wrote down the name of your company. I see it’s not far away.”

Asakawa got out of the taxi and was about to close the door when he hesitated for a moment. He felt an unnameable dread at the thought of confirming what he’d just heard. Maybe I’d better not stick my nose into anything funny. It could just be a replay of the last time. But now that his interest had been aroused, he couldn’t just walk away. He knew that all too well. He asked Kimura one last time:

“The guy-he was struggling in pain, trying to get his helmet off, right?”

3

Oguri, his editor, scowled as he listened to Asakawa’s report. Suddenly he was remembering what Asakawa had been like two years ago. Hunched over his word processor day and night like a man possessed, he’d labored at a biography of the guru Shoko Kageyama, incorporating all his research and more. Something wasn’t right about him then. So bedeviled was he that Oguri had even tried to get him to see a shrink.

Part of the problem was that it had been right then. Two years ago the whole publishing industry had been caught up in an unprecedented occult boom. Photos of “ghosts” had swamped the editorial offices. Every publisher in the country had been deluged with accounts and photographs of supernatural experiences, every one of them a hoax. Oguri had wondered what the world was coming to. He had figured that he had a pretty good handle on the way the world worked, but he just couldn’t think of a convincing explanation for that kind of thing. It was utterly preposterous, the number of “contributors” that had crawled out of the woodwork. It was no exaggeration to say that the office had been buried daily by mail, and every package dealt with the occult in some way. And it wasn’t just the Daily News company that was the target of this outpouring: every publisher in Japan worthy of the name had been swept up in the incomprehensible phenomenon. Sighing over the time they were wasting, they’d made a rough survey of the claims. Most of the submissions were, predictably, anonymous, but it was concluded that there was no one out there who was sending out multiple manuscripts under assumed names. At a rough estimate, this meant that about ten million different individuals had sent letters to one publisher or another. Ten million people! The figure was staggering. The stories themselves weren’t nearly as terrifying as the fact that there were so many of them. In effect, one out of ten people in the country had sent something in. Yet not a single person in the industry, nor their families and friends, was counted among the informants. What was going on? Where were the heaps of mail coming from? Editors everywhere scratched their heads. And then, before anyone could figure it out, the wave began to recede. The strange phenomenon went on for about six months, and then, as if it had all been a dream, editorial rooms had returned to normal, and they no longer received any submissions of that nature.

It had been Oguri’s responsibility to determine how the weekly of a major newspaper publisher should react to all this. The conclusion he came to was that they should ignore it scrupulously. Oguri strongly suspected that the spark which had set off the whole thing had come from a class of magazines he routinely referred to as “the rags”. By running readers’ photos and tales, they’d stoked the public’s fever for this sort of thing and created a monstrous state of affairs. Of course Oguri knew that this couldn’t quite explain it all away. But he had to approach the situation with logic of some sort.

Eventually the editorial staff from Oguri on down had taken to hauling all this mail, unopened, to the incinerator. And they dealt with the world just the way they had, as if nothing untoward were happening. They maintained a strict policy of not printing anything on the occult, turning a deaf ear to the anonymous sources. Whether or not that did the trick, the unprecedented tide of submissions began to ebb. And, of all times, it was then that Asakawa had foolishly, recklessly, run around pouring oil on the dying flames.

Ogurivfixed Asakawa with a dour gaze. Was he going to make the same mistake twice?

“Now listen, you.” Whenever Oguri couldn’t figure out what to say, he started out like this. Now listen, you.

“I know what you’re thinking, sir.”

“Now, I’m not saying it’s not interesting. We don’t know what’ll jump out at us. But, look. If what jumps out at us looks anything like it did that other time, I won’t like it very much.”

Last time. Oguri still believed that the occult boom two years ago had been engineered. He hated the occult for all he’d gone through on account of it, and his bias was alive and kicking after two years.

“I’m not trying to suggest anything mystical here. All I’m saying is that it couldn’t have been a coincidence.”

“A coincidence. Hmm…” Oguri cupped a hand to his ear and once again tried to sort out the story.

Asakawa’s wife’s niece, Tomoko Oishi, had died at her home in Honmoku at around 11 p.m. on the fifth of September. The cause of death was “sudden heart failure”. She was a high school senior, only seventeen. On the same day at the same time, a nineteen-year-old prep school student on a motorcycle had died, also of a cardiac infarction, while waiting for a light in front of Shinagawa Station.

“It sounds to me like nothing but coincidence. You hear about the accident from your cab driver, and you remember your wife’s niece. Nothing more than that, right?”

“On the contrary,” Asakawa stated, and paused for effect. Then he said, “The kid on the motorcycle, at the moment he died, was struggling to pull off his helmet.”

“… So?”

“Tomoko, too-when her body was discovered, she seemed to have been tearing at her head. Her fingers were tightly entwined in her own hair.”

Asakawa had met Tomoko on several occasions. Like any high school girl, she paid a lot of attention to her hair, shampooing it every day, that sort of thing. Why would a girl like that be tearing out her precious hair? He didn’t know the true nature of whatever it was that had made her do that, but every time Asakawa thought of her pulling desperately at her hair, he imagined some sort of invisible thing to go along with the indescribable horror she must have felt.

“I don’t know… Now listen, you. Are you sure you’re not coming at this with preconceptions? If you took any two incidents, you could find things in common if you looked hard enough. You’re saying they both died of a heart attack. So they must have been in a lot of pain. So she’s pulling at her hair, he’s struggling with his helmet… It actually sounds pretty normal to me.”

While he had to recognize that this was a possibility, Asakawa shook his head. He wasn’t going to be defeated so easily.

