Ring

1

October 12-Friday

“First let’s have a look at this video.”

Ryuji Takayama grinned as he spoke. They sat on the second floor of a coffee shop near Roppongi Crossing. Friday, October 12th, 7:20 p.m. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since Asakawa had watched the video. He’d chosen to have this meeting on a Friday night in Roppongi, the city’s premier entertainment district, in the hopes that, surrounded by the gay voices of girls, his dread would dissipate. It didn’t seem to be working. The more he talked about it, the more vividly the events of the previous night replayed themselves in his mind. The terror only increased. He even thought he sensed, fleetingly, a shadow lurking somewhere within his body that possessed him.

Ryuji’s dress shirt was buttoned all the way up to the top, and his tie seemed rather tight, but he made no move to loosen it. As a result, the skin of his neck above his collar was slightly swollen-just looking at it was uncomfortable. Then there were his angular features. Even his smile would have struck your average person as being somehow nasty.

Ryuji took an ice cube from his glass and popped it into his mouth.

“Weren’t you listening to what I just said?” hissed Asakawa. “I told you, it’s dangerous.”

“Then what did you bring this to me for? You want my help, don’t you?” Still smiling, he crunched the ice cube loudly between his teeth.

“There’re still ways for you to help without watching it.”

Ryuji hung his head sulkily, but a faint grin still played over his features.

Asakawa was suddenly seized with anger and raised his voice hysterically. “You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe a thing I’ve been telling you!” There was no other way for him to interpret Ryuji’s expression.

For Asakawa himself, watching the video had been like unsuspectingly opening a letter-bomb. It was the first time in his life he’d experienced such terror. And it wasn’t over. Six more days. Fear tightened softly around his neck like a silken noose. Death awaited him. And this joker actually wanted to watch the video.

“You don’t have to make a scene. So I’m not scared-do you have a problem with that? Listen, Asakawa, I’ve told you before: I’m the kind of guy who’d get front-row seats for the end of the world if he could. I want to know how the world is put together, its beginning and its end, all its riddles, great and small. If someone offered to explain them all to me, I’d gladly trade my life for the knowledge. You even immortalized me in print. I’m sure you recall.”

Of course Asakawa remembered it. That’s exactly why he’d opened up to Ryuji and told him everything.

It had been Asakawa who first dreamed up the feature. Two years ago, when he was thirty, he had begun to wonder what other young Japanese people his age were really thinking- what dreams they had in life. The idea was to pick out several thirty-year-olds, people active in all walks of life-from a MITI bureaucrat and a Tokyo city councilman to a guy working for a top trading firm to regular, average Joes-and summarize each one, from the sort of general data every reader would want to know to their more unique aspects. By doing this regularly, in a carefully limited area of newsprint, he would try to analyze what it meant to be thirty in contemporary Japan. And just by chance, among the ten to twenty names that had surfaced as candidates for this kind of treatment, Asakawa encountered an old high school classmate, Ryuji Takayama. His official position was listed as Adjunct Lecturer in Philosophy at Fukuzawa University, one of the nation’s top private schools. Asakawa found this puzzling, as he recalled Ryuji going on to medical school. Asakawa himself had done the groundwork, and had listed “scholar” as one of the vocations to be included in his survey, but Ryuji was far too much of an individual to be a fair representative of thirty-year-old budding scholars as a whole. His personality had been hard to get a handle on in high school, and with the added polishing of the intervening years it seemed it had only become more slippery. Upon finishing medical school, he had enrolled in a graduate philosophy program, completing his PhD the year of the survey. He undoubtedly would have been snapped up for the first available assistant professorship if it weren’t for the unfortunate fact that there were older students in the pipeline ahead of him, and positions were awarded strictly on the basis of seniority. So he took the part-time lecturer’s job and ended up teaching two classes a week on logic at his alma mater.

These days, philosophy as a field of inquiry had drawn ever closer to science. No longer did it mean amusing oneself with silly questions such as how man should live. Specializing in philosophy meant, basically, doing math without the numbers. In ancient Greece, too, philosophers doubled as mathematicians. Ryuji was like that: the philosophy department signed his pay checks, but his brain was wired like a scientist’s. On the other hand, in addition to his specialized professional knowledge, he also knew an extraordinary amount about paranormal psychology. Asakawa saw this as a contradiction. He considered paranormal psychology, the study of the supernatural and the occult, to be in direct opposition to science. Ryuji’s answer: Au contraire. Paranormal psychology is one of the keys to unlocking the structure of the universe. It had been a hot day in the middle of summer, but just like today he’d been wearing a striped long-sleeved dress shirt with the top button buttoned tightly. I want to be there when humanity is wiped out, Ryuji had said, sweat gleaming on his overheated face. All those idiots who prattle on about world peace and the survival of humanity make me puke.

Asakawa’s survey had included questions like this:

Tell me about your dreams for the future.

Calmly, Ryuji had replied: “While viewing the extinction of the human race from the top of a hill, I would dig a hole in the earth and ejaculate into it over and over.”

Asakawa had pressed him: “Hey, are you sure it’s okay for me to write that down?”

Ryuji had smiled faintly, just like he was doing now, and nodded.

“Like I said, I’m not afraid of anything.” After saying this, Ryuji leaned over and brought his face close to Asakawa’s.

“I did another one last night.”

Again?

This made the third victim Asakawa knew about. He’d learned of the first one in their junior year in high school. Both of them had lived in Tama Ward in Kawasaki, an industrial city wedged between Tokyo and Yokohama, and commuted to a prefectural high school. Asakawa used to get to school an hour before classes started every morning and preview the day’s lessons in the crisp dawn. Aside from the janitors, he was always the first one there. By contrast, Ryuji hardly ever made it to first period. He was what was known as habitually tardy. But one morning right after the end of summer vacation, Asakawa went to school early as usual and found Ryuji there, sitting on top of his desk as if in a daze. Asakawa spoke to him. “Hey, what’s up? Didn’t think I’d see you here this early.” “Yeah, well,” was the curt reply: Ryuji was staring out the window at the schoolyard, as if his mind were somewhere else. His eyes were bloodshot. His cheeks were red, too, and there was alcohol on his breath. They weren’t that close, though, so that was as far as the conversation went. Asakawa opened his school-book and began to study. “Hey, listen, I want to ask you a favour…” said Ryuji, slapping him on the shoulder. Ryuji was highly individualistic, got good grades, and was a track star as well. Everybody at school kept one eye on him. Asakawa, meanwhile, was thoroughly unremarkable. Having someone like Ryuji ask him a favour didn’t feel bad at all.

“Actually, I want you to call my house for me,” said Ryuji, laying his arm on Asakawa’s shoulders in an overly familiar manner.

“Sure. But why?”

“All you have to do is call. Call and ask for me.”

Asakawa frowned. “For you? But you’re right here.”

“Never mind that, just do it, okay?”

So he did as he was told and dialled the number, and when Ryuji’s mother answered he said, “Is Ryuji there?” while looking at Ryuji, who stood right in front of him.

“I’m sorry, Ryuji has already left for school,” his mother said calmly.

“Oh, I see,” Asakawa said, and hung up the phone. “There, is that good enough?” he said to Ryuji. Asakawa still didn’t quite get the meaning of all this.

“Did it sound like there was anything wrong?” asked Ryuji. “Did Mom sound nervous or anything?”

“No, not particularly.” Asakawa had never heard Ryuji’s mother’s voice before, but he didn’t think she sounded especially nervous.

“No excited voices in the background or anything?”

“No. Nothing special. Nothing like that. Just, like, breakfast table sounds.”

“Well, okay, then. Thanks.”

“Hey, what’s going on? Why did you ask me to do that?”

Ryuji looked vaguely relieved. He put his arm around Asakawa’s shoulders and pulled Asakawa’s face close. He put his mouth to Asakawa’s ear and said, “You seem like you can keep a secret, like I can trust you. So I’ll tell you. As a matter of fact, at five o’clock this morning, I raped a woman.”

Asakawa was shocked speechless. The story was that at dawn that morning, around five, Ryuji had sneaked into the apartment of a college girl living alone and attacked her. As he left he threatened her that if she called the cops he wouldn’t take it lying down, and then he came straight to school. As a result he was worried that the police might be at his house right about now, and so he’d asked Asakawa to call for him to check.

After that, Asakawa and Ryuji began to talk fairly often. Naturally, Asakawa never told anyone about Ryuji’s crime. The following year Ryuji had come in third in the shot-put in the area high-school track and field meet, and the year after that he’d entered the medical program at Fukuzawa University. Asakawa spent that year studying to retake the entrance exam for the school of his choice, having failed the first time. The second time he succeeded, and was accepted into the literature department of a well-known university.

Asakawa knew what he really wanted. In truth, he wanted Ryuji to watch the video. Ryuji’s knowledge and experience wouldn’t be of much use to Asakawa if they were based only on what Asakawa was able to verbalize about the video. On the other hand, he saw that it was ethically wrong to get someone else wrapped up in this just to save his own skin. He was conflicted, but he knew if he had to weigh the two options which way the scale would tip. He wanted to maximize his own chances of survival, no question. But, still… He suddenly found himself wondering, like he always did, just why he was friends with this guy. His ten years of reporting for the newspaper had allowed him to meet countless people. But he and Ryuji could just call each other up anytime to go have a drink-Ryuji was the only one Asakawa had that kind of relationship with. Was it because they happened to have been classmates? No, he had plenty of other classmates. There was something in the depths of his heart that resonated with Ryuji’s eccentricity. At that thought, Asakawa began to feel like he didn’t really understand himself.

“Hey, hey. Let’s get a move on. You’ve only got six days left, right?” Ryuji grabbed Asakawa’s upper arm and squeezed it. His grip was strong. “Hurry up and show me that video. Think how lonely I’ll be if you bite the dust because we dawdled.”

Rhythmically squeezing Asakawa’s arm with one hand, Ryuji jabbed his fork into his untouched cheesecake, shovelled it into his mouth and began to chew noisily. Ryuji had the habit of chewing with his mouth open. Asakawa felt himself beginning to feel sick at the sight of the food mixing with saliva and dissolving before his eyes. His angular features, his squat build, his bad habits. Now, while still munching away on his cheesecake, he fished more ice out of the glass with his hand and started crunching it, making even more noise.

That’s when Asakawa realized that he had no one else he could rely on but this guy.

It’s an evil spirit I’m dealing with, an unknown quantity. Nobody normal could deal with it. There’s probably nobody but Ryuji who could watch that video and not bat an eye. Set a thief to catch a thief. There’s no way around it. What do I care if Ryuji ends up dead? Someone who says he wants to watch the extinction of mankind doesn’t deserve to live a long life.

That was how Asakawa rationalized getting someone else wrapped up in this.

2

The two men headed for Asakawa’s place in a taxi. If the streets weren’t crowded it took less than twenty minutes to get from Roppongi to Kita Shinagawa. All they could see in the mirror was the driver’s forehead. He maintained a resolute silence, one hand on the wheel, and didn’t try to start up a conversation with his passengers. Come to think of it, this whole thing had started with a talkative cabby. If he hadn’t caught a taxi that time he wouldn’t have been caught up in this whole horrific mess, Asakawa thought as he recalled the events of a fortnight ago. He regretted not having bought a subway ticket and making all those transfers anyway, no matter how much of a pain in the neck they were.

“Can we make a copy of the video at your place?” asked Ryuji. Asakawa had two video decks because of his work. One was a machine he’d bought when they had first started to catch on, and it wasn’t functioning as well as it could, but it did at least make copies with no problem.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Okay, in that case I want you to make me a copy as soon as possible. I want to take my time and study it at my place.”

He’s got the guts, thought Asakawa. And in his present state of mind, Asakawa found his words encouraging.

They decided to get out of the cab at Gotenzan Hills and walk from there. It was 8:50. There was still the possibility that his wife and kid would be awake at this hour. Shizu always gave Yoko a bath at a little before nine, and then put her to bed. She’d lie down beside the baby to help her get to sleep, and in the process would fall asleep herself. And once she went to sleep, nothing was going to get Shizu out of bed. In an effort to maximize time talking alone with her husband, Shizu used to leave messages on the table saying, “wake me up.” So when he got home from work, Asakawa would follow her instructions, thinking she really meant to get up, and try to shake his wife awake. But she wouldn’t wake up. He would try harder, but she would just wave her hands around her head like she was shooing a fly, frowning and making annoyed sounds. She was half awake, but the will to go back to sleep was much stronger than Asakawa was, and he eventually had to cut his losses and retreat. Eventually, note or no, Asakawa stopped trying to wake her up, and then she stopped leaving notes. By now, nine o’clock had become Shizu ‘n’ Yoko’s inviolate sleepy time. On a night like this, though, it was actually more convenient that way.

Shizu hated Ryuji. Asakawa thought this was an eminently reasonable attitude, so he never even asked her why. I’m begging you, don’t bring him into our home anymore. Asakawa still remembered the repugnance on his wife’s face when she said that. But most of all, he couldn’t play this video in front of Shizu and Yoko.

The house was dark and still, and the fragrance of hot bath water and soap wafted even out to the entry hall. Evidently mommy and baby had just now gone to bed, towels under their wet hair. Asakawa put his ear to the bedroom door to make sure they were asleep, and then showed Ryuji into the dining room.

“So the baby’s gone night-night?” Ryuji asked with an air of disappointment.

“Shhh,” said Asakawa, putting a finger to his lips. Shizu wasn’t going to wake up from something like that, but then again he couldn’t swear she wouldn’t sense that something was different from usual and come out after all.

Asakawa connected the output jacks of one of the video decks to the input jacks of the other, and then inserted the video. Before pressing play, he looked at Ryuji as if to say, do you really want to do this?

“What’s wrong? Hurry up and play it/’ urged Ryuji, without taking his eyes off the screen. Asakawa pressed the remote into Ryuji’s hand and then stood up and went to the window. He didn’t feel like seeing it again. Really he should watch it over and over, analyzing it cool-headedly, but he couldn’t seem to find the will to chase this thing any further. He just wanted to run away. Nothing more. Asakawa went out onto the balcony and smoked a cigarette. He’d promised his wife when Yoko was born that he wouldn’t smoke inside the apartment, and he’d never broken that promise. Although they’d been married for a full three years, he and his wife had a relatively good relationship. He couldn’t go against his wife’s wishes, not after she’d given him darling Yoko.

Standing on the balcony, he peered into the room: through the frosted glass, the image on the screen was flickering. The fear quotient was different watching it here, surrounded by three people on the sixth floor of a downtown apartment building, compared to watching it alone at Villa Log Cabin. But even if Ryuji watched it under the same conditions, he probably wouldn’t lose his head and start crying or anything. Asakawa was counting on him to laugh and fling abuse as he watched, even turning a menacing gaze toward what he saw on the screen.

Asakawa finished his cigarette and went to go back inside. Just at that moment, the door separating the dining room from the hall opened, and Shizu appeared in her pyjamas. Flustered, Asakawa grabbed the remote and paused the video.

“I thought you were asleep.” There was a note of reproach in Asakawa’s voice.

“I heard noises.” As she said this Shizu looked back and forth between the TV screen, with its distorted images and staticky sound, and Ryuji and Asakawa. Her face clouded over with suspicion.

“Go back to bed!” said Asakawa in a tone of voice that allowed for no questions.

“I think we ought to let the missus join us, if she’d like to. It’s quite interesting.” Ryuji, still seated cross-legged on the floor, looked up. Asakawa wanted to yell at him. But instead of speaking, he balled all his thoughts up into his fist and slammed it down onto the table. Startled by the sound, Shizu quickly put her hand on the doorknob, then narrowed her eyes and bowed ever-so-slightly and said to Ryuji, “Please make yourself at home.” With that she turned on her heel and disappeared back behind the door. Two guys alone at night, turning videos on and off… Asakawa knew just what his wife was imagining. He didn’t miss the look of disdain in her narrowed eyes-disdain not so much for Ryuji as for male instincts in general. Asakawa felt bad that he couldn’t explain.

Just as Asakawa had expected, Ryuji was still utterly calm after he’d finished watching. He hummed as he rewound the tape, then set about checking it point by point, alternately fast-forwarding and pausing it.

“Well, it looks like yours truly is mixed up in it now. You’ve got six days left, I’ve got seven,” said Ryuji happily, as if he’d been allowed to join in a game.

“So what do you think?” asked Asakawa.

“It’s child’s play.”

“Huh?”

“Didn’t you use to do this sort of thing when you were a kid? Scare your friends by showing them a spooky picture or something and saying that whoever looked at it would come to harm? Chain letters, that sort of thing.”

Of course Asakawa had experienced that kind of thing, too. The same sort of thing had come up in the ghost stories they’d told each other on summer nights.

“So what are you getting at?”

“Nothing, I guess. Just, that’s how it felt to me.”

“Was there anything else you noticed? Tell me.”

“Hmm. Well, the images themselves aren’t especially frightening. It seems like a combination of realistic images and abstract ones. If it wasn’t for the fact that four people had died exactly as dictated in the video, we could just snort and pass it off as an oddity. Right?”

Asakawa nodded. Knowing that the words on the video were no lie was what made the whole thing so troublesome.

“The first question is, why did those poor fools die? What’s the reason? I can think of two possibilities. The last scene on the video is the statement, ‘he who watches this is fated to die,’ and then immediately thereafter, there was… well, for lack of a better word, let’s call it a charm. A way to escape that fate. So the four erased the part that explained the charm, and because of that they were killed. Or, perhaps they simply failed to make use of the charm, and that’s why they were killed. I suppose even before that, though, we have to determine if it was really those four who erased the charm. It’s possible that the charm had already been erased when they watched the video.”

“How are we going to determine that? We can’t just ask them, you know.”

Asakawa got a beer from the refrigerator, poured a glassful, and set it in front of Ryuji.

“Just you watch.” Ryuji replayed the end of the video, watching closely for the exact moment when the charm-erasing mosquito coil commercial ended. He paused the tape and began to advance it slowly, frame by frame. He’d go past it rewind it, pause it, advance it again frame by frame… Then, finally, just for a split second, the screen showed a scene of three people sitting around a table. For just the briefest moment, the program which had been interrupted by the commercial was resuming. It was a late-night talk show broadcast nightly at eleven on one of the national networks. The gray-haired gent was a best-selling author, and he was joined by a lovely young woman and a young man whom they recognized as a traditional storyteller from the Osaka region. Asakawa brought his face close to the screen.

“I’m sure you recognize this show,” said Ryuji.

“It’s The Night Show on NBS.”

“Right. The writer is the host, the girl is his foil, and the storyteller is today’s guest. Therefore, if we know what day the storyteller was a guest on the show, we know whether or not our four kids erased the charm.”

“I get it.”

The Night Show was on every weeknight at eleven. If this particular episode turned out to have been broadcast on August 29th, then it had to be those four who erased it, that night at Villa Log Cabin.

“NBS is affiliated with your publisher, isn’t it? This ought to be an easy one.”

“Gotcha. I’ll look into it.”

“Yes, please do. Our lives may depend on it. Let’s make sure of everything, no matter what. Right, my brother-in-arms?”

Ryuji slapped Asakawa on the shoulder. They were both facing their deaths now. Brothers in arms.

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Scared? Au contraire, my friend. It’s kind of exciting to have a deadline, isn’t it? The penalty is death. Fantastic. It’s no fun playing if you’re not willing to bet your life on the outcome.”

For a while now Ryuji had been acting pleased about the whole thing, but Asakawa had worried it was just bravado, a cover for his fear. Now that he peered into his friend’s eyes, though, he couldn’t find the smallest fragment of fear there.

“Next: we figure out who made this video, when, and to what end. You say Villa Log Cabin is only six months old, so we contact everybody who’s stayed in B-4 and ferret out whoever brought in a videotape. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to limit the search to late August. Chances are it was somebody who stayed there right before our four victims.”

“That’s mine, too?”

Ryuji downed his beer in one swig and thought for a moment. “Of course. We’ve got a deadline.

Don’t you have a buddy you can rely on? If so, get him to help.”

“Well, there is one reporter who’s got an interest in this case. But this is a matter of life and death. I can’t just…” Asakawa was thinking about Yoshino.

“Not to worry, not to worry. Get him involved. Show him the video-that’ll light a fire under his ass. He’ll be happy to help out, trust me.”

“Not everybody’s like you, you know.”

“So tell him it’s black-market porn. Force him to watch it. Whatever.”

It was no use reasoning with Ryuji. He couldn’t show it to anybody without figuring out the charm first. Asakawa felt he was in a logical cul-de-sac. To crack the secrets of this video would require a well-organized search, but because of the nature of the video it would be next to impossible to enlist anybody. People like Ryuji, willing to play dice with death at the drop of a hat, were few and far between. How would Yoshino react? He had a wife and kids himself-Asakawa doubted he’d be willing to risk his life just to satisfy his curiosity. But he might be able to help even without watching the video. Maybe Asakawa should tell him everything that had happened, just in case.

“Yeah. I’ll give it a try.”

Ryuji sat at the dining room table holding the remote.

“Right, then. Now, this falls into two broad categories: abstract scenes and real scenes.” Saying this, he rewound to the volcanic eruption and paused the tape on it. “There, take that volcano. No matter how you look at it, that’s real. We have to figure out what mountain that is. And then there’s the eruption. Once we know the name of the mountain, we should be able to find out when it erupted, meaning we’ll be able to ascertain when and where this scene was shot.”

Ryuji unpaused the tape again. The old woman came on and started saying God knew what. Several of the words sounded like some sort of regional dialect.

“What dialect is that? There’s a specialist in dialects at my university. I’ll ask him about it. That’ll give us some idea of where this old woman is from.”

Ryuji fast-forwarded to the scene near the end with the man with the distinctive features. Sweat poured down his face, he was panting while rocking his body rhythmically. Ryuji paused just before the part where his shoulder was gouged. It was the closest view of the man’s face. It was quite a clear shot of his features, from the set of his eyes to the shape of his nose and ears. His hairline was receding, but he looked to be around thirty.

“Do you recognize this man?” Ryuji asked.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Looks faintly sinister.”

“If you think so, then he must be pretty evil indeed. I’ll defer to your opinion.”

“As well you should. There aren’t many faces that make this kind of an impact. I wonder if we can locate him? You’re a reporter, you must be a pro at this sort of thing.”

“Don’t be funny. You might be able to identify criminals or celebrities by their faces alone, but ordinary people can’t be located that way. There are over a hundred million people in Japan.”

“So start with criminals. Or maybe porn actors.”

Instead of answering, Asakawa took out a memo pad. When he had a lot of things to do he tended to make lists.

Ryuji stopped the video. He helped himself to another beer from the refrigerator and poured some into each of their glasses.

“Let’s drink a toast.”

Asakawa couldn’t think of a single good reason to pick up his glass.

“I have a premonition,” said Ryuji, his dirt-coloured cheeks flushing slightly. “There’s a certain universal evil clinging to this incident. I can smell it-the impulse I felt then… I told you about it, right? The first woman I raped.”

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“It’s already been fifteen years since then. Then, too, I felt a strange premonition tickling my heart.

I was seventeen. It was September of my junior year in high school. I studied math until three in the morning, then did an hour of German to give my brain some rest. I always did that. I found language study was perfect for loosening up tired brain cells. At four, as always, I had a couple of beers and then went out for my daily walk. When I set out there was already something unusual budding in my brain. Have you ever walked around a residential neighbourhood late at night? It feels really good. The dogs are all asleep. Just like your baby is now. I found myself in front of a certain apartment building. It was an elegant wood framed two-story affair, and I knew that inside it lived a certain well-groomed college girl that I sometimes saw on the street. I didn’t know which apartment was hers. I let my gaze roam over the windows of all eight apartments in turn. At this point, as I looked, I didn’t have anything definite in mind. Just… you know. When my eyes came to rest on the southern end of the second floor, I heard something crack open in the depths of my heart, and I felt like the darkness that had sent forth its shoots in my mind was growing gradually larger. Once more I looked at all the windows in turn. Once again, in the same place, the darkness began to whirlpool. And I knew. I knew that the door wouldn’t be locked. I don’t know if she just forgot, or what. Guided by the darkness that was living in my heart I climbed the apartment stairs and stood in front of that door. The nameplate was in Roman letters, in Western order, given name first: YUKARI MAKITA. I grasped the doorknob firmly with my right hand. I held onto it for a while, and then forcefully turned it to the left. It wouldn’t turn. What the hell? I thought, and then suddenly, there was a click and the door opened. Are you with me? She hadn’t forgotten to lock it at all: it unlocked itself at that very moment. Some energy was being exerted on it. The girl had spread her bedding beside her desk and gone to sleep. I had expected to find her in a bed, but she wasn’t. One of her legs poked out from under the covers…”

Here Ryuji interrupted his story. He seemed to be replaying the ensuing events agilely in the back of his mind, staring down distant memories with a mixture of tenderness and cruelty. Asakawa had never seen Ryuji look so conflicted.

“… then, two days later, on my way home from school, I passed in front of that apartment building. A two-ton truck was parked in front of it, and guys were hauling furniture and stuff out of the building. And the person moving was Yukari. She was standing around aimlessly, leaning on a wall, accompanied by a guy who looked like he must be her dad, just staring at her furniture as it was being carried away. I’m sure her dad didn’t know the real reason his daughter was moving so suddenly. And so Yukari disappeared from my life. I don’t know if she moved back in with her parents or got another apartment somewhere and kept going to the same college… But she just couldn’t live in that apartment a second longer. Heh, heh, poor thing. She must’ve been awfully scared.”

Asakawa found it hard to breathe as he listened. He felt disgusted even to be sitting here drinking beer with this man.

“Don’t you feel the least bit guilty?”

“I’m used to it. Try slamming your fist into a brick wall every day. Eventually you won’t even feel the pain anymore.”

Is that why you go on doing it? Asakawa made a silent vow never to bring this man into his home again. At any rate, to keep him away from his wife and daughter.

“Don’t worry-I’d never do anything like that to your babykins.”

Asakawa had been seen through. Flustered, he changed the subject.

“You said you have a premonition. What is it?”

“You know, just a bad feeling. Only some fantastically evil energy could come up with such an involved bit of mischief.”

Ryuji got to his feet. Even standing, he wasn’t much taller than Asakawa was when sitting down. He wasn’t even five-three, but he had broad, sculpted shoulders-it wasn’t hard to believe he’d medalled in shot-put in high school.

“Well, I’m off. Do your homework. In the morning, you’ll be down to five days left.” Ryuji extended the fingers of one hand.

“I know.”

“Somewhere, there’s this vortex of evil energy. I know. It makes me feel… nostalgic.” As if for emphasis, Ryuji clutched his copy of the tape to his breast as he headed for the entry hall.

“Let’s have the next strategy session at your place.” Asakawa spoke quietly but distinctly.

“Alright, alright.” Ryuji’s eyes were smiling.

