Spiral

1

Today was Ando’s turn on autopsy duty. In the M.E.’s office, he ran his gaze over the file for his next corpse. As he compared the Polaroids of the scene, his palms started to sweat, and he had to walk over to the sink several times to wash his hands. It was mid-October and it wasn’t warm, but Ando had always been a heavy sweater. He was in the habit of washing his hands several times a day.

He spread the photos out on the table once more. One in particular held his attention. In it, a stocky man sat with his head resting on the edge of a bed, the position he’d been in when he stopped breathing. There were no evident external wounds. The next photo was a close-up of his face. No evidence of blood congestion, no signs of strangulation. In none of the photos could Ando find anything to establish a cause of death. Which was why, even though there was nothing to indicate a crime, the body had been sent to the M.E.’s office for a post-mortem. It looked to be a sudden death, an unnatural one at that, and under the circumstances the body couldn’t legally be cremated until the cause of death was discovered.

The corpse was found with both arms and both legs spread wide. Ando knew the man, knew him well-an old friend from college, whom Ando had never dreamed of having to dissect. Ryuji Takayama, who’d been alive up until a mere twelve hours ago, had been a classmate of Ando’s through six years of medical school.

Most graduates of their program were aspiring clinicians, and when Ando decided to go into forensic medicine, people called him an oddball behind his back. But Takayama had gone even further off track. He’d led his class at med school, but after graduation he’d started over as an undergraduate in the Department of Philosophy. At the time of his death, he’d been a Lecturer in Philosophy, specializing in logic. Lecturer was the position Ando held in his own department. In other words, even granting that the school had let Takayama re-enroll as a junior, his rise in the department had been meteoric. Thirty-two at the time of his death, he’d been two years younger than Ando, who’d spent a couple of years after high school cramming to get into the university of his choice.

Ando’s eyes came to rest on the line where the time of death had been noted: 9:49 the previous evening.

“This time of death is awfully precise,” Ando said, glancing up at the tall police lieutenant who had come to observe the autopsy. As far as Ando knew, Takayama had lived alone in his apartment in East Nakano. A bachelor, living alone, dying suddenly at home-it shouldn’t have been possible to get such a precise fix on the time of death.

“I guess you could say we were lucky,” the lieutenant said nonchalantly, seating himself in a nearby chair.

“Lucky? How?”

The lieutenant glanced at his companion, a young sergeant. “Mai Takano’s here, isn’t she?”

“Yes, sir. I saw her outside in the waiting room.”

“You wanna go get her?”

“Yes, sir.”

“She’s not a relative, but she’s the one who discovered the body. One of Professor Takayama’s pet students-his lover, in fact. If you find anything suspicious about her report, feel free to ask her some questions yourself. Any question, Doc.”

It was policy to turn the body over to the next of kin directly following the autopsy. In Takayama’s case, that would be his mother, or his brother and sister-in-law. They were out in the waiting room, where they’d been joined by Mai Takano.

The woman in question stepped into the office, then stopped and shook her head. Upon noticing her, Ando immediately stood up, bowed, and offered her a chair. “I apologize for putting you through this,” he said.

Mai, dressed in a plain navy dress, had a white handkerchief clutched in her hands. Ando wondered if proximity to death brought out a woman’s beauty. Her body was slender, her arms and legs delicate, and the subdued simplicity of her dress emphasized the paleness of her skin. Her face was a perfect oval in shape, with smooth, balanced features. Ando could see the beautiful curves of her skull without dissecting her. No doubt, beneath her skin, her organs had a healthy hue and her skeletal frame was perfectly regular. He had a sudden urge to touch them.

The lieutenant introduced them, and they exchanged names. Mai went to sit down in the chair Ando had indicated, but she faltered. She had to steady herself on the desk.

“Are you alright?” Ando peered at her, examining her complexion. She suddenly looked ashen under the surface whiteness of her skin. He wondered if she was anemic.

“I’m quite fine, thank you.” She stared at a point on the floor for a while, her handkerchief pressed to her forehead, until the lieutenant brought her a glass of water. She drank it, and it seemed to calm her somewhat. She raised her head and spoke in a voice so soft Ando could hardly make it out.

“Sorry, it’s just that I’m…”

Ando understood immediately. She was having her period; that, plus the emotional stress, was responsible for her anemic state. If that was all, it was nothing to worry about.

“It so happens that the late Mr Takayama and I were buddies back in college.” He told her this partly to set her at ease.

Mai raised her eyes, downcast until now. “You said your name was Dr Ando?”

“Yes.”

She gazed intently at him. Then, with evident pleasure, she narrowed her eyes and bowed slightly as though she were meeting an old friend. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Ando thought he knew how to interpret her expression: she probably felt she could trust his friendship with Takayama to keep him from treating the body callously. But, in truth, his friendship or lack of it with the deceased had no effect on how he wielded his scalpel.

“Excuse me, Ms Takano,” the lieutenant broke in. “Would you mind telling the doctor exactly what you told us about how you discovered the body?” He seemed determined not to let down his guard on this case just because there were no signs of foul play. There was no time to waste in exchanging fond memories of the dear departed.

He’d brought Mai here for the express purpose of having her present her story to Ando. She’d been the first person to see the body, and Ando was the medical examiner in charge of the autopsy. Hopefully between them they could establish the cause of death. That was why they were gathered here today.

In a hushed tone, Mai began to tell Ando more or less the same story she’d told the police the night before.

“I had just gotten out of the bath and was blow-drying my hair when the phone rang. I looked at my watch immediately. I suppose it’s a habit of mine. If I know what time it is when the phone rings, I can usually guess who it is. Professor Takayama rarely called me; usually, I called him. And he hardly ever called after nine o’clock. So, at first, I didn’t think it was him. I picked up the receiver, said ‘Hello,’ and a moment later I heard a scream from the other end of the line. At first I thought it was a prank. I held the phone away from my ear, in surprise, but then the scream faded into a moan, and then it gave out altogether. I felt like I was wrapped in… in a stillness not of this world… I brought the receiver back to my ear and listened for signs of anything, all the while dreading what I might find out. And then, suddenly, like a switch flicking on, Professor Takayama’s face was in my mind. I recognized the scream. It sounded like him. I hung up the phone and then dialed his number, but the line was busy. And so I concluded that it was he who had called, and that something bad had happened to him.”

“So you and Ryuji didn’t have any sort of conversation?” Ando asked.

She shook her head. “No. I just heard that scream.”

Ando scribbled something on a memo pad and urged her to continue. “What happened next?”

“I went to his apartment to see what had happened. It took me about an hour to get there, by train. And when I went in… he was there, by the bed in the room past the kitchen…”

“The front door was unlocked?”

“He’d… given me a key.” She said this with a certain artless bashfulness.

“No, what I mean is-it was locked from the inside, then?”

“Yes, it was.”

“So then, you went in,” Ando prompted her.

“Professor Takayama had his head on the bed, facing up, his arms and legs spread out.” Her voice caught. She shook her head vigorously as if to repel the scene replaying itself before her eyes.

Ando hardly needed her to elaborate. He had the photos before him. They spoke of Ryuji’s lifeless body more eloquently than words could.

Ando used the pictures as a fan to send a breeze over his sweaty brow. “Was there anything different about the room?”

“Nothing that I noticed… Except, the phone was off the hook. I could hear a whining sound coming from it.”

Ando tried to collate the information he’d gleaned from the incident report and Mai’s story to reconstruct the situation. Ryuji had sensed something was wrong with him and had called his lover, Mai Takano. He must have hoped she could help him. But then why hadn’t he called 911? You have a sudden pain in your chest-if you have the time and strength to use the phone, normally your first call would be for an ambulance.

“Who dialed 911?”

“I did.”

“From where?”

“Professor Takayama’s apartment.”

“And he hadn’t done so, correct?” Ando shot a glance at the lieutenant, who nodded. He’d already confirmed that there had been no request for an ambulance from the deceased.

Ando briefly considered the possibility of a suicide. Distraught at his lover’s cruel treatment of him, a man decides to take his own life and swallows poison. He decides to call the woman who’s driven him to it, to accuse and torment her. Instead, all he can manage is a dying scream.

But, according to the report, suicide didn’t seem to be a possibility. There were no signs on the scene of anything that might have contained poison, nor any proof that Mai had taken such an object away from the premises. Besides, one look at the shape she was in dispelled any such suspicions. One had to be quite obtuse to the subtleties of relations between the sexes not to see at a glance how deeply Mai Takano had respected her professor. The moistness that welled up in her eyes now and then was not due to guilt about having driven her lover to take his own life; it came from profound sorrow at the thought of never being able to touch his body again. For Ando, it was like looking in a mirror; he confronted his own grief-stricken face every morning. That kind of devastation couldn’t be faked. Then there was the fact that she’d come down to the M.E.’s office to claim the body after the autopsy. But most important of all, Ando couldn’t imagine a guy as dauntless as Ryuji Takayama killing himself over something like a break-up.

Which left the heart or the head.

Ando had to look for signs of sudden heart failure or cerebral hemorrhaging. Of course, he couldn’t rule out the possibility that an examination of the stomach contents would turn up potassium cyanide. Or signs of food poisoning, or carbon monoxide poisoning, or one of the other unexpected causes that he occasionally came across. But his suspicions had never been far off the mark before. Takayama had sensed something wrong with him all of a sudden, and he’d wanted to hear his girlfriend’s voice one last time. But there hadn’t been enough time to do more than scream before his heart stopped beating. That had to be it more or less.

The technician who was assisting Ando that day poked his head into the office and said, “Doctor, everything’s ready.”

Ando stood and said, to no one in particular, “Well, time to get started.”

One way or another, he’d have the facts once he’d dissected the body. He’d never failed to establish a cause of death before. In no time, he’d figure out what had killed Takayama. The thought that he might not didn’t even cross his mind.

2

The autumn morning sunlight slanted into the hallway leading to the autopsy room. There was something dark and dank about the corridor, nonetheless, and as they walked, their rubber boots made a sickening sound. There were four of them: Ando, the technician, and the two policemen. The rest of the staff-another assistant, the recorder, and the photographer-were already in the autopsy room.

When they opened the door, they could hear the sound of running water. The assistant was standing at the sink next to the dissecting table, washing instruments. The faucet was abnormally large, and water cascaded from it in a thick, white column. The 350-square-foot floor was already covered with water, which was why all eight of them, including the two police witnesses, wore rubber boots. Usually, the water was left running for the duration of the autopsy.

On the dissecting table, Ryuji Takayama awaited them, stark naked, his white belly protruding. He was about five-three, and between the layer of fat around his middle and the muscles on his shoulders and chest, he was built like an oil drum. Ando lifted the body’s right arm. No resistance, other than gravity. Proof that life had indeed left the body. This man had once prided himself on the strength of his arms, and now Ando could move them about as freely as he would a baby’s. Ryuji had been the strongest of any of them in school; nobody was a match for him at arm-wrestling. Anybody who challenged him found his arm slapped flat on the table before he could even flex his biceps. Now, that same arm was powerless. If Ando let go, it’d flop helplessly onto the table.

He turned his gaze to the lower torso, to the exposed genitalia. The penis was shriveled amidst thick black pubic hair, and the glans was almost entirely hidden by the foreskin. The member was incredibly small, almost cute, given the robustness of the body. Ando found himself wondering if Ryuji and Mai had been able to have normal sexual relations at all.

He took up the scalpel and inserted it below the jaw, slicing the thick muscle in a straight line all the way down to the abdomen. The body had been dead for twelve hours and was completely cold. He broke the ribs with bone-cutters, removing them one by one, and then took out both lungs and handed them to his assistant. In med school Ryuji had been a diehard anti-smoker, and from the look of his lungs, he’d remained one to the end. They were a handsome shade of pink. With practiced movements, the assistant weighed and measured the lungs, announcing his findings to the recorder, who wrote them down. All the while, the room was bathed in flashes of light as photos were taken of the lungs from every angle. Everybody knew his job well, and everything went forward without a hitch.

The heart was enveloped in a thin fatty membrane. Depending on the light it looked either whitish or yellowish, and it was a bit larger than average. Eleven ounces. The weight of Ryuji’s heart. Point thirty-six percent of his total body weight. Just looking at the outer surface of the organ, which a mere twelve hours ago had still been pumping life-blood, Ando could tell it had suffered severe necrosis. The left part of the heart, below the fatty membrane, had turned a dark reddish-brown color, darker than the rest of the heart. Part of the coronary artery, branching off the surface of the organ to coil around it, was blocked, probably by a thrombosis. Blood had been unable to flow past that point, and the heart had stopped. Classic indicators of a heart attack.

Based on the extent of the necrosis, Ando had a pretty good idea where the blockage had occurred: in the left coronary artery, just before it branched off. With a blockage there the chance of death was extremely high. The cause of death, then, had pretty well been established, though he’d have to wait for test results, which wouldn’t come in for a day at least, to know what had caused the blockage. Ando pronounced with confidence a case of “myocardial infarction due to blockage of the left coronary artery” and moved on to extracting the liver. After that, he checked for abnormalities in the kidneys, spleen, and intestines, and examined the stomach contents, but nothing caught his eye.