“But, sir, then it would be the chest that hurt. Why should they be tearing at their heads?”

“Now listen, you. Have you ever had a heart attack?”

“Well… no.”

“And have you asked a doctor about it?”

“About what?”

“About whether or not a person having a heart attack would tear at his head?”

Asakawa fell silent. He had, in fact, asked a doctor. The doctor had replied, I couldn^rt rule it out. It was a wishy-washy answer. After all, the opposite sometimes happens. Sometimes when a person experiences a cerebral hemorrhage, or bleeding in the cerebral membrane, they feel stomach discomfort at the same time as a headache.

“So it depends on the individual. When there’s a tough math problem, some people scratch their heads, some people smoke. Some people may even rub their bellies.” Oguri swiveled in his chair as he said this. “The point is, we can’t say anything at this stage, can we? We don’t have space for that stuff. You know, because of what happened two years ago. We won’t touch this kind of thing, not lightly. If we felt fine about specu-lating in print, then we could, of course.”

Maybe so. Maybe it was just like his editor said, it was a freak coincidence. But still-in the end the doctor had just shaken his head. He’d pressed the doctor-do heart attack victims really pull out their own hair? And the doctor had just frowned and said, Hmmm. His look said it all: none of the patients he’d seen had acted like that.

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

At the moment there was nothing to do but retreat meekly. If he couldn’t discover a more objective connection between the two incidents, it would be difficult to convince his editor. Asakawa promised himself that if he couldn’t dig up anything, he’d just shut up and leave it alone.

4

Asakawa hung up the phone and stayed there like that for a while, motionless, his hand still on the receiver. The sound of his own unnecessarily excited voice, hanging on the other person’s reaction, still echoed in his ears. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to be able to do this. The person on the other end had taken the phone from his secretary with a suitably pompous tone, but as he’d listened to Asakawa’s proposal the tone of his voice had softened somewhat. At first he’d probably thought Asakawa was calling about advertising. Then he’d done some quick calculating and realized the potential profit in having an article written profiling him.

The “Top Interview” series had begun running in September. The idea was to spotlight a CEO who had built up his company on his own, focusing on the obstacles he’d overcome and how. Considering that he’d actually succeeded in getting an appointment to do the interview, Asakawa should have been able to hang up the phone with a little more satisfaction. But something weighed on him. All he’d hear from this philistine were the same old corporate war stories, boasts about what a genius he was, how he’d seized his opportunities and clawed his way to the top… If Asakawa didn’t thank him and stand up to leave, the tales of valor would go on forever. He was sick of it. He detested whoever had come up with this project. He knew, all too well, that the magazine had to sell ad space to survive, and that this kind of article laid the necessary groundwork for that. But Asakawa himself didn’t much care if the company made money or lost it. All that mattered to him was whether or not the work was engaging. No matter how easy a job was physically, if it didn’t involve any imagination, it usually ended up exhausting you.

Asakawa headed for the archives on the fourth floor. He needed to do some background reading for the interview tomorrow, but more than that, there was something that was bothering him. The idea of an objective, causal relationship between those two incidents fascinated him. And then he remembered. He didn’t even know how to begin, but a certain question had come to him in the furtive moment that his mind had wrested free of the voice of the philistine.

Were these two inexplicable sudden deaths indeed the only ones that had occurred at 11 p.m. on September 5th?

If not-that is, if there had been other, similar, incidents-then the chances of them being a coincidence were practically nil. Asakawa decided to take a look at the newspapers from early September. Part of his job was reading the newspaper meticulously. But in his case, he usually read only the headlines in the local news section, so there was more than just a chance that there was something he’d missed. He had a feeling there had been. He had the feeling that about a month ago, in the corner of a page in the local news section, he’d seen an odd headline. It had been a small article, on the lower left-hand page… All he remembered was where it had appeared. He remembered reading the headline and thinking, hey, but then someone from the desk had called to him, and he’d gotten so distracted by work that he never actually read the article.

With the buoyancy of a child on a treasure hunt, Asakawa began his search with the morning edition from September 6th. He was certain he’d find a clue. Reading month-old newspapers in the gloomy archives was giving him a sort of psychological uplift he never got from interviewing a philistine. Asakawa was much more cut out for this kind of thing than for running around on the beat dealing with people of all sorts.

The September 7th evening edition-that’s where the article was, in just the position he’d remembered it being. Squeezed into a corner by news of a shipwreck that had claimed 34 lives, the article took up even less space than he’d recalled. No wonder he had overlooked it. Asakawa took off his silver-rimmed glasses, buried his face in the newspaper, — and pored over the article.

This was all there was to the article, but Asakawa felt like he had a bite. First of all, the girl who died was seventeen and attended a private girls’ school in Yokohama, just like his niece Tomoko. The guy who rented the car was nineteen and a prep school student, just like the kid who died in front of Shinagawa Station. The estimated time of death was virtually identical. Cause of death unknown, too.

There had to be some connection among these four deaths. It couldn’t take too long to establish definitive commonalities. After all, Asakawa was on the inside of a major news-gathering organization-he wasn’t lacking for sources of information. He made a copy of the article and headed back to the editorial office. He felt like he’d just struck gold, and his pace quickened of its own accord. He could barely wait for the elevator.

The Yokosuka City Hall press club. Yoshino was sitting at his desk, his pen scurrying across a sheet of manuscript paper. As long as the expressway wasn’t crowded, you could make it here from the main office in Tokyo in an hour. Asakawa came up behind Yoshino and called his name.

“Hey, Yoshino.”

He hadn’t seen Yoshino in a year and a half.

“Huh? Hey, Asakawa. What brings you down to Yokosuka? Here, have a seat.”