The moment Ryuji left, Asakawa looked at the wall clock in the dining room. A wedding gift from a friend, its butterfly-shaped red pendulum was swinging. 11:21. How many times had he checked the time today? He was becoming obsessed with the passage of time. Just like Ryuji said, in the morning he’d only have five days left. He wasn’t at all sure if he’d be able to unlock the riddle of the erased part of the tape in time. He felt like a cancer patient facing an operation with a success rate of almost nil. There was debate over whether cancer patients should be told they had cancer or not; until now Asakawa had always thought they deserved to be allowed to know. But if this was how it would feel, then he preferred not knowing. There were some people who, when facing death, would burn brightly with what life they had left. Asakawa couldn’t manage that feat. He was still alright for the moment. But as the clock chipped away at his remaining days, hours, minutes, he wasn’t confident he’d be able to keep his wits about him. He felt like he understood, now, why he was attracted to Ryuji even while being disgusted by him. Ryuji had a psychological strength he just couldn’t match. Asakawa lived his life tentatively, always worried about what people around him thought. Ryuji, meanwhile, kept a god-or a devil-chained up inside him that allowed him to live with complete freedom and abandon. The only time Asakawa felt his desire to live chase away his fear was when he thought of how his wife and daughter would feel after his death. Now he suddenly worried about them, and softly opened the bedroom door to check on them. Their faces in sleep were soft and unsuspecting. He had no time to shrink in terror. He decided to call Yoshino and explain the situation and ask for his help. If he put off until tomorrow what he could do today, he was bound to regret it.

3

October 13-Saturday

Asakawa had thought of taking the week off work, but then decided that using the company’s information system to the full would give him a better chance of clearing up the mysteries of the videotape than holing up in his apartment pointlessly cowering. As a result, he went in to work, even though it was a Saturday. “Went in to work,” but he knew full well that he wouldn’t get any actual work done. He figured the best policy would be to confess everything to his editor and ask that he be temporarily taken off his assignments. Nothing would help more than enlisting his editor’s cooperation. The problem was whether or not Oguri would believe his story. He’d probably bring up the previous incident yet again and snort. Even though he had the video as proof, if Oguri started out by denying everything, he’d have all sorts of other arguments arrayed to support his view. He’d skewer all sorts of things his way to convince himself he was right. Still…it would be interesting, Asakawa thought. He’d brought the video in his briefcase, just in case. How would Oguri react if he showed it to him? More to the point, though, would he even give it a glance? Last night he’d stayed up late explaining the whole sequence of events to Yoshino, and he’d believed. And then, as if to prove it, he’d said he absolutely didn’t want to see the video-please don’t show it to him. In exchange, he’d try to cooperate however he could. Of course, in Yoshino’s case, there was a firm foundation for that belief. When Haruko Tsuji and Takehiko Nomi’s corpses had been discovered in a car by a prefectural road in Ashina, Yoshino had rushed to the scene and felt the atmosphere there, the stifling atmosphere that had the investigators convinced that only something monstrous could have done this, but that kept them from saying so. If Yoshino hadn’t actually been there himself, he probably wouldn’t have accepted Asakawa’s story quite so easily.

In any case, what Asakawa had on his hands was a bomb. If he flashed it in front of Oguri’s eyes threateningly, it ought to have some effect. Asakawa was tempted to use it out of curiosity, if for nothing else.

Oguri’s customary mocking smile had been wiped from his face. Both elbows were planted on his desk, and his eyes moved restlessly as he went over Asakawa’s story once again with a fine-toothed comb.

Four young people almost certainly watched a particular video together at Villa Log Cabin on the night of August 29th, and exactly a week later, just as the video had predicted, they died under mysterious circumstances. Subsequently, the video had caught the eye of the cabin manager, who had brought it into the office where it calmly waited until Asakawa discovered it. Asakawa had then watched the damned thing. And now he was going to die in five days? Was he supposed to believe that? And yet those four deaths were an indisputable fact. How could he explain them? What was the logical thread to connect all this?

Asakawa’s expression, as he stood looking down at Oguri, had an air of superiority that was rare for him. He knew from experience just what Oguri was thinking right about now. Asakawa waited until he thought Oguri’s thought process would have reached a dead end, and then extracted the videotape from his briefcase. He did it with exaggerated dignity, theatrically, as if laying down a royal flush.

“Would you like to take a look at it? You’re quite welcome to.” Asakawa indicated with his eyes the TV by the sofa under the window, flashing a composed, provocative smile. He could hear Oguri swallow loudly. Oguri didn’t even glance in the direction of the window; his eyes were fixed on the jet-black videotape that had been placed on his desk. He was honestly trying to decide what to do.

If you want to watch it, you could just press play. It’s that easy. C’mon, you can do it. Just laugh like you always do and say how stupid it is, and shove it in the video deck. Do it, give it a shot. Oguri’s mind was trying to issue the command to his body. Stop being such an idiot and watch it. If you watch it, doesn’t it show that you don’t believe Asakawa? Which means, right, think about it now, it means if you refuse to watch it, you must believe this cock-and-bull story. So watch it already. You believe in modern science, don’t you? You’re not a kid afraid of ghosts.

In fact, Oguri was 99 % sure that he didn’t believe Asakawa. But still, way back in a corner of his mind, there was that what if What if it were true? Maybe there were some niches in this world that modern science couldn’t reach yet. And as long as there was that risk, no matter how hard his mind worked, his body was going to refuse. So Oguri sat in his chair and didn’t move. He couldn’t move. It didn’t matter what his mind understood: his body wasn’t listening to his mind. As long as there was the possibility of danger, his body would keep loyally activating his instincts for self-preservation. Oguri raised his head and said, in a parched voice:

“So, what is it you want from me?”

Asakawa knew he had won. “I’d like you to relieve me of my assignments. I want to make a thorough investigation of this video. Please. I think you realize my life is on the line here.”

Oguri shut his eyes tightly. “Are you going to get an article out of it?”

“Well, regardless of how I may appear to you, I’m still a reporter. I’ll write down my findings so everything isn’t buried with Ryuji Takayama and myself. Of course, whether or not to print them is something I’ll leave up to you.”

Oguri gave two decisive nods. “Well, it can’t hurt. I guess I’ll have a cub take your feature interview.”

Asakawa bowed slightly. He went to return the video to his briefcase, but couldn’t resist the temptation to have a little more fun. He proffered the tape to Oguri once again, saying, “You believe me, don’t you?”

Oguri gave a long sigh and shook his head. It wasn’t that he believed or disbelieved; he just felt a tinge of uneasiness. Yeah, that was it.

“I feel the same way,” were Asakawa’s parting words. Oguri watched him walk out and told himself that if Asakawa was still alive after October 18th, then he’d watch that video with his own eyes. But even then, maybe his body wouldn’t let him. That what if didn’t feel like it was ever going to go away.

In the reference room Asakawa stacked three thick volumes on a table. Volcanoes of Japan, Volcanic Archipelago, and Active Volcanoes of the World. Figuring that the volcano in the video was probably in Japan, he started with Volcanoes of Japan. He looked at the colour photos at the beginning of the book. Mountains belching white smoke and steam rose gallantly into the sky, sides covered with brownish-black lava rock; bright red molten rock spewed into the night sky from craters whose black edges melted into the darkness; he thought of the Big Bang. He turned the pages, comparing these scenes to the one seared into his brain. Mt Aso, Mt Asama, Showa Shinzan, Sakurajima… It didn’t take as long to locate as he’d feared. After all, Mt Mihara on Izu Oshima Island, part of the same chain of volcanoes that included Mt Fuji, is one of Japan’s more famous active volcanoes.

“Mt Mihara?” muttered Asakawa. The two-page spread for Mt Mihara had two aerial shots and one photo taken from a nearby hilltop. Asakawa recalled the image on the video and tried to imagine it from various angles, comparing it to these photos. There was a definite similarity. From a perspective at the foot of the mountain, the peak seemed gently sloped. But from the air one could see a circular rim surrounding a caldera, in the centre of which was a mound which was the mouth of the volcano. The photo taken from a nearby hilltop especially resembled the scene in the video. The colour and contours of the mountainside were almost the same. But he needed to confirm it, instead of just relying on his memory. Asakawa made a copy of the photos of Mt Mihara, along with two or three other candidates.

Asakawa spent the afternoon on the phone. He called people who had used cabin B-4 in the last six months. He would have been better off meeting them face to face and gauging their reactions, but he simply didn’t have that kind of time. It was tough to spot a lie just from a voice on a telephone. Asakawa pricked up his ears, determined to catch the slightest crack. There were sixteen parties he needed to check out. The low number was due to the fact that the cabins hadn’t been equipped with individual video decks when Villa Log Cabin opened in April. A major regional hotel was torn down over the summer, and it was decided to transfer the large number of VCRs it no longer needed to Villa Log Cabin. That was in mid-July. The decks had been installed and the tape library assembled by the end of that month, just in time for the summer vacation season. As a result the brochure didn’t mention that each room had its own video equipment. Most guests had been surprised to see the VCR when they arrived, and thought of it as nothing more than a way to kill time on a rainy day; almost nobody had expressly brought a tape for the purpose of recording something. Of course, that was if he believed the voices on the phone. So who had brought the tape in question? Who had made it? Asakawa was desperate not to overlook anything. He chipped away at people’s responses time and again, but not once did anybody seem like they were hiding something. Of the sixteen guests he called, three had come to play golf and hadn’t even noticed the VCR. Seven had noticed it but hadn’t touched it. Five had come to play tennis but had been rained out, and with nothing else to do had watched videos: classic films, mostly. Probably old favourites. The last group, a family of four named Kaneko, from Yokohama, had brought a tape so they could record something on another channel while watching a historical miniseries.

Asakawa put down the receiver and cast an eye over the data he had collected concerning the sixteen groups of guests. Only one looked pertinent. Mr and Mrs Kaneko and their two grade-school-aged kids. They’d stayed in B-4 twice last summer. The first time had been the night of Friday, August 10th, and the second time they had stayed two nights, Saturday and Sunday, August 25th and 26th. The second time was three days before the four victims had been there. Nobody had stayed there on the Monday or Tuesday following the Kanekos’ stay: the four teenagers were the very next people to use the cabin. Not only that, the Kanekos’ sixth-grade son had brought a tape from home to record a show. The boy was a faithful fan of a certain comedy series broadcast every Sunday at eight, but his parents, of course, controlled the TV, and every Sunday at eight they made a habit of watching the annual historical miniseries on NHK, the public television network. There was only one television in the cabin, but knowing it had a VCR, the boy had brought a tape, thinking to record his show and watch it later. But while he was recording, a friend came over to tell him that the rain had let up. He and his younger sister ran off to play tennis. His parents finished their program and turned off the television, forgetting that the VCR was still recording. The children ran around on the courts until almost ten, then came home all tuckered out and went straight to bed. They, too, had completely forgotten about the tape. The next day, when they were almost home, the kid suddenly remembered he’d left the tape in the VCR and shouted to his father, who was driving, to go back. This turned into quite an argument, but eventually the boy gave up. He was still whimpering when they got home.

Asakawa took out the videotape and stood it on his desk. Where the label would have been stuck the words Fujitex VHS T120 Super AV glinted in silver. Asakawa redialled the Kanekos’ number.

“Hi, sorry to keep calling you like this. It’s Asakawa again, from the Daily News.”

There was a pause, then the same voice he had spoken to before said, “Yes?” It was Mrs Kaneko.

“You mentioned that your son left behind a videotape. Do you happen to know what brand it was?”

“Well, now, let me see,” she replied, trying not to laugh. He heard noises in the background. “My son’s just got home. I’ll ask him.”

Asakawa waited. There was no way the kid’d remember.

“He says he doesn’t know. But we only use cheap brands, the kind you buy in packs of three.”

He wasn’t surprised. Who really paid attention to what brand of tape they used every time they wanted to record something? Then Asakawa had an idea. Hold on, where’s the case for this tape? Videotapes are always sold in cardboard cases. Nobody just throws them away. At least, Asakawa himself had never thrown away a tape case, neither for an audio cassette or a video tape.

“Does your family store your videotapes in their cases?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Look, I’m very sorry, but could you please check to see if you have an empty case lying around?”

“Huh?” she asked vacantly. Even if she understood his question, she couldn’t guess what he was getting at, and it made her slow on the uptake.

“Please. Someone’s life may depend on it.” Housewives were susceptible to the “matter of life and death” ploy. Whenever he needed to save time and get one moving, he found that the phrase had just the right impact. But this time, he wasn’t lying.

“Just a moment, please.”

Just as he’d expected, her tone changed. There was quite a long pause after she set down the receiver. If the case had been left at Villa Log Cabin along with the tape, then it must have been thrown away by the manager. But if not, then there was a good chance the Kanekos still had it. The voice returned.

“An empty case, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I found two.”

“Alright. Now, the manufacturer’s name and the type of tape should be printed on the case…”

“Let’s see. One says Panavision T120. The other is a… Fujitex VHS T120 Super AV.”

The exact same name as on the videotape he held in his hand. Since Fujitex had sold countless numbers of these tapes, this was hardly definitive proof, but at least he’d taken a step forward. That much was certain. This demon tape had originally been brought there by a sixth-grade boy, it was probably safe to conclude. Asakawa thanked the woman politely and hung up the phone.

Starting at eight o’clock on the night of Sunday, August 26th, the video deck in cabin B-4 is left recording. The Kaneko family forgets the tape and goes home. Then come the four young people in question. It’s rainy that day, too. Thinking to watch a movie, they go to use the video deck, only to find a tape already inside. Innocently they watch it. They see incomprehensible, eerie things. Then, the threat at the end. Cursing the evil weather, they think up a cruel bit of mischief. Erasing the section that tells how to escape certain death, they leave the video there to frighten the next guests. Of course, they hadn’t believed what they’d seen. If they had, they wouldn’t have been able to carry out their prank. He wondered if they remembered the tape at the moment of their deaths. Maybe there hadn’t been any time for that before the angel of death carried them off. Asakawa shivered-it wasn’t just them. Unless he could find a way to avoid dying in five days, he’d end up just like them. Then he’d know exactly how they felt when they died.

But if the boy had been recording a TV show, then where had those images come from? All along Asakawa had thought that someone had shot them with a video camera and then brought the tape there. But the tape had been set to record from the television, meaning that somehow these incredible scenes had infiltrated the airwaves. He would never have dreamed it.

The airwaves had been hijacked.

Asakawa recalled what had happened last year at election time, when, after NHK had signed off for the night, an illicit broadcast had appeared on the same channel, slandering one of the candidates.

The airwaves had been hijacked. That was the only thing that fit. He was faced with the possibility that on the evening of August 26th, these images had been riding the airwaves in the South Hakone region, and that this tape had picked them up, purely by chance. If that was true, then there must be a record of it. Asakawa realized he needed to contact the local bureau and find out some facts.

4

It was ten when Asakawa got home. As soon as he entered the apartment, he softly opened the bedroom door and checked the sleeping faces of his wife and daughter. No matter how tired he was when he got home, he always did this.

There was a note on the dining room table. Mr Takayama called. Asakawa had been trying to call Ryuji all day long, but he hadn’t been able to catch him at home. He was probably out and about on his own investigations. Maybe he has something, thought Asakawa as he dialled. He let it ring ten times. No answer. Ryuji lived alone in his East Nakano apartment. He wasn’t home yet.

Asakawa took a quick shower, opened a beer, and tried calling again. Still not home. He switched to whiskey on the rocks. He’d never be able to get a good night’s sleep without alcohol. Tall and slender, Asakawa had never in his life had an illness worth the name. To think that this was how he was sentenced to die. Part of him still felt it was a dream, that he’d reach ten o’clock on October 18th without having understood the video or figured out the charm, but in the end nothing would happen and the days would stretch out before him as they always had. Oguri would wear a mocking expression and expound on the foolishness of believing in superstitions, while Ryuji would laugh and say, “We just don’t understand how the world works.” And his wife and daughter would greet their daddy with these same sleeping faces. Even a passenger on an airplane falling from the sky can’t shake the hope that he’ll be the one to survive.

He drained his third glass of whiskey and dialled Ryuji’s number a third time. If he didn’t answer this time, Asakawa was going to give up for the night. He heard seven rings, then a click as someone picked up the receiver.

“What the hell have you been up to all this time?” he shouted, without even checking to see who he was talking to. Thinking he was addressing Ryuji, he allowed his anger full vent. Which only served to emphasize the strangeness of their relationship. Even with his friends, Asakawa always maintained a certain distance and carefully controlled his attitude. But he had no qualms about calling Ryuji every name in the book. And yet, he’d never once thought of Ryuji as a truly close friend.

But surprisingly, the voice that answered wasn’t Ryuji’s.

“Hello? Excuse me…”

It was a woman, startled from having been yelled at out of nowhere.

“Oh, sorry. Wrong number.” Asakawa started to hang up.

“Are you calling for Professor Takayama?”

“Well, ah, yes, as a matter of fact I am.”

“He’s not back yet.”

Asakawa couldn’t help but wonder who this young, attractive voice belonged to. He figured it was a safe bet she wasn’t a relative, since she’d called him “Professor”. A lover? Couldn’t be. What girl in her right mind would fall for Ryuji?

“I see. My name is Asakawa.”

“When Professor Takayama returns, I’ll have him call you. That’s Mr Asakawa, right?”

Even after he had replaced the receiver, the woman’s soft voice continued to ring pleasantly in his ears.

Futons were usually only used in Japanese-style rooms, with tatami-mat floors. Their bedroom was carpeted, and had originally had a Western-style bed in it, but when Yoko was born they took it out. They couldn’t have a baby sleeping on a bed, but the room was too small for a crib and a bed. So they were forced to get rid of their double bed and switch to futons, rolling them up every morning and spreading them out again every night. They laid two futons side-by-side and the three of them slept together. Now Asakawa crawled into the open space on the futons. When the three of them went to bed at the same time, they always slept in the same positions. But Shizu and Yoko were restless sleepers, so when they went to bed before Asakawa, it was less than an hour before they had rolled around and sprawled all over. As a result, Asakawa ended up having to fit himself into whatever space was left. If he was gone, how long would it take for that space to be filled, Asakawa wondered. It wasn’t that he was worried about Shizu remarrying, necessarily. It was just that some people were never able to fill the space left behind by the loss of a spouse. Three years? Three years would be about right. Shizu would move back home and let her parents take care of the baby while she went to work. Asakawa forced himself to imagine her face, shining with as much vitality as could be expected. He wanted her to be strong. He couldn’t stand to imagine the kind of hell his wife and child would have to live through with him gone.

Asakawa had met Shizu five years ago. He had just been transferred back to the main Tokyo office from the Chiba bureau; she was working in a travel agency connected with the Daily News conglomerate. She worked on the third floor, he worked on the seventh, and they sometimes saw each other on the elevator, but that was the extent of it until one day when he’d gone to the travel agency to pick up some tickets. He was travelling for a story, and as the person handling his arrangements wasn’t in Shizu had taken care of him. She was just twenty-five and loved to travel, and her gaze told how much she envied Asakawa being able to go all over the country on assignments. In that gaze, he also saw a reflection of the first girl he’d ever loved. Now that they knew each other’s names, they started to make small talk when they ran into each other on the elevator, and their relationship rapidly deepened. Two years later they married, after an easy courtship with no objections from either set of parents. About six months before their wedding they had bought the three-room condo in Kita Shinagawa-their parents had helped with the down payment. It wasn’t that they’d anticipated the spike in land value and had therefore rushed to buy even before the wedding. It was simply that they wanted to get the mortgage paid off as quickly as possible. But if they hadn’t bought when they did, they might never have been able to afford to live in the city like this.

Within a year, their condo had tripled in value. And their monthly mortgage payments were less than half of what they would have been paying to rent. They were constantly complaining that the place was too small, but in truth it constituted quite an asset for the couple. Now Asakawa was glad he had something to leave them. If Shizu used his life insurance to pay off the mortgage, then the condo would belong to her and Yoko free and clear.

I think my policy pays twenty million yen, but I’d better check, just to be sure.

His mind was clouded, but he mentally divided up the money in different ways, telling himself that he must write down any financial advice that might occur to him. He wondered how they’d rule his death. Death by illness? Accident? Homicide?

In any case, I’d better reread my insurance policy.

Every night for the past three days he had gone to bed in a pessimistic mood. He pondered how to influence a world he would have disappeared from, and thought about leaving a sort of last testament.

October 14-Sunday

The next morning, Sunday, Asakawa dialled Ryuji’s number as soon as he woke up.

“Yeah?” answered Ryuji, sounding for all the world like he’d just woken up. Asakawa immediately remembered his frustration of the night before, and barked into the receiver. “Where were you last night?”

“Huh? Oh. Asakawa?”

“You were supposed to call, weren’t you?”

“Oh, yeah. I was drunk. College girls these days sure can drink. Sure can do other stuff, too, if you know what I mean. Whoo-whee. I’m exhausted.”

Asakawa was momentarily at a loss: it was like the past three days were just a dream. He felt foolish for having taken everything so seriously.

“Well, I’m on my way over. Wait for me,” said Asakawa, hanging up the phone.

To get to Ryuji’s place Asakawa rode the train to East Nakano and then walked for ten minutes in the direction of Kami Ochiai. As he walked Asakawa reflected hopefully that even though Ryuji had been out drinking the night before, he was still Ryuji. Surely he’d found something. Maybe he’d even solved the riddle, and he’d gone out drinking and carousing to celebrate. The closer he drew to Ryuji’s apartment the more upbeat he became, and he began to walk faster. Asakawa’s emotions were wearing him out, bouncing back and forth between fear and hope, pessimism and optimism.

Ryuji opened the door in his pajamas. Unkempt and unshaven, he’d obviously just got out of bed. Asakawa couldn’t take his shoes off fast enough, he was still in the entryway when he asked, “Have you learned anything?”

“No, not really. But come in,” said Ryuji, scratching his head vigorously. His eyes were unfocused and Asakawa knew at a glance that his brain cells weren’t awake yet.

“Come on, wake up. Drink some coffee or something.” Feeling like his hopes had been betrayed, Asakawa put the kettle on the stove with a loud clatter. Suddenly he was obsessed with the time.

The two men sat cross-legged on the floor in the front room. Books were stacked all along one wall.

“So tell me what you’ve turned up,” said Ryuji, jiggling his knee. There was no time to waste. Asakawa collected everything he’d learned the day before and laid it out chronologically. First he informed Ryuji that the video had been recorded from the television in the cabin beginning at 8 p.m. on August 26th.

“Really?” Ryuji looked surprised. He, too, had assumed it had been made on a video camera and then brought in later.

“Now, that’s interesting. But if the airwaves were hijacked as you say, there should be others who saw the same thing…”

“Well, I called our bureaus in Atami and Mishima and asked about that. But they say they haven’t received any reports of suspicious transmissions flying around South Hakone on the night of August 26th.”

“I see, I see…” Ryuji folded his arms and thought for a while. “Two possibilities come to mind. First, everybody who saw the transmission is dead. But hold on-when it was broadcast, the charm should have been intact. So… And, anyway, the local papers haven’t picked up on anything, right?”

“Right. I’ve already checked that out. You mean whether or not there were any other victims, right? There weren’t. None at all. If it was broadcast, then other people should have seen it, but there haven’t been any other victims. Not even any rumours.”

“But remember when AIDS started to appear in the civilized world? At first doctors in America had no idea what was going on. All they knew was that they were seeing people die from symptoms they’d never encountered before. All they had was a suspicion of some strange disease. They only started calling it AIDS two years after it had appeared. That kind of thing happens.”

The mountainous valleys west of the Tanna Ridge only contained a few scattered farmhouses, on the lower reaches of the Atami-Kannami Highway. If you gazed south, all you could see was South Hakone Pacific Land, isolated in its dreamy alpine meadows. Was something invisible at work in that land? Maybe lots of people were dying suddenly, but it just hadn’t made it into the news yet. It wasn’t just AIDS: Kawasaki Disease, first discovered in Japan, had been around for ten years before it was officially recognized as a new disease. It was still only a month and a half since the phantom broadcast had been accidentally caught on videotape. It was quite possible that the syndrome hadn’t yet been recognized. If Asakawa hadn’t discovered the common factor in four deaths-if his niece hadn’t been among them- this “illness” would probably still be sleeping underground. That was even scarier. It usually took hundreds, thousands, of deaths before something was officially recognized as a “disease”.

“We don’t have time to go door-to-door down there talking to residents. But, Ryuji, you mentioned a second possibility.”

“Right. Second, the only people who saw it are us and the four young people. Hey, do you think the grade school brat who recorded this knew that broadcast frequencies are different from region to region? What they’re showing on Channel 4 in Tokyo might be broadcast on a completely different channel out in the country. A dumb kid wouldn’t know that-maybe he set it to record according to the channel he watches in Tokyo.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Think about it. Do people like us, who live in Tokyo, ever turn to Channel 2? It’s not used here.”

Ah-ha. So the boy had set the VCR to a channel a local would never have used. Since they were recording while watching something else, he hadn’t actually seen what was being recorded. In any event, with the population so sparse in those mountains, there couldn’t be too many viewers in the first place.

“Either way, the real question is, where did the broadcast originate from?” It sounded so simple when Ryuji said it. But only an organized, scientific investigation would be able to determine the transmission’s point of origin.

“W-wait a minute. We’re not even sure your basic premise is right. It’s only a guess that the boy accidentally recorded phantom airwaves.”

“I know that. But if we wait for hundred-percent proof before proceeding, we’ll never get anywhere. This is our only lead.”

Airwaves. Asakawa’s knowledge of science was paltry. He didn’t even really know what airwaves were: he’d have to start his investigation there. There was nothing to do but check it out. The broadcast’s point of origin. That meant he’d have to go back there. And after today, there were only four days left.

The next question was: who had erased the charm? If they allowed that the tape had been recorded on-site, it couldn’t have been anybody but the four victims. Asakawa had checked with the TV network and found out when the young storyteller, Shinraku Sanyutei, had been a guest on The Night Show. They’d been right. The answer that came back was August 29th. It was almost certain that the four young people had erased the charm.

Asakawa took several photocopies from his briefcase. They were photographs of Mt Mihara, on Izu Oshima Island. “What do you think?” he asked, showing them to Ryuji.

“Mt Mihara, eh? I’d say this is definitely the one.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Yesterday afternoon, I asked an ethnologist at the university about Granny’s dialect. He said it wasn’t used much anymore, but that it was probably one found on Izu Oshima. In fact, it contained features traceable to the Sashikiji region on the southern tip of the island. He’s pretty cautious, so he wouldn’t swear that that was it, but combined with this photo I think we’re safe in assuming that the dialect is Izu Oshima’s, and the mountain is Mt Mihara. By the way, did you do any research into Mt Mihara’s eruptions?”

“Of course. Since the war-and I think we’re probably okay in limiting ourselves to eruptions since the war…” Considering developments in film technology, this seemed a safe assumption.

“Right.”

“Now, are you with me? Since the war, Mt Mihara has erupted four times. The first time was in 1950–1951. The second was in ’57, and the third was in ’74. The fourth time I’m sure we both remember well: the autumn of 1986. The ’57 eruption produced a new crater; one person died and fifty-three were injured.”