He was about to cut the skull open when his assistant craned his neck suspiciously.

“Doctor, take a look at that throat.”

The assistant pointed to a spot inside the throat where it had been split open. Part of the mucus membrane on the surface of the pharynx had ulcerated. The ulcer wasn’t large, and Ando might have overlooked it had it not been for his assistant’s alertness. Ando had never seen anything like it before. It was probably unrelated to the cause of death, but he cut out a piece of it anyway. He’d have to wait until they ran tests on the tissue sample before he could tell just what it was.

Now, he made incisions in the skin around Ryuji’s head, and peeled back the scalp from the back to the forehead. The man’s wiry hair now covered his face, his eyes, nose, and mouth, and the white inner surface of the scalp was exposed to the overhead light. Anyone who saw it could tell that the human face was constructed out of a single slab of flesh. Ando removed the top of the skull and lifted out the brain.

It was a whitish mass covered with innumerable wrinkles. Even among the elite students who were assembled at their medical school, Ryuji had stood out for his brains. He was good at English, German, and French, and he’d ask questions in class that you couldn’t follow if you weren’t reading the latest foreign bulletins. That managed to intimidate even the lecturers. But the deeper he’d gotten into medicine, the more Ryuji’s interests had shifted toward the pure realm of mathematics. For a while, everyone in their class had been hooked on code games. They’d each take their turn devising a code, and the others competed to see who could break it first. Invariably, it was Ryuji. When it was Ando’s turn and he came up with a code he was sure couldn’t be cracked, Ryuji figured it out with ease. At the time, Ando had been less exasperated by Ryuji’s mathematical genius than chilled by the feeling that his mind had been read. He simply couldn’t believe that his code had been broken. Nobody else was able to solve it. But, in turn, Ando was the only one who ever broke one of Ryuji’s codes. Although he could claim that one triumph, nobody knew better than Ando himself that it had come through sheer luck, not through any logical acumen. He’d gotten tired of wrestling with the code and gazed out the window, where his eyes happened to settle on a sign for a flower shop. The phone number on the sign gave him an idea, and he stumbled on the key to the sequence of characters. It was pure chance that his thoughts had traveled in the same direction as Ryuji’s. Ando was convinced to this day that his moment of triumph had just been a fluke.

Back in those days, Ando had felt something akin to envy toward Ryuji. Several times he’d felt his self-confidence crumble under the burden of knowing that he’d never dominate Ryuji, that he’d always be under Ryuji’s sway.

And now Ando was staring at that brain that had been so remarkable. It was only slightly heavier than average, and looked no different from any normal person’s brain. What had Ryuji been using these cells to think about when he was alive? Ando could imagine the process that had led Ryuji deeper and deeper into pure mathematics until eventually he’d abandoned numbers altogether and arrived at logic. If he’d lived another ten years, he’d surely have contributed something major to the field. Ando admired, and hated, Ryuji’s rare gifts. His brain’s cerebral fissure looked deep, and the frontal lobe loomed like an unconquerable ridge.

But it was all over now. These cells had ceased functioning. The heart had stopped due to a myocardial infarction, and the brain had died, too. In effect, physically at least, Ryuji was now under Ando’s dominion.

He checked to rule out cerebral hemorrhaging, and then replaced the brain in the skull.

Fifty minutes had elapsed since he had taken his scalpel. Autopsies usually took around an hour. Ando had basically finished the examination, when he paused, as if he’d remembered something. He reached a hand into Ryuji’s now-hollow abdominal area and felt around with his fingertips until he pulled out two round objects the size of a quail’s eggs. The pair of testicles, a grayish flesh-color, looked curiously adorable.

Ando asked himself who was more to be pitied, Ryuji, who’d died without issue, or himself, who’d accidentally let his son die at the age of three years and four months.

Me, of course.

He thought so without hesitation. Ryuji had died in ignorance. To the end, he’d never been tormented by the kind of sorrow that bored into your chest. There were no limits to the joy of having a child. But the sorrow of losing that child just never went away-would never go away, Ando felt, even if he lived another thousand years. His heart full, Ando dropped the testicles onto the dissecting table. They were dead now, without having created anything.

All that was left was to sew the body back up. Ando stuffed the empty chest and abdominal cavity full of rolled-up newsprint, to give it volume, and began stitching. He stitched up the head, too, then washed the body clean and wrapped it in a bathrobe. Stripped of its internal organs, the body looked skinnier.

You’ve lost weight, Ryuji.

Ando couldn’t figure out why he’d addressed the corpse in his head like that. Usually he didn’t. Was there something about Ryuji’s cadaver that made him want to talk to it? Or was it simply because he’d known the guy? Of course, the conversation was one-way-Ryuji didn’t answer. But when the two assistants picked up the body to put it in the casket, Ando thought he could hear Ryuji’s voice from somewhere deep inside his own chest. He got a ticklish feeling around his navel. He scratched himself, but the feeling didn’t go away. Before long it was as if the itch had left his body and was hovering in the air.

Disconcerted, Ando stood next to the coffin and stroked Ryuji’s body from the chest to the belly. He felt something sticking out near the abdomen, and he opened the bathrobe. Looking closely, he saw that the edge of a piece of newspaper was sticking out through the stitches just above the navel. Ando thought he’d sewn up the incision carefully, but somehow there it was, just a corner. The newspaper they’d packed the cavity with must have shifted when they moved the body, and the corner had found its way into an opening. It was lightly blood-stained and had bits of fat clinging to it. Ando wiped away the white membrane until he could see numbers printed on the paper. They were small, hard to read. His face drew closer to them. He read the numbers, six digits arranged in two rows of three:

178

136

He couldn’t tell if this was part of the stock market report, or maybe two telephone numbers that had happened to be in alignment, or perhaps program codes on the television schedule. In any case, what were the chances of the corner of a randomly folded newspaper containing nothing but six digits? For no reason he could think of, Ando etched the numbers into his brain.

178, 136.

Then he poked the newspaper back into the belly and gave it a couple of taps with his latex-gloved fingers. After making sure the paper didn’t pop out again, he closed Takayama’s bathrobe and once again ran his hand down the body’s chest. There was nothing anomalous to interrupt the roundness of the torso. Ando took a couple of steps back from the coffin.

Suddenly, inexplicably, he shuddered. He raised his hands to peel off his gloves and found that the hair on his arms stood on end. He leaned on a stepladder standing nearby and stared at Ryuji’s face. The eyelashes trembled as if the eyes, now peacefully shut, would open any minute. The splashing of the water was suddenly very loud. Everybody else in the room was busy with his own tasks, and Ando seemed to be the only one aware of the intense aura rising from the body. Is this guy really dead?… Bah! What an idiotic question. The swatches of newspaper, which occupied the cavity where the guts used to be, shifted, causing the abdomen to rise and fall gently. Ando marveled at how the assistants and the cops could be so detached.

Ando felt the urge to urinate. He imagined the dead Ryuji walking around, complete with the rustle of crumpled sheets of newspaper, and the need to evacuate his bladder became almost unbearable.

3

Having finished the morning’s autopsies, Ando headed toward Otsuka Station on the JR Line to get some lunch. Walking along, he stopped over and over to look behind him. He didn’t know what caused his anguish, or what it meant. It wasn’t that his son was on his mind. And he’d probably performed over a thousand autopsies. So why did this one in particular bother him so? He always performed his work meticulously. He couldn’t remember ever seeing newspaper sticking out from between his sutures. It was a mistake, though a minor one to be sure. But was that what was bothering him? No, that wasn’t it.

He entered the first Chinese restaurant he passed and ordered the lunch special. The place was far emptier than it usually was at five minutes past noon. The only customer aside from Ando was an older man sitting near the register slurping noodles. He wore a leather alpine hat and shot Ando an occasional glance. It bothered Ando. Why doesn’t he take off his hat? Why does he keep looking at me? Ando was looking for significance in the tiniest thing; his nerves, he realized, were on edge.

His mind was like a sheet of photosensitive paper, and on it were imprinted the digits from the newspaper. They flickered against his eyelids, and he couldn’t brush them away. They were like a melody stuck in his head.

Something made him glance at the pay phone that sat behind the alpine-hat man. Maybe he should try dialing the numbers. But only small towns had six-digit phone numbers-there certainly weren’t any in Tokyo. He knew full well that even if he dialed the number, there’d be no connection. But what if someone picked up anyway?

Hey, Ando, that was a hell of a thing to do to a guy. Pulling out my balls-oh, man!

If Ryuji’s voice came on the line to cajole…

“Here you are, sir.” A voice spoke in a monotone, and the lunch set was placed on the table before him: soup, a bowl of rice, and stir-fry. Among the vegetables in the stir-fry there lurked two hard-boiled quail eggs. They were the same size as Ryuji’s testicles.

Ando gulped once, and then drained his glass of lukewarm water. He didn’t categorically deny supernatural phenomena; still, he felt stupid for being so obsessed with the numbers. But obsessed he was. 178,136. Did they mean something? After all, Ryuji had been into codes.

A code.

In between sips of his soup, Ando spread a napkin out on the table, took a ballpoint pen from his pocket, and wrote down the numbers.

178, 136

He tried assigning each letter of the alphabet a number from 0 to 25, so that A equaled 0, B equaled 1, C equaled 2, and so on. This would make it a simple substitution cipher, the most basic kind of code. He decided first to treat each number as a one-digit numeral, substituting the corresponding letter of the alphabet for each.

BHI, BDG

Put it all together: “bhibdg”. Ando didn’t have to go to a dictionary to see that there was no such word in any language. The next step was to break down the numerals into combinations of one- and two-digit numbers. Since there were only twenty-six letters in the alphabet, in terms of a simple substitution cipher this meant that he could, for the time being, rule out numbers larger than twenty-six, such as 78 or 81. He began writing down the possible combinations on the napkin.

Only one of the combinations produced an actual word: R-I-N-G.

Ring.

Ando thought it over, recalling what he knew about the English word. He was most familiar with its use as a noun to mean “circle”. But he also knew that it described the sound a bell or a telephone makes; it could be a verb meaning “to cause a bell or a telephone to sound”, and by extension, could mean calling someone on the phone or summoning someone by means of a bell.

Was it nothing more than a coincidence? A piece of newspaper sticking out of Ryuji’s stomach, six digits on that scrap of newspaper-and Ando had played with them until he came up with the word “ring”. Was this all pure chance?

Somewhere in the distance he heard an alarm. He remembered the fire bell he’d heard once as a child in the small town he’d grown up in. Both his parents worked overtime and never came back until late, so he was home alone with his grandmother. They covered their ears when the clamor of the bell broke the night’s silence. Ando could remember curling up on his grandmother’s knees, trembling. Their town had an old fire-watch tower, and the bell meant that fire had broken out somewhere. But he didn’t know that. All he knew was that the sound carried with it an air of terrible dread. It seemed like a harbinger of tragedy to come. And in fact, a year later on the exact same day, his father died unexpectedly.

Ando found that he’d lost his appetite. In fact, he felt nauseated. He pushed aside the food, which had only just arrived, and asked for another glass of water.

Hey, Ryuji, are you trying to tell me something?

When they’d signed over to the family the coffin containing his body, all hollowed out like a tin toy, Ryuji had seemed to relax his white, square-jawed visage a tiny bit, giving the impression, almost, of a smile. Only an hour ago, Mai had seen that face and bowed, to no one in particular. They’d probably hold the wake tonight, and then cremate the body tomorrow. This very moment, the hearse was probably well on its way to the family’s house in Sagami Ohno. Ando wished he could watch Ryuji’s body turn to ash. He had the strange feeling that his old classmate was still alive.

4

They were to meet at the benches near the library. Ando finished auditing a lecture at the law school on the main campus, checked his watch, and then headed for the appointed spot.

Only the day before, Mai Takano had placed a call to the M.E.’s office. Ando happened to be there-it was his turn on autopsy duty again-and when he heard her voice on the phone, he instantly recalled her face. It wasn’t all that unusual to get calls from relatives or friends of people he’d worked on, but usually they were calling to ask about the cause of death. Mai had a different reason for calling. She said that on the evening of the day of the autopsy, she’d slipped out of the wake early and gone to Ryuji’s apartment. She’d needed to set in order an unpublished manuscript he’d been working on. In the process, she’d discovered something that bothered her. She hinted, subtly, that it might have something to do with Ryuji’s death.

Of course, Ando was interested in anything of value she might be able to tell him, but he was also eager to be in the presence of her pristine beauty again. He’d told her he had to attend a lecture on the main campus, but after that he could make time for her. She could tell him all about it then.

He’d told her when the lecture was scheduled to end, and then she’d suggested the place.

The benches in front of the library, under the cherry trees.

He’d spent two years on the main campus getting his general education requirements out of the way, but he and his friends had never used these benches as a rendezvous point. His future wife, who’d been a liberal arts major at this university, had preferred to meet under the gingko trees.