Yoshino pulled up a chair toward the desk and urged Asakawa to sit. Yoshino hadn’t shaved, and it gave him a seedy look, but he could be surprisingly considerate toward others.

“You keeping busy?”

“You could say that.”

Yoshino and Asakawa had known each other when Asakawa was still in the local-news department, which Yoshino had entered three years ahead of him. Yoshino was thirty-five now.

“I called the Yokosuka office. That’s how I learned you were here.”

“Why? You need me for something?”

Asakawa handed him the copy he’d made of the article. Yoshino stared at it for an extraordinarily long time. Since he’d written the article himself, he should have been able to remember what it said just by looking at it. As it was, he sat there concentrating all his nerves on it, hand frozen halfway through the motion of putting a peanut in his mouth. It was as if he were chewing it: recalling what he’d written and digesting it.

“What about it?” Yoshino had assumed a serious expression.

“Nothing special. I just wanted to find out more details.”

Yoshino stood up. “All right. Let’s go next door and talk over a cup of tea or something.”

“Do you have time for this right now? Are you sure I’m not interrupting?”

“Not a problem. This is more interesting than what I was doing.”

There was a little cafe right next to City Hall where you could get coffee for two hundred yen a cup. Yoshino sat down and immediately turned to the counter and called out, “Two coffees.” Then, turning back to Asakawa, he hunched over, leaning close. “Okay, look, I’ve been on the local beat for 12 years now. I’ve seen a lot of things. But. Never have I come across anything as downright odd as this.”

Yoshino paused for a sip of water, then continued. “Now, Asakawa. This has got to be a fair trade of information. Why is someone from the main office looking into this?”

Asakawa wasn’t ready to tip his hand. He wanted to keep the scoop for himself. If an expert like Yoshino caught wind of it, in a heartbeat he’d chase and nab the prize for himself. Asakawa promptly came up with a lie.

“No” special reason. My niece was a friend of the dead girl, and she keeps badgering me for information-you know, about the incident. So as long as I was down here…”

It was a poor lie. He thought he saw Yoshino’s eyes flash with suspicion, and he shrank back, unnerved.

“Really?”

“Yeah, well, she’s a high school student, fight? It’s bad enough that her friend’s dead, but then there are the circumstances. She just keeps bugging me about it. I’m begging you. Give me details.”

“So, what do you want to know?”

“Did they ever decide on the cause of death?”

Yoshino shook his head. “Basically, they’re saying their hearts just stopped all of a sudden. They have no idea why.”

“How about the murder angle? Strangulation, for example.”

“Impossible. No bruise marks on the neck.”

“Drugs?”

“No traces in the autopsy.”

“In other words, the case hasn’t been solved.”

“Shit, no. No solving to be done. It isn’t a murder-it’s not even an incident, really. They died of some illness, or from some kind of accident, and that’s all there is to it. Period. There’s not even an investigation.”

It was a blunt way of putting it. Yoshino leaned back in his chair.

“So why haven’t they released the names of the deceased?”

’They’re minors. Plus, there’s the suspicion that it was a love suicide.”

At this point Yoshino suddenly smiled, as if he’d just remembered something, and he leaned forward again.

“You know, the guy? He had his jeans and his briefs down around his knees. The girl, too-her panties were pulled down to her knees.”

“So, you mean it was coitus interruptusl”

“I didn’t say they were doing it. They were just getting ready to do it. They were just getting ready to have a little fun and, bam! That’s when it happened,” Yoshino clapped his hands together for effect.

“When what happened?”

Yoshino was telling his story for maximum effect.

“Okay, Asakawa, level with me. You’ve got something. I mean, something that connects with this case. Right?”

Asakawa didn’t reply.

“I can keep a secret. I won’t steal your scoop, either. It’s just that I’m interested in this.”

Asakawa still remained silent.

“Are you gonna keep me hanging here in suspense?”

Should I tell … ? But I can’t. I mustn’t say anything yet. But lies aren’t working…

“Sorry, Yoshino. Could you wait just a little longer? I can’t tell you quite yet. But I will in two or three days. I promise.”

Disappointment clouded Yoshino’s face. “If you say so, pal…”

Asakawa gave him a pleading look, urging him to continue his story.

“Well, we’ve got to assume that something happened. A guy and a gal suffocate just when they’re getting ready to do it? That’s not even funny. I guess it’s possible that they’d taken poison earlier and it had only taken effect just then, but there were no traces. Sure, there are poisons that leave no trace, but you can’t figure on a couple of students getting their hands on something like that.”

Yoshino thought of the place where the car had been found. He’d actually gone there himself and still had a clear impression. The car was parked on an overgrown piece of vacant land in a little ravine just off the unpaved prefectural road that led from Ashina to Mt Okusu. Cars coming up the road could just catch the reflection of its taillights as they passed. It wasn’t hard to imagine why the prep school kid, who’d been driving, had chosen this place to park in. After nightfall hardly any cars used this road, and with the thick growth of trees providing cover, it made for a perfect hideaway for a penniless young couple.

“Then, you’ve got the guy with his head jammed up against the steering wheel and the side window. Meanwhile, the girl’s got her head buried between the passenger seat and the door. That’s how they died. I saw them being taken out of the car, with my own eyes. Each body came tumbling out the moment the doors were opened. It’s like at the moment of death some sort of force had been pushing them from the inside, didn’t stop when they died but kept pushing for thirty hours or so until the investigators opened the doors, and then burst out. Now, are you with me here? This car was a two-door, one of those where you can’t lock the doors with the key still inside. And the key was in the ignition, but the doors… well, you catch my drift. The car was completely sealed. It’s hard to imagine that any force from the outside could have affected them. And what kind of expression do you suppose they had on their dead faces? They were both scared shitless. Faces contorted with terror.”