“Considering when video cameras came out, I’d guess we’re looking at the ’86 eruption, but I don’t think we can be sure yet.”

At this point Ryuji seemed to remember something, and started rummaging around in his bag. He pulled out a slip of paper. “Oh, yes. Evidently this is what she’s saying. The gentleman kindly translated it into standard Japanese for me.”

Asakawa looked at the scrap of paper, on which was written:

How has your health been since then? If you spend all your time playing in the water, monsters are bound to get you. Understand? Be careful of strangers. Next year you’re going to give birth to a child. You listen to granny now, because you’re just a girl. There’s no need to worry about local people.

Asakawa read through it twice, carefully, and then looked up.

“What is this? What does it mean?”

“How should I know? That’s what you’re going to have to find out.”

“We’ve only got four days left!”

Asakawa had too many things to do. He didn’t know where to start. His nerves were on edge and he’d begun to lash out.

“Look. I’ve got one more day to spare than you. You’re the point man on this. Act like it. Give it your all.”

Suddenly misgivings began to well up in Asakawa’s heart. Ryuji could abuse his extra day. If, for example, he came up with two guesses as to the nature of the charm, he could tell Asakawa about one, and wait for Asakawa’s survival or death to tell him which one was right. That single day could turn into a powerful weapon.

“It doesn’t really matter to you if I live or die, does it, Ryuji? Sitting there calmly like that, laughing…” Asakawa wailed, knowing as he did that he was becoming shamefully hysterical.

“You’re talking like a woman now. If you’ve got time to bitch and whine like that you ought to use your head a bit more.”

Asakawa still glared at him resentfully.

“I mean, how would you prefer I put it? You’re my best friend. I don’t want you to die. I’m doing my best. I want you to do your best, too. We both have to do our best, for each other. Happy now?” Midway through his speech Ryuji’s tone suddenly became childish, and he finished with an obscene laugh.

As he laughed, the front door opened. Startled, Asakawa leaned over and peered through the kitchen at the entry hall. A young woman was bending over to remove a pair of white pumps. Her hair was cut short, brushing the tops of her ears, and her earrings gleamed white. She took her shoes off and raised her gaze, her eyes meeting Asakawa’s.

“Oh, pardon me. I thought the Professor was alone,” said the woman, covering her mouth with her hand. Her elegant body language and her pure white outfit clashed utterly with the apartment. Her legs below her skirt were slim and willowy, her face slender and intelligent; she looked like a certain female novelist who appeared in TV commercials.

“Come in.” Ryuji’s tone had changed. The vulgarity was concealed beneath a newfound dignity. “Allow me to introduce you. This is Miss Mai Takano from the philosophy department at Fukuzawa University. She’s one of the department’s star pupils, and always pays close attention in my classes. She’s probably the only one who really understands my lectures. This is Kazuyuki Asakawa, from the Daily News. He’s my… best friend.”

Mai Takano looked at Asakawa with some surprise. At this point he still didn’t know why she should be surprised. “Pleased to meet you,” said Mai, with a thrilling little smile and bow. The kind of smile that made any onlooker feel refreshed. Asakawa had never met such a beautiful woman. The fine texture of her skin, the way her eyes glowed, the perfect balance of her figure-not to mention the intelligence, class, and kindness she radiated from within. There was literally nothing to find fault with in this woman. Asakawa shrank back like a frog from a snake. Words failed him.

“Hey, say something.” Ryuji elbowed him in the ribs.

“Hello,” he said finally, awkwardly, but his gaze was still transfixed.

“Professor, were you out last night?” asked Mai, gracefully sliding her stockinged feet two or three steps closer.

“Actually, Takabayashi and Yagi invited me out with them, so…”

Now that they were standing next to each other, Asakawa could see that Mai was a good ten centimetres taller than Ryuji. She probably only weighed half as much as he did, though.

“I wish you’d tell me if you’re not coming home. I waited up for you.”

Asakawa suddenly returned to his senses. This was the voice he’d spoken to last night. This was the woman who’d answered the phone when he’d called.

Meanwhile, Ryuji was hanging his head like a boy scolded by his mother.

“Well, never mind. I’ll forgive you this time. Here, I brought you something.” She held out a paper bag. “I washed your underwear for you. I was going to straighten up here, too, but you get angry when I move your books.”

From this exchange Asakawa couldn’t help but guess the nature of their relationship. It was obvious that they were not only teacher and student, but lovers as well. On top of that, she’d waited here alone for him last night! Were they that close? He felt the kind of annoyance he sometimes felt when he saw a badly mismatched couple, but this went far beyond that. Everything to do with Ryuji was crazy. Then there was the love in Ryuji’s eyes as he gazed at Mai. He was like a chameleon, changing his expression, even his speech patterns. For an instant, Asakawa was mad enough to want to open Mai’s eyes by exposing Ryuji’s crimes.

“It’s nearly lunchtime, Professor. Shall I fix something? Mr Asakawa, you’ll be staying too, won’t you? Have you any requests?”

Asakawa looked at Ryuji, uncertain how to respond.

“Don’t be shy. Mai’s quite the chef.”

“I’ll leave it up to you,” Asakawa finally managed to say.

Mai immediately left for a nearby market to buy ingredients for lunch. Even after she had gone, Asakawa stared dreamily toward the door.

“Man, you look like a deer caught in the headlights of a car,” said Ryuji with an amused leer.

“Oh, sorry.”

“Look, we don’t have time for you to space out like this.” Ryuji slapped Asakawa lightly on the cheek. “We have things to talk about while she’s gone.”

“You haven’t shown Mai the video.”

“What do you think I am?”

“Okay, then. Let’s get through it. I’ll go after we eat.”

“Right, now the first thing you have to find is the antenna.”

“The antenna?”

“You know, the spot where the broadcast originated.”

He couldn’t afford to relax, then. On the way home he’d have to stop by the library and read up on airwaves. Part of him wanted to rush down to South Hakone now, but he knew it would be quicker in the long run to do some background reading first, to get an idea of what he was looking for. The more he knew about the characteristics of airwaves, and about how to track down pirate broadcasts, the more options he’d be able to give himself.

There was a mountain of things to be done. But now Asakawa felt distracted, his thoughts somewhere else. He couldn’t get her face, her body, out of his mind. Why was Mai with a guy like Ryuji? He felt both puzzled and angry.

“Hey, are you listening to me?” Ryuji’s voice brought Asakawa back down to earth. “There was a scene in the video with a baby boy, remember?”

“Yes.” He chased Mai’s image from his mind momentarily and recalled the vision of the newborn, covered in slippery amniotic fluid. But the transition didn’t go well; he ended up imagining Mai wet and naked.

“When I saw that scene I got a strange sensation in my own hands. Almost as if I were holding that boy myself.”

Sensation. Holding someone. In the arms of his imagination he was holding first Mai and then the baby boy, in blinding succession. Then, finally, he had it-the feeling he’d had watching the video, of holding the infant and then throwing both hands up in the air. Ryuji had felt the exact same sensation. This had to be significant.

“I felt it too. I definitely felt something wet and slippery.”

“You too, huh? So what does it mean?”

Ryuji got down on all fours, bringing his face up close to the television screen as he replayed that scene. It lasted about two minutes, the baby boy giving his birth-cry all the while. They could see a pair of graceful hands beneath the child’s head and bottom.

“Wait a minute, what’s this?” Ryuji paused the video and began to advance it a frame at a time. Just for a second the screen went dark. Watching it at normal speed it was so brief as to be hardly noticeable. But watching it over and over, frame by frame, it was possible to pick out moments of total blackness.

“There it is again,” cried Ryuji. For a time he arched his back like a cat and stared at the screen intently, and then he moved his head back and his eyes darted around the room. He was thinking furiously, Asakawa could tell by the movements of his eyes. But he had no idea what Ryuji was thinking. In all, the screen went dark thirty-three times during the course of the two-minute scene.

“So what? Are you telling me you’ve been able to figure something out just from this? It’s just a glitch in the filming. The video camera was defective.”

Ryuji ignored Asakawa’s comment and began to search through other scenes. They heard footsteps on the outside stairs. Ryuji hurriedly pushed the stop button.

Finally the front door opened and Mai appeared, saying, “I’m back.” The room was once again wrapped in her fragrance.

It was Sunday afternoon, and families with children were playing on the lawn in front of the city library. Some fathers were playing catch with their boys; others were lying on the grass, letting their kids play. It was a beautiful clear Sunday afternoon in mid-October, and the world seemed blanketed in peace.

Faced with the scene, Asakawa suddenly wanted nothing more than to rush home. He’d spent some time on the fourth floor in the natural sciences section, boning up on airwaves, and now he was just staring out the window, looking at nothing in particular. All day he’d found himself drifting off like this. All sorts of thoughts would come to him, without rhyme or reason; he couldn’t concentrate. Probably it was because he was impatient. He stood up. He wanted to see the faces of his wife and child, now. He was overcome with the thought. Now. He didn’t have much time left. Time to play with his daughter on the lawn like that…

Asakawa got home just before five. Shizu was making dinner. He could read her bad mood as he stood behind her and watched her slice vegetables. He knew the reason, too-all too well. He finally had a day off, but he’d left her early that morning, saying only, “I’m going to Ryuji’s place.” If he didn’t look after Yoko once in a while, at least when he had a day off, Shizu tended to feel swamped by the stresses of raising a child. And to top it off, he’d been with Ryuji. That was the problem. He could have just lied to her, but then she wouldn’t have been able to contact him in an emergency.

“There was a call from a realtor/’ said Shizu, not missing a beat with the knife.

“What about?”

“He asked if we were thinking about selling.”

Asakawa had sat Yoko on his knee and was reading her a picture book. She most likely didn’t understand, but they were hoping that if they exposed her to a lot of words now, maybe they’d accumulate in her head and then come flowing out like a burst dam when she got to be two or so.

“Did he make a good offer?”

Ever since land prices had begun to skyrocket, realtors had been trying to get them to sell.

“Seventy million yen.”

That was less than before. Still, it was enough to leave quite a bit for Shizu and Yoko, even after they paid off the mortgage.

“So what did you tell him?”

Wiping her hands on a towel, Shizu finally turned around. “I told him my husband wasn’t home.”

That’s how it always went. My husband’s not at home, she’d say, or I’d have to talk it over with my husband first. Shizu never decided anything on her own. He was afraid she’d have to start soon.

“What do you think? Maybe it’s about time we considered it. We’d have enough to buy a house in the suburbs, with a yard. The realtor said so, too.”

It was the family’s modest dream: to sell the condo they were living in now and build a big house in the suburbs. Without capital, a dream was all it would ever be. But they did have this one powerful asset: a condo in the heart of the city. They had the means to make that dream come true, and every time they spoke of it now it was with excitement. It was right there-all they had to do was reach out their hands…

“And then, you know, we could have another baby, too.” It was perfectly clear to Asakawa just what Shizu was seeing in her mind’s eye. A spacious suburban residence, with a separate study room for each of their two or three kids, and a living room large enough that she needn’t be embarrassed no matter how many guests dropped in. Yoko, on his knee, started to act up. She’d noticed that her daddy’s eyes had strayed from the picture book, that his attention was focussed on something besides herself, and she was registering her objections. Asakawa looked at the picture book once more.

“Long, long ago Marshy-land was called Marshy-beach, because the reed-thick marshes stretched all the way down to the seashore.”

As he read aloud, Asakawa felt tears well up in his eyes. He wanted to make his wife’s dream come true. He really did. But he only had four days left. Would his wife be able to cope when he died of unknown causes? She didn’t yet know how fragile her dream was, how soon it would come crashing down.

By 9 p.m. Shizu and Yoko were asleep as usual. Asakawa was preoccupied by the last thing Ryuji had brought up. Why did he keep replaying the scene with the baby? And what about that old woman’s words-“Next year you’re going to have a child.” Was there a connection between the baby boy and the child the old woman mentioned? And what about the moments of total blackness? Thirty-odd times they occurred, at varying intervals.

Asakawa thought he’d watch the video again, to try and confirm this. Ryuji had been looking for something specific, no matter how capricious it had seemed at the time. Ryuji had great powers of logic, of course, but he also had a finely tuned sense of intuition. Asakawa, on the other hand, specialized in the work of dragging out the truth through painstaking investigation.

Asakawa opened the cabinet and picked up the videotape. He went to insert it into the video deck, but just at that moment, he noticed something that stayed his hand. Wait a minute, something’s not right. He wasn’t sure what it was, but his sixth sense was telling him something was out of the ordinary. More and more he was sure that it wasn’t just his imagination. He really had felt something was funny when he touched the tape. Something had changed, ever so slightly.

What is it? What’s different? His heart was pounding. This is bad. Nothing about this is getting any better. Think, man, try to remember. The last time I watched this… I rewound it. And now the tape’s in the middle. About a third of the way through. That’s right about where the images end, and it hasn’t been rewound. Somebody watched it while I was away.

Asakawa ran to the bedroom. Shizu and Yoko were asleep, all tangled up together. Asakawa rolled his wife over and shook her by the shoulder.

“Wake up. Shizu! Wake up!” He kept his voice low, trying not to awaken Yoko. Shizu twisted her face into a scowl and tried to squirm away.

“I said, wake up!” His voice sounded different from usual.

“What… what’s wrong?”

“We have to talk. Come on.”

Asakawa dragged his wife out of bed and pulled her into the dining room. Then he held the tape out to her. “Did you watch this?”

Taken aback by the ferocity of his tone, Shizu could only look back and forth from the tape to her husband’s face. Finally, she said, “Was I not supposed to?”

What’re you so mad about? she thought. Here it is Sunday, and you’re off somewhere, and I’m bored. And then there was that tape you and Ryuji were whispering over, so I pulled it out. But it wasn’t even interesting. Probably just something the boys in the office cooked up anyway. Shizu remained silent, only talking back in her mind. There’s no call for you to get so upset about it.

For the first time in his married life, Asakawa felt a desire to hit his wife. “You… idiot!” But somehow he managed to resist the urge and just stood there, fist clenched. Calm down and think. It’s your own fault. You shouldn’t have left it where she could see it. Shizu never even opened mail addressed to him; he’d figured it was safe just leaving the tape in the cabinet. Why didn’t I hide it? After all, she came in the room while Ryuji and I were watching it. Of course she’d be curious about it. I was wrong not to hide it.

“I’m sorry,” Shizu mumbled, discontentedly.

“When did you watch it?” Asakawa’s voice shook.

“This morning.”

“Really?”

Shizu had no way of knowing how important it was to know exactly when she watched it. She just nodded, curtly.

“What time?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just tell me!” Asakawa’s hand started to move again.

“Around ten-thirty, maybe. It was right after Masked Rider ended.”

Masked Rider? That was a children’s show. Yoko was the only one in the family who’d have any interest in that. Asakawa fought desperately to keep from collapsing.

“Now, this is very important, so listen to me. While you were watching this video, where was Yoko?”

Shizu looked like she was about to burst into tears.

“On my lap.”

“Yoko, too? You’re saying both of you… watched… this video?”

“She was just watching the screen flicker-she didn’t understand it.”

“Shut up! That doesn’t matter!”

This was no longer just a matter of destroying his wife’s dreams of a house in the suburbs. The entire family was threatened now-they could all perish. They’d all die an utterly meaningless death.

As she observed her husband’s anger, fear, and despair, Shizu began to realize the seriousness of the situation. “Hey… that was just a… a joke, right?”

She recalled the words at the end of the video. At the time she’d dismissed them as just a tasteless prank. They couldn’t be real. But what about the way her husband was acting?

“It’s not for real, right? Right?”

Asakawa couldn’t respond. He merely shook his head. Then he was filled with tenderness for the ones who now shared his fate.

5

October 15-Monday

Every morning when he woke up now, Asakawa found himself wishing that it had all been a dream. He called a rent-a-car place in the neighbourhood and told them that he’d be in on schedule to pick up the car he’d reserved. They had his reservation on file, no mistake. Reality marched on without a break.

He needed a way to get around if he was going to try and find out where that broadcast had originated. It would be too hard to break in on TV frequencies with an off-the-shelf wireless transmitter; he figured that it had to have been done with an expertly modified unit. And the image on the tape was clear, with no interference. That meant that the signal had to have been strong, and close. With more information he might have been able to establish the area in which the broadcast was receivable, and thus to pinpoint the point of origin. But all he had to go on was the fact that the television in Villa Log Cabin B-4 had picked up the transmission. All he could do was go there, check out the lay of the land, and then start going over the area with a fine-toothed comb. He had no idea how long it would take. He packed enough clothes for three days. He certainly wouldn’t need any more than that.

He and Shizu looked at each other, but Shizu didn’t say anything about the video. Asakawa hadn’t been able to think of a good lie, and so he’d let her go to bed with only the vaguest of excuses about the threat of death in a week. For her part, Shizu seemed to fear finding out anything specific, and seemed happy to let things remain ambiguous and unexplained. Rather than questioning him like she usually would, she seemed to guess at something on her own that made her keep an eerie silence. Asakawa didn’t know exactly how she was interpreting things, but it didn’t seem to assuage her uneasiness. As she watched her usual morning soap opera on TV she seemed extraordinarily sensitive to noises from outside, starting from her seat any number of times.

“Let’s just not talk about this, okay? I don’t have any answers for you. Just let me handle it.” This was all Asakawa could think to say to calm his wife’s anxieties. He couldn’t allow himself to appear weak to his wife.

Just as he was stepping out of the house, as if on cue, the phone rang. It was Ryuji.

“I’ve made a fascinating discovery. I want you to tell me what you think.” There was a hint of excitement in Ryuji’s voice.

“Can’t you tell me about it over the phone? I’m supposed to go pick up a rental car.”

“A rental car?”

“You’re the one who told me to find out where the broadcast originated from.”

“Right, right. Listen, put that on the back burner for a while and get over here. Maybe you don’t have to go looking for an antenna after all. Maybe that whole premise will just crumble away.”

Asakawa decided to pick the car up first anyway, so that if he still needed to go to South Hakone Pacific Land, he could leave straight from Ryuji’s place.

Asakawa parked the car with two wheels up on the sidewalk and banged on Ryuji’s door.

“Enter! It’s unlocked.”

Asakawa jerked the door open and deliberately stomped through the kitchen. “So what’s this big discovery?” he asked, forcefully.

“What’s eating you?” Ryuji glanced over from where he sat, cross-legged on the floor.

“Just hurry up and tell me what you’ve found!”

“Relax!”

“How am I supposed to relax? Just tell me, already!”

Ryuji held his tongue for a moment. Then, gently, he asked, “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

Asakawa plopped himself down in the middle of the floor, clenching his hands on his knees. “My wife and… my wife and daughter watched that piece of shit.”

“Well, that’s a hell of a thing. I’m sorry to hear that.” Ryuji watched until Asakawa began to regain his composure. The latter sneezed once and blew his nose loudly.

“Well, you want to save them too, don’t you?”

Asakawa nodded his head like a little boy.

“Well then, all the more reason to keep a cool head. So I won’t tell you my conclusions. I’ll just lay out the evidence. I want to see what the evidence suggests to you first. That’s why I couldn’t have you excited like that, see.”

“I understand,” Asakawa said, meekly.

“Now go wash your face or something. Pull yourself together.”

Asakawa could cry in front of Ryuji. Ryuji was the outlet for all the emotions he couldn’t break down and show his wife.

He came back into the room, wiping his face with a towel, and Ryuji held out a piece of paper. On it was a simple chart:

Some things were clear at a glance. Ryuji had broken down the video into separate scenes.

“Last night I suddenly got the idea for this. You see what it is, right? The video consists of twelve scenes. I’ve given each one a number and a name. The number after the name is the length of the scene in seconds. The next number, in brackets, is-are you with me? — the number of times the screen goes dark during that scene.”

Asakawa’s expression was full of doubt.

“After you left yesterday I started to examine other scenes besides the one with the infant. To see if they had any of these instants of darkness, too. And, lo and behold, there were, in scenes 3, 4, 8, 10, and 11.”

“The next column says ‘real’ or ‘abstract.’ What’s that?”

“Broadly speaking, we can divide the twelve scenes into these two categories. The abstract scenes, the ones like images in the mind, what I suppose we could almost call mental landscapes. And the real ones, scenes of things that really exist, that you could actually look at with your eyes. That’s how I divided them up.”

Here Ryuji paused for a second.

“Now, look at the chart. Notice anything?”

“Well, your black curtain only comes down on the ‘real’ scenes.”

“Right. That’s absolutely right. Keep that in mind.”

“Ryuji, this is getting annoying. Hurry up and tell me what you’re driving at. What does this mean?”

“Now, now, hold your horses. Sometimes when one is given the answers up front it dulls one’s intuition. My intuition has already led me to a conclusion. And now that I have that in mind, I’ll twist any phenomenon to rationalize holding onto that conclusion. It’s like that in criminal investigations, too, isn’t it? Once you get the notion that he’s the guy, it suddenly seems like all the evidence agrees with you. See, we can’t afford to wander off the track here. I need you to back up my conclusion. That is, I want to see, once you’ve taken a look at the evidence, if your intuition tells you the same thing mine told me.”

“Okay, okay. Get on with it.”

“Alright: the black curtain only appears when the screen is showing real landscapes. We’ve established that. Now, cast your mind back on the sensations you felt the first time you saw these images. We discussed the scene with the infant yesterday. Anything besides that? What about the scene with all the faces?”

Ryuji used the remote to find the scene. “Take a good, long look at those faces.”

The wall of dozens of faces slowly retreated, the number swelling into the hundreds, the thousands. When he looked closely at them, each one seemed different, just like real faces.

“How does this make you feel?” Ryuji asked.

“Like somehow I’m the one being reproached. Like they’re calling me a liar, a fraud.”

“Right. As it happens, I felt the same thing- or, at least, what I felt was very similar to the sensation you’re describing.”

Asakawa tried to concentrate his nerves on where this fact led. Ryuji was awaiting a clear response.

“Well?” asked Ryuji again.

Asakawa shook his head. “It’s no good. I’ve got nothing.”

“Well, if you had the leisure to spend more time thinking about it, you might notice the same thing I did. See, both of us have been thinking that these images were captured by a TV camera, in other words by a machine with a lens. No?”

“They weren’t?”

“Well, what’s this black curtain that momentarily covers the screen?”

Ryuji advanced the film frame by frame until the screen went black. It stayed black for three or four frames. If you calculated one frame at a thirtieth of a second, then the darkness lasted for about a tenth of a second.

“Why does this happen in the real scenes and not the imagined ones? Look more closely at the screen. It’s not completely black.”

Asakawa brought his face closer to the screen. Indeed, it wasn’t totally dark. Something like a faint white haze hung suspended within the darkness.

“A blurred shadow. What we have here is the persistence of vision. And as you watch, don’t you get an incredible sense of immediacy, as if you’re actually a participant in the scene?”

Ryuji looked Asakawa full in the face and blinked once, slowly. The black curtain.

“Eh?” murmured Asakawa, “Is this… the blink of an eye?”

“Exactly. Am I wrong? If you think about it, it’s consistent. There are things we see with our eyes, but there are also scenes we conjure up in our minds. And since these don’t pass through the retina, there’s no blinking involved. But when we actually look with our eyes, the images are formed according to the strength of the light that hits the retina. And to keep the retina from drying out, we blink, unconsciously. The black curtain is the instant when the eyes shut.”

Once again, Asakawa was filled with nausea. The first time he’d finished watching the video he’d run to the toilet, but this time the evil chill was even worse. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something had climbed into his body. This video hadn’t been recorded by a machine. A human being’s eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin-all five senses had been used to make this video. These chills, this shivering, were from somebody’s shadow sneaking into him through his sense organs. Asakawa had been watching the video from the same perspective as this thing within him.

He mopped his brow again and again, but still it was damp with cold sweat.

“Did you know-hey, are you listening? Individual differences aside, the average man blinks twenty times a minute, and the average woman fifteen times. That means that it might have been a woman who recorded these images.”

Asakawa couldn’t hear him.

“Heh, heh, heh. What’s the matter? You look like you’re dead already, you’re so pale,” Ryuji laughed. “Look on the bright side. We’re one step closer to a solution now. If these images were collected by the sense organs of a particular person, then the charm must have something to do with that person’s will. In other words: maybe she wants us do something.”

Asakawa had temporarily lost his faculty of reason. Ryuji’s words vibrated in his ears, but their meaning didn’t make it to his brain.

“At any rate, we now know what we have to do. We have to find out who this person is. Or was. I think he or she is probably no longer with us. And then we have to find out what this person desired while he or she was still alive. And that’ll be the charm that will allow us to go on living.”

Ryuji winked at Asakawa, as if to say, how’m I doin’?

Asakawa had left the No. 3 Tokyo-Yokohama Freeway and was now heading south on the Yokohama-Yokosuka road. Ryuji had reclined the passenger seat and was sleeping a perfect, stress-less sleep. It was almost two in the afternoon, but Asakawa wasn’t the least bit hungry.

Asakawa reached out a hand to wake Ryuji, but then pulled it back. They weren’t at their destination yet. Asakawa didn’t even really know what their destination was. All Ryuji had done was tell him to drive to Kamakura. He didn’t know where they were going or why they were going there. It made him a nervous, irritable driver.

Ryuji had packed in a hurry, saying he’d explain where they were going once they were in the car. But once underway, he’d said, “I didn’t sleep last night-don’t wake me till Kamakura,” and then he’d promptly gone to sleep.

He exited the Yokohama-Yokosuka road at Asahina and then took the Kanazawa road five kilometres until they reached Kamakura Station. Ryuji had been asleep for a good two hours.

“Hey, we’re here,” said Asakawa, shaking him. Ryuji stretched his body like a cat, rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands, and shook his head rapidly from side to side, lips flapping.

“Ahh, I was having such a pleasant dream…”

“What do we do now?”

Ryuji sat up and looked out the window to see where he was. “Just go straight on this road, and then when you reach the Outer Gate to the Hachiman Shrine turn left and stop.” Then Ryuji went to lie down again, saying, “Maybe I can still catch the tail-end of that dream, if you don’t mind.”

“Look, we’ll be there in five minutes. If you’ve got time to sleep, you’ve got time to explain to me what we’re doing here.”

“You’ll see once we get there,” said Ryuji, jamming his knees up against the dashboard and going back to sleep.

Asakawa made the left and stopped. Dead ahead was an old two-story house with a small sign reading “Tetsuzo Miura Memorial Hall.”

“Pull into that parking lot.” Ryuji had apparently opened his eyes slightly. He wore a satisfied look and his nostrils were flared like he was sniffing perfume. “Thanks to you I was able to finish my dream.”

“What was it about?” asked Asakawa, as he turned the steering wheel.

“What do you think? I was flying. I love dreams where I’m flying.” Ryuji snorted happily and licked his lips.