Before he even got close to the benches he recognized the woman sitting there as Mai. Her one-piece today was a primary color, making her look younger than she had at the M.E.’s office ten days ago. He circled around in front of her to get a look at her face, but she was immersed in a paperback and didn’t look up.

He accosted her, with intentionally loud footsteps, and she raised her head.

“Ms Takano?”

She started to stand up, saying, “Thank you for… the other day.” She plainly couldn’t figure out quite how to greet a man who had just dissected her lover.

Ando was holding a briefcase. His hands looked nimble and his fingers long and thin enough to proclaim what he did for a living.

“May I sit down?”

Without waiting for her reply, he sat down next to her and crossed his legs.

“Have the test results come back yet?” she asked in an inflectionless voice.

Ando glanced at his watch. “How are you for time? If it’s okay with you, why don’t we go have a cup of tea? There are a couple of things I’d like to ask you.”

Without a word, Mai stood up and tugged at the hem of her dress.

They went to a cafe of her choosing. For a student hangout, it was surprisingly quiet-it felt more like a hotel lounge. They sat at a table next to the window, where they could look out onto the street, and the waitress brought them water and hot towels.

Mai didn’t hesitate before ordering. “I’ll have a fruit parfait.”

Surprised, and unable to settle on anything, Ando could only say, “Coffee for me.” Ten days ago, he’d gotten an impression of meekness from her. That was beginning to change.

“I love fruit,” she shrugged after the waitress left. For a moment, Ando thought she’d said I love you, and then kicked himself for indulging in such a ridiculous fantasy. A man of your age!

It was truly a gorgeous fruit parfait, nestled on wafers and topped with a cherry. From the way she tore into it, it was clear that Mai was partial to this shop’s confections. She had the same kind of intent look that Takanori used to wear when he was eating something he loved. It just about broke Ando’s heart. He didn’t even sip his coffee, but simply marveled at the utter concentration with which she wielded her spoon. Even if he could have convinced his wife to come to a place like this, she wouldn’t have ordered a fruit parfait. She would have stuck to lemon tea, no sugar please, or something like that: she was always on a diet, and never let anything sweet pass her lips. But Mai, at least with her clothes on, looked thinner than his wife had been back in her better days. To be sure, his wife had gotten so thin by the time they’d separated that Ando had often had to avert his eyes; when he thought of her now, however, he always pictured her face as round and soft as it had been when they got married.

Mai took the cherry into her mouth, and then demurely spat the seed out onto an oval-shaped glass dish before wiping her lips with her napkin. He’d never met a woman so fun just to watch. She munched away on the wafers, spilling crumbs on the tabletop, and then gazed longingly at the cream that clung to the bottom of the dish. No doubt she was wondering if she could lick it up.

When she’d finally finished eating, she asked Ando what sort of tests had been performed on Ryuji’s organs after the autopsy. It felt incredibly strange to be talking about the treatment of cutout organs to a young woman whom he’d just watched eat a fruit parfait. But here goes.

Not long ago, he’d gotten burned trying to explain similar tests to a bereaved family member. There’d been a lapse in communication: the other person hadn’t really understood what was meant by a tissue sample. The family member was imagining his loved one’s organs in jars, pickled in formaldehyde, and Ando and he had wasted a lot of time in meaningless back-and-forth. Tissue samples were as mundane to Ando as ballpoint pens were to an office worker, but he had realized then that most people had no idea what they looked like, how big they were, how they were obtained, etc., unless it was spelled out to them. So he decided to start by telling her about tissue samples.

“It’s almost all lab work, you see. First, we cut out a small piece of the heart in the area where the infarction took place and preserve it in formaldehyde. From it we slice a smaller portion in the shape of a Sashimi and embed that in paraffin. You know, wax. Then we slice from that a microscope specimen, take the wax off, and stain it. Then we have a tissue sample, which we send off to the lab for analysis. After that, it’s just a matter of waiting for the results.”

“So I should imagine a thin slice of the organ squeezed between two glass plates?”

“That’s about right.”

“And that makes it easier to examine?”

“Of course. We stain it so its cellular structure can be examined with a microscope.”

“Did you have a look?”

A look? At what? Ryuji’s cells, of course. Regardless, Ando thought Mai’s question had an odd nuance.

“I gave it a quick peek before sending it off to the lab, yes.”

“How was it?” She was leaning forward now.

“There was a blockage in his left coronary artery, just prior to the left circumflex branch. The blood couldn’t get past it, and Ryuji’s heart stopped. As I think I explained, we took circular sections of the tissue in question and examined them under a microscope. I was surprised by what I found. You see, usually, when there’s a heart attack, what’s happened is that the arteries have hardened: cholesterol or other lipids have built up, narrowing the passageway, until one of these atheromas breaks off, clogging the artery. But in Ryuji’s case, while there was blockage, it wasn’t due to hardening of the arteries. That much was clear.”

“So what was it?” Mai’s question was short and to the point.

Ando’s answer was just as concise. “A sarcoma.”

“A sarcoma?”

“That’s right. We haven’t determined yet if the cells belong to a specific tissue or if it’s an undifferentiated tumor, but at the very least, we’ve never seen it before in the tunica intima or tunica media. Simply put, he developed a strange lump that blocked his blood flow.”

“So these were like cancer cells?”

“It’s probably safe to think of it in those terms. But normally, sarcomas don’t occur inside blood vessels. It’s impossible.”

“But when the test results come back, you’ll know what caused the sarcoma, right?”

Ando shook his head, laughing. “Unless there are other symptoms, we probably won’t. I’m sure I don’t even have to mention AIDS as an example

Even in today’s world, in which science, seemingly, is omnipotent, there are still a whole host of illnesses whose causes are unknown. There was no way to tell whether the symptom in question would prove to be part of a larger, identifiable syndrome or not.

Ando continued. “There is one more possibility. Ryuji might have had a congenital defect in his coronary artery.”

A layperson could figure out what that meant. If Ryuji had been born with that lump in his artery, it would have seriously impaired his ability to live an active life.

“But Professor Takayama…”

“I know. He was a track star in high school. His event was the shot-put, I believe.”

“Yes.”

“So it’s hard to imagine it had been there since birth. Which is why I want to ask you if Ryuji ever complained about pains in his chest, that sort of thing.”

Ando’s relationship with Ryuji had basically ended upon graduation. They said “hi” if they passed each other in the hall at the university, but that was about it. Ando certainly wouldn’t have noticed any change in Ryuji’s physical condition.

“We were together for less than two years.”

“That’s fine. Did he ever mention anything to you during that period?”

“He was tougher than other people. I can’t even remember him catching a cold. He wasn’t the type to whine, though, so even if he had a problem he might not have mentioned it. I certainly never noticed anything.”

“Nothing? Nothing at all?”

“Well… that’s just it, you see.”

Ando remembered suddenly that he hadn’t called Mai here to give her a report on the autopsy. She had summoned him, to tell him about something that had happened when she’d been going over Ryuji’s papers the night of the wake.

“Right. Well, let’s hear it.”

“I’m not sure if it has any connection with the professor’s death, though.” Mai was maddeningly cute as she dithered. Ando fixed her with an intense gaze, trying to urge her onward.

“Please tell me.”

“Well, ten nights ago, I slipped out of the wake early. I went to the professor’s apartment to put in order an unpublished article of his. While I was doing that, the phone rang. I didn’t know what to do, but in the end I picked up the receiver. It was ‘Asakawa’, a friend of the professor’s from high school.”

“Do you know this person?”

“We’d met once. We ran into each other at the professor’s apartment four or five days before he died.”

“A man?”

“Of course.”

“Right. And?”

“He didn’t seem to know that the professor had died. So I told him, briefly, about what had happened the night before. Mr Asakawa seemed really shocked. He said he’d be right over.”

“Meaning…”

“To Professor Takayama’s apartment.”

“Did he show up?”

“Yes, much sooner than I’d expected. He came in and glanced all around the apartment as if he were searching for something. And he asked me over and over if I had noticed anything. He looked like a man driven into a corner. He kept asking me if I’d noticed anything strange about the place immediately after the professor’s death. But what really struck me as odd was what he said next.”

She paused and sipped some water.

“So… what did he say?”

“I remember it exactly. He said: ‘He didn’t tell you anything there at the end? No last words? Nothing, say, about a videotape?’”

“A videotape?”

“Yes. Strange, isn’t it?”

What an unexpected, inappropriate thing to bring into a discussion about Ryuji’s sudden death the night before. Why bring up such a matter?

“Well, had you heard anything about a videotape from Ryuji?”

“No. Nothing.”

“A videotape, huh?” Ando muttered, leaning back in his chair. He sensed a shadow over the image of this Asakawa who’d visited Ryuji’s apartment the night of the autopsy.

“In any case, I was wondering-I’m not an expert, but is it possible that whatever was recorded on this videotape was so shocking it gave him a heart attack?”

“Hmm.”

Ando thought he understood what had been troubling Mai. She would have been too embarrassed even to bring the matter up until she’d ascertained the cause of death. It reminded him of a thriller he’d seen on TV two or three days ago. A woman is having an affair with one of her husband’s subordinates, but she’s been ensnared. Somebody has videotaped the two of them going at it at a love hotel, catching everything, and the tape is mailed to her with an extortion letter. At home, she puts the tape into the VCR and glares at the screen. Snow, and then an image cut its way in. The naked body of a woman pressed up against a young man’s. Panting. The instant she realizes that it’s her on the screen, she faints. It was such a common and vulgar scene that Ando had felt like a fool watching the drama.

No doubt it was possible to use a videotape to provide simultaneous visual and aural stimulation and shock somebody’s system. If the wrong kind of conditions were met, the possibility of it resulting in death couldn’t be ruled out. But Ando had examined Ryuji’s body in detail. He’d even taken slices of his coronary artery and made tissue samples.

“No, that’s out of the question. He definitely had a blockage in his left coronary artery. Besides, you know Ryuji. Can you really imagine him dying from shock just from watching a videotape?” He laughed as he said that.

“No, of course not…” Mai allowed herself to be coaxed into a weak laugh. Their impressions of Ryuji jibed, then. He’d been a man of almost disgusting daring, real steel in his spine. It would have taken something extraordinary to get to him, body or soul.

“Do you happen to know how I might contact this Asakawa person?”

“I’m sorry…” Mai started to say she didn’t, but then she brought a hand to her mouth. “No, wait, I think I remember the professor introducing him as Kazuyuki Asakawa from the Daily News.”

“Kazuyuki Asakawa from the Daily News.” Ando made a note in his planner. If he called the newspaper, he shouldn’t have much trouble finding the man’s contact info. He might need to talk to the man yet.

Mai seemed to have caught a glimpse of what he’d written in his planner. She brought her hand to her chin and said, “Huh.”

“What?” Ando looked up at her.

“So that’s how you’d write Kazuyuki.”

Ando looked back down at the page.

It took him a minute to get what she meant. There were several different combinations of characters that could be used to spell the surname “Asakawa”. The same was true for the given name “Kazuyuki”. Normally, he would have had to ask which characters were used, or just written the name down phonetically. But instead, he’d written the ideograms without hesitation, as if the name were one he’d known all along.

Mai’s eyes opened wide as she asked, “How did you know it’s written that way?”

Ando couldn’t answer. Was this some sort of premonition? He felt he’d be coming into close contact with the man fairly soon.

5

For the first time in nearly a year and a half, Ando had allowed himself some sake with his dinner. This was the first time since the death of his son that he’d even wanted alcohol. He had liked to drink. It wasn’t that he’d given it up out of a sense of guilt for the boy’s death. Alcohol tended to amplify whatever mood he was in to begin with. If he was in a good mood, it made him jubilant; if he felt sad, it just made him sadder. For the last year and a half he’d been shrouded in grief, and so naturally he’d been unable to drink. He had the feeling that if he took one swallow he wouldn’t be able to stop until he was falling-down drunk. He was afraid he’d be unable to control an impulse to die should it arise. He didn’t have the courage to go there.

It was raining, rare for late October. It was a misty rain, wafting underneath his umbrella like smoke, wetting his neck. He didn’t feel cold. A faint glow from the sake warmed his body. As he walked back to his apartment, he kept sticking his hand out from beneath the umbrella to see if he could catch raindrops on his palm, but it didn’t work. The rain seemed to be coming not down from the sky, but up from below.

On his way down the road from the station, he wavered in front of a convenience store, thinking to buy a bottle of whiskey. Brightly lit skyscrapers towered over him. The cityscape was more beautiful than any natural landscape. The government edifices, all lit up, glowed cannily in the rain. He stared at the flashing red light at the very top of a building until it began to seem like a message in Morse code. It flashed on and off, slowly, like some thickheaded, barely articulate monster.

Ever since he’d separated from his wife he’d been living in a dilapidated four-story apartment building facing Yoyogi Park. It was definitely a step down from the South Aoyama condo he’d lived in before. There was no parking, so he’d had to give up his brand-new BMW. In his miserable little studio apartment he felt like he was a student again. There was nothing in the place to suggest that he cared about how he lived. The only furniture was a bookcase and an aluminum bed.