Yoshino paused to catch his breath. There was a loud gulping sound. It wasn’t clear which of them had swallowed his saliva.

“Think about it. Suppose, just for the hell of it, that some fearsome beast had come out of the woods. They’d have been scared, and they would have huddled close to each other. Even if he hadn’t, the girl would absolutely have clung to him. After all, they were lovers. But instead, their backs were pressed up against the doors, as if they were trying to get as far away from each other as they could.”

Yoshino threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Beats the hell out of me.”

If it hadn’t been for the shipwreck in the waters off Yokosuka, the article might have been given more space. And if it had, there would have been a lot of readers who would have enjoyed trying to solve the puzzle, playing detective. But. … But. A consensus had spread, an atmosphere, among the investigators and everybody else who had been at the scene. They all thought more or less the same thing, and all of them were on the verge of blurting it out, but nobody actually did. That kind of consensus. Even though it was completely impossible for two young people to die of heart attacks at exactly the same moment, even though none of them really believed it, everybody told themselves the medical lie that it had happened just like that. It wasn’t that people refrained from saying anything out of fear of being laughed at for being unscientific. It was that they felt they’d be drawing unto themselves some unimaginable horror by admitting it. It was more convenient to indulge in the scientific explanation, no matter how unconvincing it was.

A chill ran up Asakawa’s spine and Yoshino’s simultaneously. Unsurprisingly, they were both thinking the same thing. The silence only confirmed the premonition which was welling up in each man’s breast. It’s not over-it’s only just started. No matter how much scientific knowledge they fill themselves with, on a very basic level, people believe in the existence of something that the laws of science can’t explain.

“When they were discovered… where were their hands?” Asakawa suddenly asked.

“On their heads. Or, well, it was more like they were covering their faces with their hands.”

“Were they by any chance pulling at their hair, like this?” Asakawa tugged at his own hair to demonstrate.

“Eh?”

“In other words, were they tearing at their heads, or pulling out their hair, or anything like that?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“I see. Could I get their names and addresses, Yoshino?”

“Sure. But don’t forget your promise.”

Asakawa smiled and nodded, and Yoshino got up. As he stood the table swayed and their coffee spilled into their saucers. Yoshino hadn’t even touched his.

5

Asakawa kept investigating the four victims’ backgrounds whenever he had a free minute, but had so much work to do that he wasn’t getting as far as he’d hoped. Before he knew it a week had passed, it was a new month, and both August’s rain-soaked humidity and September’s summery heat became distant memories pushed aside by the signs of deepening autumn. Nothing happened for a while. He’d been making a point of reading every inch of the local-news pages, but without coming across anything remotely similar. Or was it just that something horrible was advancing, slowly but surely, where Asakawa couldn’t see? But the more time elapsed, the more inclined he was to think that the four deaths were just coincidences, unconnected in any way. He hadn’t seen Yoshino since then, either. He had probably forgotten the whole thing, too. If he hadn’t, he would have contacted Asakawa by now.

Whenever his passion for the case showed signs of waning, Asakawa would take four cards out from his pocket and be reminded once again that it couldn’t have been a coincidence. On the cards he’d written the deceased’s names, addresses, and other pertinent information, and on the remaining space he planned to record their activities during the months of August and September, their upbringing, and anything else his research turned up.

Tomoko Oishi and Haruko Tsuji went to the same high school and were friends; Shuichi Iwata and Takehiko Nomi studied at the same prep school and were friends: this much had been clear prior to legwork, which indeed confirmed it. And from the simple fact that Tsuji and Nomi had gone for a drive together on Mt Okusu in Yokosuka on the night of September 5th, it was obvious that they were, if not quite lovers, at least fooling around. When he’d asked her friends, he’d heard the rumor that Tsuji had been dating a prep school guy from Tokyo. However, Asakawa still didn’t know when or how they’d met. Naturally, he suspected that Oishi and Iwata were going out, too, but he couldn’t find anything to back this up. It was equally possible that Oishi and Iwata had never even seen each other. In which case, what was there to link these four? They seemed far too closely related for this unknown being to have picked them totally at random. Maybe there was some secret that only the four of them knew, and they’d been killed for it… Asakawa tried out a more scientific explanation with himself: perhaps the four of them had been in the same place at the same time, and all four had been infected with a virus that attacks the heart.

Hey, now. Asakawa shook his head as he walked. A virus that causes sudden heart failure? Come on.

He climbed the stairs, muttering to himself, a virus, a virus. Indeed, he should start out with attempts at scientific explanation. Well, suppose there was a virus that caused heart attacks. At least it was a little more realistic than imagining that something supernatural was behind it all; it seemed less likely to get him laughed at. Even if such a virus hadn’t yet been discovered on earth, maybe it had just recently fallen to earth inside a meteor. Or maybe it had been developed as a biological weapon and had somehow escaped. You couldn’t rule out the possibility. Sure. He’d try thinking of it as a kind of virus for a while. Not that this would satisfy all his doubts. Why had they all died with looks of astonishment on their faces? Why had Tsuji and Nomi died on opposite sides of that small car, as if they were trying to get away from each other? Why hadn’t the autopsies revealed anything? The possibility of an escaped germ weapon could at least answer the third question. There would have been a gag order.