The Tetsuzo Miura Memorial Hall looked deserted. A large open space on the ground floor featured photographs and documents in frames on the wall or in cases under glass, and an outline of this Miura fellow’s achievements was plastered onto the centre wall. Reading it, Asakawa finally figured out who the man was.

“Excuse me. Is there anyone here?” called Ryuji into the depths of the building. There was no reply.

Tetsuzo Miura had died two years ago at the age of 72, after retiring from a professorship at Yokodai University. He’d specialized in theoretical physics, concentrating on theories of matter and statistical dynamics. But the Memorial Hall, modest as it was, didn’t result from his achievements as a physicist, but from his scientific investigations of paranormal phenomena. The resume on the wall claimed that the Professor’s theories had attracted worldwide interest, although undoubtedly only a limited number of people had actually paid any attention. After all, Asakawa had never even heard of the guy. And what exactly were this man’s theories? To find the answer, Asakawa began to examine the items on the walls and in the display cases. Thoughts have energy, and that energy … Asakawa had read this far when he heard, echoing from another room, the sound of someone hurrying down stairs. A door opened and a fortyish man with a moustache poked his head in. Ryuji approached the man, holding out one of his business cards. Asakawa decided to follow his example and took his own card-holder from his breast pocket.

“My name is Takayama. I’m at Fukuzawa University.” He spoke smoothly and affably; Asakawa was amused at how different he sounded. Asakawa held out his own card. Faced with the credentials of an academic and a reporter, the man looked rather dismayed. It was Asakawa’s card he was frowning at.

“If it’s alright, there’s something we’d like to consult with you about.”

“What would that be?” The man eyed them cautiously.

“As a matter of fact, I once had the pleasure of meeting the late Professor Miura.”

For some reason the man seemed relieved to hear this, and relaxed his expression. He brought out three folding chairs and arranged them to face each other.

“Is that so? Please, have a seat.”

“It must have been about three years ago… yes, that’s right, it was the year before he died. My alma mater was sounding me out about possibly giving a lecture on the scientific method, and I thought I might take the opportunity to hear what the Professor had to say…”

“Was it here, in this house?”

“Yes. Professor Takatsuka introduced us.”

Hearing this name, the man at last smiled. He realized he had something in common with his visitors. These two must be on our side. They’re not here to attack us after all.

“I see. I’m sorry about all that. My name is Tetsuaki Miura. Sorry, I’m fresh out of business cards.”

“So you must be the Professor’s…?”

“Yes, I’m his only son. Hardly worthy of the name, though.”

“Is that right? Well, I had no idea the Professor had such an outstanding son.”

It was all Asakawa could do to keep from laughing at the sight of Ryuji addressing a man ten years older than himself and calling him an “outstanding son”.

Tetsuaki Miura showed them around briefly. Some of his late father’s students had got together after his death to open the house to the public, and to put in order the materials he’d collected over the years. As for Tetsuaki himself, he said, somewhat self-deprecatingly, that he hadn’t been able to become a researcher like his father had wanted, but instead had built an inn on the same lot as the Hall, and devoted himself to managing it.

“So here I am exploiting both his land and his reputation. Like I say, I’m hardly a worthy son.” Tetsuaki gave a chagrined laugh. His inn was used largely for high-school excursions-mostly physics and biology clubs, but he also mentioned a group devoted to parapsychological research. High-school clubs needed to have a reason to go on trips. Basically, the Memorial Hall was bait to bring in student groups.

“By the way…” Ryuji sat up straight and tried to guide the conversation to the heart of the matter.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’ve been boring you, babbling on like this. So tell me, what brings you here?”

It was apparent that Tetsuaki didn’t have much in the way of talent for science. He was nothing but a merchant who adjusted his attitude to suit the situation, Asakawa could tell that Ryuji thought little of the man.

“To tell you the truth, we’re looking for someone.”

“Who?”

“Actually, we don’t know the name. That’s why we’re here.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.” Tetsuaki looked troubled, as if to urge his visitors to make a little more sense.

“We can’t even say for sure if this person is still alive, or has already died. What’s clear is that this person had powers that ordinary people don’t.”

Ryuji paused to watch Tetsuaki, who seemed to understand immediately what he meant.

“Your father was probably Japan’s greatest collector of this sort of information. He told me that, using a network of connections he himself had forged, he had assembled a list of people all over the country with paranormal powers. He said he was storing the information.”

Tetsuaki’s face clouded over. Surely they weren’t going to ask him to search through all those records for a single name. “Yes, of course the files have been preserved. But there are so many of them. And many of those people are frauds anyway.” Tetsuaki blanched at the thought of looking through all those files again. It had taken a dozen of his father’s students several months to organize them. Following the wishes of the deceased, they’d included even uncertain cases, swelling the number of files even further.

“We certainly don’t intend to put you to any trouble. With your permission, we’ll search through them ourselves, just the two of us.”

“They’re in the archives upstairs. Perhaps you’d like to take a look at them first?” Tetsuaki stood up. They could only talk like that because they had no idea how much there was. Once they had a look at all those shelves, he had a feeling they wouldn’t feel like tackling them. He led them to the second floor.

The archives were in a high-ceilinged room at the head of the stairs. They entered the room to find themselves facing two bookcases of seven shelves each. Each file-book contained materials relating to forty cases, and at first glance there seemed to be thousands of file books. Asakawa didn’t notice Ryuji’s reaction, he was too busy turning pale himself. If we spend time on this, we could well die here in this gloomy room. There’s got to be another way!

Ryuji, unfazed, asked, “Do you mind if we have a look?”

“Go right ahead.” Tetsuaki stayed and watched them for a little while, half out of astonishment and half out of curiosity to see just what they thought they’d find. But eventually he seemed to have given up on them. “I’ve got work to do/’ he said, leaving.

When they were alone, Asakawa turned to Ryuji and spoke. “So, want to tell me what’s going on?” His voice was a bit thick, because he was still craning his neck looking at all the files. These were the first words he’d spoken since entering the Hall. The files were arranged in chronological order, beginning with 1956 and ending in 1988. 1988-that was the year Miura had died. Only death had brought down the curtain on his thirty-two-year quest.

“We don’t have much time, so I’ll tell you while we look. I’ll start with 1956. You start with 1960.”

Asakawa tentatively pulled out a file and flipped through it. Each page contained at least one photo and a piece of paper on which was written a short description as well as a name and an address.

“What am I looking for?”

“Pay attention to names and addresses. We’re trying to find a woman from Izu Oshima Island.”

“A woman?” asked Asakawa, cocking his head questioningly.

“Remember that old woman on the video? She told somebody they were going to give birth to a daughter. Think she was talking to a man?”

Ryuji was right. Men could not bear children.

So they started searching. It was a simple, repetitive task, and since Asakawa asked why these files existed in the first place, Ryuji explained.

Professor Miura had always been interested in supernatural phenomena. In the ’50s, he’d begun experiments with paranormal powers, but he hadn’t got any results reliable enough to allow him to formulate a scientific theory. Clairvoyants would find themselves unable to do in front of an audience what they had done easily before. It took a lot of concentration to be able to display these powers. What Professor Miura was searching for was the kind of person who could exert his or her power at any time, under any circumstances. He could see that if the person failed in front of witnesses, then Miura himself would be called a fraud. He was convinced that there must be more people out there with paranormal powers than he knew about, so he set about finding them. But how was he to do this? He couldn’t interview everybody to check for clairvoyance, second sight, telekinesis. So he came up with a method. To anybody who might possibly have such powers, he sent a piece of film in a securely sealed envelope and asked them to imprint upon it with their minds a certain pattern or image, and then send it back to him, still sealed. In this way he could test the powers of people even at great distances. And since such psychic photography seemed to be a fairly basic power, people who possessed it often seemed to be clairvoyant as well. In 1956, he’d begun to recruit paranormals from all over the country, with the help of former students of his who had gone to work for publishers and newspapers. These former students helped set up a network which would report any rumour of supernatural powers straight back to Professor Miura. However, an examination of the film returned to him suggested that no more than a tenth of claimants actually had any power. The rest had skillfully broken the seal and replaced the film. Obvious cases of deception were weeded out at this point, but cases where it wasn’t clear one way or the other were kept, ultimately resulting in the unmanageable collection Asakawa saw before him. In the years since Miura had started, the network had been perfected through the development of the mass media and an increase in the number of participating former students; the data had piled up year after year until the man died.

“I see,” murmured Asakawa. “So that’s the meaning of this collection. But how do you know that the name of the person we’re looking for is in here?”

“I’m not saying it definitely is. But there’s a strong possibility it’s here. I mean, look at what she did. You know yourself that there are a few people who can actually produce psychic photos. But there can’t be too many paranormals who can actually project images onto a television tube without any equipment whatsoever. That’s power of the very highest order. Someone with that kind of power would stand out, even if they didn’t try to. I don’t think Miura’s network would have let someone like that slip through.”

Asakawa had to admit that the possibility was genuine. He redoubled his efforts.

“By the way, why am I looking at 1960?” Asakawa suddenly looked up.

“Remember the scene on the video that shows a television? It was a rather old model. One of the early sets, from the ’50s or early ’60s.”

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean…”

“Shut up. We’re talking probabilities here, right?”

Asakawa chided himself for being so irritated this last little while. But he had good reason to be. Given the limited time frame, the number of files was huge. It would have been more unnatural to be calm about it.

At that moment, Asakawa saw the words “Izu Oshima” in the file he was holding.

“Hey! Got one,” he yelled, triumphantly. Ryuji turned around, surprised, and peered at the file.

Motornachi, Izu Oshima. Teruko Tsuchida, age 37, Postmarked February 14, 1960. A black-and-white photograph showing a white lightning-like slash against a black background. The description read: Subject sent this with a note predicting a cross-shaped image. No traces of substitution.

“How about that?” Asakawa trembled with excitement as he waited for Ryuji’s response.

“It’s a possibility. Take down the name and address, just in case.” Ryuji turned back to his own search. Asakawa felt better for having found a likely candidate so soon, but at the same time he was a bit dissatisfied with Ryuji’s brusque reaction.

Two hours passed. They didn’t find another woman from Izu Oshima. Most of the submissions were either from Tokyo itself or the surrounding Kanto region. Tetsuaki appeared, offering them tea and two or three possibly sarcastic comments before leaving. Their hands on the files were getting slower and slower; they’d been at it for two hours and hadn’t even polished off a year’s worth.

Finally, somehow, Asakawa got through 1960. As he went to start on 1961 he happened to glance at Ryuji. Ryuji was sitting cross-legged on the floor, motionless, face buried in an open file. Is he asleep, the idiot? Asakawa reached out his hand, but then Ryuji emitted a stifled groan.

“I’m so hungry I could die. How about you go buy us some takeout and oolong tea? Oh, and make reservations for this evening at Le Petit Pension Soleil.”

“What the hell?”

“That’s the inn the guy runs.”

“I know that. But why would I want to stay there with you?”

“You’d rather not?”

“For starters, we haven’t got time to lounge around at an inn.”

“Even if we find her now, there’s no way to get to Izu Oshima right now. We can’t go anywhere today. Don’t you think it’d be better to get a good night’s sleep and marshal our energies for tomorrow?”

Asakawa felt an indescribable aversion to spending the night with Ryuji at an inn. But there was no alternative, so he gave up and went out to buy food and tell Tetsuaki Miura they’d be staying the night. Then he and Ryuji ate their takeout and drank their oolong tea. It was seven in the evening. A brief respite.

His arms were tired and his shoulders stiff. His eyes swam, he took off his glasses. Instead, he held the files close enough to his face that he could lick them if he wanted. He had to use all his concentration or he was afraid he’d miss something, which tired him even more.

Nine o’clock. The silence of the archives was broken by Ryuji’s mad screech. “I’ve found it, finally! So that’s where she was hiding.”

Asakawa felt himself drawn to the file. He sat down next to Ryuji and put his glasses back on to look at it. It said:

Izu Oshima, Sashikiji. Sadako Yamamura. Age 10. The envelope was postmarked August 29, 1958. Subject sent this with a note predicting it would be imprinted with her own name. She’s the real thing, without a doubt. Attached was a photograph showing the character yama, “mountain”, in white against a black background. Asakawa had seen that character somewhere before.

“That’s… that’s it.” His voice trembled. On the video, the scene of the eruption of Mt Mihara had been followed immediately by a shot of the character for “mountain”, identical to this one. Not only that, the screen of the old television in the tenth scene had displayed the character sada. This woman’s name was Sadako Yamamura.

“What do you think?” asked Ryuji.

“No question about it. This is it.”

At long last Asakawa found hope. The thought crossed his mind that maybe, just maybe, they’d beat the deadline.

6

October 16-Tuesday

10:15 a.m. Ryuji and Asakawa were on a high speed passenger boat that had just left port at Atami. There was no regular ferry linking Oshima and the mainland, so they’d had to leave the car in the parking lot next to the Atami Korakuen Hotel. Asakawa was still clutching the key in his left hand.

They were scheduled to arrive on Oshima in an hour. A strong wind blew and it looked like rain. Most of the passengers hadn’t ventured out onto the deck, but stayed huddled in their reserved seats. Asakawa and Ryuji had been in too much of a hurry to check before buying their tickets, but it looked like a typhoon was approaching. The waves were large, and the rocking of the boat was worse than usual.

Sipping a can of hot coffee, Asakawa went over the whole chain of events again in his mind.

He wasn’t sure if they should congratulate themselves for having come this far, or reproach themselves for not having found out about “Sadako Yamamura” and set out for Oshima Island earlier. Everything had hung on noticing that the black curtain flashing momentarily over the images on the video was eyelids, blinking. The images had been recorded not by machine but by the human sensory apparatus. Essentially, the person had focused her energies on the video deck at cabin B-4 while it was recording, and created not a psychic photo but a psychic video. This surely indicated paranormal powers of immeasurable proportions. Ryuji had assumed that such a person would stand out from the crowd, and gone looking for her, and had ultimately found out her name. Not that they knew for sure that “Sadako Yamamura” was, in fact, the culprit. She was still just a suspect. They were heading to Oshima in order to follow up on their suspicions.

The sea was rough, causing the boat to pitch and roll violently. Asakawa felt an ugly premonition come over him. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea for both of them to go to Oshima. What if they got tied down by the typhoon and couldn’t leave the island? Who’d save his wife and daughter? The deadline was almost at hand. 10:04 p.m., the day after tomorrow.

Asakawa warmed his hands with the coffee can and shrank down into his seat. “I still can’t believe it, you know. That a human being could really do something like that.”

“It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, now, does it?” Ryuji answered without taking his eyes from his map of Oshima. “Anyway, it’s a reality staring you in the face. You know, all we’re seeing is one small part of a continuously changing phenomenon.”

Ryuji set the map down on his knee. “You know about the Big Bang, right? They believe that the universe was born in a tremendous explosion twenty billion years ago. I can mathematically express the form of the universe, from its birth to the present. It’s all about differential equations. Most phenomena in the universe can be expressed with differential equations, you know. Using them, you can figure out what the universe looked like a hundred million years ago, ten billion years ago, even a second or a tenth of a second after that initial explosion. But. But. No matter how far we go back, no matter how we try to express it, we just can’t know what it looked like at zero, at the very moment of the explosion. And there’s another thing. How is our universe going to end? Is the universe expanding or contracting? See, we don’t know the beginning and we don’t know the end; all we can know about is the in-between stuff. And that, my friend, is what life is like.”

Ryuji poked Asakawa in the arm.

“I guess you’re right. I can look at photo albums and get a reasonable idea of what I was like when I was three years old, or when I was a newborn.”

“See what I mean? But what’s before birth, what’s after death-these are things we just don’t know.”

“After death? When you die, that’s the end, you just disappear. That’s all, right?”

“Hey, have you ever died?”

“No, I haven’t.” Asakawa shook his head with utter earnestness.

“Well then you don’t know, do you? You don’t know where you go after you die.”

“Are you saying there’s such a thing as spirits?”

“Look, all I can say is, I just don’t know. But when you’re talking about the birth of life, I think things go a lot smoother when you posit the existence of a soul. None of the claptrap of modern molecular biologists actually sounds real. What are they really saying? ‘Take hundreds each of twenty-odd different amino acids, put them in a bowl, mix them all together, add a little electrical energy, and voila, protein, the building block of life.’ And they really expect us to believe that? Might as well tell us we’re all children of God- at least that’d be easier to swallow. What I think is that there’s a completely different kind of energy involved at the moment of birth; almost like there’s a certain will at work.”

Ryuji seemed to lean in a little closer to Asakawa, but then he suddenly changed the subject. “By the way, I couldn’t help but notice you were engrossed in the Professor’s oeuvre back at the Memorial Hall. Come across anything interesting?”

Now that he mentioned it, Asakawa remembered that he had started to read something. Thoughts have energy, and that energy …

“I think it said something about thoughts being energy.”

“What else?”

“I didn’t have time to finish reading it.”

“Heh, heh, that’s too bad. You were just getting to the good part. The Professor could really make me laugh, the way he’d set out in all seriousness things that would shock normal people. What the old man was saying, basically, is that ideas are life forms, with energy of their own.”

“Huh? You mean, the thoughts in our heads can turn into living beings?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Well, that’s a rather extreme suggestion.”

“It is indeed, but similar ideas have been propounded since before the time of Christ. I suppose you could just look at it as a different theory of life.”

Having said this much, Ryuji suddenly seemed to lose interest in the conversation, returning his gaze to the map.

Asakawa understood what Ryuji was saying, most of it anyway, but it didn’t sit very well with him. We may not be able to scientifically explain what we’re facing. But it’s real, and because it’s real we have to face it as a real phenomenon and deal with it as such, even if we don’t understand its cause or effect. What we need to concentrate on right now is figuring out the riddle of the charm and saving our own asses, not unlocking all the secrets of the supernatural. Ryuji might have some good points. But what Asakawa really needed from him were clearer answers.

The farther out to sea they went the worse the motion of the boat, and Asakawa began to worry he’d get seasick. The more he thought about it the more he thought he felt an unsettled feeling in his chest. Ryuji, who had been nodding off, suddenly raised his head and looked outside. The sea was throwing up dark gray waves, and in the distance they could see the dim shadow of an island.

“You know, Asakawa, something’s worrying me.”

“What?”

“The four kids who stayed at the log cabin. Why didn’t they try to carry out the charm?”

That again.

“Isn’t it obvious? They didn’t believe the video.”

“Well, that’s what I thought. It explains why they pulled a prank like erasing the charm. But I was just remembering a trip I took with the track team back in high school. In the middle of the night, Saito comes bursting into the room. You remember Saito, right? Kind of not quite all there. There were twelve of us on the team, and we were all sleeping together in one room. And that idiot comes running in, teeth chattering, and screams, ‘I’ve seen a ghost!’ He opened the bathroom door and saw a little girl crouched behind the trash can by the sink-she was crying. Now, aside from me, how do you think the other ten guys reacted to this?”

“They probably half believed and half laughed it off.”

Ryuji shook his head. “That’s how it’d work in a horror movie, or on TV. At first no one takes it seriously, and then one by one, they’re picked off by the monster, right? But it’s different in real life. Every single one of them, without exception, believed him. All ten of them. And not because all ten of them were especially chicken, either. You could try it on any group of people and get the same results. A fundamental sense of terror is built into us humans, on the instinctual level.”

“So what you’re saying is, it’s strange that those four didn’t believe the video.”

As he listened to Ryuji’s story, Asakawa was recalling the face of his daughter, crying from seeing the demon mask. He remembered how puzzled he’d been-how had she known the demon mask was supposed to be scary?

“Hmm. Well, the scenes on that video don’t tell a story, and they’re not all that frightening to just look at. So I suppose it’s possible to disbelieve it. But weren’t they at least bothered, those four? What would you do? If you were told that carrying out a charm would save your life, even if you didn’t believe in it, wouldn’t you feel you ought to give it a try anyway? I would have expected at least one of them to break rank. I mean, even if he or she insisted on putting on a brave face in front of the others, he or she could always perform the charm in secret after getting back to Tokyo.”

Asakawa’s bad feeling grew stronger. He had actually wondered the same thing himself. What if the charm turns out to be something impossible?

“So maybe it was something they couldn’t carry out, and so they convinced themselves they didn’t believe it anyway…” An example occurred to Asakawa. What if a woman who had been murdered left a message in the world of the living in an effort to get someone else to avenge her, so that she could be at peace?

“Heh, heh. I know what you’re thinking. What would you do if that turned out to be the case?”

Asakawa asked himself: if the charm included a command to kill someone, would he be able to do it? Would he be able to kill a perfect stranger to save his own life? But what worried him more was, if it came to that, who would be the one to carry out the charm? He shook his head furiously.

Stop thinking such stupid things. All he could do at the moment was pray that this Sadako Yamamura person’s desire was something that anybody could fulfil.

The outlines of the island were becoming clearer; the wharf at Motomachi Harbor was slowly coming into view.

“Listen, Ryuji. I have a favour to ask.” Asakawa spoke fervently.

“What’s that?”

“If I don’t make it in time… that is…” Asakawa couldn’t bring himself to say the word “die.” “If you figure out the charm the very next day, could you… Well, there’s my wife and daughter…”

Ryuji cut in. “Of course. Leave it to me. I’ll be responsible for saving wifey and babykins.”

Asakawa took out one of his business cards and wrote a phone number on the back. “I’m going to send them to her parents’ house in Ashikaga until we solve this thing. This is the number there. I’m going to give it to you now, before I forget.”

Ryuji put the card in his pocket without even glancing at it.

Just then came the announcement that the ship had docked at Motomachi on Oshima Island. Asakawa intended to call home from the waterfront and convince his wife to go home to her parents’ for a while. He didn’t know when he’d get back to Tokyo. Who knew? Time might run out for him here on Oshima. He couldn’t stand the thought of his family alone and terrified in their little condo.

As they walked down the gangway, Ryuji asked: “Hey Asakawa. Do a wife and kid really mean that much?”

It was a very un-Ryuji-like question. Asakawa couldn’t help but laugh as he replied, “You’ll find out, one of these days.”

But Asakawa didn’t really think Ryuji was capable of starting a normal family.

7

The wind was stronger here on the pier at Oshima than it had been on the wharf at Atami. Overhead the clouds were scurrying from west to east, while underfoot the concrete jetty shook with the force of waves breaking against it. The rain wasn’t falling that hard, but the raindrops, borne by the wind, were hitting Asakawa’s face head-on. Neither of them had umbrellas. They jammed their hands into their pockets and hunched forward as they walked quickly along the pier over the ocean.

Islanders holding placards for car-rental companies or banners for inns were there to greet the tourists. Asakawa lifted his head and looked for the person who was supposed to meet them. Before getting on the boat at the harbour in Atami, Asakawa had contacted his office and asked for the phone number of the Oshima office, ultimately enlisting the help of a correspondent named Hayatsu. None of the national news organizations had full-fledged bureaus on Oshima; instead they hired locals as stringers. These correspondents kept an eye on island doings, watching for any noteworthy incidents or interesting episodes and reporting them to the main office; they were also responsible for assisting any reporters dispatched to the island on stories. Hayatsu had worked for the Daily News before retiring here to Oshima. His territory included not just Oshima itself but all seven islands in the Izu chain, and when anything happened he didn’t have to wait for a reporter to arrive from headquarters, but could file his own articles. Hayatsu had a network of contacts on the island, so his cooperation promised to speed up Asakawa’s investigation.

On the phone, Hayatsu himself had responded positively to Asakawa’s request, promising to meet him at the jetty. Since they’d never met, Asakawa had described himself and said he was traveling with a friend.

Now he heard a voice from behind. “Excuse me, are you Mr Asakawa?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Hayatsu, the Oshima correspondent.” He held out umbrellas and smiled good-naturedly.

“Sorry to impose on you so suddenly like this. We really appreciate your help.”

As they hurried to Hayatsu’s car, Asakawa introduced Ryuji. The wind was so loud they could hardly speak over it until they’d climbed inside the vehicle. It was a compact, but surprisingly spacious inside. Asakawa rode in front, Ryuji in the back.

“Shall we go straight to Takashi Yamamura’s house?” asked Hayatsu, both hands on the steering wheel. He was over sixty, and had a full head of hair, though much of it was gray.

“So, you’ve already found Sadako Yamamura’s family?” Asakawa had already told Hayatsu on the phone that they were coming to investigate someone by that name.

“It’s a small town. Once you said it was a Yamamura from Sashikiji, I knew right away who it was. There’s only one family by that name here. Yamamura’s a fisherman who runs his house as a bed-and-breakfast in the summertime. What do you think? We could have him put you up there tonight. Of course you’re welcome at my place, too, but it’s a little small and rundown. I’m sure having you stay there would be an imposition on you.” Hayatsu laughed. He and his wife lived alone, but he wasn’t exaggerating: they really didn’t have room to sleep two guests.

Asakawa looked back at Ryuji.

“I’m fine with that.”

Hayatsu’s little car sped toward the Sashikiji district, on the southern tip of the island. Sped as much as it could, that is: the Oshima Ring Road circling the island was too narrow and winding to go very fast on. The vast majority of the cars they passed were also compacts. At times their field of vision opened up to their right, to reveal the ocean, and when it did the sound of the wind would change. The sea was dark, reflecting the deep leaden colour of the sky, and it heaved violently, throwing up whitecaps. If it hadn’t been for those brief flashes of white, it would have been difficult to tell where the sky stopped and the sea began, or where the sea stopped and the land began. The longer they gazed at it the more depressing it seemed. The radio blared a typhoon alert, and their surroundings became even darker. They veered right at a fork in the road and immediately entered a tunnel of camellias. They could see bare roots beneath the camellias, tangled and wizened; long years of exposure to wind and rain had eroded some of the plants’ soil. Now they were wet and slick with rain-it looked to Asakawa like they were speeding through the intestines of a huge monster.

“Sashikiji is dead ahead,” said Hayatsu. “But I don’t think this Sadako Yamamura woman is here anymore. You can get the details from Takashi Yamamura. From what I hear he’s a cousin of her mother’s.”

“How old would this Sadako be now?” asked Asakawa. For some time now Ryuji had been scrunched down in the back seat, uttering not a word.

“Hmm. I’ve never actually met her; you know. But if she’s still alive, she must be forty-two, forty-three, maybe?”

If she’s still alive? Asakawa wondered why Hayatsu had used that expression. Maybe she was missing? Suddenly he was filled with misgivings. What if they’d come all this way to Oshima only to find no one knew if she was dead or alive? What if this was a dead end?

Finally the car pulled up in front of a two-story house bearing the sign Yamamura Manor. It stood on a gentle slope with a commanding view of the ocean. No doubt in good weather the scenery was splendid. In the offing they could make out the triangular shape of an island. That was Toshima.

“When the weather is nice, you can see Nijima, Shikinejima and even Kozushima from here,” said Hayatsu proudly, pointing south over the sea.

8

“Investigate? What is it exactly I should investigate about this woman?”

She joined the troupe in ’65? You’ve got to be kidding-that’s twenty-five years ago. Yoshino was ranting to himself. It’s hard enough to trace a criminal’s steps a year after the fact. But twenty-five?