He went inside and walked over to the window to open it. The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

He recognized the speaker immediately. There was only one person who’d start a conversation with him like that, without bothering to identify himself: Miyashita, another classmate from his med school days. Miyashita was currently an Assistant Researcher in Pathology.

“Sorry not to call earlier.” Ando knew why Miyashita had called, so he apologized before he could be reproached.

“I was at your lab today.”

“I was at the M.E.’s office.”

“Must be nice having two paying jobs.”

“What are you talking about? Your job’s tenure track.”

“Never mind that. You haven’t RSVP’d about Funakoshi’s farewell party.”

Funakoshi, over at Internal Medicine, was leaving to take over his father’s clinic back home, the old man was retiring. Miyashita had taken it upon himself to organize a send-off for him. He’d already told Ando the time and place, and Ando was supposed to get back to him right away to tell him whether or not he’d be attending. He had gotten wrapped up in other things and forgotten. If his son hadn’t died, Ando would probably have been the one getting the big send-off. His stint in forensics was only supposed to be temporary, a stepping-stone. He’d planned to get the basics down pat, then switch to clinical work in preparation for taking over his wife’s father’s clinic… One moment of carelessness, and the whole blueprint had been ruined.

“When is it again?” Ando wedged the receiver in between his ear and his shoulder as he flipped through the pages of his planner.

“Next Friday.”

“Friday, huh?” He didn’t need to check his schedule. Only three hours ago, as he and Mai had parted, they’d made a dinner date for that evening. Six o’clock next Friday. It was clear which commitment should take priority. For the first time in ten years, he’d asked a young woman out to dinner, and somehow, she hadn’t bolted. There was no way he was going to send things back to square one. Ando felt the date could be the moment of truth as to whether or not he was ever going to wake up from his long nightmare.

“So how about it?” Miyashita nagged.

“Sorry, but I can’t make it. Prior engagement.”

“Really? You sure this isn’t the same old thing?”

The same old thing? Ando didn’t know what that meant. He couldn’t remember if he used any excuse habitually to turn down his friend’s invitations.

“What same old thing?”

“Your not being able to drink. When I know for a fact you used to drink like a fish.”

“It’s not that.”

“Look, if you don’t want to drink, you don’t have to. Fake it with oolong tea or something. But you’ve got to be there.”

“I said it’s not that.”

“So you can drink?”

“Sort of.”

“Wait-is it some girl you’re after?”

Miyashita’s intuition was sharper than one would have guessed from his rotund physique. Ando always tried to play things as straight as he could with Miyashita, but he wasn’t sure he could say he was “after” a woman he’d only met twice. He didn’t know how to respond, so he said nothing.

“She must be something if she made you forget Funakoshi’s send-off.”

Ando still had nothing to say.

“Well, I’m happy for you. Don’t worry-hey, why don’t you bring her along? We’d welcome her, you know? With open arms.”

“We’re not at that stage yet.”

“You’re taking things slowly?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“Hey, I won’t twist your arm.”

“Sorry.”

“Do you know how many times you’ve apologized during this conversation? I get the picture. I’ll put you down for a no-show. To make up for it, I’m going to spread the word that you’ve got a girl, so brace yourself.”

Miyashita laughed, and Ando knew he wouldn’t be able to get mad at the guy. The only comfort Ando had been afforded during the gut-wrenching da’ s after his son died and his wife left him had come from a present Miyashita had given him. Miyashita hadn’t told him to “cheer up” or anything meaningless of that sort; instead he’d given Ando a novel, saying, “Read this.” It was the first Ando had heard of his friend’s interest in literature; he also discovered for the first time that books could genuinely give strength. The novel was sort of a Bildungsroman, the story of an emotionally and physically scarred youth who learns to overcome his past. The book still occupied an honored place on Ando’s bookshelf.

“By the way,” said Ando, changing the subject, “did you learn anything from Ryuji’s tissue sample?”

It was Miyashita’s Pathology Department that usually handled any diseased samples that needed to be analyzed.

“Oh, that.” Miyashita sighed.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know quite what to tell you. I’m at my wits’ end with that. What do you think of Professor Seki?”

Seki was the doctor in charge of the pathology lab. He was famous for his research on the initial formation of cancer cells.

“What do I think of him? Why?”

“The old man says some funny things sometimes.”

“What did he say?”

“It’s not the arterial blockage that he’s focusing on. You remember the throat was ulcerated?”

“Of course.”

It wasn’t very noticeable, but he definitely remembered it. He’d overlooked it until his assistant had drawn his attention to it. After the autopsy, he’d cut the affected portion out complete.

“He took one look at it with his naked eye, and what do you think the old man said it looked like?”

“Knock it off and just tell me.”

“Alright, alright, I’ll tell you: he said it looked like what you see on smallpox victims.”

“Smallpox?” Ando yelped in spite of himself.

Smallpox had been stamped out through a concerted global vaccination effort. Since a case in Somalia in 1977, not a single patient had been reported worldwide. In 1979, the WHO had declared the disease eradicated. Smallpox only infects humans. No new victims meant that the virus itself had effectively ceased to exist. The last specimens were being kept frozen in liquid nitrogen in Moscow and in a lab in Atlanta, Georgia. If a new case had appeared, it could only have come from one of the two research facilities, but, given the tight security the virus was under, it was unthinkable.

“Surprised?”

“It has to be a mistake.”

“Probably is. Still, that’s what the old guy said. Respect his opinion.”

“When will you have the results?”

“In about a week. Listen, if we actually do turn up the smallpox virus, it’ll be huge for you.”

Miyashita sounded bemused; he didn’t believe it himself. He was sure it was an error of some sort. It was only natural, since medical professionals their age had never even had the chance to see a real smallpox patient. The only way for them to learn about the illness was through specialist works on viruses. Ando had seen a picture once, in a book, of a child covered with smallpox eruptions. A cute kid, mercilessly defiled by the pea-sized pustules, turning a hollow gaze on the camera. Those sores were the primary visible characteristic of smallpox. Ando seemed to remember reading that they reached their peak seven days after infection…

“First of all, Ryuji didn’t even have a rash on his skin.”

That much had been clear at a glance. His skin had glistened smoothly under the glare of the lights.

“Listen. This is so stupid I don’t even want to say it. Did you know there’s a strain of smallpox that produces obstructions in blood vessels, with a near one hundred percent mortality rate?”

Ando shook his head, ever so slightly. “No.”

“Well, there is.”

“Don’t tell me that’s what caused Ryuji’s arterial blockage.”

“Fine, then, I won’t. But listen, that sarcoma he had on the interior wall of his artery-what was that? You looked at it under magnification.”

Ando didn’t answer.

“What caused it?”

Ando couldn’t answer.

“I hope you’re inoculated,” Miyashita laughed. “It’d be pretty funny, though, wouldn’t it? If that’s what it turned out to be.”

“Jokes aside, I just thought of something.”

“What?”

“Forget smallpox, but suppose the sarcoma in his artery was actually caused by some sort of virus. There should be other people who’ve died with the same symptoms.”

Miyashita grunted. He was weighing the possibilities. “Maybe. Can’t rule it out.”

“If you have the time, could you ask people at the other university hospitals? You’ve got the connections. It shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Gotcha. I’ll see if any other bodies presented the same symptoms. If this turns out to be part of a larger syndrome, we could be in trouble.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll have a good laugh over this, I’ll bet.”

They said goodbye and hung up at the same time.

The damp night air had stolen in through the open window. Ando went to shut it, sticking his head out before he did. The rain seemed to have stopped. The street directly below was lit by street-lamps at regular intervals; tire tracks stretched into the distance, twin dry stripes. Headlights streamed past on the No. 4 Metropolitan Expressway. The seamless whole of the city’s din had become waterlogged, turning into a listless eddy. He shut the window, abruptly cutting off the sound.

Ando took a medical dictionary down from the bookshelf and leafed through it. He knew next to nothing about smallpox. It was the kind of thing there was no point in researching unless you had a scholarly interest in viruses. Smallpox was the common name for the viruses variola major and minor, genus orthopoxvirus, in the poxvirus family. Variola major had a fatality rate of thirty to fifty percent, while variola minor’s was under five percent. There were also pox viruses that affected monkeys, rabbits, cows, and rats, but there had been hardly any cases of these in Japan; even if they did break out, they involved no serious danger, causing only localized rashes.

Ando closed the dictionary. The whole thing seemed ridiculous. Professor Seki had only glanced at the sore with his naked eye. And what he’d said was hardly a conclusive diagnosis. All he’d said was that the affected area looked like what happened with smallpox. Ando made denial after denial to himself. Why was he trying so hard to deny the possibility? Simple: if by some chance a virus was discovered in Ryuji’s body, then he’d have to worry about whether Mai Takano had been infected. She and Ryuji had been intimate. In the case of smallpox, eruptions would occur in the mucous membrane inside the mouth; when they ulcerated, the virus would spread. As a result, saliva was a major medium for the spread of the disease. Visions of Mai’s lips touching Ryuji’s danced in his head. He hurriedly shook them off.

He poured whiskey into a glass and drank it down straight. The alcohol, after a year and a half of temperance, had a powerful effect on him. As it burned his throat and seeped into his stomach, he was engulfed in lethargy. He sat on the floor, leaned back against the bed, and spread his limbs carelessly. Only a part of his brain remained alert. He stared at the stains on the ceiling.

The day before his boy had drowned, Ando had dreamed of the ocean. Looking back now, he knew the dream had come true. He’d known his son’s fate ahead of time, and he still hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Regret had made him a more cautious man since.

And now, he was having a definite premonition. A piece of newspaper had poked its way out of Ryuji’s belly after the autopsy, and he’d been able to take the numbers written on it and find the word “ring”. He couldn’t believe it was just a coincidence. Ryuji was trying to tell him something-in his own way, using a medium only he could manipulate. By now, most of Ryuji’s body had been reduced to ash, all but a small part which remained in the form of a tissue sample. Ando got the feeling that even in his dismembered, tissue-sampled state, Ryuji was speaking to him. Which was why he felt his friend was still alive. His body had been cremated, but Ryuji was not without words and some means to communicate them.

Ando kept fiddling with this notion as he loitered just this side of incoherence. A certain delusion-it could be a joke or it could be for real-was producing a new storyline.

Utterly ridiculous.

Objective reason reared its head. In that instant, Ando felt as if he were gazing with the eyes of a disembodied spirit at his own body, spread-eagled on the bed. His body posture looked familiar to him. He’d seen that pose somewhere recently. In the midst of an overpowering sleepiness, he recalled the Polaroids of Ryuji’s dead body. It was the same pose: head back on the bed, arms and legs flung wide. He fought off sleep and got to his feet so that he could crawl into bed and pull up the covers. He couldn’t stop trembling until he dropped off to sleep.

6

He finished his second autopsy at the M.E.’s office, then headed back to the university, leaving the clean-up to his colleagues. Miyashita had contacted him, hinting at a development in the pursuit of Ryuji’s cause of death, and Ando had been on tenterhooks ever since. He darted up the steps out of the subway.

He entered the university hospital by the main entrance and then crossed over to the old wing. The new wing, which housed the main entrance, was only two years old. It was a totally modern seventeen-story building connected by a complex of halls and stairways to the old wings, which crowded around like high-rise apartments. The whole place was like a maze. First-time visitors invariably got lost. New and old intertwined, and the color, width, and smell of the hallways-even the squeak of his shoes on the floor-shifted as he pressed on. When he stopped at the iron door that marked the boundary and glanced back at the new wing’s wide corridor, he lost his sense of perspective momentarily. He was overcome by an illusion that he was gazing at the future.

The door to the Pathology Department was open a crack, and he could see Miyashita’s back where he sat on a stool. Rather than being ensconced in his lab equipment as Ando had expected, he was turned toward the central table, going through some literature. His face was down close to the book opened before him, and he was flipping its pages rapidly. Ando approached him from behind and tapped him on a burly shoulder.

Miyashita turned around and took off his glasses, then turned the book over and laid it on the table. The title on the spine read, A Beginner’s Guide to Astrology. Ando was taken aback.

Miyashita twirled on his stool until he was facing Ando and then asked, with a straight face, “So, what’s your date of birth?”

Ignoring him, Ando picked up the Beginner’s Guide and leafed through it.

“Horoscopes? What are you, a high-school girl?”

“You’d be surprised at how often this stuff hits the mark. Now tell me when you were born.”

“Never mind that. Listen.” Ando pulled another stool out from under the table and sat down. He moved carelessly, though, and knocked the Beginner’s Guide off the table. It fell to the floor with a thud.

“Calm down, will ya?” Miyashita bent over- it looked like it pained him-to retrieve the book. But Ando wasn’t interested in any book.

“So did you find a virus?” he demanded.

Miyashita shook his head. “My first step was to check with other universities’ forensic medicine departments to see if bodies had been brought in with the same symptoms as Ryuji. I’ve got the results of that inquiry.”