If he were to pursue this hypothesis further, he could deduce that the fact that there hadn’t been any other victims yet meant that the virus was not airborne. It was either blood-borne, like AIDS, or was fairly noncontagious. But more importantly, where had these four picked it up? He’d have to go back and sift through their activities in August and September again and look for places and times they had in common. Since the participants’ mouths had been shut permanently, it wouldn’t be easy. If their meeting had been a secret among the four of them, something neither parents nor friends knew about, then how was he to ferret it out? But he was sure that these four kids had some time, some place, some thing in common.

Sitting down at his word processor Asakawa chased the unknown virus from his thoughts. He needed to get out the notes he’d just taken, to sum up the contents of the cassette he’d made. He had to get this article finished today. Tomorrow, Sunday, he and his wife Shizu were going to visit her sister, Yoshimi Oishi. He wanted to see with his own eyes the spot where Tomoko had died, to feel on his own flesh whatever air still lingered. His wife had agreed to go to Honmoku to console her bereaved older sister; she had no inkling of her husband’s true motives.

Asakawa started pounding the keys of the word processor before he’d come up with a decent outline.

6

Shizu was seeing her parents for the first time in a month. Ever since their granddaughter Tomoko had died, they came to Tokyo from their home in Ashikaga whenever they could, not only to console their daughter but to be consoled in turn. Shizu only understood this today. Her heart ached when she saw her aged parents’ thin, grief-stricken faces. They had once had three grandchildren: their oldest daughter Yoshimi’s daughter Tomoko, their second daughter Kazuko’s son Kenichi, and Shizu’s daughter Yoko. One grandchild from each of their three daughters-not all that common. Tomoko had been their first grandchild, and their faces had crinkled up every time they had seen her; they had enjoyed spoiling her. Now they were so depressed that it was impossible to say whose grief was deeper, the parents’ or the grandparents’.

I guess grandchildren really mean a lot.

Shizu had just turned thirty this year. It was all she could do to imagine what her sister must be feeling, putting herself in her sister’s place, contemplating how she’d feel if she lost her own child. But really, there was no comparison to be made between her daughter Yoko, only a year and a half old, and Tomoko, who had died at seventeen. She couldn’t fathom how every passing year would deepen her love for her child.

Sometime after three in the afternoon, her parents began to get ready to go home to Ashikaga.

Shizu could hardly contain her surprise. Why had her husband, who always protested that he was too busy, suggested this visit to her sister’s house? This was the same husband who’d skipped the poor girl’s funeral, pleading that he had a deadline to meet. And now here it was almost dinnertime, and he wasn’t showing the slightest inclination of leaving. He’d only met Tomoko a few times, and had probably never talked with her for very long. Surely he wasn’t feeling detained by memories of the deceased.

Shizu tapped Asakawa lightly on the knee and whispered in his ear, “Dear, it’s probably about time…”

“Look at Yoko. She’s sleepy. Maybe we ought to see if we could let her take a nap here.”

They had brought their daughter. Normally, this was nap time. Sure enough, Yoko had started blinking like she did when she was sleepy. But if they let her sleep here, they’d have to stay in this house for at least two more hours. What would they find to talk about with her grieving sister and her husband for two more hours?

“She can sleep on the train, don’t you think?” said Shizu, dropping her voice.

“Last time we tried that she got fussy, and it was awful all the way home. No, thanks.”

Whenever Yoko got sleepy in a crowd, she got unbelievably fidgety. She’d flail her little arms and legs, wail at the top of her lungs, and just generally make life difficult for her parents. Scolding her only made it worse-there was no way to calm her down except to try to get her to sleep. At times like that Asakawa became intensely conscious of the looks of people around him, and he’d start sulking himself, as though he were the prime victim of his daughter’s shrieking. The accusing stares of the other passengers always made him feel like he was choking.

Shizu preferred not to see her husband in that state, with his cheeks twitching nervously and all. “All right, then, if you say so.”

“Great. Let’s see if she’ll take a nap upstairs.”

Yoko lay in her mother’s lap, eyes half closed.

“I’ll go put her down,” he said, caressing his daughter’s cheek with the back of his hand. The words sounded strange coming from Asakawa, who hardly ever helped with the baby. Maybe he’d had a change of heart, now that he’d witnessed the sorrow of parents who’d lost a child.

“What’s come over you today? It’s spooky.”

“Don’t worry. She looks like she’ll go right down. Leave it to me.”

Shizu handed the child over. “Thanks. I just wish you were like this all the time.”

As she was transferred from her mother’s bosom to her father’s, Yoko began to scrunch up her face, but before she had time to follow through she had fallen asleep. Asakawa climbed the stairs, cradling his daughter. The second floor consisted of two Japanese-style rooms and the Western-style room which had been Tomoko’s. He laid Yoko on the futon in the Japanese-style room that faced south. He didn’t even need to stay with her as she fell asleep. She was already out, her breathing regular.

Asakawa slipped out of the room and listened to see what was going on downstairs, and then entered Tomoko’s bedroom. He felt a little guilty about invading a dead girl’s privacy. Wasn’t this the kind of thing he abhorred? But it was for a good cause-defeating evil. There was nothing but to do it. Even as he thought this, he hated the way he was always willing to seize on any reason, no matter how specious, in order to rationalize his actions. But, he protested, it wasn’t like he was writing an article about it: he was just trying to figure out when and where the four had been together. Sorry.

He opened her desk drawers. Just the normal assortment of stationery supplies, like any high school girl would have, rather neatly arranged. Three snapshots, a junk box, letters, a notepad, a sewing kit. Had her parents gone through here after she died? It didn’t look like it. Probably she was just naturally neat. He was hoping to find a diary-it would save him a lot of time. Today I got together with Haruko Tsuji, Takehiko Nomi, and Shuichi Iwata, and we … If he could just find an entry like that. He took a notebook from her bookshelf and flipped through it. He actually came across a very girlish diary in the back of a drawer, but there were only a few desultory entries on the first few pages, all of them dated long ago.