“We need anything and everything you can find out. We want to know what kind of life this woman’s led, what she’s doing right now, what she wants.”

Yoshino could only sigh. He wedged the receiver between his ear and his shoulder and pulled a notepad over from the edge of the desk.

“… And how old was she at the time?”

“Eighteen. She graduated from high school on Oshima and went straight to Tokyo, where she joined a theatre group called Theatre Group Soaring.”

“Oshima?” Yoshino stopped writing and frowned. “Hey, where are you calling from, anyway?”

“From a place called Sashikiji, on Izu Oshima Island.”

“And when do you plan on coming back?”

“As soon as I can.”

“You realize there’s a typhoon heading your way?”

Of course there was no way Asakawa could be ignorant of it, being right there in the middle of it, but to Yoshino the whole thing had taken on an unreal quality that he had begun to find amusing. The “deadline” was the night after next, and yet Asakawa himself was holed up on Oshima, possibly unable to escape.

“Have you heard any travel advisories?” Asakawa still didn’t know many details.

“Well, I’m not sure, but the way it looks now, I imagine they’ll be grounding all flights and suspending ocean transport.”

Asakawa had been too busy chasing down Sadako Yamamura to pick up any reliable information about the typhoon. He’d had a bad feeling ever since stepping onto the Oshima pier, but now that the possibility of being stranded here had been voiced, he suddenly felt a sense of urgency. Receiver still in hand, he fell silent.

“Hey, hey, don’t worry. They haven’t cancelled anything yet.” Yoshino tried to sound positive. Then he changed the subject. “So, this woman … Sadako Yamamura. You’ve checked her history out up to the age of eighteen?”

“More or less,” Asakawa answered, conscious of the sound of the wind and waves outside the phone booth.

“This isn’t your only lead, right? You’ve got to have something besides this Theatre Group Soaring.”

“Nope, that’s it. Sadako Yamamura, born in Sashikiji on Izu Oshima Island in 1947 to Shizuko Yamamura… hey, make a note of that name. Shizuko Yamamura. She was twenty-two in ’47. She left her new baby, Sadako, with her grandmother and ran off to Tokyo.”

“Why did she leave the baby on the island?”

“There was a man. Make a note of this, too: Heihachiro Ikuma. At the time he was Assistant Professor of Psychiatry. He was Shizuko Yamamura’s lover.”

“So does that mean Sadako is Shizuko and Ikuma’s child?”

“I haven’t been able to find proof, but I think it’s safe to assume that.”

“And they weren’t married, right?”

“Exactly. Heihachiro Ikuma already had a family.”

So it had been an illicit affair. Yoshino licked the tip of his pencil.

“Okay, I’m with you. Go on.”

“Early in 1950 Shizuko suddenly revisits her hometown for the first time in three years. She’s reunited with her daughter Sadako, and lives here for a while. But by the end of the year she’s absconded again, this time taking Sadako with her. For the next five years, nobody knows where Shizuko and Sadako are or what they’re doing. But in the mid ’50s, Shizuko’s cousin, still living here on the island, hears a rumour that Shizuko has become famous doing something or other.”

“Was she involved in some sort of incident?”

“It’s unclear. The cousin just says that he started hearing things about Shizuko, through the grapevine. But when I gave him my card, he saw I work for a newspaper and said, ‘If you’re a reporter you probably know more about it than me.’ From the way he was talking it sounds like from about 1950 to 1955 Shizuko and Sadako were involved in something that caused a stir in the media. But news from the mainland was hard to come by on the island…”

“And so you’d like me to check and see what it was that got them in the news?”

“You read my mind.”

“Idiot. It was obvious.”

“There’s more. In ’56, Shizuko comes back to the island, dragging Sadako with her. The mother’s so worn down that she looks like a different person, and she won’t answer any of her cousin’s questions. She just closes up, mumbling incoherently. And then one day she throws herself into Mt Mihara, the volcano, and kills herself. She was thirty-one.”

“So I’m also finding out why Shizuko committed suicide.”

“If you would.” Still holding the receiver, Asakawa bowed. If he ended up stranded on this island, then Yoshino would be his only hope. Asakawa regretted that both he and Ryuji had so blithely come here. Ryuji could have easily investigated a little hamlet like Sashikiji all by himself. It would have been more efficient for Asakawa to stay in Tokyo and wait for Ryuji to contact him, and then team up with Yoshino to check things out on that end.

“Alright, I’ll do what I can. But I think I’m a little understaffed here.”

“I’ll call Oguri and ask him to send some people your way.”

“That’d be great.”

It was one thing to say it, of course, but Asakawa didn’t have much confidence in the idea. His editor was always complaining about being short-handed. Asakawa seriously doubted he’d spare valuable manpower for something like this.

“So, her mother kills herself, and Sadako stays on in Sashikiji, taken care of by her mother’s cousin. That cousin has turned his house into a bed-and-breakfast now.” He was about to say that he and Ryuji were now staying in that very house, but decided it was an unnecessary detail.

“The following year, Sadako, who’s a fourth grader now, makes a name for herself at school by predicting the eruption of Mt Mihara. Did you get that? Mt Mihara erupted in 1957, on the very day and time Sadako had predicted.”

“Now that’s impressive. If we had a woman like that we wouldn’t need the Coordinating Committee for Earthquake Prediction.”

As a result of her prediction’s coming true, her fame had spread throughout the island, and was picked up by Professor Miura’s network. But Asakawa figured he didn’t need to explain all that. What was important now was…

“After that, islanders kept coming to Sadako asking her to predict their futures. But she turned down every single request. She just kept saying she didn’t have that kind of power.”

“Out of modesty?”

“Who knows? Then, when she finishes high school, she takes off for Tokyo like she just couldn’t wait to get away. The relatives who’d been taking care of her got exactly one postcard from her. It said she’d passed the test and had been accepted into Theatre Group Soaring. They haven’t heard from her again to this day. There’s not a soul on the island who knows where she is or what she’s up to.”

“In other words, the only clue we have, the only trace she left, is this Theatre Group Soaring.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Okay, let me make sure I have this straight. What I’m supposed to find out is: what Shizuko Yamamura was in the news for, why she jumped into a volcano, and where her daughter went and what she did after joining a theatre troupe at age eighteen. In other words, all about the mother and all about the daughter. Just those two things.”

“Right.”

“Which first?”

“Huh?”

“I’m asking you whether you want me to start with the mother or the daughter. You don’t have much time left, you know.”

The most pressing issue, clearly, was what had become of Sadako.

“Could you start with the daughter?”

“Gotcha. I guess first thing tomorrow I’ll pop in to the office of Theatre Group Soaring.”

Asakawa looked at his watch. It was only a little past six in the evening. Still plenty of time before a rehearsal space would be closing.

“Hey, Yoshino. Not tomorrow. Say you’ll do it tonight.”

Yoshino heaved a sigh and shook his head slightly. “Now look, Asakawa. I have my own work to do, you know-did you ever think of that? I’ve got a mountain of things I’ve got to write up before morning. Even tomorrow’s a little…” Yoshino trailed off. If he said any more it would look like he was trying to make Asakaw feel too much in his debt. He always took the greatest care to appear manly in situations like this.

“Please, I’m begging you. I mean, my deadline is the day after tomorrow.” He knew how things worked in their business, and he was afraid to put it any more strongly. All he could do was to wait quietly for Yoshino’s decision.

“But… Ah, what the hell. I’ll try to get to it tonight. I’m not making any promises, mind you.”

“Thanks. I owe you.” Asakawa bowed and started to hang up.

“Hey, hang on a second. There’s something important I haven’t asked you yet.”

“What’s that?”

“What possible relationship could there be between what you saw on that video and this Sadako Yamamura?”

Asakawa paused. “You wouldn’t believe it even if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“No video camera recorded those images.” Asakawa paused for a good long moment to allow his meaning to sink into Yoshino’s brain. “Those images are things that Sadako saw with her eyes and things she imagined in her head, fragments presented one after another with nothing to contextualize them.”

“Huh?” Yoshino was momentarily at a loss for words.

“See. I told you, you wouldn’t believe it.” “You mean they’re like psychic photos?” “The phrase doesn’t even begin to cover it. She actually caused these images to appear on a TV tube. She’s projecting moving images onto a TV.” “So, what, she’s a production agency?” Yoshino laughed at his own joke. Asakawa didn’t get angry. He understood why Yoshino had to joke. He listened silently to his friend’s carefree laughter.

9:40 p.m. As he climbed the stairs out of Yotsuya Sanchome Station on the Marunouchi subway line, a gust of wind threatened to blow Yoshino’s hat off, and he had to hold it down onto his head with both hands. He looked around him for the fire station he was supposed to use as a landmark. It was right there on the corner. A minute’s walk down the street took him to his destination.

A sign stood on the sidewalk, reading Theatre Group Soaring; next to it a flight of stairs led down to a basement, from the depths of which came the voices of young men and women, raised in mingled singing and recitation. They probably had a performance coming up and were planning to rehearse until the trains stopped running. He didn’t have to be an arts reporter to figure that out. But he spent most of his time chasing after crime stories. He had to admit it felt a little weird visiting the rehearsal space of a repertory theater company.

The stairs to the basement were made of steel and every step clanged. If the founding members of the company had no recollection of Sadako Yamamura, then the thread would snap, and that psychic’s life, on which all their hopes rested, would sink back into the darkness. Theatre Group Soaring had been founded in 1957, and Sadako had joined in 1965. There were only four founding members still around today, including a guy named Uchimura, a playwright and director who spoke for the group.

Yoshino gave his card to a twenty-something intern standing at the entrance to the rehearsal hall and asked him to call Uchimura.

“You have a visitor from the Daily News, sir.” The intern spoke in a resonant, actorly voice, calling to the director, who sat by the wall watching over everyone’s performances. Uchimura turned around in surprise. Realizing his visitor was from the press, he was all smiles as he approached Yoshino. Theatre companies all treated the press with great politeness. Even the smallest mention in a newspaper’s arts column could make a big difference in ticket sales. With only a week left until opening night, he assumed the reporter had come to take a peek at the rehearsals. The Daily News had never paid much attention to him before, so Uchimura poured on the charm, determined to make the most of the chance. But the minute he learned the real reason for Yoshino’s visit, Uchimura abruptly seemed to lose all interest in him. Suddenly he was extremely busy. He looked around the hall until he spied a smallish actor in his fifties, seated on a chair. “Over here, Shin,” he said in a shrill voice, summoning the man. Something in the overly familiar tone he used when addressing the middle-aged actor-or maybe it was his womanish voice itself, combined with his ungainly long arms and legs-gave the brawny Yoshino the creeps. This guy is different, he thought.

“Shin baby, you don’t go on until the second act. Be a dear and talk to this man about Sadako Yamamura. You remember that creepy girl, don’t you?”

Shin’s voice was one Yoshino had heard before, dubbing Japanese dialogue onto Western movies shown on TV. Shin Arima was better known as a voice actor than for his work onstage. He was one of the other original members still in the troupe.

“Sadako Yamamura?” Arima scratched his balding head as he tried to reel in quarter-century-old memories. “Oh, that Sadako Yamamura.” He grimaced. Evidently the woman had left a deep impression on him.

“You remember? Well, then, I’m rehearsing here, so take him up to my room, won’t you?”

Uchimura bowed slightly and walked back toward the assembled players; by the time he reached the place where he’d been sitting, he was once more every inch the lordly director.

Opening a door marked President, Arima pointed to a leather sofa set and said, “Have a seat.” If this was the President’s office, it meant that the troupe was organized like a business. No doubt the director doubled as CEO.

“So what brings you out in the middle of a storm like this?” Arima’s face glistened red with sweat from rehearsing, but a kindly smile lurked in the depths of his eyes. The director looked like the type of person who was always weighing the other’s motives while conversing, but Arima was the kind of guy who answered everything you asked him honestly, without covering anything up. Interviews could either be easy or painful, depending on the subject’s personality.

“I’m sorry to bother you when you’re so busy like this.” Yoshino sat down and took out his notepad. He assumed his usual pose, pen clutched in his right hand.

“I never expected to hear the name Sadako Yamamura, not now. That was ages ago.”

Arima was recalling his youth. He missed the youthful energy he’d had then, running away from the commercial theater company he’d originally belonged to and founding a new troupe with his friends.

“Mr Arima, when you placed her name a few minutes ago you said, ‘that Sadako Yamamura.’ What exactly did you mean by that?”

“That girl-let me see, when was it she joined, anyway? I believe we’d only been around a few years. The company was really taking off then, and we had more kids wanting to join every year. Anyway, that Sadako, she was a strange one.”

“In what way was she strange?”

“Hmm.” Arima put his hand to his jaw and thought for a while. Come to think of it, why do I have the impression that she was strange?

“Was there something in particular about her, something that stood out?”

“No, to look at her, she was just an ordinary girl. A little tall, but quiet. She was always alone.”

“Alone?”

“Well, usually the interns become quite close to each other. But she never tried to get involved with the others.”

There was always someone like that in any group. It was hard for Yoshino to imagine that this alone had made her stand out.

“How would you describe her, say, in a word?”

“In a word? Hmm. Eerie, I’d have to say.” Without hesitating, he called her “eerie.” And Uchimura had called her “that creepy girl”. Yoshino couldn’t help but feel sorry for a young woman of eighteen whom everybody characterized as eerie. He began to imagine some grotesque figure of a woman.

“What was it about her that made her seem eerie?”

Now that he stopped to think about it, it seemed odd to Arima that his impressions of an intern who’d been around for no longer than a year, and twenty-five years ago at that, should still seem so fresh. There was something tugging at the back of his mind. Something had happened, something that had served to fix her name in his memory.

“Oh, yes, now I remember. It was right in this room.” Arima looked around the president’s office. Thinking back on the incident, he could vividly recall even how the furniture had been arranged in those days, when this room was still being used as the main office.

“You see, we’ve rehearsed in this space since the beginning, but it used to be a lot smaller. This room we’re in now used to be our main office. There were lockers over there, and we had a frosted-glass divider standing right about here… Right, and there used to be a TV right there- well, we have a different one there now.” Arima pointed as he spoke.

“A TV?” Yoshino narrowed his eyes and adjusted his grip on his pen.

“Right. One of those old black and white jobs.”

“Okay. So what happened?” Yoshino urged him to go on.

“Rehearsal had just ended and nearly everybody had gone home. I wasn’t happy with one of my lines, and I came up here to go over my part one more time. I was right over there, see…” Arima pointed to the door. “I was standing there, looking into the room, and through the frosted glass I could see the TV screen flickering. I thought, well, someone’s watching TV. Mind you, I wasn’t mistaken. It was on the other side of the divider, so I couldn’t actually see what was on the screen, but I could see the quavering black and white light. There was no sound. The room was dim, and as I came around the divider, I wondered who was in front of the TV, and I peered at the person’s face. It was Sadako Yamamura. But when I came around to the other side of the divider and stood beside her, there was nothing on the screen. Of course, I automatically assumed that she’d just switched it off. At that point, I had no doubts yet. But…”

Arima seemed reluctant to continue.

“Please, go on.”

“I spoke to her. I said, ‘You’d better hurry home before the trains stop running.’ And I turned on the desk lamp. But it wouldn’t turn on. I looked and saw that it wasn’t plugged in. I crouched down to plug it in, and that’s when I noticed it: the television wasn’t plugged in, either.”

Arima vividly recalled the chill that had run up his spine when he saw the plug lying there on the floor.

Yoshino wanted to confirm what he’d just heard. “So even though it wasn’t plugged in, the television was definitely on?”

“That’s right. It made me shudder, let me tell you. I raised my head without thinking and looked at Sadako. What was she doing sitting there in front of an unplugged television set? She didn’t meet my gaze, but just kept staring at the screen, with a faint smile on her lips.”

Arima seemed to remember the smallest detail. The episode had obviously made a deep impression on him.

“And did you tell anyone about this?”

“Naturally. I told Uchy-that is, Uchimura, the director, whom you just met-and also Shigemori.”

“Mr Shigemori?”

“He was the real founder of the company. Uchimura is actually our second leader.”

“Ah-ha. So how did Mr Shigemori react to your story?”

“He was playing mah-jongg at the time, but he was fascinated. He always did have a weakness for women, and it seemed he’d had his eye on her for a while, planning to make her his. Then that evening, after he’d had a few, he started talking crazy, saying ‘tonight I’m going to storm Sadako’s apartment’. We didn’t know what to do. It was just drunken babbling-we couldn’t take it too seriously, but we couldn’t go along with it, either. After a while, everybody went home, and Shigemori was left alone. And in the end we never knew if he actually went to Sadako’s apartment that night or not. Because the next day, when Shigemori showed up at the rehearsal space, he looked like a completely different person. He was pale and silent, and he just sat in his chair saying absolutely nothing. Then he died, right there, just like going to sleep.”

Startled, Yoshino looked up. “What was the cause of death?”

“Cardiac paralysis. Today they’d call it ‘sudden heart failure’, I guess. He was pushing himself pretty hard to get ready for a premiere, and I think he just overdid it.”

“So basically, nobody knows if something happened between Sadako and Shigemori.”

Yoshino pressed the point, and Arima gave a definite nod. No wonder she’d left such a strong impression, Yoshino thought.

“What happened to her after that?”

“She quit. I think she was only with us for a year or two.”

“And then what did she do, after she quit?”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there.”

“What do most people do after they quit the troupe?”

“People who are really dedicated try to join another company.”

“Do you think Sadako Yamamura might have done that?”

“She was a bright girl, and her acting instincts weren’t bad at all. But she had such personality defects. I mean, this business is all about personal relationships. I don’t think she was really cut out for it.”

“So you’re saying there’s a possibility she left the theatre world altogether?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“Isn’t there anybody who might know what happened to her?”

“Maybe one of the other interns who was here at the time.”

“Would you happen to have any of their names and addresses?”

“Hold on.” Arima stood up and walked over to the shelves built into the wall. Bound files were lined up from one end of the shelf to the other; he took one down. It contained the portfolios applicants submitted when they took the entrance exam.

“Including her, there were eight interns who joined in 1965.” He waved their portfolios in the air.

“May I have a look?”

“Go right ahead.”

Each portfolio had two photos attached, a head shot and a full-body shot. Trying to remain calm, Yoshino pulled out Sadako Yamamura’s portfolio. He looked at her photos.

“Hey, didn’t you say she was ‘eerie’ a few minutes ago?” Yoshino was confused. There was too much of a gap between the Sadako he’d imagined from Arima’s description and the Sadako in the photos. “Eerie? You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve never seen such a pretty face.”

Yoshino wondered why he had phrased it that way-why he’d said “pretty face” instead of “pretty girl”. Certainly her facial features were perfectly regular. But she lacked a certain womanly roundness. But looking at the full-body shot, he had to admit that her slender waist and ankles were strikingly feminine. She was beautiful-and yet, the passage of twenty-five years had corroded their impressions of her, until they remembered her as “eerie”, as “that creepy girl”. Normally they should have recalled her as “that wonderfully beautiful young woman”. Yoshino’s interest was piqued by this “eeriness” that seemed to elbow out the salient prettiness of her face.

9

October 17-Wednesday

Standing at the intersection of Omotesando and Aoyamadori, Yoshino once more took out his notebook. 6–1 Minami Aoyama, Sugiyama Lodgings. That had been Sadako’s address twenty-five years before. The address had him worried. He followed Omotesando as it curved, and sure enough, 6–1 was the block opposite the Nezu Museum, one of the more upmarket districts in the city. Just as he’d feared, there were nothing but imposing red-brick condos where the cheap Sugiyama Lodgings should have been.

Who were you kidding anyway? How were you supposed to follow this woman’s tracks twenty-five years later?

His only remaining lead was the other kids who’d joined the theatre group at the same time as Sadako. Of the seven who’d come in that year, he’d only been able to find contact information for four. If none of them knew anything about Sadako’s whereabouts, then the trail would have gone dead. And Yoshino had a feeling that was exactly what would happen. He looked at his watch: eleven in the morning. He dashed into a nearby stationery shop to send a fax to the Izu Oshima bureau. He might as well tell Asakawa everything he’d found out up to this point. At that very moment, Asakawa and Ryuji were at that “bureau”, Hayatsu’s home.

“Hey, Asakawa, calm down!” Ryuji yelled toward Asakawa, who was pacing around the room with his back turned. “Panicking won’t help, you know.”

The typhoon warnings flowed steadily from the radio: maximum wind velocity, barometric pressure near the eye of the storm, millibars, north-northeasterly winds, areas of violent winds and rain, heaving swells… It all rubbed Asakawa the wrong way.

At the moment, Typhoon No. 21 was centred on a point in the sea roughly a hundred and fifty kilometres south from Cape Omaezaki, advancing in a north-northeasterly direction at a speed of roughly twenty kilometres an hour, maintaining wind speeds of forty meters per second. At this rate it would hit the sea just south of Oshima by evening. It would probably be tomorrow — Thursday — before air and sea travel was restored. At least, that was Hayatsu’s forecast.

“Thursday, he says!” Asakawa was seething. My deadline is tomorrow night at ten! You damn typhoon, hurry up and blow through, or turn into a tropical depression, or something. “When the hell are we going to be able to catch a plane or a boat off this island?” Asakawa wanted to get angry at someone, but he didn’t even know who. I never should’ve come here. I’ll regret it forever. And that’s not all-I don’t even know where to begin regretting. I never should have watched that video. I never should have got curious about Tomoko Oishi and Shuichi Iwata’s deaths. I never should have taken a cab that day… Shit.

“Don’t you know how to relax? Complaining to Mr Hayatsu isn’t going to get you anywhere.” Ryuji grabbed Asakawa’s arm, with an unexpected gentleness. “Think about it this way. Maybe the charm is something that can only be carried out here on the island. It’s at least possible. Why didn’t those brats use the charm? Maybe they didn’t have the money to come to Oshima. It’s plausible. Maybe these storm clouds will have a silver lining-at least try to believe it, and maybe you’ll be able to calm down.”

“That’s if we can figure out what the charm is!” Asakawa brushed away Ryuji’s hand. Asakawa saw Hayatsu and his wife Fumiko exchange a glance, and it seemed to him they were laughing.

Two grown men going on about charms.

“What’s so funny?” He started to advance on them, but Ryuji grabbed his arm, with more force than before, and pulled him back.

“Knock it off. You’re wasting your energy.”

Seeing Asakawa’s irritation, the kind-hearted Hayatsu had begun to feel almost responsible for transportation being disrupted on account of the typhoon. Or perhaps he was just sympathetic at the sight of people suffering so because of the storm. He prayed for the success of Asakawa’s project. A fax was due to arrive from Tokyo, but waiting seemed only to ratchet up Asakawa’s annoyance. Hayatsu tried to defuse the situation.

“How is your investigation coming?” Hayatsu asked gently, seeking to calm Asakawa.

“Well…”

“One of Shizuko Yamamura’s childhood friends lives right nearby. If you’d like, I can call him over and you can hear what he has to say. Old Gen won’t be out fishing on a day like this. I’m sure he’s bored-he’d be happy to come over.”

Hayatsu figured that if he gave Asakawa something else to investigate it would be bound to distract him. “He’s nearing seventy, so I don’t know how well he’ll be able to answer your questions, but it has to be better than just waiting.”

“Alright…”

Without even waiting for the answer, Hayatsu turned around and called to his wife in the kitchen: “Hey, call Gen’s place and have him get over here right away.”

Just as Hayatsu had said, Genji was happy to talk to them. He seemed to like nothing better than talking about Shizuko Yamamura. He was sixty-eight, three years older than Shizuko would have been. She’d been his childhood playmate, and also his first love. Whether it was because the memories became clearer as he talked about them or just because he was stimulated by having an audience, the recollections came pouring out of him. For Genji, talking about Shizuko was talking about his own youth.

Asakawa and Ryuji learned a certain amount from his rambling, occasionally tearful stories about Shizuko. But they were aware that they could only trust Old Gen so far. Memories were always liable to being prettified, and all of this had happened over forty years ago. He might even be getting her confused with another woman. Well, maybe not-a man’s first love was special, not someone he’d mix up with someone else.

Genji wasn’t exactly eloquent. He used a lot of roundabout expressions, and Asakawa soon got tired of listening. But then he said something that had Asakawa and Ryuji listening intently. “I think that what made Shizu change was that stone statue of the Ascetic we pulled up out of the sea. There was a full moon that night…” According to the old man, Shizuko’s mysterious powers were somehow connected to the sea and the full moon. And on the night it happened, Genji himself had been beside her, rowing the boat. It was 1946, on a night toward the end of summer; Shizuko was twenty-one and Genji was twenty-four.

It was hot for so late in the season, and even nightfall brought no relief. Genji spoke of these events of forty-four years ago as though they had happened last night.

That sweltering evening, Genji was sitting on his front porch lazily fanning himself, gazing at the night sky calmly reflected on the moonlit sea. The silence was broken when Shizu came running up the hill to his house. She stood in front of him, tugging at his sleeve, and cried, “Gen, get your boat! We’re going fishing.” He asked her why, but all she would say was, “We’ll never have another moonlit night like this.” Genji just sat there as if in a daze, looking at the most beautiful girl on the island. “Wipe that stupid look off your face and hurry up!” She pulled at his collar until he got to his feet. Genji was used to having her push him around and tell him what to do, but he asked her anyway, “What in the world are we going fishing for?” Staring at the ocean, she gave a brisk reply: “For the statue of the Ascetic.”

“Of the Ascetic?”

With raised eyebrows and a note of regret in her voice, Shizuko explained that earlier in the day, some Occupation soldiers had hurled the stone statue of the Ascetic into the sea.

In the middle of the island’s eastern shore there was a beach called the Ascetic’s Beach, with a small cave called the Ascetic’s Grotto. It contained a stone statue of En no Ozunu, the famed Buddhist ascetic, who had been banished here in the year 699. Ozunu had been born with great wisdom, and long years of discipline had given him command of occult and mystic arts. It was said that he could summon gods and demons at will. But Ozunu’s power to foretell the future had made him powerful enemies in the world of books and weapons, and he’d been judged a criminal, a menace to society, and exiled here to Izu Oshima. That had been almost thirteen hundred years ago. Ozunu holed himself up in a small cave on the beach and devoted himself to even more strenuous disciplines. He also taught farming and fishing to the people of the island, earning respect for his virtue. Finally he was pardoned and allowed to return to the mainland, where he founded the Shugendo monastic tradition. He was thought to have spent three years on the island, but stories of his time there abounded, including the legend that he had once shod himself with iron clogs and flown off to Mt Fuji. The islanders still retained a great deal of affection for En no Ozunu, and the Ascetic’s Grotto was considered the holiest place on the island. A festival, known as the Festival of the Ascetic, was held every year on June 15th.