“So, were there any?”

“Yup. Six altogether, as far as I could determine.”

“Six deaths.” But Ando had no idea yet whether or not that was a lot.

“Everybody I asked was astonished. They’d all figured they were the only ones who’d stumbled across this.”

“What universities are we talking about?”

Letting the table edge wedge into his belly, Miyashita reached for the file folder that had been placed unceremoniously on top of it.

“Shuwa University had two, Taido University had one, and Yokodai University in Yokohama had three. Six total. And there’s every chance we’ll see more.”

“Let me have a look,” Ando said, taking the folder from Miyashita.

That morning, Miyashita and his counterparts at the other schools had faxed each other the relevant files. The folder contained faxes of copies of the original death certificates and autopsy reports. As such, they were somewhat blurry and not very easy to read. Ando took the printouts from the folder and skimmed them for relevant info.

First, the body dissected at Taido. Shuichi Iwata, age nineteen. He’d died on September 5th, at about eleven at night; he’d been on his 50cc motorbike in the intersection in front of Shinagawa Station when he’d fallen. The autopsy had determined that his coronary artery had been blocked by unexplained swelling and that a cardiac infarction had ensued.

Two of the three bodies autopsied at Yokodai belonged to a young couple, and they’d died together. Takehiko Nomi, age nineteen, and Haruko Tsuji, age seventeen. Sometime before dawn on September 6th, their bodies had been discovered in a rented car parked at the foot of Mt Okusu, in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture. When the bodies were discovered, Haruko Tsuji’s panties were down around her ankles, and Takehiko Nomi’s jeans and briefs were pulled down to his knees. They’d obviously pulled over into a wooded area intending to have car sex, when their hearts stopped simultaneously. The autopsies had discovered strange lumps in their coronary arteries, which were, again, blocked off.

Ando raised his eyes to the ceiling, muttering, “What the hell?”

“The couple in the car, right?”

“Yeah. They had heart attacks at the same time in the same place. And, counting this Shuichi Iwata autopsied at Taido, we have four people experiencing blockage of their coronary arteries at about the same time. What’s going on here?”

“Those aren’t the only symptoms, either. Have you looked at the mother and child?”

Ando looked down at the files again. “No, not yet.”

“Take a look. They had ulcerations on their pharynxes, just like Ryuji.”

Ando riffled through the pages until he found the notations for a mother and daughter autopsied at Shuwa. The mother was Shizu Asakawa, age thirty, and the daughter was Yoko, only eighteen months old.

When Ando saw the names, he felt something tug at his mind. He rested his hands for a moment, thinking. Something didn’t sit right.

“What’s wrong?” Miyashita peered at him.

“Nothing.”

Ando read on. On October 21st, at around noon, a car driven by Shizu’s husband and carrying Shizu and Yoko had gotten into an accident near the Oi off-ramp of the Metropolitan Bayside Expressway. Heading from Urayasu toward Oi, it was not uncommon to encounter traffic near the entrance to the Tokyo Harbor Tunnel. The Asakawas’ car had slammed into a light truck at the end of a column of vehicles waiting to exit at Oi. The car was badly wrecked, and mother and daughter, together in the back seat, had lost their lives, while Mr Asakawa had sustained serious injuries.

“Why did they get sent in for autopsies?” Ando wondered aloud. There wasn’t much call to autopsy people who had obviously died in a traffic accident. A full forensic autopsy such as they’d received, with a public prosecutor presiding, usually didn’t happen unless a crime was suspected.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Keep reading.”

“Why don’t you buy a new fax machine anyway? I can hardly read these. It’s making my head hurt,” Ando said, waving the curling page in Miyashita’s face. He just wanted to know what had happened, and he was having trouble grasping the situation from the blurry printouts cranked out by the antiquated fax.

“You are one impatient bastard,” Miyashita said by way of preface. Then he began to explain. “At first, the feeling was that they had indeed died in the collision. But further examination showed no life-threatening injuries. The car was completely wrecked, but on the other hand, mother and daughter were in the back seat. This probably raised some doubts. They did a meticulous post-mortem on both of them. And sure enough, they found bruises and lacerations from the accident on their faces, their feet, et cetera, but the wounds showed no vital reaction. And I think that brings us to your territory.”

It was easy to tell if a corpse’s injuries had been sustained before or after death based on the presence or absence of a vital reaction. In this case, there was none. Which meant only one thing: at the time of the crash, mother and daughter were already dead.

“So, what, the husband was driving his dead wife and child around?”

Miyashita spread his hands. “So it would seem.”

That would immediately justify the forensic autopsy. Perhaps the husband had decided to kill himself and taken his family with him; he’d strangled his wife and child and driven off with them looking for the best place to end his own life, but had gotten into an accident on the way. The autopsies, however, had cleared the husband, for Shizu and Yoko had both had arterial blockages identical to the other cases. They couldn’t have been murdered. They’d both died of heart attacks on the expressway, shortly before the accident.

Once that was established, it was easy to guess how the husband lost control of the vehicle… He doesn’t realize for a while that his wife and daughter are dead-maybe they just quietly stopped breathing-so he drives on, thinking they’re asleep in the back seat. They’ve been curled up like that for an awfully long while. He tries to wake them up, keeping one hand on the steering wheel and reaching with the other into the rear of the car. He shakes his wife. She doesn’t wake up. He glances back to the front again before putting his hand on his wife’s knee. Then, suddenly, he realizes the change that’s come over her. He panics and just stares at his wife and child, not realizing that the traffic’s clogged ahead of him.

That had to be more or less what happened. Having lost his own son, Ando could well understand the panic the husband must have felt. It had been the same for him. If only he’d been able to overcome the panic, maybe he needn’t have lost Takanori… In the driver’s case, though, overcoming panic wouldn’t have accomplished anything. His wife and daughter were already dead.

“So what happened to the husband?” He felt sympathy for the man, who’d lost his family only two weeks before.

“He’s hospitalized, of course.”

“How bad are his injuries?”

“Physically, he doesn’t seem to be that bad off. Mostly it’s his mind that was affected.”

“Emotional damage?”

“Ever since they brought him in with the bodies of his wife and daughter, he’s been catatonic.”

“Poor guy.” He could think of nothing else to say. The facts spoke volumes about the violence of the psychological shock Asakawa had received in losing both wife and child in a single moment. He must have loved them deeply.

Ando grabbed the faxes out of Miyashita’s grip, licked his fingertips, and began paging through the flimsy sheets again. He wanted to know which hospital the man was in. He was curious about the symptoms, and he thought that if Asakawa was in a hospital where Ando knew somebody, specifics could be obtained.

The first thing that leapt into sight was the name.

Kazuyuki Asakawa.

“What’s this?” Ando let out a stupid-sounding yell, so surprised he was. “Kazuyuki Asakawa” was the same name he’d inscribed in his planner the other day. The man who’d gone to Ryuji’s apartment the night after his death and peppered Mai with questions about some videotape.

“You know him?” Miyashita yawned.

“No, but Ryuji did.”

“Really?”

“The driver, this Asakawa guy, was a friend of Ryuji’s.”

“How do you know?”

Ando gave a brief explanation of what Mai had told him about Asakawa’s visit. “This doesn’t look good.”

There was no need for Ando to specify what didn’t look good. Including Ryuji, seven people had died of the same thing. Four on September 5th, one on October 19th, and two on October 21st. The pair at Mt Okusu had died simultaneously, as had the mother and daughter whose car had been in the accident near the Oi exit. The surviving member of that family had been a friend of Ryuji’s. All these people, who seemed to be connected in one way or another, had died from some new-found sarcoma that blocked off the coronary artery. Naturally, the first thought to occur to Ando was that he might be dealing with a contagious disease. Judging from how limited the circle of victims was so far, it probably wasn’t airborne. Perhaps, like AIDS, this new epidemic was relatively difficult to contract despite its deadliness.

He considered Mai. He had to assume she’d had physical contact with Ryuji. How he was going to explain this development to her weighed heavily on his mind. All he could tell her, basically, was that she was in danger. Would it even do any good to warn her, if it turned out that was all he could do?

I’d better go to Shuwa U.

The files he held in his hand simply didn’t contain enough information. He couldn’t do any better than to speak directly with the doctor who’d conducted the autopsies on Asakawa’s wife and daughter. He asked Miyashita if he could use the phone, and picked up the receiver to call Shuwa University.

7

On the Monday after the three-day weekend, Ando paid a visit to Shuwa University Medical School, located in Ota Ward. When he’d called from Miyashita’s lab he’d pressed for an immediate appointment, but the party on the other end hadn’t been impressed, calmly saying he could make time on Monday, if that would do. Ando had to acquiesce. This wasn’t a murder investigation or anything of that sort. His curiosity had been piqued, that was all.

Ando knocked on the door of the Forensic Medicine Department and waited. He heard nothing from beyond the door. He looked at his watch and realized that there were still ten minutes to his one o’clock appointment. Forensic medicine usually had a smaller staff than surgery or internal medicine. The three or four people in it here had probably all gone out to lunch.

While he stood wondering what to do, from behind him a voice called out, “May I help you?” Perfect timing.

He turned around to see a short young man who wore rimless glasses. Ando thought he looked too young to be a lecturer here, but on the other hand, he thought he recognized the slightly shrill voice. Ando offered the young man his card, introducing himself and stating his business. The young man said, “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” and handed over his card. Just as Ando thought, it was the man he’d spoken to on the phone on Friday. His name card said he was Kazuyoshi Kurahashi, Lecturer in Forensic Medicine at Shuwa University. Judging by the man’s position, Ando figured they had to be about the same age, but Kurahashi looked young enough to be in his early twenties. Probably it was to avoid being taken for a student that he spoke in an overdone tone of authority and stolidity.

“Come right this way,” Kurahashi said punctiliously, ushering Ando in.

Ando had learned just about everything he could by fax. His purpose today was to see with his own eyes things that couldn’t be faxed, and to speak directly to the doctor who’d been in charge of the autopsies. He and Kurahashi exchanged small talk, and then began to share their observations of the bodies they’d dissected. Apparently, Kurahashi had been quite surprised by the unidentified sarcomas he’d found blocking the coronary arteries. As soon as the conversation turned to them, his cool demeanor cracked.

“Would you care to see?” So saying, he went to get one of the tissue samples from the blocked arteries.

Ando had a good look at it with his naked eye, then placed it under a microscope and examined it on a cellular level. One glance told him that these cells had undergone the same transformations as Ryuji’s. When cells are treated with a hematoxylin-eosin stain, the cytoplasm turns red while the nucleus turns blue, allowing them to be differentiated with ease. Here, the diseased cells’ shapes were distorted; their nuclei were larger than normal. Whereas normal cells had an overall reddish tint, these cells looked bluish. Ando stared at the red, amoeba-like speckles floating on the blue. He had to find out what had caused this change-the culprit, as it were. Obviously, it wasn’t going to be easy. He had to deduce the murder weapon and the criminal entirely on the basis of the damage done to the victims’ bodies.

Ando lifted his eyes from the microscope and took a deep breath. Somehow, the longer he looked, the harder it was to breathe. “Whose cells are these, by the way?”

“The wife’s.” Kurahashi turned his head only slightly to answer. He was standing by the shelves which covered one wall, removing and replacing files. He kept shaking his head, evidently unable to locate what he was looking for.

Ando bent over the instrument again, and again the microscopic world assailed him.

So these are Kazuyuki Asakawa’s wife’s. Knowing who they belonged to, he found himself trying to imagine, in detail, what had happened to their owner. Last month, a car her husband had been driving had collided with a truck near the Oi exit ramp on the Metropolitan Bayside Expressway. Sunday, October 21st, noon. Autopsies had confirmed that mother and child had expired an hour prior to the accident. In other words, they had died simultaneously, at around eleven in the morning. Of the same cause, no less. And that was what he just couldn’t wrap his mind around.

So small these lumps of flesh were compared to the rest of the body, yet big enough to block off an artery and stop a heart. He had a hard time imagining that these sarcomas had been growing gradually over a long period of time, since they’d claimed two lives at virtually the same instant. Even if the victims had contracted a virus of some sort, if the virus required an incubation period of months before producing its symptoms, there was no way the two victims should have died nearly simultaneously. The physical differences between the victims should have assured some sort of lag. There was a thirty year age difference between Shizu and Yoko Asakawa, and that should have had some effect. Maybe it was just a coincidence? But no, that couldn’t be. The young couple autop-sied at Yokodai had died simultaneously, too. And if it wasn’t just a coincidence, he had no choice but to conclude that the period between infection and death was extremely short.

The viral hypothesis didn’t seem to make for an adequate explanation. Ando momentarily laid aside that scenario, wondering if it could have been food poisoning or the like. With food poisoning, when two people eat the same spoiled item, it’s not uncommon for both to fall prey to the same symptoms at the same time. Of course, “food poisoning” could involve a wide range of things; there are natural, chemical, and bacterial toxins. But he’d never heard of any toxin that caused sarcomas in the coronary artery. Perhaps some lab somewhere had been performing ultra-secret bacteriological research, and something had mutated and escaped…

Ando looked up again. He was merely speculating, and he knew all too well that guessing would get him nowhere.