On the shelf beside the desk there were no books, only a red flowered makeup stand. He opened the drawer. A bunch of cheap accessories. A lot of mismatched earrings-it seemed she had a habit of losing one of every pair she owned. A pocket comb with several slender black strands of hair still wrapped around it.

Opening the built-in wardrobe, his nose was assailed by the scent of high school girls. It was packed tight with colourful dresses and skirts on hangers. His sister-in-law and her husband had obviously not figured out what to do with these clothes, which still carried their daughter’s fragrance. Asakawa pricked up his ears at what was going on downstairs. He wasn’t sure what they’d think if they caught him in here. There was no sound. His wife and her sister must still be talking about something. Asakawa searched the pockets of the clothes in the wardrobe one by one. Handkerchiefs, movie ticket stubs, gum wrappers, napkins, commuter pass case. He examined it: a pass for the stretch between Yamate and Tsurumi, a student ID card, and a membership card. There was a name written on the membership card: Something-or-other Nono-yama. He wasn’t sure how to pronounce the characters for the first name-Yuki, maybe? From the characters alone he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Why did she have someone else’s card in her pass case? He heard footsteps coming up the stairs. He slipped the card into his pocket, put the case back where he’d found it, and shut the wardrobe. He stepped into the hall just as his sister-in-law reached the top of the stairs.

“Sorry, is there a bathroom up here?” He made a show of acting antsy.

“It’s there at the end of the hall.” She didn’t seem to suspect anything. “Is Yoko sleeping like a good girl?”

“Yes, thanks. Sorry to put you to such trouble.”

“Oh no, not at all.” The sister-in-law bowed slightly, then stepped into the Japanese-style room, hand on her kimono sash.

In the bathroom, Asakawa took out the card. “Pacific Resorts Club Member’s Card” it read. Underneath this was Nonoyama’s name and membership number and the expiration date. He flipped it over. Five membership conditions, in fine print, plus the name of the company and its address. Pacific Resorts Club, Inc., 3–5 Kojimachi, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo. Phone no. (03) 261-4922. If it wasn’t something she’d found or swiped, Tomoko must have borrowed this card from this Nonoyama person. Why? To use Pacific Resorts facilities, of course. Which one, and when?

He couldn’t call from the house. Saying he was going to go buy cigarettes, he ran to a pay phone. He dialled the number.

“Hello, Pacific Resorts, may I help you?” A young woman’s voice.

“I’d like to know what facilities I can use with a membership card.”

The voice didn’t respond right away. Maybe they had so many facilities available that she couldn’t just list them all.

“That is… I mean… for example, like on an overnight trip from Tokyo,” he added. It would have stood out if the four of them had gone away for two or three nights together. The fact that he hadn’t turned anything up so far meant that they had probably gone for no longer than a single night. She could easily get away for a single night by lying to her parents that she was staying at a friend’s house.

“We have a full range of facilities at our Pacific Land in South Hakone,” she said, in her businesslike manner.

“Specifically, what sorts of leisure activities do you have there?”

“Certainly, sir. We have provisions for golf, tennis, and field sports, as well as a swimming pool.”

“And you have lodging there?”

“Yes, sir. In addition to a hotel, Pacific Land features the Villa Log Cabin community of rental cottages. Shall I send you our brochure?”

“Yes. Please.” He pretended to be a prospective customer, hoping it would make it easier to extract information from her. “The hotel and the cabins, are they open to the general public?”

“Certainly, at non-member rates.”

“I see. Can you give me the phone number? Maybe I’ll go have a look.”

“I can take care of reservations right now, if you wish…”

“No, I, ah, may be going for a drive down there sometime and just decide to have a look… So could I just have the phone number?”

“One moment, please.”

As he waited, Asakawa took out a memo pad and pen.

“Are you ready?” The woman returned and dictated two eleven digit phone numbers. The area codes were long-they were way out in the sticks. Asakawa scribbled them down.

“Just for future reference, where are your other facilities located?”

“We have the same sort of full-service resorts at Lake Hamana and at Hamajima in Mie Prefecture.”

Much too far! Students wouldn’t have that kind of war chest.

“I see. Sounds like they’re all on the Pacific, just like the name says.”

Then the woman began to detail all the fabulous advantages of becoming a Pacific Resorts Club member; Asakawa listened politely for a while before cutting her off. “Great. The rest I’m sure I can find out from the pamphlet. I’ll give you my address so you can send it.” He told her his address and hung up. Listening to her sales pitch, he’d begun to think it actually wouldn’t be a bad idea to join, if he could afford it.

It had been over an hour since Yoko had gone to sleep, and Shizu’s parents had already returned to Ashikaga. Shizu herself was in the kitchen doing the dishes for her sister, who was still prone to break down at the slightest provocation. Asakawa briskly helped carry dishes in from the living room.

“What’s got into you today? You’re acting weird,” said Shizu, without interrupting her dishwashing. “You put Yoko down, you’re helping in the kitchen. Are you turning over a new leaf? If so, I hope it sticks.”

Asakawa was lost in thought, and didn’t want to be bothered. He wished his wife would act like her name, which meant “quiet”. The best way to seal a woman’s mouth was not to reply.

“Oh, by the way, did you put a disposable on her before putting her to bed? We wouldn’t want her to leak at someone else’s house.”

Asakawa showed no interest, but just looked around at the kitchen walls. Tomoko had died here. There had been shards of glass and a pool of coke next to her when she was found. She must have been attacked by the virus right when she was going to have a drink of coke from the fridge. Asakawa opened the refrigerator, mimicking Tomoko’s movements. He imagined holding a glass, and pretended to drink.