Right after the end of World War II, however, as part of their policy toward Shintoism and Buddhism, the Occupation forces had taken En no Ozunu’s statue from where it was enshrined in the cave and tossed it into the ocean. Shizuko, who had deep faith in Ozunu, had evidently been watching. She had hid herself in the shadow of the rocks at Worm’s Nose Point and watched carefully as the statue was cast from the American patrol boat. She memorized the exact spot.

Genji couldn’t believe his ears when he heard that they were going fishing for the statue of the Ascetic. He was a good fisherman with strong arms, but he’d never tried to catch a stone statue. But there was no way he could just turn Shizuko down, given the secret feelings he nursed for her. He launched his boat into the night, thinking to take this opportunity to put her in his debt. And truth be told, being out on the sea under a beautiful moon like this, just the two of them, promised to be a wonderful thing.

They’d built fires on Ascetic’s Beach and at Worm’s Nose as landmarks, and now they rowed farther and farther out to sea. Both of them were quite familiar with the ocean here-the lie of the seafloor, the depth, and the schools of fish that swam here. But now it was night time, and no matter how bright the moon was, it illuminated nothing beneath the surface. Genji didn’t know how Shizuko intended to find the statue. He asked her, while working the oars, but she didn’t answer. She just checked their position again by the bonfires on the beach. One might have been able to get a pretty good idea of where they were by gazing over the waves at the fires on the beach, and estimating the distance between them. After they’d rowed several hundred meters, Shizuko cried, “Stop here!”

She went to the stern of the boat, leaned down close to the surface of the water, and peered into the dark sea. “Look the other way,” she commanded Genji. Genji guessed what Shizuko was about to do, and his heart leapt. Shizuko stood up and took off her splash-patterned kimono. His imagination aroused by the sound of the robe slipping across her skin, Genji found it hard to breathe. Behind him he heard the sound of her jumping into the sea. As the spray hit his shoulders he turned around and looked. Shizuko was treading water, her long black hair tied back with a rag and one end of a slender rope clenched between her teeth. She thrust her upper body out of the water, took two deep breaths, then dived to the bottom of the sea.

How many times did her head pop up from the surface of the water to gasp for air? The last time, she no longer had the end of the rope in her mouth. “I’ve tied it fast to the Ascetic. Go ahead and pull him up,” she said in a trembling voice.

Gen shifted his body to the bow of the boat and pulled on the rope. In no time Shizuko climbed aboard, draped her kimono around her body, and came up beside Genji in time to help him haul up the statue. They placed it in the centre of the boat and headed back to the shore. The whole way back, neither Genji nor Shizuko said a word. There was something in the atmosphere that quashed all questions. He found it mysterious that she’d been able to locate the statue in the darkness at the bottom of the sea. It was only three days later that he was able to ask her. She said that the Ascetic’s eyes had called to her on the ocean floor. The green eyes of the statue, master of gods and demons, had glowed at the bottom of the deep dark sea… That’s what Shizuko had said.

After that, Shizuko began to feel physical discomfort. She’d never even had a headache up until then, but now she often experienced searing pains in her head, accompanied by visions of things she’d never seen before flashing across her mind’s eye. And it happened that these scenes she had glimpsed very soon manifested themselves in reality. Genji had questioned her in some detail. It seemed that when these future scenes inserted themselves into her brain, they were always accompanied by the same citrus fragrance in her nostrils. Genji’s older sister had married and moved to Odawara, on the mainland; when she died, the scene had presented itself to Shizuko beforehand. But it didn’t sound like she could actually, consciously predict things that would happen in the future. It was just that these scenes would flash across her mind, with no warning, and with no inkling of why she’d witnessed those exact scenes. So Shizuko never allowed people to ask her to predict their futures.

The following year she went up to Tokyo, despite Genji’s efforts to stop her. She came to know Heihachiro Ikuma, and conceived his child. Then, at the end of the year, she went back to her hometown and gave birth to a baby girl. Sadako.

They didn’t know when Genji’s tale would end. Ten years later Shizuko jumped into the mouth of Mt Mihara, and to judge by the way Genji related the event, it seemed he had decided to blame it on her lover, Ikuma. It was perhaps a natural thought, as he had been Genji’s rival in love, but his obvious resentment made his account hard to sit through. All they’d gleaned from him was the knowledge that Sadako’s mother had been able to see the future, and the possibility that this power had been given her by a stone statue of En no Ozunu.

Just then the fax machine began to hum. It printed out an enlargement of the head shot of Sadako Yamamura that Yoshino had got from Theater Group Soaring.

Asakawa was strangely moved. This was the first actual look he’d had at this woman. Even though it had only been for the briefest moment, he’d shared the same sensations as her, seen the world from the same vantage point. It was like catching the first glimpse of a lover’s face in the dim morning light, finally seeing what she looks like, after a night of entwined limbs and shared orgasms in the dark.

It was odd, but he couldn’t think of her as hideous. That was only natural; although the photo that came through the fax machine was somewhat blurred around the edges, still it fully communicated the allure of Sadako’s beautifully regular features.

“She’s a fine woman, isn’t she?” Ryuji said. Asakawa suddenly recalled Mai Takano. If you compared them purely on the basis of looks, Sadako was far more beautiful than Mai. And yet the scent of a woman was much more powerful with Mai. And what about that “eerie” quality that was supposed to characterize Sadako? It didn’t come through in the photograph. Sadako had powers that ordinary people didn’t have; they must have influenced the people around her.

The second page of the fax summarized information about Shizuko Yamamura. It picked up right where Genji’s story had left off just now.

In 1947, having left behind her hometown of Sashikiji for the capital, Shizuko suddenly collapsed with head pains and was taken to a hospital. Through one of the doctors, she came to know Heihachiro Ikuma, an assistant professor in the psychiatry department of Taido University. Ikuma was involved in trying to find a scientific explanation for hypnotism and related phenomena, and he became very interested in Shizuko when he discovered that she had startling powers of clairvoyance. The finding went so far as to change the thrust of his research. Thereafter Ikuma would immerse himself in the study of paranormal powers, with Shizuko as the subject of his research. But the two soon progressed beyond a mere researcher-subject relationship. In spite of his having a family, Ikuma began to have romantic feelings toward Shizuko. By the end of the year she was pregnant with his child, and to escape the eyes of the world she went back home, where she had Sadako. Shizuko immediately returned to Tokyo, leaving Sadako in Sashikiji, but three years later she returned to reclaim her child. From then until the time of her suicide, evidently, she never let Sadako leave her side.

When the 1950s dawned, the partnership of Heihachiro Ikuma and Shizuko Yamamura was a sensation in the pages of the news papers and the weekly news magazines. They provided a sudden insight into the scientific underpinnings of supernatural powers. At first, perhaps dazzled by Ikuma’s position as a professor at such a prestigious university, the public unanimously believed in Shizuko’s powers. Even the media wrote her up in a more-or-less favorable light. Still, there were persistent claims that she could only be a fake, and when an authoritative scholarly association weighed in with the one-word comment “questionable”, people began to shift their support away from the pair.

The paranormal powers Shizuko exhibited were mainly ESP-related, such as clairvoyance or second sight, and the ability to produce psychic photographs. She didn’t display the power of telekinesis, the ability to move things without touching them. According to one magazine, simply by holding a piece of film in a tightly sealed envelope against her forehead, she could psychically imprint upon it a specified design; she could also identify the image on a similarly concealed piece of film a hundred times out of a hundred. However, another magazine maintained that she was nothing more than a con-woman, claiming that any magician, with some training, could easily do the same things. In this way the tide of public opinion began to rise against Shizuko and Ikuma.

Then Shizuko was visited by misfortune. In 1954 she gave birth to her second baby, but it became ill and died at only four months of age. It had been a boy. Sadako, who was seven at the time, seemed to have showered a special affection on her newborn little brother.

The following year, in 1955, Ikuma challenged the media to a public demonstration of Shizuko’s powers. At first Shizuko didn’t want to do it. She said that it was hard to concentrate her awareness the way she wanted to among a mass of spectators; she was afraid she’d fail. But Ikuma was unyielding. He couldn’t stand being labelled a charlatan by the media, and he couldn’t think of a better way to outwit them than by offering clear proof of her authenticity.

On the appointed day, Shizuko reluctantly mounted the dais in the lab theatre, under the watchful eyes of nearly a hundred scholars and representatives of the press. She was mentally exhausted, to boot, so these were hardly the best conditions for her to work under. The experiment was to proceed along quite simple lines. All she had to do was identify the numbers on a pair of dice inside a lead container. If she had just been able to exert her powers normally, it would have been no problem. But she knew that each one of the hundred people surrounding her was waiting and hoping for her to fail. She trembled, she crouched down on the floor, she cried out in anguish, “Enough of this!” Shizuko herself explained it this way: everybody had a certain degree of psychic power. She just had more of it than others did. But surrounded by a hundred people all willing her to fail, her power was disrupted-she couldn’t get it to work. Ikuma went even further: “It’s not just a hundred people. No, now the whole population of Japan is trying to stamp out the fruits of my research. When public opinion, fanned by the media, begins to turn, then the media says nothing the people don’t want to hear. They should be ashamed!” Thus the great public display of clairvoyance ended with Ikuma’s denunciation of the mass media.

Of course, the media interpreted Ikuma’s diatribe as an attempt to shift the blame for the failed demonstration, and that’s how it was written up in the next day’s newspapers. A FAKE AFTER ALL … THEIR TRUE COLORS REVEALED. .. TAIDO UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR A FRAUD. .. FIVE YEARS OF DEBATE ENDED … VICTORY FOR MODERN SCIENCE. Not a single article defended them.

Toward the end of the year, Ikuma divorced his wife and resigned from the university. Shizuko began to become increasingly paranoid. After that, Ikuma decided to acquire paranormal abilities himself, and he retreated deep into the mountains and stood under waterfalls, but all he got was pulmonary tuberculosis. He had to be committed to a sanatorium in Hakone. Meanwhile Shizuko’s psychological state was becoming more and more precarious. Eight-year-old Sadako convinced her mother to go back home to Sashikiji, to escape the eyes of the media and the ridicule of the public, but then Shizuko slipped her daughter’s gaze and jumped into the volcano. And so three people’s lives crumbled.

Asakawa and Ryuji finished reading the two-page printout at the same time.

“It’s a grudge,” muttered Ryuji. “Imagine how Sadako must have felt when her mom threw herself into Mt Mihara.”

“She hated the media?”

“Not just the media. She resented the public at large for destroying her family, first treating them like darlings, and then when the wind changed scorning them. Sadako was with her mother and father between the ages of three and ten, right? She had first-hand knowledge of the vagaries of public opinion.”

“But that’s no reason to arrange an indiscriminate attack like this!” Asakawa’s objection was made in full consciousness of the fact that he himself belonged to the media. In his heart he was making excuses-he was pleading. Hey, I’m just as critical of the media’s tendencies as you are.

“What are you mumbling about?”

“Huh?” Asakawa realized that unknowingly he had been voicing his complaints, as if they were a Buddhist chant.

“Well, we’ve begun to illuminate the images on that video. Mt Mihara appears because it’s where her mother killed herself, and also because Sadako herself had predicted its eruption. It must have made a particularly strong psychic impression on her. The next scene shows the character for ‘mountain’, yama, floating into view. That’s probably the first psychic photograph Sadako succeeded in making, when she was very small.”

“Very small?” Asakawa didn’t see why it had to be from when she was very small.

“Yes, probably from when she was four or five. Next, there’s the scene with the dice. Sadako was present during her mother’s public demonstration; this scene means that she was watching, worried, as her mother tried to guess the numbers on the dice.”

“Hold on a minute, though. Sadako clearly saw the numbers on the dice in that lead bowl.”

Both Asakawa and Ryuji had watched that scene with their own eyes, so to speak. There was no mistaking.

“And?”

“Shizuko couldn’t see them.”

“Is it so strange that the daughter could do what the mother couldn’t? Look, Sadako was only seven then, but her power already far outstripped her mother’s. So much so that the combined unconscious will of a hundred people was nothing to her. Think about it: this is a girl who could project images onto a cathode-ray tube. Televisions produce images by an entirely different mechanism from photography-it’s not just a matter of exposing film to light. A picture on TV is composed of 525 lines, right? Sadako could manipulate those. This is power of a completely different order here.”

Asakawa still wasn’t convinced. “If she had so much power, what about the psychic photo she sent to Professor Miura? She should have been able to produce something much more impressive.”

“You’re even dumber than you look. Her mother had gained nothing but unhappiness by letting people know about her power. Her mother probably didn’t want her to make the same mistake. She probably told Sadako to hide her abilities and just lead a normal life. Sadako probably carefully restrained herself so as to produce only an average psychic photo.”

Sadako had stayed in the rehearsal hall alone after everyone else had left, so that she could test her powers on the television set, still a rarity in those days. She was trying to be careful not to let anyone know what she could do.

“Who’s the old woman who appears in the next scene?” asked Asakawa.

“I don’t know who that is. Perhaps she came to Sadako in a dream or something, whispered prophecies in her ear. She was using an old dialect. I’m sure you’ve noticed that everyone here now speaks fairly standard Japanese. That lady was pretty old. Maybe she lived in the twelfth century, or maybe she has some connection to En no Ozunu.”

… Next year you’re going to have a child.

“I wonder if that prediction really came true?”

“Oh, that? Well, there’s the scene with the baby boy right after that. So I originally thought it meant that Sadako had given birth to a boy, but according to this fax, that doesn’t appear to be the case.”

“There’s her brother who died at four months old…”

“Right. I think that’s it.”

“But what about the prediction? The old woman is definitely speaking to Sadako-she says you. Did Sadako have a baby?”

“I don’t know. If we believe the old lady, then I guess she did.”

“Whose child was it?”

“How should I know? Listen, don’t think I know everything. I’m just speculating here.”

If Sadako Yamamura did have a child, who was the father? And what was the child doing now?

Ryuji stood up suddenly, banging his knees on the table as a result.

“I thought I was getting hungry. Look-it’s way past noon. Say, Asakawa, I’m going to get something to eat.” So saying, Ryuji headed for the door, rubbing his kneecaps. Asakawa had no appetite, but something still bothered him, and he decided to tag along. He’d just remembered something Ryuji had told him to investigate, something he’d had no clue how to approach and so hadn’t done anything about. This was the question of the identity of the man in the video’s last scene. It might be Sadako’s father, Heihachiro Ikuma, but there was too much enmity in the way Sadako looked at him for that. When he’d seen the man’s face on the screen, Asakawa had felt a dull, heavy pain somewhere deep inside his body, accompanied by a strong feeling of antipathy. He was a rather handsome man, particularly around the eyes; he wondered why she hated him so. No matter what, that kind of gaze was not one Sadako would have turned on a relative. There was nothing in Yoshino’s report to suggest that she had squared off against her father. Rather, he got the impression that she was close to her parents. Asakawa suspected it would be impossible to discover the identity of this man. Nearly thirty years had undoubtedly changed his looks considerably. Still, just on the off-chance, maybe he should ask Yoshino to dig up a photo of Ikuma. He wondered what Ryuji would think about this. Wanting to take the matter up with him, Asakawa followed Ryuji outside.

The wind blew loudly. There was no point in using an umbrella. Asakawa and Ryuji hunched their shoulders and ran down the street to a bar in front of the harbor.

“How about a beer?” Without waiting for a reply, Ryuji turned to the waitress and called out, “Two beers.”

“Ryuji, to go back to our earlier conversation, what do you think the images on that video are, finally?”

“Don’t know.”

Ryuji was too busy eating his Korean barbecue lunch special to even look up, so he gave a curt answer. Asakawa stabbed a sausage with his fork and took a swallow of his beer. Out the window they could see the pier. There was nobody at the ticket window for the Tokai Kisen ferry line. Everything was silent. No doubt all the tourists trapped on the island were sitting at the windows of their hotels or B&Bs, looking worriedly at this same dark sea and sky.

Ryuji looked up. “I imagine you’ve probably heard what people say goes though a person’s mind at the moment of death, right?”

Asakawa returned his gaze to the scene in front of him. “The scenes from your life that have made the deepest impression on you are replayed, sort of like a flashback.” Asakawa had read a book in which the author described an experience along those lines. The author had been driving his car along a mountain road when he lost control of the steering wheel, plunging the car into a deep ravine. During the split second that the car hung in the air after leaving the road, the author realized that he was going to die. And at the instant he realized that, a sequence of different scenes from throughout his life came pitter-pattering up and flashed through his brain, so clearly that he could see every detail. In the end, miraculously, the writer had survived, but the memory of that instant remained vivid for him.

“You can’t be suggesting… Is that what this is?” Asakawa asked. Ryuji raised a hand and signalled the waitress to bring him another beer.

“All I’m saying is, that’s what the video reminds me of. Each one of those scenes represents a moment of extreme psychic or emotional engagement for Sadako. It’s not too much of a stretch to think that they were the scenes in her life that left the deepest impression, is it?”

“I get it. But hey, does that mean that…”

“Right. There’s a strong possibility that that’s the case.”

So Sadako Yamamura is no longer of this world? She died, and the scenes which flitted through her mind at the moment of death had taken this shape and remained in the world of the living- was that it?

“So why did she die? And another thing, what was her relationship with the man in the last scene of the video?”

“I told you to stop asking me so many questions. There’s a lot I don’t understand about it, either.”

Asakawa looked unconvinced.

“Hey, try using your head for a change. You rely too much on other people. What would you do if something happened to me and you were stuck trying to figure out the charm all by yourself?”

That hardly seemed likely. Asakawa might die, and Ryuji might solve the riddle alone, but the opposite would never happen. Asakawa was sure of that, if of nothing else.

They went back to the “bureau” where Hayatsu was waiting for them. “You had a call from a fellow named Yoshino. He wasn’t at his office, so he said he’d call back in ten minutes.”

Asakawa sat in front of the phone and prayed for good news. The phone rang. It was Yoshino.

“I’ve been trying to call you. Where were you?” There was a note of reproach in his voice.

“Sorry about that. We went out to get a bite to eat.”

“Okay. Now, did you get my fax?” Yoshino’s tone changed. The note of criticism disappeared, and his voice became gentler. Asakawa felt something unpleasant coming.

“Yes, thanks. It was very helpful.” Asakawa switched the receiver from his left hand to his right. “And, so? Did you find out what happened to Sadako after that?” Asakawa asked enthusiastically.

There was a pause before Yoshino replied, however. “No. I hit a dead end.”

The second he heard this, Asakawa’s face crumpled as if he were about to burst into sobs. Ryuji watched as if he found it amusing to see a man’s expression turn from hope to despair before his eyes. Then he plopped himself down on the floor facing the garden and stretched his legs out in front of him.

“What do you mean, a dead end?” Asakawa’s voice had risen several notes.

“I was only able to locate four of the interns who joined the troupe with Sadako. I called them, but none of them know anything. They’re all middle-aged guys of around fifty now. All any of them could tell me was they hadn’t seen her since shortly after the death of Shigemori, the company’s representative. There’s no more information to be had about Sadako Yamamura.”

“Nonsense. This can’t be the end of it.”

“Well, how does it look on your end?”

“How does it look on my end? I’ll tell you how it looks. It looks like I’m going to die tomorrow night at ten o’clock. And not just me-my wife and daughter are going to die on Sunday morning at eleven. That’s how it looks.”

Ryuji called out from behind him, “Hey, don’t forget about me! You’ll make me feel bad.”

Asakawa ignored him and continued. “There’ve got to be other things you can try. Maybe there’s someone besides the interns who would know what happened to Sadako. Listen, my family’s lives depend on it.”

“Not necessarily, though.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Maybe you’ll still be alive after the deadline passes.”

“You don’t believe me. I get it.” Asakawa could feel the whole world go dark before his eyes.

“Well… I mean, how could I really believe a hundred percent in a story like this?”

“Now, look, Yoshino.” How should he put it? What did he need to say to convince him? “I don’t even believe the half of it myself. It’s stupid. A charm? Come on! But you see, if there’s even a one-in-six chance that it’s all true… It’s like Russian roulette. You’ve got a gun with one bullet in it, and you know that there’s only one chance in six that when you pull the trigger it’ll kill you. But could you pull that trigger? Would you risk your family on those odds? No, you wouldn’t. You’d move the muzzle away from your temple- if you could you’d throw the whole damned gun into the ocean. Right? It’s only natural.”

Asakawa was all wound up now. Behind him Ryuji was wailing, “We’re idiots! Both of us, idiots!”

“Shut up!” Asakawa shielded the receiver with the palm of his hand as he turned to yell at Ryuji.

“Something wrong?” Yoshino lowered the tone of his voice.

“No, it’s nothing. Listen, Yoshino, I’m begging you. You’re the only one I can count on.” Suddenly Ryuji grabbed Asakawa’s arm. Giving way to anger, Asakawa spun around, but when he did he saw that Ryuji was looking unexpectedly earnest.

“We’re idiots. You and I both have lost our cool,” he said, quietly.

“Could you hold on a minute?” Asakawa lowered the receiver. Then, to Ryuji, “What’s the matter?”

“It’s so simple. Why didn’t we think of it before? There’s no need to follow Sadako’s trail chronologically. Why can’t we work our way backwards? Why did it have to be cabin B-4? Why did it have to be Villa Log Cabin? Why did it have to be South Hakone Pacific Land?”

Asakawa’s expression changed in a heartbeat as he came to a realization. Then, in a much calmer mood, he picked up the receiver again.

“Yoshino?”

Yoshino was still waiting on the other end of the line.

“Yoshino, forget about the theatre company lead for a while. There’s something else I urgently need you to check on. It’s just come up. I believe I’ve already told you about South Hakone Pacific Land…”

“Yeah, you did. It’s a resort club, right?”

“Right. As I recall, they built a golf course there about ten years ago, and then gradually expanded into what they are now. Now, listen, what I need you to look up is, what was there before Pacific Land?”

He could hear the scratching of pen on paper.

“What do you mean, what was there before? Probably nothing but mountain meadows.”

“You may be right. But then again, you may be wrong.”

Ryuji tugged at Asakawa’s sleeve again. “And a layout. If there was something standing on that land before the resort, tell your gentleman caller to get a map that shows the layout of the buildings and the grounds.”

Asakawa relayed the request to Yoshino and hung up the phone, willing him to come up with something, anything, by way of a lead. It was true: everybody had a little psychic power.

10

October 18-Thursday

The wind was a little stronger, and low white clouds raced by in the otherwise clear sky. Typhoon No. 21 had passed by the previous evening, grazing the Boso Peninsula to the northeast of Oshima before dissipating over the ocean. In its wake it left painfully dazzling blue seas. In spite of the peaceful autumn weather, as Asakawa stood on the deck of the boat watching the waves he felt like a condemned man on the eve of his execution. Raising his eyes he could see the gentle slope of the Izu highlands in the middle distance. Today, at last, he would face his deadline. It was now ten in the morning; in another twelve hours, it would come, unerringly. It had been a week since he watched the video in cabin B-4. It seemed like ages ago. Of course it felt like a long time: in just one week he’d experienced more terror than most people experience in a lifetime.

Asakawa wasn’t sure now that being cooped up on Oshima all day Wednesday had hurt him. On the phone yesterday he’d got excited and accused Yoshino of dragging his feet, but now that he thought about things calmly, he was actually very grateful to his colleague for doing so much for him. If Asakawa had been running around chasing down leads himself, he probably would have got agitated and missed something, or gone down a blind alley.

This is fine. The typhoon was on our side. If he didn’t think that way, he’d never make it. Asakawa was starting to prepare his mind so that when his time came to die he wouldn’t be consumed with regrets about what he had or hadn’t done.

Their last clue was the three-page printout he held in his hand. Yoshino had spent half the previous day tracking down the information before faxing it. Before South Hakone Pacific Land had been built, the land had been occupied by a rather unusual facility. Unusual these days, that is- at the time, establishments like it were perfectly run-of-the-mill. It was a tuberculosis treatment facility-a sanatorium.

Nowadays few people lived in fear of TB, but if one read much pre-war fiction, one couldn’t help but come across mention of it. It was the tuberculosis bacillus that gave Thomas Mann the impetus to write The Magic Mountain, that allowed Motojiro Kajii to sing with piercing clarity of his decay. However, the discovery of streptomycin in 1944, and hydrazide in 1950, stole TB’s literary cachet, reducing its status to that of just another communicable disease. In the ’20s and ’30s, as many as 200,000 people a year were dying from it, but the number dropped drastically after the war. Even so, the bacillus didn’t become extinct. Even now, it still kills around five thousand people a year.

In the days when TB ran rampant, clean, fresh air and a quiet, peaceful environment were deemed essential for recovery. Thus, sanatoriums were built in mountainous areas. But as progress in medicinal treatments produced a corresponding drop in the number of patients, these facilities had to adjust their range of services. In other words, they had to start treating internal ailments, even performing surgeries, or else they wouldn’t be able to survive financially. In the mid-1960s, the sanatorium in South Hakone was faced with just this choice. But its situation was even more critical than most, due to its extreme remoteness. It was just too hard to get to. With TB, once patients checked in they usually didn’t check back out again, so ease of access wasn’t much of an issue. But it proved to be a fatal flaw in the plan to transform the place into a general hospital. The sanatorium ended up shutting down in 1972.

Waiting in the wings was Pacific Resorts, which had been looking for a suitable location to build a golf course and resort. In 1975, Pacific Resorts bought a section of alpine land which included the old sanatorium site and immediately set about developing their golf course. Later they built summer homes to sell, a hotel, a swimming pool, an athletic club, and tennis courts-the whole line of resort facilities. And in April of this year, six months ago, they’d put the finishing touches to Villa Log Cabin.

“What kind of place is it, then?” Ryuji was supposed to be on deck, but he suddenly appeared in the seat next to Asakawa.

“Huh?”

“South Hakone Pacific Land, of course.”

That’s right. He’s never been there.

“It’s got a nice view at night.” Asakawa recalled the curiously lifeless atmosphere, the tennis balls with their hollow echo under the orange lights… Where does that atmosphere come from anyway? I wonder how many people died there when it was a sanatorium. Asakawa pondered this as he remembered how the beautiful evening lights of Numazu and Mishima had spread out at his feet.

Asakawa put the first page of the printout on the bottom and spread the other two pages out on his lap. The second page was a simple diagram showing the layout of the sanatorium grounds; the third showed the building as it was today, an elegant three-story building containing an information center and a restaurant. This was the building Asakawa had entered to ask directions to Villa Log Cabin. Asakawa shifted his gaze back and forth between the two pages. The passage of nearly thirty years was embodied in those two pieces of paper. If it wasn’t for the fact that the access road was in the same place, he’d have no idea what on one map corresponded to what on the other. Mentally reconstructing the layout as he knew it, he looked at the second page to try to find out what had originally stood where the cabins were now. He couldn’t be absolutely sure, but when he lay one page on top of the other, it certainly seemed as if there had been nothing there before. Just thick woods covering the side of a valley.