Kurahashi approached the table where Ando was sitting and pulled out a chair. He held a file folder, from which he drew out ten or so photos.

“These are from the scene of the accident. I don’t know if they’ll be of any use to you.”

Ando hardly expected that shots of the scene would give him anything to go on. He was convinced that the problem was rooted in irregularities at the cellular level, and not in a driver’s carelessness. But since Kurahashi had gone to all the trouble of digging out the photos, Ando didn’t feel right about returning them without at least taking a look at them. He glanced through them, one by one.

The first photo was of the wrecked automobile. The hood had been crumpled up until it was shaped like a mountain. Both headlights and the bumper were crushed. The windshield had been shattered, too, but the center pillars hadn’t been bent. Although the car itself had been totaled, most of the shock evidently hadn’t carried to the back seat.

Next was a shot of the surface of the road. It was dry, and there were no skidmarks, suggesting that Asakawa hadn’t been watching where he was going. Where was he looking, then? Most likely at the back seat. Maybe he was even touching the cold bodies of his wife and daughter. Ando recalled the sequence of events he’d worked out in Miyashita’s lab three days before.

He flipped through two or three more pictures, laying them on the table like playing cards. There was nothing in them to catch the eye, he thought, but then his hand stopped. He was holding a photo of the car’s interior. The camera had been lodged against the passenger’s side window and aimed so as to take in the front of the cabin. The seatbelt was draped over the driver’s seat, and the passenger’s seat was pushed forward. Ando stared, momentarily unsure of what in this picture had aroused his interest.

He’d had the same experience paging absently through books before. Sometimes a word would return to mind and keep him from turning the pages, but he’d be unable to remember where in the book he’d seen it, or, for that matter, what the word was. His palms started to perspire. He could feel his intuition at work. This photo was trying to tell him something. He brought the picture so close to his face that his nose was almost touching it. He examined every corner of it. Then he concentrated his vision on one point, and finally found the thing that had been hiding there.

On the passenger’s seat sat the black thing, mostly hidden because the back of the seat had been pushed forward. A section of the front and one of the sides were the only visible portions. A similar flat, black thing rested on the floor of the car, also on the passenger’s side, held down there by the headrest of the passenger’s seat. Ando gave a little cry of excitement and called Kurahashi over.

“Hey, what do you think this is?” He held the photo out to Kurahashi and indicated where he should look. The short man took off his glasses and looked closely at the photo. Then he shook his head, not so much because he couldn’t make out the thing, but because he couldn’t figure out why Ando was interested in it.

“What is it?” Kurahashi muttered without taking his eyes from the photo.

“It looks to me like a video deck,” said Ando, seeking confirmation.

“That is what it looks like.” As soon as he recognized the object for what it was, Kurahashi thrust the photo back at Ando. The object on the passenger’s seat could just as well have been a candy box, given its black, rectangular shape. But a close look at the front of the object revealed a round black button. It certainly looked like a video deck, but it could also have been a tuner or an amp. Regardless, Ando had decided that a video deck was what it was. The thing on the floor, under the headrest, looked like a portable word processor or a personal computer. Considering Asakawa’s profession, it wasn’t odd that he’d be carrying around a word processor. But a video deck?

“Why’s it there?”

His conclusion that it was a video machine, of course, had to do with what Mai had told him. According to her, the day after Ryuji’s death, Asakawa had visited Ryuji’s apartment and asked her repeatedly about a videotape. The very next day, he’d put a video deck on the passenger seat of a car and gone somewhere, only to get in an accident on his way home to Shinagawa. Where had he been with that deck? If it was just to get it repaired, there was no need to get on the highway; surely there were electronics shops in his neighborhood. It bothered Ando. Asakawa couldn’t have been driving around with a bare VCR for no reason.

Ando went through the photos again. When he found one that showed the wrecked car’s license plate, he took out his planner and noted it. A Shinagawa plate, WA 5287. From the WA, Ando knew it was a rental. So not only was Asakawa driving a video deck around, he’d gone to the trouble of renting a car for the purpose. Why? Ando tried to put himself in Asakawa’s position. If he were carrying around his own video deck, why would he be doing so?

Dubbing …

He could think of no other reason. Suppose A calls B saying he has a fantastic videotape. B wants a copy, but A owns only one video deck, naturally. If B really wants a copy, he has no alternative but to take his own deck to A’s house and ask him to let him make a copy of it.

Even so … Ando lowered his head. What could a video possibly have to do with these deaths?

Ando was possessed by an urge he couldn’t reason with. He wanted to get his hands on the tape-if at all possible, he wanted to watch it. The accident had happened near Oi. What police precinct was that? The wrecked car had to be stored temporarily at the traffic division of the local precinct. If there had been a video deck in the car, the police would have taken possession of it, too. With Asakawa’s wife and daughter dead and he barely conscious, perhaps no one had come to pick up the deck; perhaps it was still at the stationhouse. As an M.E., Ando had quite a few acquaintances on the police force. Getting his hands on that video deck wouldn’t be too hard.

But first, Ando realized, he needed to meet Asakawa. It’d save Ando a lot of time if he could learn the facts of the case from Asakawa himself. According to the fax, Asakawa had been catatonic when he was taken to the hospital, but that was over ten days ago. Maybe there had been a change in his condition. If there was any chance of communicating with Asakawa, then the sooner the better.

“Do you know which hospital Kazuyuki Asakawa is in?”

“The Saisei Aid Society Hospital in Shinagawa, I think.” Checking his file, Kurahashi said, “I was right. But it says here the patient’s catatonic.”

“I’m going to pay him a visit all the same,” Ando remarked, nodding several times as if to persuade himself.

8

Ando had dozed off with his face pressed up against the window of the cab. Then his head slipped off the support of his right hand, and he collapsed forward so that his face banged into the back of the driver’s seat; at the same time, he heard something that sounded like an alarm bell, off in the distance. Reflexively he looked at his watch. Ten past two. Immediately on leaving Shuwa he’d hopped in a cab, and he couldn’t have been riding for more than about ten minutes. He’d probably only dropped off for a couple of those minutes, but somehow he had the feeling that a long time had elapsed. It felt like days had passed since Kurahashi had shown him the photos of the accident. Feeling as if he’d been spirited somewhere far away, Ando sat in the sealed cab and listened to the clanging alarm.

The cab wasn’t moving. It was in the left-hand lane of a four-lane road, and it must have been a turn lane, since all the other lanes were flowing. Only they were stopped. He leaned forward and peered out through the windshield. Ahead and to the left he could see a railroad crossing: the bar was down and the signal light was flashing. It could have been his imagination, but the rhythms of the light and the bell seemed to be slightly out of synch. The crossing for the Keihin Express Line was about a hundred feet ahead on the No. 1 Tokyo-Yokohama Freeway, and Ando’s taxi had been waiting for a train to go by. Shinagawa Saisei Hospital, his destination, was on the other side of the tracks. A train went by, bound for Tokyo, but the bar still didn’t rise; the arrow indicating a Yokohama-bound train began to flash. It didn’t look like they’d be able to get across any time soon. The cab driver had resigned himself to waiting and was flipping through a sheaf of papers bound by a paper clip, writing something down now and then.

No need to hurry. Visiting hours last until five, so there’s still plenty of time.

Ando suddenly raised his head from the headrest: he thought he’d felt somebody’s gaze on him. Somewhere close, outside the car, a pair of eyes was staring at him. Maybe this was what it felt like to be placed between slides as a tissue sample and examined under a microscope. There was something of the observer in the gaze that had been turned on him. Ando looked all around.

Maybe somebody in one of the other cars had recognized him and was trying to catch his attention. But he didn’t see a familiar face in any of the cars, and there was nobody on the sidewalk. He tried to convince himself it was just his imagination, but the gaze showed no signs of relenting. Once again Ando turned his head right and left. To the left, just beyond the sidewalk, the ground rose in a grassy embankment that ran alongside the railroad tracks. Something in the shadow of the weeds was moving. It moved and froze, moved and froze. Without once taking its gaze off Ando, some creature was crawling along on the ground, alternating between stillness and motion. It was a snake. Ando was surprised to see one in such a place. Its tiny, intense eyes glowed in the autumn-afternoon sun. There was no doubt that this was the observer he’d sensed, and it dredged up memories of a scene from his grade school days.

He’d lived in the country, in a little town surrounded by farmers’ fields. Once, on his way home from school-Ando remembered it as a peaceful spring afternoon-he’d seen a snake on a concrete wall that flanked a ditch filled with water. At first the threadlike gray snake had looked to him like just a crack in the wall, but as he got closer he could see the roundness of its body emerge from the surface. As soon as he saw it was a snake, he scooped up a rock the size of his fist. He tossed the rock in his palm a few times, gauging its size and weight, and then went into a pitcher’s wind-up. It was several yards from where he stood to the wall on the other side of the ditch. He really didn’t think he’d hit the bull’s-eye. But the rock arced high in the air and came down from above directly onto the snake’s head, crushing it. Ando recoiled with a cry. He was standing more than a dozen feet away, but it felt like he’d smashed the snake’s head with his own clenched fist. He wiped his palm over and over on his trousers. The snake had fallen into the ditch like a suction cup peeling off a stainless steel surface. Ando took a couple of steps into the tangle of grass on the bank of the ditch and leaned forward, trying to catch the snake’s last moments. He got there in time to see its corpse float away. At that moment, he’d felt the same gaze upon him that he did now. It hadn’t been the dead snake’s gaze, but rather that of a bigger snake that lay in the grass watching him. Its smooth face betrayed no expression as it entangled him in its insistent, unwavering stare. Ando had been shaken by the malevolence of that gaze. If the little snake he’d killed had been the big snake’s child, some catastrophe would befall him for sure. The big snake was laying a curse on him: that was the purpose of the insistent stare. His grandmother had told him many times that if he killed snakes something terrible would happen to him.

Repentant, Ando pleaded silently with the snake, hoping it’d understand that he hadn’t meant to kill.

That was more than twenty years ago. But now, Ando recalled the incident with startling clarity. Snake curses were nothing but superstition, he knew. He doubted reptiles even had the ability to recognize their own offspring. Yet… the alarm kept on ringing. Enough! Stop thinking! Ando cried voicelessly. But still the image of a baby snake, white belly upturned, floating away in the ditch, parent snake swimming along behind, continued to pester him like threads that wouldn’t come untangled.

I was cursed.

He was losing control of his thoughts. Against his will, he could see the chain of karmic cause and effect looming before him. He couldn’t shake off a vision of the murdered baby snake getting caught in the tangled vegetation lining the sides of the ditch, of the parent snake catching up with it and entwining itself around it, the two of them floating there… The image reminded him of DNA. The DNA within a cell’s nucleus, he realized, looked like two snakes coiling around each other and flying up into the sky. DNA, by which biological information is transmitted endlessly from generation to generation. Perhaps a pair of snakes perpetually ensnared humanity.

Takanori!

His silent call to his son was filled with misery. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to hold himself together for much longer. Ando lifted his head and looked out the window. He had to distract himself, to interrupt this chain of associations at once. Through the windshield he could see the bright red Keihin Express train go by, slowly. With Shinagawa Station right ahead, it was moving no faster than a slithering snake. Snakes again. There was no way out. He closed his eyes and tried again to think of something else. The tiny hand grabbed at Ando’s calf as it slipped away into the sea. He could feel the touch again. It was the snake’s curse, it had to be. He was about to let out a sob. The situations were too similar. The baby snake, its head crushed, carried away by the flow. Two decades later, its parent’s curse had manifested itself. Takanori was close by, but Ando couldn’t save him. The beach in June, before the season had officially opened. He and his son, paddling out to sea, holding onto a rectangular float. He could hear his wife, back on the shore, call:

Taka! That’s far enough. Come back!

But the boy was too busy bobbing up and down and splashing about. Her voice didn’t reach him.

Honey, come back, okay?

Hysteria was beginning to tinge her voice.

The waves were getting taller, and Ando, too, thought that it was time to turn back. He tried to turn the float around. Just at that moment, a whitecap rose in front of them, and in an instant overturned the float and threw both him and the boy into the sea. His head went under, and it was then that he first realized they were so far out that even his own feet didn’t touch the bottom. He started to panic. When his head broke above the surface again, his son was nowhere to be seen. Treading water, he turned around until he could see his wife running into the sea toward him, still fully clothed. At the same time, a hand grasped at his leg. His son’s hand. Ando tried hastily to turn around towards the boy to draw him up, but that had been the wrong move. Taka’s hand slipped away from his calf, and all Ando’s hand managed to do was graze his son’s hair.

His wife’s half-crazed cries shot over the early-summer sea as she rushed through the water. I know he’s close, but I can’t reach him! He dived under the surface and moved blindly about but couldn’t manage to make contact with that small hand again. His son had disappeared-for good. His body never surfaced again. Where had it drifted to? All that remained were the few strands of hair that had tangled in Ando’s wedding ring.