“What in the world are you doing?” Shizu was staring at him, mouth wide open. Asakawa kept going: still pretending to drink, he looked behind him. When he turned around, there was a glass door right in front of him, separating the living room from the kitchen. It reflected the fluorescent light above the sink. Maybe because it was still bright outside and the living room was filled with light, it only reflected the fluorescent light, and not the expressions of the people on this side. If the other side of the glass was dark, and this side light, like it would have been that night when Tomoko was standing here… That glass door would have been a mirror reflecting the scene in the kitchen. It would have reflected Tomoko’s face, contorted with terror. Asakawa could almost start to think of the pane of glass as a witness to everything that had happened. Glass could be transparent or reflective, depending on the interplay of light and darkness. Asakawa was bringing his face nearer the glass, as if drawn there, when his wife tapped him on the back. Just at that moment, they heard Yoko crying upstairs. She was awake.

“Yoko’s up.” Shizu wiped her wet hands on a towel. Their daughter usually didn’t cry so hard upon waking up. Shizu rushed up to the second floor.

As she was going out, Yoshimi came in. Asakawa handed her the card he’d found. “This had fallen under the piano.” He spoke casually and waited for a reaction.

Yoshimi took the card and turned it over. “This is strange. What was this doing there?” She cocked her head, puzzled.

“Could Tomoko have borrowed it from a friend, do you suppose?”

“But I’ve never heard of this person. I don’t think she had a friend by that name.” Yoshimi looked at Asakawa with exaggerated worry. “Darn it. This looks important. I swear, that girl…” Her voice choked up. Even the slightest thing would set the wheels of grief in motion for her. Asakawa hesitated to ask, but did.

“Did, ah… did Tomoko and her friends by any chance go to this resort during summer vacation?”

Yoshimi shook her head. She trusted her daughter. Tomoko hadn’t been the kind of child to lie about staying over at her friends’. Plus, she had been studying for exams. Asakawa could understand how Yoshimi felt. He decided not to ask about Tomoko any further. No high school student with exams looming in front of her was going to tell her parents that she was renting a cottage with her boyfriend. She would have lied and said she was studying at a friend’s house. Her parents would never know.

“I’ll find the owner and return it.”

Yoshimi bowed her head in silence, and then her husband called from the living room and she hurried out of the kitchen. The bereaved father was seated in front of a newly-installed Buddhist altar, speaking to his daughter’s photograph. His voice was shockingly cheerful, and Asakawa became depressed. He was obviously living in denial. Asakawa could only pray that he’d be able to get through.

Asakawa had found out one thing. If this Nonoyama had in fact lent Tomoko the membership card, he or she would have contacted Tomoko’s parents to ask for the card back upon learning of her death. But Tomoko’s mother knew nothing about the card. Nonoyama couldn’t have forgotten about the card. Even if it were part of a family membership deal, dues were expensive enough that Nonoyama wouldn’t just allow the card to stay lost. So what did this mean? This was how Asakawa figured it: Nonoyama had lent the card to one of the other three, either Iwata, Tsuji, or Nomi. Somehow it passed into Tomoko’s possession, and that’s how things had ended. Nonoyama would have contacted the parents of the person he or she had lent it to. The parents would have searched their child’s belongings. They wouldn’t have found the card. The card was here. If Asakawa contacted the families of the other three victims, he might be able to unearth Nonoyama’s address. He should call right away, tonight. If he couldn’t dig up a clue this way, then it would be unlikely that the card would provide a means for finding when and where the four had been together. At any rate, he wanted to meet Nonoyama and hear what he or she had to say. If he had to, he could always find some way to track down Nonoyama’s address based on the membership number. Asking Pacific Resorts directly probably wouldn’t get him anywhere, but he was sure that his newspaper connections could come up with something.

Someone was calling him. A distant voice. “Dear… dear…” His wife’s flustered voice mingled with the baby’s crying.

“Dear, could you come here for a minute?”

Asakawa came to himself again. Suddenly he wasn’t even sure what he’d been thinking about all this time. There was something strange about the way his daughter was crying. That feeling became stronger as he mounted the stairs.

“What’s wrong?” he asked his wife, accusingly.

“Something’s not right with Yoko. I think something’s happened to her. The way she’s crying-it’s different from how it usually sounds. Do you think she’s sick?”

Asakawa placed his hand on Yoko’s forehead. She didn’t have a fever. But her little hands were trembling. The trembling spread to her whole body, and sometimes her back shook. Her face was beet red, her eyes clenched shut.

“How long has she been like this?”

“It’s because she woke up and there was no one here with her.”

The baby often cried if her mother wasn’t there when she woke up. But she always calmed down when her mother ran to her and held her. When a baby cried it was trying to ask for something, but what…? The baby was trying to tell them something. She wasn’t just being bratty. Her two tiny hands were clasped tightly over her face… cowering. That was it. The child was wailing out of fear. Yoko turned her face away, and then opened her fists slightly: she seemed to be trying to point forward. Asakawa looked in that direction. There was a pillar. He raised his eyes. Hanging about thirty centimeters from the ceiling was a fist-sized mask, of a hannya-a female demon. Was the child afraid of the mask?

“Hey, look,” said Asakawa, pointing with his chin. They looked at the mask simultaneously, then slowly turned their gazes to each other.

“No way… she’s frightened of a demon?”

Asakawa got to his feet. He took down the demon mask from where it hung on the beam and laid it face down on top of the dresser. Yoko couldn’t see it there. She abruptly stopped crying.