He went back to the first page. It contained one more very important piece of information, besides the story of the sanatorium’s transformation into a resort. Jotaro Nagao, 57. A doctor, a GP and paediatrician, with a private practice in Atami. For five years, from 1962 to 1967, Nagao had worked at the South Hakone sanatorium. He’d been young, just past his internship. Of the doctors who’d been there at the time, the only ones still alive were Nagao and Yozo Tanaka, who was retired now, living with his daughter and her husband in Nagasaki. All the rest, including the head of the facility, were dead. Therefore, Dr Nagao was their only chance to find out anything about the sanatorium in South Hakone. Yozo Tanaka was already 80, and Nagasaki was much too far away-they wouldn’t have time to visit him.

Asakawa had pleaded desperately with Yoshino to find a living witness, and Yoshino, gritting his teeth to keep from yelling back at Asakawa, had come up with Dr Nagao. He’d sent not only the man’s name and address, but also an intriguing summary of his career. It was probably just something Yoshino had happened to come across in his research, and he’d decided to append it, not actually meaning anything by it. Dr Nagao had been at the sanatorium from 1962 to 1967, but he hadn’t spent the entirety of those five years in the performance of his duties. For two weeks- a short time, to be sure, but significant-he’d gone from doctor to patient, and been housed in an isolation ward. In the summer of 1966, while visiting an isolation ward up in the mountains, he’d carelessly allowed himself to contract the smallpox virus from a patient. Fortunately, he had been inoculated a few years previously, so it didn’t turn into anything major: no visible outbreak, no recurrence of the fever, only minor symptoms. But they’d put him in isolation to keep him from infecting anyone else. What was so interesting was that this had assured Nagao a place in medical history. He had been the last smallpox patient in Japan. It wasn’t necessarily something that would get him into the Guinness Book, but Yoshino seemed to have thought it was interesting. For people of Asakawa and Ryuji’s generation, the word “smallpox” didn’t even register.

“Ryuji, have you ever had smallpox?”

“Idiot. Of course not. It’s extinct.”

“Extinct?”

“Yes. Eradicated through human ingenuity. Smallpox no longer exists in this world.”

The World Health Organization had made a dedicated effort to wipe out smallpox through vaccinations, and as a result it had all but disappeared from the face of the earth by 1975. There are records of the last smallpox patient in the world: a Somalian youth who came down with it on October 26, 1977.

“Can a virus become extinct? Is that possible?” Asakawa didn’t know much about viruses, but he couldn’t shake the impression that no matter how much you tried to kill one, eventually it would mutate and find a way to survive.

“See, viruses kind of wander around on the border between living things and non-living things. Some people even theorize that they were originally human genes, but nobody really knows where they come from or how they emerged. What’s certain is that they’ve been intimately connected with the appearance and evolution of life.”

Ryuji’s arms had been folded behind his head; now he stretched them wide. His eyes glittered. “Don’t you find it fascinating, Asakawa? The idea that genes could escape from our cells and become another life form? Maybe all opposites were originally identical. Even light and darkness-before the Big Bang they were living together in peace, with no contradiction. God and the Devil, too. All the Devil is is a god who fell from grace-they’re the same thing, originally. Male and female? It used to be that all living things were hermaphroditic, like worms or slugs, with both female and male sex organs. Don’t you think that’s the ultimate symbol of power and beauty?” Ryuji laughed as he said this. “It’d sure save a lot of time and trouble when it comes to sex.”

Asakawa peered at Ryuji’s face to see what was so funny. There was no way that an organism with both female and male genitalia epitomized perfect beauty.

“Are there any other extinct viruses?”

“Gee, if you’re so interested I suggest you look right into it when you get back to Tokyo.”

“I’ll get back.”

“Heh, heh. Don’t worry. You’ll get back.”

At that moment the high-speed boat they were on was exactly halfway through the voyage linking Oshima and Ito, on the Izu Peninsula. They could have made it back to Tokyo quicker by flying, but they wanted to visit Dr Nagao in Atami, so they’d taken the sea route.

Straight ahead they could see the ferris wheel at the Atami Korakuen. They were arriving right on time, at 10:50. Asakawa descended the gangway and ran to the parking lot where they’d left their rental car.

“Calm down, would you?” Ryuji followed at a leisurely pace. Nagao’s clinic was near Kinomiya Station on the Ito Line-not very far away at all. Asakawa watched impatiently as Ryuji climbed into the car, and then headed into Atami’s maze of hills and one-way streets.

Immediately after he’d settled himself, Ryuji said, with a perfectly straight face, “Hey, I was thinking-maybe the Devil’s behind this whole thing after all.” Asakawa was too busy looking at street signs to answer. Ryuji continued. “The Devil always appears in the world in a different form. You know the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe in the second half of the thirteenth century? Half of the total population died. Can you believe that? Half, that’s like the population of Japan being reduced to sixty million. Naturally, artists at the time likened the plague to the Devil. It’s like that now, too-don’t we talk about AIDS as if it were a modern Devil? But listen, devils never drive humanity to extinction. Why? Because if people cease to exist, so do devils. The same with viruses. If the host cell perishes, the virus can’t survive. But humanity drove the smallpox virus to extinction. Really? Could we really do that?”

It’s impossible in the modern world to even imagine the terror once inspired by smallpox, when it raged throughout the world claiming so many lives. Such was the suffering it caused that it gave rise to innumerable religious beliefs and superstitions in Japan, as well as elsewhere. People believed in gods of pestilence, and it was the God of Smallpox that brought that disease, though perhaps it should have been called a devil. In any case, could people really drive a god to the brink of extinction? Ryuji’s question harboured a deep uncertainty.

Asakawa wasn’t listening to Ryuji. In some corner of his mind he wondered why the guy was rambling on about this now, but mainly he was just thinking about not making any wrong turns. Every nerve focussed on getting to Dr Nagao’s clinic as fast as possible.

11

In a lane in front of Kinomiya Station was a small, one-story house with a shingle by the door that read Nagao Clinic: Internal Medicine and Paediatrics. Asakawa and Ryuji stood in front of the door for some time. If they couldn’t pull any information out of Nagao, it’d be sorry, time’s up! There was no more time to scare up new leads. But just what was there to find out from him? It was probably hoping for too much to think that he’d even remember much of anything about Sadako Yamamura from thirty years ago. They didn’t even have any hard evidence that Sadako had any connection at all with the sanatorium in South Hakone. All of Nagao’s colleagues at the sanatorium, except for Yozo Tanaka, had died of old age. They probably could have tracked down the names of some nurses if they’d tried, but it was too late for that now.

Asakawa looked at his watch. 11:30. Only a little over ten hours left until the deadline, and here he was, hesitating to open the door.

“What are you waiting for? Go on in.” Ryuji gave him a shove. Of course, he could understand why Asakawa was hesitating, even though he’d been in such a hurry to get here. He was scared. No doubt he was afraid of seeing his last hope dashed, his last chance to survive eliminated. Ryuji stepped in front of him and opened the door.

A couch big enough for three people stood along one wall of the small waiting room. Conveniently, there were no patients waiting. Ryuji bent over at the little receptionist’s window and spoke to the fat middle-aged nurse behind it. “Excuse me. We’d like to see the doctor.”

Without lifting her eyes from her magazine, the nurse lazily replied, “Would you like to make an appointment?”

“No, that’s not it. There’s something we’d like to ask him about.”

She closed her magazine, looked up, and put on her glasses. “May I ask what this is in regards to?”

“Like I say, we’d just like to ask him a few questions.”

Irritated, Asakawa peeked out from behind Ryuji’s back and asked, “Is the doctor in?”

The nurse touched the rims of her glasses with both hands and studied the two men. “What is this about?” she asked overbearingly.

Both Ryuji and Asakawa stood up straight. Ryuji said, loudly enough to be heard, “With a receptionist like her it’s no wonder there are no patients.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

Asakawa hung his head; it wouldn’t do to get her angry. But just then the door to the examination room opened and Nagao appeared, dressed in a white lab coat.

Although he was completely bald, Nagao looked rather younger than his 57 years. He frowned and fixed a suspicious gaze on the two men in his entryway.

Asakawa and Ryuji both turned at the sound of Nagao’s voice, and the instant they saw his face, they gasped simultaneously.

And we thought this guy might be able to tell us something about Sadako? No kidding. As if it were an electric current coursing through his brain, Asakawa found himself replaying the final scene of the video in his head. The sweating, panting face of a man seen from close up, eyes bloodshot. A gaping wound in his exposed shoulder, from which blood ran, dripping into the viewer’s eyes, clouding them over. A tremendous pressure on the viewer’s chest, murderous intent in the man’s face… And that face was exactly what they saw now: Dr Nagao. He was older now, but there was no way of mistaking him.

Asakawa and Ryuji exchanged glances. Then Ryuji pointed at the doctor and began to laugh. “Heh, heh, heh. Now this is why games are interesting. Ah, who would have thought it? Imagine running into you here.”

Nagao was obviously displeased at the way these two strange men had reacted to seeing him. He raised his voice. “Who are you?” Unfazed, Ryuji walked right up to him and grabbed him by the lapels. Nagao was several centimetres taller than Ryuji. Ryuji flexed his powerful arms and pulled the doctor’s ear to his mouth, then spoke in a gentle voice that belied his strength.

“So tell me, pal, what was it you did to Sadako Yamamura thirty years ago at the South Hakone Sanatorium?”

It took a few seconds for the words to sink into the doctor’s brain. Nagao’s eyes darted around nervously as he searched his memories. Then they came to him, scenes of a time he’d never been able to forget. His knees sagged; all the strength seemed to go out of his body. Just as he was about to faint, Ryuji steadied him and leaned him back against the wall. Nagao wasn’t shocked by the memories themselves. Rather, it was the fact that the man before him, who may or may not have even been thirty years old, knew about what had happened. Indescribable dread pierced his soul.

“Doctor!” exclaimed the nurse, Ms Fujimura.

“I think it’s about time this place closed for lunch,” Ryuji said, signalling to Asakawa with his eyes. Asakawa closed the curtain over the entryway so that no patients would come in.

“Doctor!” Nurse Fujimura didn’t know how to handle the situation. She just waited, dumbly, for Nagao to instruct her. Nagao somehow pulled himself together a little and thought about what to do next. Thinking that above all, he couldn’t let this nosy woman find out about what had happened, he assumed a calm expression.

“Nurse Fujimura, you can take your break now. Run along now and get something to eat.”

“But, doctor…”

“Just do as I say. There’s no need to worry about me.”

First two strange men come in and whisper something in the doctor’s ear, and the next thing she knows the doctor is collapsing. She didn’t know what to make of all this, and so she just stood there for a few moments. Finally, the doctor shouted, “Go, now!” She practically flew out the front door.

“Now, then. Let’s hear what you have to say for yourself.” Ryuji went into the examination room. Nagao followed after, looking like a patient who’s just been informed he has cancer.

“I’ll warn you before we start, you mustn’t lie to us. I and this gentleman here know everything-we’ve seen it with our very eyes.” Ryuji pointed first to Asakawa and then to his own eyes.

“What the…?” Seen it? Impossible. The bushes were too thick. There was nobody else around. Not to mention, these two are too young. They would have only been …

“I understand why you might be reluctant to believe me. But we both know your face-all too well.” Suddenly Ryuji’s tone changed. “Why don’t I tell you one of your distinguishing features? You’ve still got a scar on your right shoulder, haven’t you?”

Nagao’s eyes grew wide with astonishment, and his jaw started to quiver. After a pregnant pause, Ryuji said, “Now, shall I tell you why you have that scar on your shoulder?” Ryuji leaned over and stretched his neck until his lips were almost touching Nagao’s shoulder. “Sadako Yamamura bit you, didn’t she? Just like this.” Ryuji opened his mouth and pretended to bite through the white cloth. Nagao’s trembling grew worse, and he desperately tried to say something, but his mouth wouldn’t work. He couldn’t form words.

“I think you get my point. Now, we’re not going to repeat anything you tell us. We promise. All we want to know is everything that happened to Sadako.”

Not that he was in any condition to think at all, but Nagao didn’t think Ryuji’s words quite added up. If they’d already seen everything, why did they need to hear anything from the doctor’s mouth? But wait, the whole idea that they saw anything is silly. They couldn’t have seen anything. They probably weren’t even born yet. So what’s going on here? What do they think they’ve seen? The more he thought about it the less sense it made, until his head felt like it was ready to burst.

“Heh, heh, heh.” Ryuji chuckled and looked at Asakawa. The man’s eyes said it all. Frighten him like this and he’ll come clean. He’ll tell us anything.

And indeed, Nagao began to talk. He himself was puzzled as to why he remembered everything so clearly. And as he spoke, every sensory organ in his body began to recall the excitement of that day. The passion, the heat, the touch, the glossy shine of her skin, the song of the locusts, the mingled smells of sweat and grass, and the old well…

“I don’t even know what caused it. Maybe the fever and headache robbed me of my ordinary good judgment. Those were the early symptoms of smallpox-which meant I had already passed through the incubation period. But I didn’t dream that I had caught the disease myself. Fortunately, I managed not to infect anyone else in the sanatorium. To this day I’m haunted by the thought of what would have happened if the tuberculosis patients had been attacked by smallpox as well.

“The day was a hot one. I’d been examining the tomograms of a newly-admitted patient, and I had found a hole the size of a one-yen coin in one of his lungs. I’d told him to resign himself to spending a year with us, and then I’d given him a copy of the diagnosis to give his company. Then I couldn’t take it anymore-I just had to get outside. But even breathing the fresh mountain air didn’t make the pain in my head go away. So I went down the stone steps beside the ward, thinking to take shelter in the shade of the garden. There I noticed a young woman leaning against a tree trunk, gazing at the world down below. She wasn’t one of our patients. She was the daughter of a patient who’d been there long before I arrived, a man named Heihachiro Ikuma, a former assistant professor at Taido University. Her name was Sadako Yamamura. I remember the name well: her family name was different from her father’s. For about a month she had been making frequent visits to the sanatorium, but she didn’t spend much time with her father. Nor would she ask the doctors much about his condition. All I could assume was that she was there to enjoy the alpine scenery. I sat down next to her and smiled at her, asking her how her father was doing. But she didn’t look like she even wanted to know much about his illness. On the other hand, it was clear that she knew he didn’t have much longer. I could tell by the way she spoke. She knew the day her father was going to die, with more certainty than any doctor’s educated guess.

“Sitting there beside her like that, talking to her about her life and her family, I suddenly became aware that my headache, so unbearable a little while ago, had retreated. In its place appeared a fever accompanied by an odd feeling of excitement. I felt vitality well up within me, as if the temperature of my blood had been raised. I gazed at her face. I felt what I always felt, a sense of wonder that a woman with such perfect features should exist in the world. I’m not exactly sure what defines beauty, but I know that Dr Tanaka, who was twenty years older than me, used to say the same thing. That he’d never seen anyone more beautiful than Sadako Yamamura. My breathing was choked with fever, but somehow I controlled it enough to softly put a hand on her shoulder and say to her, ‘Let’s go somewhere cooler to talk, in the shade.’

“She suspected nothing. She nodded once and started to get to her feet. And as she stood up, and bent over, I saw-down the front of her white blouse-her perfectly-formed little breasts. They were so white that my whole mind was suddenly dyed milky white, and it was as if my reason was taken from me in the shock.

“She paid no attention to my agitation, but just brushed the dust from her long skirt. Her gestures seemed so innocent and adorable.

“We strolled on and on through the lush forest, surrounded by the droning of the cicadas. I hadn’t decided on any particular destination, but my feet kept heading in a certain direction. Sweat ran down my back. I took off my shirt, leaving only my undershirt. We followed an animal track until it opened up onto the side of a valley where there stood a dilapidated old house. It had probably been at least ten years since anyone had lived there. The walls were rotting and the roof looked like it could collapse at any moment. There was a well on the other side of the house, and when she saw it she ran toward it, saying, ‘Oh, I’m so thirsty.’ She bent over to look in. Even from the outside it was obvious that the well wasn’t used anymore. I ran to the well, too. But not to look inside. What I wanted to see was Sadako’s chest as she bent over again. I placed both hands on the lip of the well and got a close look. I could feel cool, damp air rising from the dark depths of the earth to caress my face, but it couldn’t take away the burning urge I felt. I didn’t know where the urge came from. I think now that the smallpox fever had taken away my mechanism of control. I swear to you, I had never experienced such sensual temptation before in my life.

“I found myself reaching out to touch that gentle swelling. She looked up in shock.

Something snapped inside me. My memories of what happened next are hazy. All I can recall are fragmentary scenes. I found myself pressing Sadako to the ground. I pulled her blouse up over her breasts, and then… My memory skips to her resisting, violently, and then biting my shoulder; it was the intense pain that brought me to my senses. I saw the blood flowing from my shoulder drip onto her face. Blood dripped into her eyes, and she shook her head in revulsion. I adjusted my body to that rhythmic movement. What did my face look like then? What did she see when she looked at me? The face of a beast, I’m sure. That’s what I was thinking as I finished.

“When it was over, she fixed me with an implacable gaze. Still lying on her back, she raised her knees and skilfully used her elbows to scoot backwards. I looked at her body again. I thought my eyes had deceived me. Her wrinkled gray skirt had bunched up around her waist, and she made no move to cover her breasts as she backed up. A ray of sunlight fell on the point where her thighs converged, clearly illuminating a small, blackish lump. I raised my eyes to her chest- beautifully-shaped breasts. Then I looked down again. Within her pubic mound, covered with hair, was a pair of perfectly developed testicles.

“Had I not been a doctor, I probably would have been shocked senseless. But I knew of cases such as this from photos in medical texts.

Testicular feminization syndrome. It’s an extremely rare syndrome. I never thought I’d see one outside of a textbook-much less in a situation such as that. Testicular feminization is a type of male pseudohermaphroditism. Externally the person seems completely female, having breasts and a vagina, but usually not a uterus. Chromosomally the person is XY, however-male. And for some reason people with this condition are all beautiful.

“Sadako was still staring at me. I was probably the first person outside her family to discover the secret of her body. Needless to say, she had been a virgin up until a few minutes previously. It had been a necessary trial if she were to go on living as a woman. I was trying to rationalize my actions. Then, suddenly, words flew into my head.

“I’ll kill you.

“As I reeled from the strength of will behind the words, I instantaneously intuited that her telepathic message was no lie. There was no room within it for even a sliver of doubt; my body accepted it as a certainty. She’d kill me, if I didn’t kill her first. My body’s instinct for self-preservation gave me an order. I climbed back on top of her, placed both hands on her slender neck, and pressed with my full weight. To my surprise, there was less resistance this time. She narrowed her eyes with pleasure and relaxed her body, almost as if she wanted to die.

“I didn’t wait to see if she’d stopped breathing. I picked her body up and went to the well. I think my actions were still beyond my will at this point. In other words, I didn’t pick her up intending to drop her into the well, but rather, the moment I picked her up, the round black mouth of the well caught my eye, and put it in my mind to do it. Everything felt as if it was working out perfectly for me. Or, rather, I felt as if I was being moved by a will beyond my own. I had a general idea of what was going to happen next. I could hear a voice in the back of my head saying this was all a dream.

“The well was dark, and from where I stood at the top I couldn’t see the bottom very clearly. From the smell of soil wafting up, it seemed that there was a shallow accumulation of water at the bottom. I let go. Sadako’s body slid down the side of the well into the earth, hitting the bottom with a splash. I stared into the well until my eyes got used to the dark, but I still couldn’t see her curled up down there. Even so, I couldn’t shake my uneasiness. I flung rocks and dirt into the well, trying to hide her body forever. I threw in arm-fuls of dirt and five or six fist-sized rocks before I just couldn’t do any more. The rocks hit her body, making a dull thud at the bottom of the well and stimulating my imagination. When I thought of that sickly beautiful body being broken by those stones, I couldn’t go through with it. I know that doesn’t make any sense. On the one hand I desired the destruction of her body, but on the other hand I didn’t want her body to be marred.”

When Nagao had finished speaking, Asakawa handed him the map of South Hakone Pacific Land.

“Where on this map would that well be?” Asakawa asked, urgently. It took Nagao a few moments to understand what he was being shown, but after he was told that what had once been the sanatorium was now a restaurant, he seemed to regain his orientation.

“I think it was right about here,” he said, pointing to a place on the map.

“No doubt about it. That’s where Villa Log Cabin is,” Asakawa said, rising. “Let’s go!”

But Ryuji was calm. “Don’t go rushing off just yet. We still have some things we need to ask this old fart. Now, this syndrome you mention…”

“Testicular feminization syndrome.”

“Can a woman with this bear children?”

Nagao shook his head. “No, she can’t.”

“One other thing. When you raped Sadako Yamamura, you had already contracted smallpox, right?”

Nagao nodded.

“In which case, the last person in Japan to be infected with smallpox was Sadako Yamamura, no?”

It was certain that just before her death, Sadako Yamamura’s body had been invaded by the smallpox virus. But she had died immediately afterward. If its host perishes, a virus can’t go on living. Nagao didn’t know how to answer and looked down, avoiding Ryuji’s gaze. He gave only a vague reply.

“Hey! What are you doing? We’ve got to get going!” Asakawa was in the doorway, urging Ryuji to hurry.

“Shit. Hope you’re happy,” said Ryuji, flicking the tip of the doctor’s nose with his index finger before following Asakawa.

12

He couldn’t explain it logically, but from his experience reading novels and watching trashy TV shows, he felt like he had a good idea of the kind of plot device called for now, based on the way the story had unfolded. There was a certain tempo to the unfolding. They hadn’t been searching for Sadako’s hiding place, but in the blink of an eye they’d stumbled upon the tragedy that had befallen her and the spot where she was buried. So when Ryuji told him to “stop in front of a large hardware store,” Asakawa was relieved: he’s thinking the same thing I am. Asakawa still couldn’t imagine what a horrible task this would be. Unless it had been completely buried, finding the old well in the vicinity of Villa Log Cabin shouldn’t be too difficult. And once they found it, it should be easy to bring up Sadako’s remains. It all sounded pretty simple-and he wanted to think it would be. It was one in the afternoon; the midday sun reflected brilliantly from the hilly streets in this hot-spring resort town. The brightness, and the neighbourhood’s laid-back weekday mood, clouded his imagination. It didn’t occur to him that even if it were only four or five meters deep, the bottom of a well was bound to be an entirely different world from the well-lit ground above.

Nishizaki Hardware. Asakawa saw the sign and braked. There were stepladders and lawn mowers lined up in front of the store. They should be able to get everything they needed here.

“I’ll let you do the shopping,” Asakawa said, running to a nearby phone booth. He paused before entering it to take a phone card from his wallet.

“Hey, we don’t have time to waste on phone calls.” But Asakawa wasn’t listening. Grumbling, Ryuji went into the store and grabbed rope, a bucket, a shovel, a pulley block, and a high-powered flashlight.

Asakawa was desperate. This might be his last chance to hear their voices. He knew full well how little time he had to waste. He only had nine hours left until his deadline. He slipped his card into the phone and dialled the number of his wife’s parents’ house in Ashikaga. His father-in-law answered.

“Hello, it’s Asakawa. Could you call Shizu and Yoko to the phone?” He knew he was being rude, skipping the customary exchange of pleasantries.

But he didn’t have time to worry about his father-in-law’s feelings. The man started to say something, but then seemed to sense the urgency of the situation, and immediately summoned his daughter and granddaughter. Asakawa was extremely glad his mother-in-law hadn’t been the one to answer. He’d never have got a word in edgewise then.

“Hello?”

“Shizu, is that you?” Hearing her voice, he missed her already.

“Where are you?”

“Atami. How’s everything there?”

“Oh, about the same. Yoko’s having a great time with Grandma and Grandpa.”

“Is she there?” He could hear her voice. No words, just sounds as she struggled to climb up on her mother’s lap to get to her father.

“Yoko, it’s Daddy.” Shizu put the receiver to Yoko’s ear.

“Dada, Dada…” He could barely hear the words, if words they were. They were all but drowned out by the sounds of her breathing into the phone, or rubbing the mouthpiece against her cheek. But these noises only made him feel that much closer to her. He was overcome with the desire to leave all this behind him and hug her.

“Yoko, you wait there, okay? Daddy’s coming soon to get you in the vroom-vroom.”

“Really? When are you getting here?” Shizu had taken the phone without him realizing it.

“On Sunday. Right, I’ll be renting a car and driving up, so let’s all take a drive into the mountains, to Nikko or something.”

“Really? Yoko, isn’t that great? Daddy’s going to take us for a drive in a car on Sunday!”

He felt his ears burning. Was he really in a position to make that kind of promise? A doctor was never supposed to say anything to give his patient false hope; he was supposed to do things to minimize the eventual shock as much as possible.

“It sounds like you’ve got this thing you’re working on straightened out.”

“Well, it’s coming along.”

“You promised me that when all this is over you’d tell me the whole thing from the beginning.”

He had promised that. In exchange for her not asking any questions right now, he’d said he’d tell her all about it once it was taken care of. His wife had kept her end of the bargain.

“Hey, how long are you going to keep talking?” Ryuji said from behind him. Asakawa turned around. Ryuji had the trunk open and was loading his purchases into the car.

“I’ll call again. I might not be able to tonight, though.” Asakawa placed his hand on the hook. If he pushed, the connection would be broken.

He didn’t even know why he’d called. Was it just to hear their voices, or did he have something more important to tell them? But he knew that even if he’d been able to talk to her for an hour, when it came time to hang up he’d still feel constrained, as if he’d only said half of what he wanted to say. It’d just be the same thing. He pressed down on the hook, and then let go. In any case, everything would be clear tonight at ten. Tonight at ten…

Driving up in the daytime like this, South Hakone Pacific Land felt like a typical mountain resort. The creepy mood he’d felt last time he came was hidden by the sunlight. Even the sound of bouncing tennis balls was normal, not sluggish and sonorous like before, but crisp and light. They could see Mt Fuji, hazy and white, and below them in the distance scattered flashes of sun from greenhouse roofs.

It was a weekday afternoon and Villa Log Cabin appeared deserted. It seemed that the only time the rental units were fully occupied was weekends and the summer vacation season. B-4 was vacant today, too. Leaving Ryuji to check in, Asakawa unloaded the car and changed into lighter clothes.

He looked carefully around the room. A week ago this evening Asakawa had fled in fear from this haunted house. He remembered running into the bathroom to throw up, feeling that he was about to piss himself. He could even remember, quite vividly, the graffiti he’d seen on the bathroom wall when he’d knelt down in front of the toilet. Now he opened the bathroom door. The same graffiti in the same place.

It was just after two. They went out onto the balcony and ate the box lunches they’d bought on the way while gazing over the grassy meadow surrounding the cabins. The fretful mood that had shadowed them here from Nagao’s clinic subsided a bit. Even amidst the worst panic, there are still scattered moments like this, when time flows leisurely by. Even when trying to finish a story by an impending deadline, Asakawa would sometimes find himself aimlessly watching coffee drop from the spout of the coffee maker, and later he’d reflect on how elegantly he’d wasted precious time.

“Eat up. We’ll need our strength,” said Ryuji. He’d bought two lunches just for himself. Asakawa meanwhile didn’t seem to have much appetite; from time to time he’d rest his chopsticks and look back inside the cabin.