At the railroad crossing, the bar finally lifted. Ando was weeping, holding his hand over his mouth to stifle his sobs. The cab driver noticed anyway and kept glancing at him in the rear-view mirror.

Get a hold of yourself, before you totally fall apart!

It was one thing to break down alone in bed, quite another to do it in broad daylight. He wished there were something, anything, he could think about that could bring him back to the here and now. Suddenly he saw Mai Takano’s face in his mind. She was working on a fruit parfait with such enthusiasm that he thought she might lick the dish when she was through. The collar of a white blouse peeked out from the neck of her dress; her left hand rested on her knee. Finished with the parfait, she wiped her lips with a napkin and stood up. He was beginning to see. Sexual fantasies about Mai were the only thing that could draw him out of the abyss of his grief. He realized that he hadn’t fantasized about a woman once since his wife had left him-or rather, since the death of his son. He’d lost all of his former attachment to sex.

The cab jostled up and down until it was straddling the tracks. At the same time, Mai’s body was bobbing up and down in Ando’s mind.

9

Mai Takano got off the Odakyu Line at Sagami Ohno and went out to the main street, but she couldn’t decide which way to turn. She’d walked this route in reverse two weeks ago, but now she’d lost all sense of direction. When she’d gone to Ryuji’s parents’ house for the wake, it was in a car from the M.E.’s office. This time, making her way there on foot from the station, she hadn’t gone more than a hundred feet or so before she found herself in unfamiliar surroundings. It wasn’t a new experience for her. She always got lost when she tried to get somewhere she’d only been to once.

She had his parents’ phone number, so all she had to do was call. But she was embarrassed to ask his mother to come pick her up. She decided to trust her intuition a little more. She didn’t have far to go, she knew. It was only a ten-minute walk from the station.

Suddenly she saw Ando’s face in her mind. She’d made a dinner date with him for the coming Friday, but now, she wondered if it’d been careless of her to accept. She was starting to regret it. To her, Ando was a friend of Ryuji’s, someone with whom she could share memories of him. If she could get Ando to tell her stories about Ryuji’s college days, maybe she’d understand Ryuji’s impenetrable ideas better. In other words, she had to admit that some calculation had gone into her decision to go out with Ando. But if Ando started entertaining the sort of thoughts a man can have about a woman, things could turn unpleasant. Since entering college, Mai had learned the hard way that men and women wanted vastly different things. What Mai wanted was to keep the relationship on a level where she and the man could provide each other with intellectual stimulation; her boyfriends’ interests, however, always tended to gravitate in another direction. She was forced to turn them down as gently as possible. The trauma her rejections caused them was always more than she could take. They’d send her long apologetic letters which only rubbed salt in her wounds, or they’d call and the first thing out of their mouths would be, “Listen, I’m really sorry about what happened last time.” She didn’t want them to apologize. She wanted them to learn and grow from the experience. She wanted to see a man turn embarrassment into energy and engage in a genuine struggle toward maturity. If the man did that, she’d resume the friendship any time. But she could never be friends with a guy whose psyche remained forever, and unabashedly, that of a child who refused to grow up.

Ryuji was the only man she’d ever been serious about. He wasn’t like the juveniles who surrounded her. The things she and Ryuji had given each other were invaluable. If she could be sure that a relationship with Ando would be like the one she’d had with Ryuji, she’d accept any number of dinner invitations from him. But she knew from experience that the chances weren’t very good. The likelihood, in Japan, of her meeting an independent guy, a man worthy of the name, was close to zero. Still, she couldn’t quite put Ando out of her mind.

Just once, Ryuji had mentioned him to her. The conversation had been about genetic engineering, when suddenly he’d digressed and dropped Ando’s name.

Mai hadn’t ever understood the difference between genes and DNA. Weren’t they just the same thing? Ryuji had set about explaining to her that DNA was the chemical material on which hereditary information was recorded, while a gene was one unit of that nearly infinite amount of hereditary information. In the course of the discussion, he’d mentioned that the technology existed to break DNA down into small segments using restriction enzymes, and to rearrange it. Mai had commented that the process sounded “like a puzzle”. Ryuji had agreed: “Absolutely, it’s like solving a puzzle, or deciphering a code.” From there, the talk had digressed, until Ryuji was telling her a story from his college days.

When Ryuji had learned that the nitty-gritty of DNA technology involved code-breaking, he’d started to play cipher games with his friends in med school, between classes. He told her an interesting anecdote about these games. Many of the students were fascinated by molecular biology, and so, before long, Ryuji had recruited about ten guys to play with. The rules were simple. One person would submit a coded message, and then everybody else would have a certain number of days in which to decipher it. The first one to get it right won. The game tested their math and logic skills, but also required flashes of inspiration. The guys loved it.

The codes varied in difficulty, depending on the skill of the person devising them, but Ryuji had been able to solve most of them. Meanwhile, only one classmate had ever been able to crack any of Ryuji’s codes. Mitsuo Ando. Ryuji told Mai how shocked he’d been when Ando had broken his code.

I got chills. It was like he’d read my mind.

And so the name Mitsuo Ando had made a deep impression on Mai.

Which was why she’d been so astonished when the detective had introduced her to Ando at the M.E.’s office. He had to be the Ando-he’d even introduced himself as an old friend of Ryuji’s. Knowing Ando had been the only one to ever unlock one of Ryuji’s codes, Mai had felt she could trust him. She just knew his skills with the scalpel had to be way up there, and that he’d easily figure out the cause of death.

Mai was still under the sway of the words of a man who’d been dead for two weeks. If Ryuji hadn’t mentioned Ando to her, she probably never would have been able to call the M.E.’s office to ask about the cause of death; she never would have ended up seeing Ando again on campus. She certainly never would have made plans to have dinner with him. One chance word from Ryuji had subtly bound her.

Mai turned off the main road into a maze of residential streets. There she spotted a convenience store sign that she recognized. She knew where to go from there. Once she turned at the convenience store, Ryuji’s parents’ house would be straight ahead. As two-week-old memories started to come back to her, she quickened her step.

It was a nondescript house, built on a parcel of about four hundred square yards. From the wake, she remembered that the first floor contained a largish living room adjoined to a smaller Japanese-style room.

No sooner had Mai rung the doorbell than Ryuji’s mother appeared at the door. She’d been waiting impatiently for Mai, and showed her up to the second floor, to the room Ryuji had studied in from grade school on through his sophomore year at college. After his junior year, Ryuji had moved out of the house, even though it was well within commuting distance, and taken a room near campus. The only times the room had been used as a study since were when Ryuji had come home to visit.

Ryuji’s mother set down a plate of shortcake and a cup of coffee and left the room. As Mai watched her shuffle down the hall, head drooping, she was touched by the woman’s grief at losing her son.

Left alone, Mai took her first good look around the room. It was a Japanese-style room with a matted floor. In one corner a carpet had been spread out under a desk. Bookshelves lined the walls, but she could only see their upper portions; the lower shelves were hidden by the confusion of cardboard boxes and appliances that littered the floor. She took a quick count of the boxes. Twenty-seven. These held everything that had been carted over from Ryuji’s East Nakano apartment after his death. The larger furniture-the bed, the desk, etc.-they’d given away. The boxes seemed to contain mostly books.

Mai sighed, then seated herself on the floor and had a sip of coffee. She was already trying to resign herself to the possibility that she wouldn’t be able to find it. Even if it were in there somewhere, it’d be quite a task to find a few manuscript pages among all those things. Perhaps the pages weren’t even in those boxes.

The twenty-seven boxes were all sealed with tape. She took off her cardigan, rolled up her sleeves, and opened the nearest one. Paperbacks. She picked up a few. One turned out to be a book she’d given him as a present. Longing washed over her. The smell of Ryuji’s old apartment clung to the cover.

This is no place to let yourself wallow in emotion.

She choked back her tears and went back to work taking things out of the box.

But when she got to the bottom, there was still no sign of the pages. Mai tried to deduce what they could have gotten mixed in with. Maybe one of the books he’d been using as a reference, or one of the files in which he’d kept his research materials. She kept breaking the seals on the boxes.

Her back started to break into a sweat. Taking books out of boxes and putting them back in was surprisingly strenuous work. After she’d finished her third box, she took a breather and entertained the idea of filling in the missing pages by herself. Ryuji’s challenging theory of symbolic logic had already been made public, albeit in piecemeal form, in specialist journals. The project at hand, however, wasn’t quite so esoteric. Ryuji had also been writing a book-length study aimed at the general reader that dealt with logic and science in the context of various social problems. What he was saying in it wasn’t too difficult. In fact, the work was being serialized in a monthly put out by a major publisher. Mai had been involved from the start, when she’d volunteered to make clean manuscript copies of what Ryuji wrote; she’d even attended meetings with his editor. As a result, she felt she had a good handle on the flow of Ryuji’s argument as well as on his writing style. If one or two pages were all that was missing, she felt confident she could come up with something to fill in the gap without creating any inconsistencies.

But that’s only if I could be sure only one page is missing.

If that were the case, she’d probably give in to the temptation. Each installment had averaged forty manuscript pages, but that was only an average. They’d ranged from thirty-seven to forty-three. This was the twelfth and last installment, and she had no idea how many pages Ryuji had actually ended up with. That meant she had no way of knowing how many were missing. When she’d slipped out of the wake to put the manuscript in order, she’d found the installment, thirty-eight handwritten pages. The final page was numbered thirty-eight, and there were thirty-seven pages preceding it. So she had no inkling at first that anything was amiss. What with the funeral and all, she was late in sitting down to make a clean copy, and the deadline was upon her when she finally sat down and read through it. It was then that she realized that there was a lacuna between the last two pages. In terms of page numbers, they looked okay-thirty-seven was followed by thirty-eight-but something important was missing. In fact, the conclusion. And without it the argument made no sense. The last two lines of page thirty-seven had been crossed out in ballpoint pen, with an arrow leading to the edge of the page. But the next page did not contain the head of that arrow. She could only surmise that he must have added something and that that something had disappeared.

Turning pale, she’d read the whole thing again from the beginning several times. But the more she read, the more obvious it was that there was a gap at the end. His line of reasoning, which had been reiterated and expanded upon in installment after installment, came to a sudden halt with the words, “However, for that very reason…” The phrase seemed to promise an antithesis, but the sentence was cut off there. The deeper she got into his train of thought, the more she was convinced that a very important passage, probably several pages long, had disappeared. And the whole thing-twelve installments, some five hundred pages-was already slated for publication in book form. This was the conclusion she was dealing with. This was serious.

So she had immediately called Ryuji’s parents and explained the situation to them. Within two or three days of the funeral, they had emptied out Ryuji’s apartment and had had all his books and personal effects brought to his old room. If the missing pages had gotten mixed in with something else, they had to be somewhere in the room, Mai had explained to Ryuji’s parents. She needed their permission to look through Ryuji’s things.

But now, confronted with the stacks of boxes, she felt like whining.

Oh, why did you have to go and die on me?

What a feat, though, drawing his last breath immediately after finishing his manuscript. She found it hateful.

I want you to come here right this minute and tell me what happened to those pages!

She reached out for her coffee, now quite cold. If only she’d read through the manuscript sooner, she wouldn’t have been in this mess. She couldn’t regret that enough. If she couldn’t find the missing pages, she’d have no other option but to try to supply them herself. She shrank in fear from the thought that what she wrote might diverge from Ryuji’s intentions. It would really be quite presumptuous of her. True, she had already been accepted into graduate school, but for a girl barely twenty to doctor the conclusion of the very last work of a logician from whom everybody had expected such great things…

I can’t do it.

Telling herself she’d just have to find the pages, she opened the next box.

Sometime after four, the room, which faced east, began to get dark, so she turned on a light. It was November, and the days were getting noticeably shorter. But it wasn’t cold. Mai got up and drew the curtains. For a while now, she’d been bothered by the feeling that someone was watching her through the window.

She’d already gone through half the cardboard boxes, and she hadn’t yet found the missing pages.

Suddenly, Mai could hear her heart beating. The inside of her chest was pounding. She stopped what she was doing and sat there, one knee up, back bent, waiting for the palpitations to subside. This had never happened to her before. She pressed a hand over the left side of her chest and tried to figure out what was causing it. Was it guilt over having lost her teacher’s work? No, that wasn’t it. Something was hiding in the room with her. A minute ago, she’d thought it was outside the room staring at her, but evidently she’d been wrong. She half expected a cat or something to dash out from behind a box.

She felt something cold on the back of her head and neck. A stabbing gaze. She turned around. She saw her pink cardigan draped over a box where she’d left it when she got to work. The spaces between its fibers glittered like eyes, reflecting the lamplight. Mai picked up the cardigan to reveal a video deck.

The jet-black deck sat on top of a box, its cords wrapped around it. It had to be the one that had been in Ryuji’s apartment. There was no TV set to be seen, however, and the deck hadn’t been hooked up.