“What’s the matter, Yoko? Did that nasty demon scare you?” Shizu seemed relieved now that she understood, and she happily rubbed her cheek against the child’s. Asakawa wasn’t so easily satisfied; for some reason, he didn’t want to be in this room any longer.

“Hey. Let’s go home,” he urged his wife.

That evening, as soon as he got home from the Oishis’, he called the Tsujis, the Nomis, and the Iwatas, in that order. He asked each family whether they hadn’t been contacted by one of their child’s acquaintances regarding a membership card for a resort club. The last person he spoke to, Iwata’s mother, gave him a long, rambling answer: “There was a call, from someone who said he’d gone to the same high school as my son, an older boy, saying he’d lent my son his resort membership card, and could he get it back… But I searched every corner of my son’s room and never could find it. I’ve been worried about it ever since.” He quickly asked for Nonoyama’s phone number, and immediately called it.

Nonoyama had run into Iwata in Shibuya on the last Sunday in August, and lent him his card, just as Asakawa had suspected. Iwata had told him he was going away with this high school girl he’d been hitting on. Summer vacation’s almost over, y’know. I want to really live it up once before it’s over, or else I won’t be able to buckle down and study for the exams.

Nonoyama had laughed when he heard this. You idiot, prep school students aren’t supposed to have summer vacations.

The last Sunday in August had been the 26th: if they’d gone anywhere for the night, it would have to have been the 27th, 28th, 29th, or 30th. Asakawa didn’t know about the college prep school, but for the high school girls at least, fall semester began on the first of September.

Maybe it was because she was tired from being so long in unfamiliar surroundings: Yoko soon fell asleep right next to her mother. When he put his ear to the bedroom door, he could hear both of them breathing regularly, fast asleep. Nine in the evening… this was Asakawa’s time to relax. Until his wife and child were asleep, there was no room in this tiny condo for him to settle down to work.

Asakawa got a beer from the fridge and poured it into a glass. It tasted special tonight. He’d made definite progress, finding that membership card. There was a good chance that sometime between the 27th and the 30th of August, Shuichi Iwata and the other three had stayed at facilities belonging to Pacific Resorts. The most likely place was Villa Log Cabin at Pacific Land in South Hakone. South Hakone was the only Pacific Resorts property close enough to be a viable candidate, and he couldn’t imagine a group of poor students going all out and staying at a hotel. They would probably have used the membership to rent one of the cottages on the cheap. They were only five thousand yen a night for members, which came to a little over a thousand apiece.

He had the phone number for Villa Log Cabin at hand. He put his notes on the table. The quickest thing would be to simply call the front desk and ask if a party of four had stayed there under the name Nonoyama. But they’d never tell him over the phone. Naturally, anybody who had risen within the firm to the position of rental cottage manager would have been well trained to consider it his duty to protect guests’ privacy. Even if he revealed his position as a reporter for a major newspaper and clearly stated his reasons for inquiring, the manager would never tell him over the phone. Asakawa considered contacting the local bureau and getting them to use a lawyer with whom they had connections to ask for a look at the guest register. The only people a manager was legally bound to show the register to were the police and attorneys. Asakawa could try to pose as one or the other, but he’d probably be spotted immediately, and that would mean trouble for the newspaper. It was safer and more effective to go through channels.

But that would take at least three or four days, and he hated to wait that long. He wanted to know now. His passion for the case was such that he couldn’t bear to wait three days. What in the world was going to come of this? If indeed the four of them had stayed the night at Villa Log Cabin at Pacific Land in South Hakone at the end of August, and if indeed that clue allowed him to unravel the riddle of their deaths-well, what could it have been anyway? Virus, virus. He was all too aware that the only reason he was calling it a virus was to keep himself from being overawed by the thought of some mysterious thing being behind it all. It made sense-to a degree-to marshal the power of science in facing down supernatural power. He wasn’t going to get anywhere fighting a thing he didn’t understand with words he didn’t understand. He had to translate the thing he didn’t understand into words he did.

Asakawa recalled Yoko’s cries. Why was she so frightened when she saw the demon mask this afternoon? On the way home on the train, he’d asked his wife, “Hey, have you been teaching Yoko about demons?”

“What?”

“You know, with picture books or something like that. Have you been teaching her to be afraid of demons?”

“No way. Why would I?”

The conversation had ended there. Shizu was unconcerned, but Asakawa worried. That kind of fear only existed on a deep, spiritual level. It was different from fearing something because you had been taught to fear it. Ever since he’d come down out of the trees, man had lived in fear of something or other. Thunder, typhoons, wild beasts, volcanic eruptions, the dark… The first time a child experiences thunder and lightning, he or she feels an instinctive fear-that was understandable. To begin with, thunder was real. It really existed. But what about demons? The dictionary would tell you that demons were imaginary monsters, or the spirits of dead people. If Yoko was going to be afraid of the demon because it looked scary, then she should also have been afraid of models of Godzilla-after all, they were made to look fearsome, too. She’d seen one, once, in a department store show window: a cunningly-made Godzilla replica. Far from being frightened, she had stared at it intently, eyes glowing with curiosity. How did you explain that? The only thing he knew for sure was that Godzilla, no matter how you looked at it, was an imaginary monster. So what about demons…? And are demons unique to Japan? No, other cultures have the same type of thing. Devils.. . The second beer wasn’t tasting as good as the first one. Is there anything else Yoko’s afraid of? That’s right, there is. Darkness. She’s terribly afraid of the dark. She absolutely never goes into an unlit room alone. “Yo-ko,” sun-child. But darkness, too, really existed, as light’s opposite pole. Even now, Yoko was asleep in her mother’s embrace, in a dark room.