Suddenly, he spoke, as if it had just occurred to him. “Maybe we’d better get this straight. What exactly are we doing here?”

“We’re going to look for Sadako, of course.” “And what do we do once we’ve found her?” “Take her back to Sashikiji and lay her to rest.”

“So that’s the charm. You’re saying that’s what she wants.”

Ryuji chewed loudly for a while on a big mouthful of rice, eyes staring straight ahead, unfocused. Asakawa could tell from the look on his face that Ryuji wasn’t entirely convinced, either. Asakawa was scared. It was his last chance, and he wanted some sort of assurance that they were doing the right thing. There were to be no second chances.

“There’s nothing else we can do now,” said Ryuji, tossing away his empty lunch box.

“What about this possibility? Maybe she wants us to clear away her resentment toward the person who killed her.”

“You mean Jotaro Nagao? You mean if we exposed him, Sadako would be appeased?”

Asakawa looked deep into Ryuji’s eyes, trying to figure out what he really thought. If they dug up the remains and laid them to rest and it still didn’t save Asakawa’s life, maybe Ryuji was planning to kill Dr Nagao. Maybe he was using Asakawa as a test case, trying to save his own skin…

“Come on. Don’t be stupid,” said Ryuji with a laugh. “First of all, if Nagao had really incurred Sadako’s resentment, he’d already be dead.”

True. She definitely had that kind of power.

“So why did she let herself be killed by him?”

“I can’t say. But look: she was surrounded by the deaths of people close to her. She knew nothing but frustration. Even disappearing from the theatre company like that was essentially a frustration of her goals, right? Then she visits her father at the sanatorium and finds out that he’s near death.”

“A person who’s given up on the world harbours no resentment toward the person who takes her out of it, is that what you’re saying?”

“Not exactly. Rather, I think it’s possible that Sadako herself caused those impulses in Old Man Nagao. In other words, maybe she killed herself, but borrowed Nagao’s hands to do it.”

Her mother had thrown herself into a volcano, her father was dying of tuberculosis, her own dreams of becoming an actress had been shattered, and then there was her congenital handicap. She had any number of reasons to commit suicide. And there were things that just didn’t add up unless one assumed she’d killed herself. Yoshino’s report had mentioned Shigemori, founder of Theatre Group Soaring. He’d got drunk and dropped in on Sadako, and died the next day of cardiac paralysis. It was almost certain that Sadako had killed him using some abnormal ability of hers. She had that kind of power. She could easily kill a man or two without leaving any evidence. So why was Nagao still alive? It made no sense, unless one decided that she must have guided his will in order to kill herself.

“Well, okay, let’s say it was suicide. But why did she have to be raped before she died? And don’t tell me it’s because she didn’t want to die a virgin.”

Asakawa had hit the nail on the head, and as a result Ryuji was at a loss for an answer. That was exactly what he was going to say.

“Is that really so stupid?”

“Huh?”

“Is it really so foolish to not want to die a virgin?” Ryuji pressed his point with a desperate earnestness. “If it were me… if by some chance it were me, that’s how I’d feel. I wouldn’t want to die a virgin.”

This wasn’t like Ryuji, Asakawa felt. Asakawa couldn’t explain it logically, but neither the words nor the facial expression were like Ryuji at all.

“Are you serious? Men and women are different. Especially in the case of Sadako Yamamura.”

“Heh, heh. Just kidding. Sadako didn’t want to be raped. Of course she didn’t. I mean, who’d want a thing like that to happen to oneself? Plus, she bit Nagao’s shoulder down to the bone. It was only after it had happened that the thought of dying occurred to her, and without even considering it she guided Nagao in that direction. I think that’s probably what happened.”

“But then, wouldn’t you still expect her to have a lingering resentment toward Nagao?” Asakawa still wasn’t convinced.

“But aren’t you forgetting? We need to imagine the spear-tip of her resentment being pointed, not at any one individual, but at society in general. Compared to that, her hatred of Nagao was as insignificant as a fart in a windstorm.”

If hatred toward society in general was what was incorporated into that video, then what was the charm? What could it be? The phrase indiscriminate attack came into Asakawa’s mind, before Ryuji’s thick voice interrupted his thoughts.

“Enough already. If we have time to think about crap like this, we should be spending it trying to find Sadako. She’s the one who’ll solve every riddle.”

Ryuji drained the last of his oolong tea and then stood up and tossed the empty can out toward the valley floor.

They stood on the gentle hillside looking around at the tall grass. Ryuji handed Asakawa a sickle and pointed with his chin to the slope on the left side of B-4. He wanted him to cut away the tangles of grass and examine the contours of the ground there. Asakawa bent down, dropped his knee, and began to swing the sickle in an arc parallel to the ground. Grass began to fall.

Thirty years before, a dilapidated house had stood here, with a well in its front yard. Asakawa stood up again. He looked around again, wondering where he’d build his dwelling if he were to live here. He’d probably choose a site with a nice view. There was no other reason to build a house up here. Where was the best view? Eyes trained on the greenhouse roofs shining far below, Asakawa walked around a bit, paying attention to the shifting perspective. The view didn’t seem to change much no matter where he went. But he thought that if he were building a house, it would be easier to build it where cabin A-4 stood than where B-4 was. When he bent down to the ground and looked he realized that was the only level area. He crawled around in the space between A-4 and B-4, cutting the grass and feeling the earth with his hands.

He had no memory of ever drawing water from a well. He realized that he’d never even seen a real well. He had no idea what one really looked like, especially one in a mountainous area such as this. Was there really groundwater here? But then, a few hundred meters east along the floor of the valley there was a patch of marsh, surrounded by tall trees. Asakawa’s thoughts weren’t coming together. What was he supposed to concentrate on during a task such as this? No idea. He felt the blood rush to his head. He looked at his watch: almost three o’clock. Seven hours left. Would all this effort get them any closer to meeting the deadline? The thought sent his mind into further disarray. His image of the well was hazy. What would remain to mark the site of an old well? A bunch of stones piled up in a circle? What if they’d collapsed and fallen into the earth? No way. Then they’d never make it in time. He looked at his watch again. Exactly three now. He’d just drunk 500 millilitres of oolong tea on the balcony, but already his throat was dry again. Voices echoed in his head: look for a bulge in the earth, look for rocks. He jabbed the shovel into the exposed dirt. Time and blood assaulted his brain. His nerves were shot, but he didn’t feel fatigued. Why was time flowing so differently now than it had on the balcony, when they were eating lunch? Why had he started to panic so much the minute he’d set to work? Was this the right thing to do, really? Weren’t there a lot of other things they should be doing?

He’d dug a cave once as a child. He must have been in the fourth or fifth grade. He laughed weakly as he recalled the episode.

“What in the world are you doing?” At the sound of Ryuji’s voice, Asakawa’s head jerked up. “What’ve you been up to, crawling around over here. We’ve got to search a wider area.”

Asakawa gaped up at Ryuji. Ryuji had the sun at his back, his face was shadowy. Drops of sweat from his dark face fell to the grass by his feet. What was I up to? A little hole had been dug in the ground right in front of him. Asakawa had dug it.

“You digging a pit or something?”

Ryuji sighed. Asakawa frowned and moved to look at his watch.

“And stop looking at your fucking watch!” Ryuji slapped his hand away. He glared at Asakawa for a little while, then sighed again. He squatted and whispered, calmly, “Maybe you ought to take a break.”

“No time.”

“I’m telling you, you need to get a hold of yourself. Panicking won’t get you anywhere.” Asakawa was crouching, too, and Ryuji poked him lightly in the chest. Asakawa lost his balance and fell over backwards, feet up in the air.

“That’s it, lie down just like that, just like a baby.”

Asakawa squirmed, trying to get to his feet.

“Don’t move! Lie down! Don’t waste your strength.” Ryuji stepped on Asakawa’s chest until he stopped struggling. Asakawa closed his eyes and gave up resisting. The weight of Ryuji’s foot receded into the distance. When he gently opened his eyes again, Ryuji was moving his short, powerful legs, crossing over into the shade of B-4’s balcony. His gait was eloquent. He’d had an inspiration as to where they could find the well, and his sense of desperation had faded.

After Ryuji had left, Asakawa lay still for a while. Flat on his back, spread-eagled, he gazed up into the sky. The sun was bright. How weak his spirit was compared to Ryuji’s. Disgusting. He regulated his breathing and tried to think coolly. He wasn’t confident he could keep himself together as the next seven hours ticked away. He’d just follow Ryuji’s every order. That’d be best. Lose himself, place himself under the sway of someone with an unyielding spirit. Lose yourself! You’ll even be able to escape the terror then. You’re going to be buried in the earth-you’ll become one with nature. As if in answer to his wish, he was suddenly overcome by drowsiness and began to lose consciousness. At the very threshold of sleep, in the midst of a daydream about lifting Yoko high into the air, he remembered once again that episode from his grade school days.

There was a municipal sports ground on the outskirts of the town where he’d grown up. There was a cliff at its edge, and at the foot of the cliff was a swamp with crayfish in it. When he was a schoolboy, Asakawa often went there with his buddies to catch crayfish. On that particular day, the sun shining on the exposed red earth of the cliff next to the swamp was like a challenge. He was tired of sitting there holding his fishing pole anyway, so he went over to where the sun was shining on the cliff and began to dig a hole in its steep face. The dirt was soft clay, and it crumbled away at his feet when he thrust in an old piece of board he’d found. Before long his friends joined him. There’d been three of them, he seemed to recall, or maybe four. Just the perfect number for digging a cave. Any more and they would have been bumping heads, any fewer and it would have been too much work for each of them.

After an hour of digging they’d made a hole just the right size for one of them to crawl into. They kept going. They’d originally been on their way home from school, and soon one of his friends said he had to be getting home. Only Asakawa, whose idea it had been in the first place, kept at it silently. And by the time the sun set the cave had grown large enough for all the boys who were left to squeeze into. Asakawa had hugged his knees; he and his friends giggled at each other. Curled up in the red clay like that, they felt like the Stone Age people at Mikkabi, whose remains they’d just learned about in Social Studies.

However, after a little while the entrance to the hole was blocked by a lady’s face. The setting sun was at her back, so her face was in shadow and they couldn’t make out her expression, but they realized it was a fiftyish housewife from the neighborhood.

“What are you boys doing digging a hole here? It’d be pretty disgusting if you got buried alive in there,” the lady said, peering into the cave. Asakawa and the two other boys exchanged glances. Young though they were, they still noticed something odd about her warning. Not, “Cut it out-that’s dangerous,” but, “Cut it out, because if you got buried alive in there and died it would be disgusting to people in the neighborhood, such as me.” She was cautioning them purely for her own good. Asakawa and his friends began to giggle again. The lady’s face blocked the entrance like a figure in a shadow play.

Ryuji’s face gradually superimposed itself over the lady’s.

“Now you’re a bit too relaxed. Imagine being able to go night-night in a place like this. Hey, you jerk, what are you giggling at?”

Ryuji woke him up. The sun was nearing the western horizon, and darkness was fast approaching. Ryuji’s face and figure against the weakening sunlight were even blacker than before.

“Come over here a minute.” Ryuji pulled Asakawa to his feet and then silently crawled back under the balcony of B-4. Asakawa followed. Under the balcony, one of the boards between the supporting pillars had been peeled partway back. Ryuji stuck his hand in behind the board and pulled it out with all his might. With a loud snap the board broke in half diagonally. The decor inside the cabin was modern, but these boards were so flimsy you could break them by hand. The builders had thoroughly skimped on the parts you couldn’t see. Ryuji poked the flashlight inside and shined it around under the cabin.

He nodded as if to say, come look at this. Asakawa fixed his gaze on the gap in the wall and looked inside. The flashlight beam was trained on a black protrusion over by the west side. As he stared at it he noticed that the sides seemed to have an uneven texture, like a pile of rocks. The top was covered with a concrete lid; blades of grass poked out of cracks in the concrete and between the stones. Asakawa immediately realized what was directly overhead. The living room of the cabin. And directly over the round rim of the well were the television and VCR. A week ago, when he’d watched that video, Sadako Yamamura had been this close, hiding, watching what went on above.

Ryuji pulled off more boards until there was an opening large enough for a man to pass through. They both ducked through the hole in the wall and crawled to the rim of the well. The cabin was built on a gradient, and they’d entered from the downhill end, so the further they went the lower the floorboards got, creating a sense of something pressing down on them. Even though there should be plenty of air in the dark crawl space, Asakawa began to find it hard to breathe. The soil here was clammier than outside. Asakawa knew full well what they must do now. He knew, but he felt no fear yet. He felt claustrophobic just from the floorboards over his head, but maybe he’d have to go down into the bottom of the well, into a place ruled by an even deeper darkness… Not maybe. To pull Sadako out, they’d almost certainly have to descend into the well.

“Give me a hand here,” said Ryuji. He’d grabbed a piece of rebar poking out from a crack in the concrete lid and was trying to pull the lid onto the downhill slope. But the ceiling was too low, and he couldn’t get much leverage. Even someone like Ryuji who could bench 120 kilos was down to half strength if he didn’t have the right footing. Asakawa went around the well until he was uphill from it and lay down on his back. He placed both hands on a support column to brace himself and then pushed against the lid with his feet. There was an ugly sound as concrete scraped against stone. Asakawa and Ryuji began to chant in order to synchronize their efforts. The lid moved. How many years had it been since the well’s face was exposed? Had the well been capped when Villa Log Cabin was built, or when Pacific Land was established, or when the sanatorium closed? They could only guess, based on the strength of the seal between the concrete and the stones, on the almost-human screech as the lid was torn away. Probably more than just six months or a year. But no longer than twenty-five years. In any case, the well had now started to open its mouth. Ryuji stuck the blade of the shovel into the space they’d made so far and pushed.

“Okay, when I give the signal, I want you to lean on the handle.”

Asakawa turned around.

“Ready? One, two, three, push!”

As Asakawa leaned on the makeshift lever, Ryuji pushed on the side of the cap with both hands. With an agonized shriek, the lid fell to the ground.

The lip of the well was faintly damp. Asakawa and Ryuji picked up their flashlights, placed their other hands on the wet rim, and pulled themselves up. Before shining light into the well, they moved their heads and shoulders into the roughly fifty-centimetre gap between the top of the well and the floor above. A putrid smell arose on the cold air. The space inside the well was so dense that they felt if they let go their hands they’d be sucked in. She was here, all right. This woman with extraordinary supernatural power, with tes-ticular feminization syndrome… “Woman” wasn’t even the right word. The biological distinction between male and female depended on the structure of the gonads. No matter how beautifully feminine the body, if those gonads were in the form of testes it was a male. Asakawa didn’t know whether he should consider Sadako Yamamura a man or a woman. Since her parents had named her Sadako, it seemed they had intended to raise her as a woman. This morning, on the boat to Atami, Ryuji had said, Don’t you think a person with both male and female genitals is the ultimate symbol of power and beauty? Come to think of it, Asakawa had once seen something in an art book that had made him doubt his eyes. A perfectly mature female nude was reclining on a slab of stone, with a splendid example of the male genitalia peeking out from between her thighs…

“Can you see anything?” asked Ryuji. The beams of their flashlights showed that water had collected in the bottom of the well, about four or five meters down. But they didn’t know how deep the water was.

“There’s water down there.” Ryuji scuffled around, tying the end of the rope to a post.

“Okay, point your flashlight downward and hold it over the edge. Don’t drop it, whatever you do.”

He’s planning to go down in there. As he realized this, Asakawa’s legs began to shake. What if I have to go down … Now, finally, with the narrow, vertical tunnel staring him in the face, Asakawa’s imagination started to work on him. I can’t do it. Go into that black water and do what? Fish around for bones, that’s what. There’s no way I can do that, I’ll go crazy. As he gratefully watched Ryuji lower himself into the hole, he prayed to God that his turn would never come.

His eyes were accustomed to the dark now, and he could see the moss covering the inner surface of the well. The stones of the wall, in the orange beam of his flashlight, seemed to turn into eyes and noses and mouths, and when he couldn’t tear his gaze away, the patterns of the stones transformed into dead faces, distorted with demonic cries at their moment of death. Innumerable evil spirits undulated like seaweed, hands outstretched toward the exit. He couldn’t drive away the image. A pebble fell into the ghastly shaft, barely a meter across, echoed against the sides of the well, and was swallowed into the gullets of the evil spirits.

Ryuji wormed his body into the space between the top of the well and the floorboards, wrapped the rope around his hands, and slowly let himself down. Soon he was standing on the bottom. His legs were submerged up to his knees. It wasn’t very deep.

“Hey, Asakawa! Go get the bucket. Oh, and the thin rope, too.”

The bucket was where they’d left it, on the balcony. Asakawa crawled out from underneath the cabin. It was dark outside. But it still felt far brighter than under the foundation. What a feeling of release! So much pure air! He looked around at the cabins: only A-l, by the road, emitted any light. He made a point of not looking at his watch. The warm, friendly voices spilling from A-l seemed to constitute a separate world, floating in the distance. They were the sounds of dinnertime. He didn’t have to look at his watch to know what time it must be.

He returned to the lip of the well, where he tied the bucket and shovel to the end of the rope and lowered them down. Ryuji shovelled earth from the bottom of the well into the bucket. From time to time he’d crouch and run his fingers through the mud, searching for something, but he didn’t find anything.

“Haul the bucket up!” he shouted. With his belly braced against the edge of the well, Asakawa pulled up the bucket, then dumped the mud and rocks out on the ground before lowering the empty bucket back down into the well. It seemed that quite a bit of dirt and sand had drifted into the well before it had been sealed. Ryuji dug and dug, but without turning up Sadako’s beautiful limbs.

“Hey, Asakawa.” Ryuji paused in his labours and looked up. Asakawa didn’t reply. “Asakawa! Something wrong up there?”

Asakawa wanted to reply: Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.

“You haven’t said a word this whole time. At least, you know, call out encouragement or something. I’m getting a bit melancholy down here.”

Asakawa said nothing.

“Well, then, how about a song? Something by Hibari Misora, maybe.”

Asakawa still said nothing.

“Hey! Asakawa. Are you still there? I know you didn’t faint on me.”

“I’m… I’m fine,” he managed to mutter.

“You’re a pain in the ass, that’s what you are.” Ryuji spat out the words and jammed the tip of the shovel into the water. How many times had he done this now? The water level was slowly dropping, but still there were no signs of what they were looking for. He could see the bucket climbing more and more slowly. Then, finally, it stopped. Asakawa let it slip out of his hands. He’d had it raised about half the height of the well, and now it plunged back down again. Ryuji managed to avoid a direct hit, but he got splashed from head to toe with muddy water. Along with anger came the realization that Asakawa was at the limit of his strength.

“Sonofabitch! Are you trying to kill me?” Ryuji climbed up the rope. “Your turn.”

My turn! Shocked, Asakawa stood up, banging his head hard on the floorboards in the process. “Wait, Ryuji, it’s okay, I’m alright, I’ve still got some strength left,” Asakawa stammered. Ryuji poked his head out of the well.

“No you haven’t, not an ounce. Your turn.”

“Just, just hold on. Let me catch my second wind.”

“We’d be here ’til dawn.”

Ryuji shined the light in Asakawa’s face. There was a strange look in his eyes. Fear of death had stolen his reason. One look told Ryuji that Asakawa was no longer capable of rational judgment. Between shovelling muddy water into a bucket and hauling that bucket four or five meters straight up, it didn’t take much to see which was the harder job.

“Down you go.” Ryuji pushed Asakawa toward the well.

“No-wait-I-it’s…”

“What?”

“I’m claustrophobic.”

“Don’t be silly.”

Asakawa continued to cringe, unmoving. The water at the bottom of the well trembled slightly.

“I can’t do it. I can’t go down there.”

Ryuji grabbed Asakawa by the collar and slapped him twice. “Snap out of it. ‘I can’t go down there.’ You’ve got death staring you in the face, and you might be able to do something about it, and now you say you can’t do it? Don’t be a worm. It’s not just your own life at stake here, you know. Remember that phone call? You ready to take sweet babykins down into the darkness with you?”

He thought about his wife and daughter. He couldn’t afford to be a coward. He held their lives in his hands. But his body wouldn’t obey him.

“Is this really going to work, though?” But there was no purpose in his voice; he knew it was pointless to even ask the question now. Ryuji relaxed his grip on his collar.

“Shall I tell you a little more about Professor Miura’s theory? There are three conditions that have to be met in order for a malevolent will to remain in the world after death. An enclosed space, water, and a slow death. One, two, three. In other words, if someone dies slowly, in an enclosed space, with water present, then usually that person’s angry spirit will haunt the place. Now, look at this well. It’s a small, enclosed space. There’s water. And remember what the old lady in the video said.”

… How has your health been since then? If you spend all your time playing in the water, monsters are bound to get you.

Playing in the water. That was it. Sadako was down there under that black muddy water playing, even now. An endless, watery, underground game.

“You see, Sadako was still alive when she was dropped into this well. And while she waited for death she coated the very walls with her hatred. All three conditions were met in her case.”

“So?”

“So, according to Professor Miura, it’s easy to exorcise such a curse. We just free her. We take her bones out of this nasty old well, have a nice memorial service, and lay her to rest in the soil of her native place. We bring her up into the wide, bright world.”

A while before, when he’d crawled out from under the cabin to get the bucket, Asakawa had felt an indescribable sense of liberation. Were they supposed to provide Sadako with the same thing? Was that what she wanted?

“So that’s the charm?”

“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t.”

“That’s pretty vague.”

Ryuji grabbed Asakawa’s collar again. “Think! There’s nothing certain in our future! All we can hope for is a vague continuation. But in spite of that, you’re going to keep on living. You can’t give up on life just because it’s vague. It’s a question of possibilities. The charm… There might be a lot of other things Sadako wants. But there’s a good possibility that taking her remains out of here will break the curse of the video.”

Asakawa twisted his face and screamed silently. Enclosed space, water, and slow death, he says. Those three conditions allow the strongest survival of an evil spirit, he says. Where’s the proof that anything that fraud Miura said is true?

“If you understand me, you’ll go down into the well.”

But I don’t understand. How can I understand something like this?

“You don’t have time to dawdle. Your deadline is almost here.” Ryuji’s voice grew gradually kinder. “Don’t think you can overcome death without a fight.”

Asshole! I don’t want to hear your philosophy of life!

But he finally began to climb over the rim of the well.

“Attaboy. You finally think you can do it?”

Asakawa clung to the rope and lowered himself down the inner wall of the well. Ryuji’s face was before his eyes.

“Don’t worry. There’s nothing down there. Your biggest enemy is your imagination.”

When he looked up, the beam of the flashlight hit him full in the face, blinding him. He pressed his back against the wall; his grip on the rope began to loosen. His feet slipped against the stones, and he suddenly dropped about a meter. His hands burned from the friction.

He was dangling just above the surface of the water, but couldn’t make himself go in. He extended one foot, putting it in the water up to his ankle, as if he were testing the temperature of a bath. With the cold touch of the water came gooseflesh, from the tips of his toes to his spine, and he immediately retracted his foot. But his arms were too tired to keep hanging onto the rope. His weight pulled him slowly down, and eventually he couldn’t endure anymore so he planted both feet. Immediately the soft dirt below the water enveloped his feet, submerging them. Asakawa still clung to the rope in front of his eyes. He started to panic. He felt as if a forest of hands were reaching up from the earth to pull him into the mud. The walls were closing in on all sides, leering at him: there’s no escape.

Ryuji! He tried to scream, but he couldn’t find his voice. He couldn’t breathe. Only a faint, dry sound escaped his throat, and he looked upward like a drowning child. He felt something warm trickle down the insides of his thighs.

“Asakawa! Breathe!”

Overcome by the pressure, Asakawa had forgotten to breathe.

“It’s alright. I’m here.” Ryuji’s voice echoed down to him, and Asakawa managed to suck in a lungful of air.

He couldn’t control the pounding of his heart. He couldn’t do what he needed to do down here. He desperately tried to think of something else. Something more pleasant. If this well had been outside, under a sky full of stars, it wouldn’t be this horrible. It was because it was covered by cabin B-4 that it was so hard to take. It cut off the escape route. Even with the concrete lid gone, there were only floorboards and spider webs above. Sadako Yamamura has lived down here for twenty-five years. That’s right, she’s down here. Right under my feet. This is a tomb, that’s what it is. A tomb. He couldn’t think of anything else. Thought itself was closed off to him, as was any kind of escape. Sadako had tragically ended her life down here, and the scenes that had flashed through her mind at her moment of death had remained here, still strong, through the power of her psyche. And they’d matured down here in this cramped hole, breathing like the ebb and flow of the tide, waxing and waning in strength according to some cycle that had at some point coincided in frequency with the television placed directly overhead; and then they’d made their appearance in the world. Sadako was breathing. From out of nowhere, the sound of breathing enclosed him. Sadako Yamamura, Sadako Yamamura. The syllables repeated themselves in his brain, and her terrifyingly beautiful face came to him out of the photographs, shaking her head coquettishly. Sadako Yamamura was here. Asakawa recklessly began to dig through the earth beneath him, searching for her. He thought of her pretty face and her body, trying to maintain that image. That beautiful girl’s bones, covered in my piss. Asakawa moved the shovel, sifting through the mud. Time no longer mattered. He’d taken off his watch before coming down here. Extreme fatigue and stress had deadened his vexation, and he forgot the deadline he was laboring under. It felt like being drunk. He had no sense of time. Only by the frequency with which the bucket came back down the well to him, and by the beating of his heart, did he have any way of measuring time.

Finally, Asakawa grasped a large, round rock with both hands. It was smooth and pleasant to the touch, with two holes in its surface. He lifted it out of the water. He washed the dirt out of its recesses. He picked it up by what must once have been ear holes and found himself face to face with a skull. His imagination clothed it with flesh. Big, clear eyes returned to the deep, hollow sockets, and flesh appeared above the two holes in the middle, forming itself into an elegant nose. Her long hair was wet, and water dripped from her neck and from behind her ears. Sadako Yamamura blinked her melancholy eyes two or three times to shake the water from her eyelashes. Squeezed between Asakawa’s hands, her face looked painfully distorted. But still, her beauty was unclouded. She smiled at Asakawa, then narrowed her eyes as if to focus her vision.

I’ve been wanting to meet you. As he thought this, Asakawa slumped down right where he was. He could hear Ryuji’s voice from far overhead.

Asakawa! Wasn’t your deadline 10:04? Rejoice! It’s 10:10!

Asakawa, can you hear me? You’re still alive, right? The curse is broken. We’re saved. Hey, Asakawa! If you die down there you’ll end up just like her. If you die, just don’t put a curse on me, okay? If you’re going to die, die nice, would you? Hey, Asakawa! If you’re alive, answer me, damnit!

He heard Ryuji, but he didn’t really feel saved. He just curled up as if in a dream, as if in another world, clutching Sadako Yamamura’s skull to his chest.