Gingerly, Mai reached out and touched the edge of the deck. The cords were wrapped around its middle, top to bottom, leaving the deck resting on them as on a see-saw.

Did I put my cardigan on this?

She couldn’t remember. Of course, there was no other explanation. Before starting on the boxes, she’d taken off her cardigan and carelessly laid it on the video deck. That had to be it.

She locked gazes with the deck for perhaps a minute, and all thoughts of the missing pages disappeared from her mind. In their place swirled questions about a video.

She couldn’t forget what Kazuyuki Asakawa had asked her the day after Ryuji’s death. “He didn’t tell you anything there at the end? No last words? Nothing, say, about a videotape?”

Mai uncoiled the cords from around the body of the machine. She picked out the power cord and looked for an outlet. An extension cord lay unassumingly under the desk. She plugged the deck into it. Four zeros started flashing on the machine’s timer display-its pulse, like that of a dead person brought back to life. Mai extended her right index finger and waved it around in front of the deck. She couldn’t decide what to do. A voice told her not to touch it. Mai pushed EJECT anyway. The slot opened, a motor whirred, and a videotape emerged. There was a label on the spine, and a title written on the label.

Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr/1989

Sticking out of the deck like that, the tape looked like a huge tongue. The deck resembled an obnoxious child, winking and wiggling his tongue at her.

Mai took firm hold of the black tongue and pulled it out.

10

Just when it was about to pull up to the hospital, Ando’s cab was overtaken by an ambulance whose siren was wailing. They were on a narrow, oneway street lined with shops, and in order to let the ambulance pass, they had to wedge the car between two delivery trucks parked on the side of the road. It looked like it might take a while to pull out again, so Ando decided to get out then and there. The eleven-story hospital towered over them, almost close enough to touch. It would be quicker to walk.

As he stepped off the street toward the main entranceway of the hospital, Ando could see the ambulance that had just passed them pull into the space between the old and new wings. It had taken the ambulance so long to negotiate the narrow streets that it had ended up arriving at the same time as Ando had on foot.

The siren fell silent, but the ambulance’s rotating light remained on, throwing its red mottled pattern onto the hospital walls. Stillness descended from the clear blue sky and created a zone of silence around the ambulance like the circle of brightness from a spotlight. To go in, Ando had to walk past the ambulance. The red light finally stopped rotating, and the echoes of the siren were disappearing into the sky. The atmosphere was thick with the prospect that, any second now, the back doors of the ambulance might burst open and spew forth emergency medical personnel unloading a stretcher-but nothing happened. Ando stood and watched. Ten seconds, twenty seconds passed, but the doors didn’t open. Silence prevailed. Thirty seconds. The air was frozen. Nobody came running out of the hospital, either.

Ando snapped out of his reverie and resumed walking. And suddenly, the ambulance doors opened with great force. A paramedic jumped out and helped his colleague inside the ambulance unload a stretcher. Ando didn’t care what had prevented them from carrying out the patient immediately-these guys were too damn slow. Now they were holding the stretcher at a slant, and Ando’s face came momentarily level with the oxygen-masked face of the patient. Their eyes met. The patient seemed to twist toward Ando, and stopped just as abruptly. His eyes were lifeless. He’d been picked up in critical condition, and now he’d met his end. In his line of work, Ando had witnessed any number of deaths. But never like this, by chance. Taking it as an ill omen, Ando averted his eyes from the dead man. He was no different from Miyashita with his astrology. First the snake on the embankment, and now this chance encounter with death. Lately, Ando had been looking for meaning in a lot of trivial events. He’d always scoffed at people who believed in jinxes and fortunes, but now, he realized, he was one of them.

Shinagawa Saisei Hospital was a general hospital connected to Shuwa University, and the man Ando was going to see, Dr Wada, actually belonged to the university. Kurahashi, his superior, seemed to have contacted him already. No sooner had Ando stated his business than he was shown to a room on the seventh floor of the west wing.

Ando peered into Asakawa’s eyes where he lay prostrate on his sickbed, and was immediately reminded of the eyes of the patient he’d just seen. Asakawa’s eyes had the exact same quality to them: they were the eyes of a dead man.

Arms hooked up to a pair of I.V.s, face turned toward the ceiling, Asakawa moved not a muscle. Ando didn’t know what the man used to look like, but he guessed the poor soul must have been at about half his normal weight. His cheeks were sunken and his beard was turning white.

Ando moved to the bedside and addressed him gently. “Mr Asakawa.”

No answer. Ando thought to touch him on the shoulder, but hesitated and turned to Dr Wada for permission. Wada nodded, and Ando placed a hand on Asakawa’s shoulder, The skin under his gown had no resilience. Ando could feel the shoulder blade, and drew back his hand involuntarily. There was no reaction.

“Backing away from the bed, Ando turned to Wada and asked, “Has he been like this the whole time?”

“Yes,” Wada answered flatly, Asakawa had been brought in from the accident site on October 21st meaning that for fifteen days now he hadn’t spoken, hadn’t cried, hadn’t laughed, hadn’t gotten angry, hadn’t eaten, hadn’t evacuated his bladder or his bowels on his own.

“What do you think is causing it, doctor?” Ando asked in his politest voice.

“At first we thought he’d sustained a brain injury in the accident, but tests showed no irregularities. We suspect a psychological cause.”

“Shock?”

“Most likely.”

Probably the shock of losing his wife and daughter at the same time had destroyed Asakawa’s mind. But Ando wondered if that had been the only cause. Probably because he’d seen the photos of the accident scene, Ando had a surprisingly clear image of the moment of the collision. And every time he envisioned it, his gaze was drawn to the passenger seat and the video deck enshrined thereon. It loomed larger and larger in his imagination. Why had Asakawa been transporting a VCR? Where had he gone with it? If only the man could explain himself.

Ando pulled a stool up next to Asakawa’s pillow and sat down. He stared at Asakawa’s face in profile for a while, trying to imagine what dreamland the poor man was lost and floating in. Which was more pleasant to live in, he wondered, the world of reality or the world of delusion? Probably Asakawa’s wife and daughter were alive in his dream world. He was probably holding his daughter to his breast and playing with her right now.

“Mr Asakawa,” said Ando, with all the sympathy of one who felt the same grief. Since Asakawa had been a high-school classmate of Ryuji’s, he must have been two years younger than Ando. But to look at him one would have thought he was past sixty. What had brought about such a change? Sadness accelerated the aging process. Ando was aware that he himself had aged rapidly over the past year, for instance. He used to be told he looked young for his age, but now, people often thought he was older than he really was.

“Mr Asakawa,” he called a second time.

Wada couldn’t bear to watch. “I don’t think he can hear you.”

It was true. No matter how many times Ando called Asakawa’s name, there was no reaction. He gave up and got to his feet.

“Will he recover?”

Wada threw up his hands. “God knows.”

Patients like Asakawa could get better or worse without warning. Medical science was usually helpless to predict what lay ahead in cases like these.

“I’d like to ask you to notify me if there’s any change in his condition.”

“Understood.”

There was no point in staying any longer. Ando and Wada left together. At the door Ando stopped and took one last look at Asakawa. He couldn’t detect the slightest change. Asakawa kept his dead gaze fixed on the ceiling.

11

Mai reclined the adjustable backrest as far as it would go, and then lay back and stared at the ceiling. This was what she did when she was at an impasse. With her back arched like this she could read the titles on the bookshelves behind her, upside down. Not minding that her still-damp hair was touching the carpet, she closed her eyes and stayed in that awkward position for a while.

Her whole studio apartment, including the bathroom and kitchenette, measured less than two hundred square feet. One entire wall was taken up with bookshelves, leaving her without enough room for a bed or a desk. At night, she pushed the low table she used in lieu of a proper desk into the corner so she could unroll her futon. She’d had to sacrifice space in order to afford a place near campus on just her monthly allowance from home and the money she earned tutoring.

Her three conditions for an apartment had been that it be close to school, that it have its own bath and toilet, and that it offer some privacy. Rent accounted for nearly half of her monthly expenses, but even so, she was satisfied with the arrangement. She knew that if she relocated a little farther out toward the suburbs she’d be able to find a bigger place, but she had no intention of moving. She actually found it convenient to be able to sit at her table in the middle of the room and have everything she needed within arm’s reach.

With her eyes still closed, she felt around until she found her CD player and turned it on. She liked the song. She tapped her thighs in time with the music. She’d been on the track team in junior high and high school; she’d been a sprinter, and her legs were still pretty firm. She regulated her breathing until her chest, under her flowered pajamas, swelled and fell along with the music. She opened and closed her nostrils in rhythm, praying for a flash of wisdom. The discomfort of knowing that she had to finish the manuscript this very night had totally zapped her concentration.

She had an appointment tomorrow afternoon with Kimura, Ryuji’s editor. She was supposed to turn over the clean copy of the last installment then. And she still hadn’t come up with a solution for what to do about the end. She hadn’t found the missing pages at Ryuji’s parents’ house, and she had no more time to spend looking for them. She’d even started to wonder if there were any pages missing to begin with. Maybe Ryuji had meant to add something later but died before he had the chance. In which case, she’d be better off giving up the search and concentrating her energies on coming up with adjustments worthy of the final installment.

But she’d been stuck for words for ages now. She hadn’t written a line. She’d taken a shower to clear her head, but still her pen would not produce. She’d write something only to cross it out, to tear up the paper and throw it away.

Suddenly it struck her. She opened her eyes. You’re not getting anywhere because you ’re trying to add something.

All her suffering came from the fact that she was trying to fill in the blank towards the end of the book with her own words. But it was only to be expected that she’d find it impossible to guess where Ryuji’s line of thought would have gone. It tended to skip and jump at the best of times. It followed, then, that the best she could hope to do was to delete passages before and after the blank and smooth things over.

Mai got up and fixed the backrest so that it was nearly vertical. She’d been a fool. Taking words out was a lot easier than putting any in. Ryuji himself would undoubtedly have preferred it that way, even if it meant leaving some of his thoughts unexpressed. That would be far better than seeing them twisted beyond recognition.

Mai felt herself relax, now that she’d hit upon a solution. And as though to seize upon her relaxation, the videotape leapt into sight. She’d brought it back from Ryuji’s parents’ house without telling them. Ever since she’d discovered it there in the study, she’d wanted to see what was on it. But there hadn’t been a TV set in the room, and the deck hadn’t been hooked up. The only way she could watch the tape was to bring it home with her. At first she’d fully intended to ask Ryuji’s parents if she could borrow it. But when she’d finally decided to leave, having given up on finding the pages, all the phrases she’d prepared vanished, and she couldn’t figure out how to broach the subject.

Excuse me, but this videotape has really got me intrigued. Would you mind if I borrowed it?

What a vague way to put it. What did “intrigued” mean, anyway? If they asked her, she wouldn’t be able to answer. So at last she’d simply left with the tape hidden in her bag.

Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr/1989. Chances are he’d just recorded a music show; the cassette itself was totally ordinary. And yet it had taken hold of her. She couldn’t even remember when she’d taken it out of her bag. There it was, sitting on top of her fourteen-inch combination TV/VCR, tempting her. Even in Ryuji’s room, when it had been shut inside the deck, that mechanical box, the tape had been attracting her in some way. Now, out of its shell, exposed, it seemed almost to have the power to suck her in whole.

The title didn’t seem to mesh with Ryuji’s taste in music. As a matter of fact, as far as she knew, he didn’t listen to music all that much. When he did, it was light classical. In any case, from the handwriting on the label it was clear enough that the tape hadn’t belonged to Ryuji. Someone else had made it. In the course of events, it had been taken to Ryuji’s apartment in East Nakano. And now, it was in Mai’s own apartment.

Without getting up, Mai reached over and put the tape in the VCR. The machine switched on automatically. She turned to the video channel and pushed PLAY.

Mai heard a thunk as the tape started to roll, and she hurriedly pressed PAUSE. What if it was something she was not meant to see? She balked. Once certain images were burned into your brain, she knew, it was impossible to wipe them away- to ever return to a state of purity. Maybe she’d better stop now before she regretted it. But in the end her doubts couldn’t overcome her curiosity, and she released the pause button.

There was the sound of static as the picture wobbled. A second later, the screen went black as if ink had been splashed over it. There was no going back now. Mai braced herself. What then unfolded before her eyes was a series of scenes whose meaning she could not understand and whose nature she could never have guessed from the title.

As soon as she’d finished watching it, Mai felt like throwing up, and she ran into the bathroom. She wished she’d turned it off halfway through, but she couldn’t resist the power of the images. She’d watched until the very end. No, it was probably more accurate to say that she was shown it. She simply couldn’t press the stop button.

She was drenched with sweat and was shivering. She felt something force its way up from her stomach into her throat. She felt more revulsion than fear-something had come inside her, deep inside her. She knew she had to get it out. She stuck her finger down her throat, but she only vomited a small amount. She choked on the taste of bile, and tears streamed from her eyes. Turning a hollow, helpless gaze around the room, she slumped to her knees. For a while she could feel herself being destroyed-and then her consciousness receded, to some place far, far away.